This is a continuation of a remarkable thread that has now received 10,000 comments running to well over a million words. Unfortunately its size has become a problem and this is the reason for the move.
The history of the New Statesman thread goes back to December 2007 when Dr David Whitehouse wrote a very influential article for that publication posing the question Has Global Warming Stopped? Later, Mark Lynas, the magazine’s environment correspondent, wrote a furious reply, Has Global Warming Really Stopped?
By the time the New Statesman closed the blogs associated with these articles they had received just over 3000 comments, many from people who had become regular contributors to a wide-ranging discussion of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, its implications for public policy and the economy. At that stage I provided a new home for the discussion at Harmless Sky.
Comments are now closed on the old thread. If you want to refer to comments there then it is easy to do so by left-clicking on the comment number, selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ and then setting up a link in the normal way.
Here’s to the next 10,000 comments.
Useful links:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
The original Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs thread is here with 10,000 comments.
Alex #1999 Yes, I linked it at #1989.
The comments are interesting. Half hate the film because it demonstrates that the Greens are fascists, the other half hate it because it makes the Greens look like fascists. Note that the article isby the head of Guardian Environment, so it can’t be written off as an abberration.
Alex Cull
The youtube at the Guardian, which you cite, is so totally absurd that the desired message is obscured.
In fact, it points out how those who may be skeptical of the “dangerous AGW” message are persecuted (even executed!) for their heretical views by the AGW-zealots.
Not very good PR for these knuckleheads (as you comment). In fact, it’s a self-inflicted shot in the foot.
Based on this, I’d say that “Age of Stupid” fits Franny Armstrong pretty well.
Max
PS But I’d say that some of the comments on the thread by a handful of AGW-groupies reveal an even greater level of stupidity. Amazing!
TonyB
A very good list of priorities that overshadow CO2 control (1998).
To your #6 I would elaborate that this includes providing an inexpensive electrical power infrastructure plus clean drinking water (which go together), to reduce drastically or even eliminate the deaths of 4 million people who die annually from contaminated drinking water plus smoke inhalation from indoor burning of wood.
This will not happen if we (in our “rich man’s guilt-driven frenzy” to control CO2) force the poorest nations of the world to abandon new fossil fuel generated electrical power for more expensive and less reliable “renewable” alternates.
Another one I would add is to extend and expand the 2006 WHO move to again allow selected use of DDT to fight malaria in the poorest countries of the world, where it has become rampant since DDT was outlawed in 1981 (in the “rich man’s guilt-driven frenzy” to “save the birds”), causing an estimated 50 million preventable deaths over the 25-year period.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124303288779048569.html
[Unfortunately, it looks like the “green lobby” has convinced the UN to do just the opposite, thereby indirectly causing the death toll from malaria to rise again.]
Max
Bob_FJ
You state
I’d say that, based on how things appear to be developing, “AGW-doomsayers” will be at the top of the list, even though some specimens may survive in zoos and university campuses.
Max
Brute
Some up-dated fun figures for you (after all, it’s your money):
Obama’s budget plus various stimulus / bailout plans total $3.6 trillion.
A dollar bill has a thickness of 0.0043 inches or 0.11 mm
1 trillion dollar bills would have a thickness of 110,000 km
3.6 trillion dollar bills would have a thickness of 396,000 km
The average distance to the moon is 384,000 km
So Obama’s stack of dollar bills would more than reach the moon from Earth.
But let’s look at Obama’s budget deficit for the year 2010 (the amount by which the spending exceeds the income over the year)
The budget deficit is expected to reach $1.3 trillion
Ramses II, Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, lived from 1304 to 1213 BC
So Ramses II died 3,221 years ago, or 1,176,631 days ago.
If you overspent $1 million per day, every day since Ramses II died, you would have reached a deficit of around $1.18 trillion by today (a bit less than Obama’s budget deficit for 2010 alone).
No wonder he was pushing for “cap ‘n tax”!
A question: Is it definitely dead, now that the Senate has not passed it, or will he try the “back door” (via EPA) to “tax” CO2 emissions and get his trillions that way?
What do you think?
Max
Max
Those big numbers are difficult to grasp properly, especially as we hear about billions and trillions every day on the news, as if they weren’t real money at all.
My favourite analogy is that of the philanthropist billionaire handing out dollar bills at the rate of one every second. Even if he did nothing else, it would take over 30 years to dispose of $1bn…
Alex
WRT 10:10’s tawdry little film, I see that even some of the warmist faithful have realised that it might be an own-goal. The ‘recommends’ are interesting reading – I often wonder if those figures ever make it any further up the editorial line, or if they are quietly binned!
JamesP
Right.
But $1 billion is peanuts today.
And it would take 1000x that long to hand out $1 trillion = 30,000 years!
He’d have to start before the glacial maximum of the last Ice Age, but since there were no human inhabitants of North America back then, he’d have to use another currency.
The mind boggles.
Max
Re: “No Pressure”, I see that 10:10 have withdrawn the video (temporarily?) from YouTube – on their web page it now says: “Sorry, we’ve taken this video down for now. More info coming very soon.”
(By the way, sorry Geoff, I hadn’t realised you had linked to it earlier! Hoping you will make a comeback to CiF eventually, your comments are much missed.)
A quick update – the 10:10 web site now has this:
“Sorry. Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.
As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website.”
Will the cinema and TV releases still go ahead, I wonder?
TonyB, You say “You labour under the apparent delusion that all the rest of us on this blog are evil, uncaring, have half a brain and give no thought at all for the future beyond next week….”
Whatever gave you that idea? :-)
I’d say a better description might be a mix of right-wing political zealots and/or cranks.
Max,
RE: #2005
Crap & Tax won’t resolve the issue…..Research Cloward & Piven strategy.
All of the assets in the entire world, (public and private) are not enough to cover this amount of debt.
The obvious result of all of this spending will be what Greece, Portugal, Spain and to some extent Great Britain is seeing now……unbridled violence.
When the US economy collapses make certain that you have plenty of food, fuel and plenty of ammo………… Those that are self reliant will survive…………those that have and are dependent on the government will not.
As for my accounts, I submit the following graph.
Peter said in 2010
“I’d say a better description might be a mix of right-wing political zealots and/or cranks”
Define and prove with citations from our discussions.
tonyb
PeterM
You describe (2010) the bloggers here:
OK. Let’s get this straight. So Bob_FJ, Brute, TonyB, myself plus many others are the “right wing political zealots”.
Guess that leaves you as the “crank”.
Is that what you had in mind?
Max
PS I would not be so impolite as to refer to you as a “crank”. I’d just say that your posts here would tend to indicated that you seem to be an “ill-informed, gullible individual with a generally left-leaning political philosophy and an irrational hysterical streak”.
Brute
Thanks for tip on gold.
But I was thinking of a faster way to make a killing.
Shorting the dollar, maybe? (Like the great philanthropist and AGW lobbyist, George Soros, who made a billion by shorting the pound sterling the last time it was on its knees).
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/soros.asp
(Peter’s kind of a guy!)
Max
Alex Cull
Here’s what Dennis Ambler at ICECAP had to say about the “No Pressure” film written by Richard Curtis and promoted by the Guardian:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
[see rest of article – link above]
Obviously, the geniuses who shot themselves in the foot with this film (and the ones driving the “10:10 climate change campaign”) are the same intellectual giants who actually believe that man-made global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year and that we have 4 years left to save our planet.
Duh! Is this any surprise?
(“Age of utter stupidity”, indeed.)
Max
Max, Dennis has got it nailed.
“Let us hope that this excursion into the ridiculous will make her sponsors think again about their relationship with this type of distorted propaganda.”
The Guardian have a new article today which indeed mentions that the charities backing the film were “absolutely appalled” when they finally saw the 4-minute clip. ActionAid works closely with 10:10 in schools, apparently, but a spokesperson commented “…we think the 10:10 campaign is very important, but the moment this film was seen it was clear it was inappropriate.”
Also: ‘At least three other groups linked to 10:10 confirmed they had privately expressed their concern. “Absolutely appalled” was the reaction from one, while another told the Observer: “The great fear was that it would just take the focus off the programme.”‘
However, putting a brave face on it, the Guardian also stated: “The film may have been somewhat tasteless, but it was an imaginative attempt to challenge public apathy over climate change, and, highly unusually for attempts to communicate about this subject, funny too.”
What I still cannot fathom is that from the very beginnings of this project, through to the breathless e-mail from Franny Armstrong to supporters telling them it was “by far our best chance of going viral and waking a whole load more people up to the climate crisis” and to the Guardian’s YouTube preview, no-one at 10:10 or among those involved in the filming had even the faintest idea of how badly it would be received. Monumental self-confidence would be the politest way of putting it.
Re the Royal Society’s latest report, there was an interview on BBC Radio 4 last week with Professor John Pethica of the RS, who led the group that produced the document.
The audio will soon vanish from the internet, but I’ve typed a transcript of it here.
Good luck with the gold/dollar speculation. You’re happy to talk about big bets on the commodities market but only Max is prepared to back his judgement on climate change to the tune of $100 which you feel has hardly any value anyway? That’s curious!
So you are planning to buy ammunition and live in the hills? And you’ll form the core of the guerrilla army who’ll eventually win back the USA from the forces of the New World Order who’ve been trying to wreck America? Will Timothy McVeigh be given a posthumous pardon when that happens?
And I was wondering if I’d overstepped the mark by calling you cranks and zealots!
Max,
You say “Go ahead and worry (1995) about something that may possibly (or may not) happen in the “geological timescale”, but count me out.”
For once you’ve come up with a valid argument. AGW is, at least in my opinion, unlikely to be a direct and serious problem for those of us who don’t expect to be around longer than the next 20 or 30 years or so. James Hansen talks about his grandchildren. Even they may be OK – 50 cm of sea level rise and a couple more degrees of warming will be serious but should be manageable.
100 or 150 years is a very short ‘geological timescale’ but literally a couple of lifetimes for humanity. So, yes, lets just not worry about it all right now. Lets give it another 50 years or so to see what happens and maybe someone will think of something if there does turn out to be a real problem later.
This may look to be a rather selfish argument in 100 years time but at least it makes sense for us.
10:10 have withdrawn their green snuff movie from their site, apologising to those who felt offended, but not to those whom they desire to kill.
Guardian Environment, who had an exclusive on the film, note that 10:10 have taken down the video, and have now uploaded it “from elsewhere” (possibly from Delingpole”s site). So the Guardian has no regrets, and is happy to embarrass “their friends” at 10:10 by continuing to show it, under the headline “there will be blood”.
One amusing side effect: CiF moderators seem to have gone on strike. They’re letting through comments like this, addressed to Guardian journalists: “why don’t you report the real version of events you spineless bunch of *rsewipes”.
Warmist commentators are divided fairly evenly between those who think its funny in a South Park way, and those like the following:
What I don’t understand is how 90 clever media people could get together to make this film, and not see how utterly disastrous it was. It’s suicidal group hysteria, on a par with the Jonestown mass suicide. But then, these are people who invade airport runways and tie themselves to railway lines.
The difference is, they are supported by our media, government, and opposition, and are funded by us via government donations to the charities which finance them.
(Alex, just seen your #2016, making the same point)
Geoff,
Maybe the 90 meejah people really see the world this way and were being authentic.
The defiant non-apology suggests that their only regret was showing their hand too soon.
PeterM
I would agree with your statement about AGW:
a) Over the past decade it has cooled slightly (0.07C/decade).
b) Will this continue for a few decades?
c) Or will it resume warming at the average rate we have seen since 1850 (0.04C/decade)?
d) Or will it even resume warming at the rate of the 1990s (0.2C/decade, as projected by IPCC)? For me this is the “outlier” case, i.e. least likely to happen.
In “50 years”, by 2060, case b) would have resulted in a (barely measurable) cooling of -0.07 * 6 =
-0.42C since 2000.
Case c) would have resulted in a (even less significant) net warming of -.07 + .05 * 4 = +0.13C since 2000.
The least likely case d) (i.e. the IPCC case) would have resulted in a (still insignificant) net warming of -.07 + 0.2 * 5 = +0.93C by 2050.
So looking at the average between the three cases, we have a net warming of 0.3 ± 0.63C from 2000 to 2060.
All of this assumes that the temperature record itself is meaningful and does not contain significant spurious warming signals (a doubtful assumption as both TonyB and Brute have pointed out here).
But even with this assumption, it is clear that there is nothing to worry about, Peter, even if Hansen feigns faked concern for his grandchildren (in order to sell his DAGW story).
Max
Correction: The calculated average net warming of the three cases from 2000 to 2060 is 0.25 ± 0.67C
Alex Cull
To the producers of the 10:10 you tube you wrote (2016):
I’d say “unbelievably stupid arrogance” would be another way.
Max
PeterM
I haven’t seen any of those you accuse of being “cranks and zealots” suggesting blowing up school children who happen not to have swallowed the “dangerous AGW” fairy tale, as your 10:10 buddies have proposed.
Max