THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS
At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.
This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.
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10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”
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TonyB in your 4795, you wrote in part about the accident-prone polar explorer Hadow
Yes, exactly, scientifically, it is a total irrelevance with respect to any known datum, and his moving line does not have a one point in time reference to anything! Given the scientific futility of it, the question is; How did he get the funding to do it? There must be some incredibly gullible (or corrupt) people around that grant those funds. Whenever I see this stuff on Hadow, I somehow think of “smoked haddock”
Just one line in the sand does not define a desert, which also moves around, just like the ice, according to the winds etc.
Didn’t he have to get rescued from an unanticipated ice island last time for example?
What an absolute fruitcake farce!
I guess Haddock likes the challenge of ice in his beard etc, and enjoys being paid for it!
Bugger the science!
Max,
I suppose I was being a little optimistic in expecting an honest response. I suppose the desire to try to prove me wrong was too strong. I certainly don’t believe we had a full and frank answer from Brute to name just one.
But of course I’m not basing my case on anything that you guys may or may not want to let on about your true beliefs. I’m basing it on a scientific poll which would have an accuracy I would expect to within about 5%.
It shows that nearly 50% of Americans oppose the Theory of Evolution. Yet, this is not just any old theory. Of course many would say that it is just that Just ‘a theory’. But that’s to misunderstand the way science uses the term ‘theory’. It is a foundation stone of modern day biology. As Max has suggested, the evidence for Darwinian Evolution is overwhelming and well accepted by educated people.
So, it is of great interest and relevance to find that the American public appears just as willing to say that the theory of evolution “has not been well supported by the evidence” as it is to say that it has been. Just like it says that the ‘theory’ of AGW is not well supported by the evidence.
The highly controversial aspect of the theory — the one that caused such an uproar when Darwin first promulgated it almost a century and a half ago — was that it implied a contradiction with the story of man’s creation as told in the book of Genesis in the Bible. It does force everyone to make a choice between religion and science. 50% of Americans have chosen religion.
Just today Brute tells me, on the basis of another Gallup poll, (is that irrelevant too?) that 41% of Americans believe global warming is exaggerated. Just 41%? That’s probably about 8% lower than I would have predicted!
Re: #4808, Peter
If you had considered for a moment what my #4791 said, before replying with a non sequitur, then you might not have asked the question that got an unwelcome answer.
Whoops……Another Gore prophecy that hasn’t come to pass. The slow drip, drip, drip of an unraveling scheme to defraud the public.
Global hurricane activity has decreased to the lowest level in 30 years.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/12/global-hurricane-activity-has-decreased-to-the-lowest-level-in-30-years/
Ahhhhhh, so now anyone who does not follow the Peter Martin world view/doctrine is a liar.
Didn’t realize that my vote would decide the future of the free world Peter. What else can I vote on?
Brute, Reur 4825, concerning building codes etc in hilly permafrost areas where Peter illustrates collapse of housing. (presumably he believes because of AGW ground-melt)
I guess we can wait for some more detail to be elucidated by Pete.
Whaddya think; will he cough up with some such, or maybe try to change the subject?
With regard to those houses, i believe Peter may have gotten the picture here.
http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/permafrost.html
Attention is directed to the sentence, “Buildings and other structures such as pipelines built directly on permafrost are becoming unstable as well, and sometimes causing landslides like that pictured above”
Barelysane, Reur 4824 on UHI stuff
Yes, quite!
Here are today’s minimum and maximum temperatures according the Oz BOM for my standard 3 out of 19 Melbourne stations. http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60900.shtml ( a real-time site)
City: 17.7 – 29.0C
Viewbank, near me: 14.5 – 30.8C
Melbourne Airport: 16.2 – 29.6C
So would you like to say what the average T for “Melbourne” was?
Funny how Melbourne City (whatever that is) seems to be much warmer overnight during the summer
Bob_FJ,
He’ll probably attribute the photograph to a renegade poster using a pseudonym, (Max).
By the way; today’s date is March 13th……Springtime officially arrives in one week. It’s snowing on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. this morning (Al Gore must be here in town). Mrs. Brute and I drove in this morning dodging snowflakes.
Peter,
In scientific terms, the above weather conditions…..excuse me…..climate conditions, described above, means IT’S COLD. Would you like to conduct a poll to determine whether or not it’s snowing here this morning? We can tally up the votes in an effort to arrive at a “consensus”. If it is determined by vote that it is NOT snowing and is NOT cold then we’ll officially have a “consensus” and we can alert Al Gore and Jimmie Hansen that their theory is correct and they are free to waste as much money as they’d like to figuring ways to tax hard working citizens that aren’t actually struggling through this non-existent cold and snow.
Maybe it’s virtual snow, after all, their climate model computers didn’t predict it, so it must not be happening.
Maybe its all due to the UHI effect?
Robin
What do you make of today’s High Court decision on the expansion of Stansted Airport?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7941470.stm
The video interview with the leader of the protesters suggests that that the judge was not impressed by the argument that anthropogenic Co2 emissions are are`destroying the planet. Could this have implications for other cases which turn on the same issue?
re 4835
Can’t find that one as easily.
Peter, you may want to post links to info used in support of your arguement. As it stands (no pun intended) all I see is a picture of a VERY old structure with severe subsidence, nothing more.
BTW Peter, bearing in mind that “sceptical” means “having doubts or reservations”, I’m surprised that you are merely sceptical about “Homeopathy, second sight, superstitious beliefs (including religion), acupuncture, that the CIA genuinely thought that Iraq had WMDs etc” (your post 4800). I would have expected you, far from having any doubts, to have rejected them altogether. Or perhaps, as I have always suspected, you don’t understand what “sceptical” means.
TonyN:
Yes, the Stanstead decision is important and could have wide implications. But I would expect the matter to go to appeal – and maybe Hansen will be called for as re Kingsnorth. We’ll see.
Peter 4835
AH! So the leaning tower of Pisa is also due to the permafrost melting :)
tonyb
Sorry guys, I was miles away on other business.
“Yes” on evolution (including a hard “no” on creationism, ID and even pastafarianism) and watching with minor interest developments in epigenetics. Also (to tackle young earth creationists head on) go with earth being about 4.6 Bn years old and every atom in your bodies (except H and if there is any He) being “forged” or nucleosynthesised in a now defunct star. Earth is an oblate spheroid, not flat. Santa Claus, well it’s nice for the kids and for me Denplan is the anti-toothfairy.
“No” on almost everything about man-made climate change. (Sensitivity wrong, computer models too simple, IPCC is a political body, surface station raw data problems, hockey stick, Stern report used wrong discount rates, general eschatology, media hype etc etc.)
But whilst I’m giving it out – my third vote is that AGW is not a hoax, scam or con, but a self-propelled delusion generated by society/scientists in very complex, pervasive and almost inevitable way. Scientists don’t understand how science really works due to pseudohistory being drummed into them and other such social bias. Gotta go now, hope that explains it for you Peter.
That first yes is a yes I don’t believe in it by the way.
Friday afternoon panic – strike that last one.
I do believe in evolution, I thought for a moment I had voted yes for creationism
Yarr!
Can’t believe you don’t accept pastafarianism matey :)
barelysane
I have however noted the recent increase in (mainly Somali) pirate numbers and the resultant slowdown in warming.
Ahaargh.
Peter, I find your attempt to link belief in creationism to AGW skepticism to be—as Max would say—a “waffle”. You expose your obvious leftist bias when you write:
So typical of a leftist to believe that those who disagree with them are stupid. As I wrote the other day, why is it that the left doesn’t respect the views of those with whom they disagree? My experience is that those with more right-of-center political views have respect for others—even those with whom they disagree.
Peter, I don’t hate you or think you are stupid for believing in AGW. Nor do I hate or think less of anyone who holds such views. I just disagree with them. I don’t call them names, I don’t hate them, I don’t try to make jokes at their expense (unless I know them and they are my friends, of course!).
Why can’t you just stick to debating the veracity of the AGW argument instead of trying to find some mental deficiency or low intelligence? Is your position becoming so tenuous that you need to resort to personal attacks?
Hi Peter,
You latest ramble (4827) on Darwin/AGW is truly astounding:
“I suppose I was being a little optimistic in expecting an honest response. I suppose the desire to try to prove me wrong was too strong. I certainly don’t believe we had a full and frank answer from Brute to name just one.”
You are now claiming that the respondents to our little poll here did not give “an honest response” to the questions because “the desire to try to prove you wrong was too strong”?
Do you realize how totally paranoid this sounds?
You discredit the poll respondents as having been “dishonest” in order to “prove you wrong” and therefore that the poll results are not valid.
Grow up, Peter.
The rest of your ramble is an attempt to link those who “do not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution” with those who “do not accept that AGW is a serious threat”; this is unfounded, blatantly judgmental and frankly silly.
Forget all this rubbish, Peter, and stick to the topic here, namely the scientific, political and economic debate surrounding the hypothesis of AGW being a serious threat.
It looks like you are using this whole “Darwin/AGW” story as a tactic to divert from a debate on AGW where you are losing.
Prove me wrong by getting back on topic again.
Regards,
Max
HELLO POLL RESPONDENTS!
I’m sure you will all be pleased to hear that we have just received another vote from a responder who has been tied up on other matters and unable to vote earlier. For this reason, we have exceptionally reopened the poll in order to accept this vote.
The latest (and final) respondent is Luke Warmer.
His vote was:
YES (for the Darwin theory of evolution) and
NO (for the premise that AGW is a serious threat)
This puts the final tally at: 11 respondents who voted the same as Luke Warmer and 1 respondent (Peter Martin) who voted YES on both propositions.
We have now confirmed the statistic that an overwhelming 92% of respondents who DO agree that the Darwin theory is valid, DO NOT agree that AGW is a serious problem, while only 8% of those who DO agree that the Darwin theory is valid, also DO agree that AGW is a serious problem.
This small poll seems to provide overwhelming evidence that the assertion by Peter that those who reject AGW are the same individuals as those who reject “science”, (i.e. Darwin) is completely false and without merit.
Please note that a small poll of this size cannot capture millions of opinions, and that there may, indeed, be individuals that would have voted “NO” on both propositions. It is clear from this poll, however, that there is no general connection between “believers” in Darwin and AGW, as was postulated by Peter.
Our poll is now closed.
Thanks again for your participation.
Thanks to TonyN for having allowed us to do this bit of opinion research on his site.
TonyB
Sorry for taking so long to respond to your #4821:
You asked:
“If you believe that;
a) Mankind can only live in an atmospheric soup of precise proportions without causing catastrophe -of which Co2 at 280ppm is the key ingredient- surely that degree of precise engineering can only come about through;
b) some sort of intelligent design/creation by God?
Therefore if you believe in a) how can you vote against b)?
I have given your very thought-provoking question a lot of thought, referring to various tomes and recent publications along the way. Please bear with me if I take some time to answer thoroughly and comprehensively.
One key reference work, of course, was the testimony of Dr. James E. Hanson before a U.S. congressional committee, wherein he testified that, “The dangerous level of CO2 is at most 450 ppm, and it is probably less.”
Scary words, indeed!
But then I applied the universal general principle of “if the prophet is no longer around when the prophesy is supposed to take place, reject the prophesy as a phony red herring”.
I believe Americans (with the exception of Sen. Inhofe and other inhabitants of the great state of Oklahoma) refer to this sort of empty prophesy as an “Oklahoma guarantee”, but we’d have to check out this bit of semantics with JZSmith or Brute for accuracy. The term apparently originated when the Oklahoma Territory issued “land grants” to one and all (that sometimes did not pan out when the weary settler finally arrived at his designated plot, where another claimant with a double-barrelled shotgun awaited him) but most recently it has been used in connection with the geological viability of a prospective Oklahoma land lease to contain oil or gas deposits, where the guarantor (the lease owner) tells the prospective driller “I’ll be a son of a bitch if there isn’t oil here.” After the driller has spent his money drilling a dry hole, the guarantor replies “Well, there wasn’t any oil, so you can call me a son of a bitch!”
But I digress. Back to my calculation:
Today’s CO2 level is 385 ppmv (at least, at Mauna Loa). On average, the atmospheric CO2 level has been increasing at 1.9 ppmv/year, so this leaves us exactly 34 years before the “dangerous level” of 450 ppmv is reached.
Hansen was born in 1943, so will become 66 this year. By the time his prophesy comes true and the Earth (as we know it) comes to a horrible end, he will be 100 years old (either suffering from severe old-age dementia, which appears to have already set in at the present time based on his strange prophesies, or dead and buried).
OK. So that threw out Hansen’s testimony on dangerous CO2 levels.
So I did some more checking and, to my great surprise, I found that the horrible pollutant, “Carbon dioxide is one of the most abundant trace gasses in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide plays an important part in vital plant and animal process, such as photosynthesis and respiration.”
What’s going on here?
Then I found some old analytical results compiled by a German engineer, Ernst Beck, that told me that there had been CO2 levels in the 19th and 20th century that reached Hansen’s “dangerous” level (at least on a local basis) without “irreversible deleterious effects” (as prophesied by Hansen).
I dug further and found, “Apart from being an essential element to all life on our planet and a vital buffer in the human system, carbon dioxide is also known to cause health effects when the concentrations exceed a certain limit.”
Aha! Now we have something!
So I checked further and found:
“At 1% concentration of carbon dioxide CO2 (10,000 ppm) and under continuous exposure at that level, such as in an auditorium filled with occupants and poor fresh air ventilation, some occupants are likely to feel drowsy.”
“The concentration of carbon dioxide must be over about 2% (20,000 ppm) before most people are aware of its presence unless the odor of an associated material (auto exhaust or fermenting yeast, for instance) is present at lower concentrations.”
“At levels above 5% (50,000 ppm) concentration, CO2 is directly toxic. [At lower levels we may be seeing effects of a reduction in the relative amount of oxygen rather than direct toxicity of CO2.]”
So, in order to reach the CO2 level where I was “likely to feel drowsy” (10,000 ppm), I started calculating how many years I still had left.
Before I completed my calculation I began “to feel drowsy” and actually dosed off. After waking up with a start, I opened the window and let some fresh, oxygen-laden air into the room so I could complete the calculation.
To my great relief, I saw that I had 5,060 years to live before “getting drowsy” from overexposure to CO2. Whew!
Since my research on “creationism” taught me that the world was only 5,000 years old today anyway, this gave me even greater relief for our future generations. We can double our time on Earth!
And finally, when I checked out how much total fossil fuel there is left on our planet today (optimistically estimated), I saw that it would take ten times this amount to even reach the “drowsiness” level of 10,000 ppm.
So after all that, I no longer believe in (a) (Thank God!) and am no longer so sure about (b).
Thanks for your provocative question. It caused me to “do my homework” and truly opened my mind to think “outside he box”.
Regards,
Max
Re: #4839, Robin
I wonder if Hansen would have as easy a ride in the Court of Appeal as he did in the Magistrates Court? If there is an appeal, then I really hope that he does give evidence. As I’ve suggested before, and I think that you agree, if the forensic mind is turned on Hansen’s kind of arguments they are not likely to come out of the process covered in glory.