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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Hi Peter,
You wrote: “Twenty years ago it would have been dismissed as absurd to talk about AGW increasing the Arctic summer ice that the NW passage would start to open. No-one says that now.”
Well it wasn’t so “absurd” when Roald Amundsen navigated the passage by boat in 1906, was it?
Regards,
Max
From 4691:
“According to them, in a survey (see about 3/4 way down the page) only 6% of the respondents would accept the scientific case that CO2 emissions are of deep concern and that strong action is needed to cut emissions.
Whereas most non creationists would tend to accept the mainstream scientific conclusion. Its quite easy for pro creationists to dismiss it. After all if science is wrong on evolution then its quite easily wrong on AGW too.
My 40% guess on the number of Americans who do believe in evolution has turned out to be right. 40% may be a minority but its a pretty influential minority.”
I am an atheist and I do indeed accept the mainstream scientific conclusion — that GW is trivial.
The conclusion that GW is important is not scientific at all. It flows from wishful thinking — otherwise known as “models”
Re: #4739, JZ Smith
A very interesting find, particularly the tables on page 2. These suggest that increased pressure to believe in AGW is having precisely the opposite effect to that intended, and the ranking of climate change in relation to other environmental issues looks devastating for an administration that is considering cap and trade legislation.
Max,
Maybe Prof Neil Axel Morner ran his Y shaped twig over various numbers and it twitched most strongly when it was slightly less than 20? :-)
See: http://www.desmogblog.com/nils-axel-morner
Max,
You’ve lapsed back into using that phrase just to “clear up this point”. A word (or a few) of advice. It does make you sound like an arrogant ***** !
Maybe we will get our act together to avert a disaster. Maybe we won’t. Maybe the warming and sea level rises will turn out to be on the lower end of their predicted range. Maybe on the higher end. Maybe there will be no disaster. Maybe a medium disaster or even a cataclysmic disaster. It will be partly down to luck. Partly down to what measures are taken.
Who knows? That’s an excellent question to ask. Either by yourself or anyone else.
PS My sockpuppet alarm has just gone off again!
It has occurred to me (months ago actually); that no matter what evidence or data is presented to Peter Martin, (and others like him), it will never convince them that this theory is a farce.
We’re right back where we’ve started…..Robin wrote of cognitive dissidence a few posts back…..this is exactly what is going on with our friend Peter and the rest of the Warmists. They embrace the social and political doctrine that the global warming ruse brings and will defend this lost cause to their dying day.
Goons such as Hansen and Gore are using this charade to line their pockets and radically change the social structure of guilt ridden, self loathing, western societies. Active politicians are using this to buy votes and consolidate their power base. There are many motives…..too numerous to list here…..however; political ideology, arrogance, elitism and greed are top factors.
10 years from now, people such as Peter Martin will be trumpeting the demise of the world due to “ocean acidification” or some other nonexistent computer generated model, having abandoned global warming for the newest, latest, cause celeb, (as long as it demonizes “the rich”, (whatever imaginary, ever changing, threshold that is nowadays), or some other scapegoat yet to be identified.
Postscript:
Robin, you’re correct. Western economies and politicians will twist themselves into pretzels combating this non-factor while all the while; the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians and other emerging industrialist will continue to benefit from cheap, reliable, abundant sources of energy…..Laughing hysterically at the wretchedness that our western societies have become and the poverty and misery its citizens must endure.
This is what the future holds for our children and grandchildren, self induced slavery beholden to a State controlled political class….. not sea level rise of 1 meter.
Quote of the day:
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, will prove the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers , 1931 to 2005 ~~~
Hi Peter,
The Northwest Passage has been open for crossings many times prior to “AGW increasing the Arctic ice summer melt”, so this would not have been dismissed “as absurd”.
Together with the Northwest Passage crossing by Roald Amundsen in 1906, there have been at least eleven other recorded crossings of the passage from the 1940s to the 1980s, not with ice-breakers but with simple wooden ships, so it certainly would be “absurd” to think that a crossing of the NW passage prior to the latest warming would have been dismissed as “absurd”.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/09/bad-reporting-about-northwest-passage.html
Regards,
Max
Max,
You are confusing the Amundsen Passage, which is essentially the shallow Canadian coastal with the deeper, more navigable, more Northerly, passages shown on this link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northwest_passage.jpg
In 1905 Amundsen needed dogs to pull his boat over the ice. If he’d tried that in recent summers they’d probably have drowned. The Amundsen passage has been open for a couple of months each summer.
I could say “I hope that this clears things up” but I don’t want to sound an arrogant shite!
Brute,
We’ve not seen the recession hit too hard down under yet. The shops are full, restaurants busy, etc. But that may change soon I guess.
Is that becuase we’ve still got privately owned banks do you think? While Presidents Bush and Obama have been busily nationalising yours? Its just as bad in the UK with the Labor party (do they still sing “We’ll keep the Red Flag Flying here” at conference time?) making the most of their opportunity to nationalise everything..
Do you think we might have to send food parcels over to you guys in the US and TonyB, and Tony N in the UK soon? :-)
Hi Peter,
You quoted me out of context to Robin and I cleared up this point. Nothing arrogant at all here, Peter, just correcting a slip-up you had made earlier.
As far as your “sockpuppet alarm” is concerned, I have no notion to what you are referring, but I’d advise you to bury this bit of paranoia. It is unfounded and truly makes you look silly, Peter.
Now to the substantive portion of your post.
You have been as clear as anyone here could expect you to be when you said we are headed for disaster unless something is done to avert this. Since nothing is being done, this means you believe we are headed for disaster. But, as always you added an escape clause, “Maybe there will be no disaster. Maybe a medium disaster or even a cataclysmic disaster”.
Hansen doesn’t have the “maybe” word in his dour predictions of disaster. It’s a sure thing with him: unless we start cutting back drastically on CO2 emissions to never reach the “dangerous level of CO2 of at most 450 ppm”, we will face “tipping points of the system with the potential for irreversible deleterious effects”. He talks, among other horrors to fierce to mention here, of “sea level rise this century [that] may be measured in meters if we follow business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions”.
IPCC takes 1,000 pages to state a watered-down version of Hansen’s dour prediction, with predicted sea level rise between 0.18 to 0.59 meters by 2100, using a series of mealy-mouthed caveats and terms such as “more likely than not”, but still putting in enough of a scare factor to be alarming.
You seem to be walking a cautious middle ground concerning the level of disaster that will befall us if we follow “business-as-usual”, but you give yourself the cop-out position by adding “Maybe there will be no disaster.”
So I take it that your answer to Robin’s question is a firm “maybe”.
Regards,
Max
Hi Peter
Reur 4758
No confusion. Eleven recorded NW Passage crossings in wooden boats, Peter, from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Nothing “absurd” about that.
Regards,
Max
No thanks Pete, Mrs. Brute and I have buckets of money and stockpiles of food.
Generous offer though.
My advice to you and Bob would be to petition your government to start unloading all of that coal, gold, uranium, and kangaroo meat as a hedge against future economic downturns.
A Gloomy Forecast for Australian Economy in 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/business/worldbusiness/20australia.html?_r=1
Minerals and resources
Large quantities of minerals and resources are extracted from Australia’s landscape. These include:
•Iron ore (World’s third largest supplier in 2006 with 270 million metric tonnes after China and Brazil.)
•nickel (third largest producer after Russia and Canada)
•bauxite/aluminium
•copper
•gold (4th largest producer after China, South Africa and the United States)
•silver
•uranium (22% of the world’s production. World’s second largest supplier after Canada.)
•diamond (third behind Russia and Botswana in terms of commercially viable gold deposits.
Australia also boasts the richest diamondiferous pipe with production reaching peak levels of 42 metric tons (41 LT/46 ST) per year in the 1990s
•opal
•zinc (second only to China in Zinc production and just under 14% of world production)
•coal (world’s largest exporter of coal and 4th largest producer of coal behind China, USA and India)
•oil shale
•petroleum (28th largest producer of petroleum)
•natural gas
Economic predictions are about as reliable as climate prophecies though…………………
Hi Peter,
Now that you have answered Robin’s question with a firm “maybe”, I think we can tone down the noise level of our exchange here.
You clearly are of the opinion “that is is not impossible that we will get warming of 3C by 2100”, adding the phrase “as a result of AGW”.
I would agree that nothing is “impossible”, but that it is highly unlikely that we will get warming over the next 92 years that is FIVE TIMES the warming we had over the past 159 years.
Even if I accept the greenhouse theory and accept that CO2 levels will rise to twice the pre-industrial values by 2100, I can calculate that this would result in warming of around 0.4C above today’s value (not 3C).
For this simple calculation I do not need fancy GCMs (that are only as good as the assumptions that are fed in).
So I agree that it’s not “impossible”, just highly “unlikely” that we will see a temperature rise of 3C over the next 92 years.
The same goes for all the other predictions (on sea level rise, droughts, floods, heavy rains, tropical cyclones, severe weather events, heat waves, etc.) They may not be “impossible”; they are just very unlikely, and even more unlikely to be caused by AGW, so I am not going to worry about them.
Regards,
Max
A New Paper On Solar Climate Forcing “ACRIM-Gap And TSI Trend Issue Resolved Using A Surface Magnetic Flux TSI Proxy Model By Scafetta Et Al 2009
http://climatesci.org/2009/03/11/a-new-paper-on-solar-climate-forcing-acrim-gap-and-tsi-trend-issue-resolved-using-a-surface-magnetic-flux-tsi-proxy-model-by-scafetta-et-al-2009/
A key statement in the conclusion reads:
“This finding has evident repercussions for climate change and solar physics. Increasing TSI between 1980 and 2000 could have contributed significantly to global warming during the last three decades [Scafetta and West, 2007, 2008]. Current climate models [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007] have assumed that the TSI did not vary significantly during the last 30 years and have therefore underestimated the solar contribution and overestimated the anthropogenic contribution to global warming.”
Max,
I’m not “copping out” as you put it. Yes “Maybe there will be no disaster.” Maybe the international community will act before its too late. Who knows?
We can work out, albeit within ranges of uncertainty, what will happen under a business as usual scenario but there is no way of predicting just how well climate mitigation schemes are going to progress.
Will politicians listen to the scientific community, or will they be swayed by the paid lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry? Will they listen to James Hansen or ignoramuses like Sen Inhofe who is reported to “cite the Bible as the source for his positions on various political issues.”
Once again “who knows?”
You’re joking, right Pete?
I think I’d go with Inhofe on this one Pete, considering the how the IPCC and Hansen’s prophecies have gone so far……
Hi Peter,
You wrote (4765):
“Maybe there will be no disaster.”
“Maybe the international community will act before its too late.”
The first statement acknowledges that “maybe” the AGW predictions are incorrect and “there will be no disaster” no matter what the “international community” does.
The second (unrelated) statement states that “maybe the international community will act [to curb CO2 emissions].
The “before its too late” is a hypothetical adjunct that assumes that there is a predetermined time limit for the “international community” to “act”. This phrase is meaningless unless it can be quantified in some manner, so let’s ignore it.
I would support the first statement.
I would disagree that the second statement is very likely, in light of the many pressing problems now facing our world plus all the many reasons cited by Robin.
Your next line of reasoning is a bit confused and frankly a bit too polemic.
You write, “Will politicians listen to the scientific community, or will they be swayed by the paid lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry? Will they listen to James Hansen or ignoramuses like Sen Inhofe who is reported to cite the Bible as the source for his positions on various political issues.”
Politicians will wait to see “how the wind blows” (as they always do). Whether they listen to one part of “the scientific community” who are “lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry“ (as you put it) or to another part of “the scientific community” who are lobbyists of the multi-billion dollar AGW industry (as I put it) will depend quite a bit on what their constituents (the voters) believe.
If these believe that Hansen’s shrill “wolf cries” have more credibility than the opinions from the skeptical scientists quoted by Imhofe, they’ll go with Hansen.
Right now, Peter, it appears that Hansen’s viewpoint is losing out with a public that observes that (a) it has been cooling for the past decade, rather than warming (despite all-time record human CO2 emissions and false yearly predictions by Hadley and GISS), (b) more and more scientists are beginning to speak out against the so-called AGW “consensus” mantra, (c) that the shrill cries of imminent disaster are not really taking place and (d) other real economic issues have taken much more urgent priority.
The few hundred miserable “ignoramuses” that showed up for Hansen’s recent “civil disobedience protest” in Washington, DC shows how ridiculously small the public support is for Hansen’s viewpoint.
A continuation of the current cooling cycle for another few years will break the back of the Hansen hysteria in the public mind, and therefore in the mind of the politicians, who will be forced to reluctantly give up their dream of obscene carbon tax (or cap) funds to shuffle around (but will quickly come up with a new alternate).
So I would fully agree with your first statement: “Maybe there will be no disaster.”
But I would seriously doubt that your second statement is correct: “Maybe the international community will act [to implement CO2 curbs].”
My assessment:
There will be no CO2 curbs from the “international community”.
There will be no disaster.
Regards,
Max
Max, further to your 4761, concerning crossings of the NWP;
Some other “inconvenient facts” that Pete CONTINUES to ignore, (or forgets) are:
1) It was warmer in Greenland around the early 1900’s per actually recorded temperatures there.
2) It is a lot easier to find a route through that complex Canadian archipelago in recent times now that there is better charting and intelligence from satellites!!!!
Hi Bob_FJ
Your points on NWP crossings are very valid.
Since smaller wooden ships crossed the NWP back in the 1940s without all the modern navigation instrumentation of today, this tells me that the currently projected “unprecedented opening” of the NWP (due to AGW, of course) is nothing new, just a lot of hype.
Regards,
Max
Brute,
A friend of mine who believes in re-incarnation, also thinks that you return as something or someone that you are particularly unkind to in the life before.
I’ll have to ask her about the late Dr Adrian Rogers , but she might well say that he’ll be back with us as a homosexual Palestinian child, probably born in a Gazan refugee camp. I hope he’s managing to enjoy life nevertheless, and that the Israelis managed to miss him with their Phosphorus shells!
Re: #4758, Peter
I hope that I never meet those dogs.
Hi Brute reur 4764
I posted that link back in 4729 :)
Didn’t get much of a reply then either (though i’m glad someone else found it). Peter seems to have done a rather good job of distracting the thread.
Peter:
First, two observations on your post (#4745) – another failed attempt to answer my question re James Hansen’s recent statement. First, you say to me “… you may well be right”. Well, as you know, I’m sceptical of the validity of the dangerous AGW hypothesis so don’t consider it likely that we are facing a serious threat, let alone disaster. Therefore, if you think I might be right, it seems that something remarkable has happened and you’re moving towards a sceptical position. Can that be so? And, second, you claim that I am suggesting we should give up. That’s a red herring: I made no such suggestion.
Some might interpret your continued failure as evasion of or inability to understand the issue – but, as I’ve said, I’m a patient man so, before coming to any conclusion, I’ll try again. But, this time, I’ll try to help you by approaching it in a slightly different way.
Here’s the question again
If I were in your position, before answering I would first see if I could challenge the basic facts. There are two possibilities:
The first is that you think I am wrong to say that it is “inevitable … that GHG emissions … will continue to rise for the next four years and for the foreseeable future”. You may believe that my detailed analysis in #4681 is inaccurate. If that is your view, please produce your counter evidence. A tip: you’ll see from my analysis that it’s not a matter, as you suggest, of it being “considered just too too hard by all the world’s nations” – it’s that so many of them don’t care, don’t consider it important or have other priorities.
The second is that you think James Hansen was misquoted. Or perhaps he didn’t really believe what he is reported to have said – maybe it was hyperbole.
I look forward to hearing your view.
Here’s one for Peter. It’s another article by George Monbiot in the Guardian. Others, however, might prefer the bulk of the comments.
Robin,
I’ve failed to predict the future yet again! That’s sad. Maybe you could give me what you would consider to be a correct answer. A model answer. Maybe you could throw in some football and racing results for the coming weekend too!
If you already know the future, I’m just wondering why you would bother to ask a question to begin with?
You say “I’m sceptical of the validity of the dangerous AGW hypothesis” Am I right in thinking you were undecided last year? Or am I thinking of someone else?