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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Pete,
You’re right………I did mention this missionary trip. The point I was making (so long ago and in context) was that we were continually attempting to give people a “head start” on self sufficiency and they squandered it knowing that another group would come around and do the same thing year after year……that, (in my mind) I was being played for a fool, expending resources in an attempt to “help” whereas these people truly didn’t want “help” or a leg up, just handouts. The point was that with a small amount of effort, they could have continued to maintained themselves without intervention.
I don’t generally wear my religious beliefs on my sleeve. My approach would be attraction rather than promotion. Many people recoil at being lectured to or the implication that they be “forced” to adhere to a particular way of thinking, (which is an issue that Global Warming zealots will have to come to realize). I personally am not big on evangelism………often times laypeople come across as being self-righteous/sanctimonious………somewhat overzealous, which I feel is a turn off. I’m far from perfect and have made numerous mistakes throughout the course of my life. I generally (try) to keep my mouth shut and my ears open. If someone inquires, or approaches me, asking an opinion, I’ll give it.
Unsolicited advice is usually viewed as criticism.
I also happen to be a participant in Alcoholics Anonymous, but I don’t run around preaching the evils of drink and the benefits of temperance……it’s a personal thing.
I’m slightly more outspoken here (mostly sarcasm) than I would be in “public”………and I also can maintain a modicum of anonymity.
So no, I’m not what would typically be referred to as a “Jesus Freak” in your world. My church is a small, “countryside” (Methodist) church with a few hundred members as you’d see in a Currier and Ives print. Being Conservative/Traditional, I don’t go for the “new age” anything………including religion. I’m not particular regarding the denomination…….I like the pastor of the church and what he has to say as well as the friends and neighbors that attend…………just good people. I don’t agree with all of the positions of the Methodist Church, I like this particular preacher.
I also belong to an automobile club whose members are hard drinking, hard swearing rather coarse fellows………mostly retired/active captains of industry, former NASA guys, Politicians, Engineers, Policemen, Doctors, Scientists, Lawyers, Military Special Forces………also good people (albeit crazy, but people that you can count on when things get rough)………
That’s too much about my personal stuff…………but I think you get the picture.
No Pete, for the umpteenth time I’ve never seen the commercial; however I’m certain that you’re prepared to tell us all about it. Maybe I missed it somehow as I was too busy ignoring all of the global warming, “we’re all gonna die unless Brute repents” commercials. Even if I had, I’d pay no more attention to it than I do the commercials that advertise that I can make $ 500,000.00 per. year recycling lawn clippings.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute apparently is a Libertarian “think tank” that spends other people’s money promoting causes that they think are pretty, but because you seem to despise them so much, I’m thinking of making a donation; they must be doing good work if you don’t like them.
Yes, I’ve heard of them.
TonyB
No, I am neither a masochist, nor do I think that I will have a “sensible discussion” with the handful of crazy fruitcakes over at the Guardian site.
The objective is to get the truth out there to counter the more absurd lies these fruitcakes are trying to sell to the unsuspecting neutral observers on the site.
I believe this is working, because there are more neutral observers who chime in than there are fruitcakes, who keep repeating the same old lies over and over again,
But I will admit that it is a bit tiresome to deal with moronic adolescents.
Regards,
Max
PS You are right that the whole thing started off with George Monbiot making a silly claim that was proven wrong (and he admitted it, like a man, although still getting it wrong), whereupon the fruitcakes tried to change the subject to the WUWT photo to ease the pain of George’s mistake and admission of error. At that point it drifted into never-never land with the fruitcakes taking over the agenda.
Max
They’re still over there bickering about the photo after two days, and still thinking you were sent over by us ‘organisers’. No doubt as a first wave attack with hundreds of others to follow. As they seem to think this is a ‘professional’ arrangement we’d better formalise it and you can tell us where we should send your large pay cheque for doing our dirty work.
Shame really as there are a couple it would be interesting to debate with. Goodness knows what the lurkers must make of it all.
Did you see that 1987 paper from James Hansen I posted last week which referenced the start of global temperature computation back to 1850? That was the genesis I think of this AGW scare as Hansen then trotted it out at Congress the following year, which then underpinned the warming trend science that appeared in the first IPCC assessment.
Interesting to see the start point-or would you reference any other paper as being the initial lynch pin of the AGW hypotheses?
TonyB
So no science then ?
No scientific papers then ?
No ?
Wax is entirely right, the charts are easily contrived Excel rubbish entirely unconvincing rubbish to scienists. Like me. So try harder, much harder, and use real world data and information. It helps. ;-)
manacker says:
May 18th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Brute,
Thanks for posting the “science” charts.
nefastus may not be impressed, since he/she/or it may have difficulty understanding things that are quite that technical, particularly if they go against nefastus’ mantra.
manacker says:
But I will admit that it is a bit tiresome to deal with moronic adolescents.
LIKE:
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Environmental Protection Agency
NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
National Center for Atmospheric Research
American Meteorological Society
State of the Canadian Cryosphere
The Royal Society of the UK
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Academies of Science from 19 countries
Academia Brasiliera de Ciencias (Brazil)
Royal Society of Canada
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Academie des Sciences (France)
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
Indian National Science Academy
Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)
Science Council of Japan
Russian Academy of Sciences
Royal Society (United Kingdom)
National Academy of Sciences (USA) (12 Mar 2009 news release)
Australian Academy of Sciences
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
Caribbean Academy of Sciences
Indonesian Academy of Sciences
Royal Irish Academy
Academy of Sciences Malaysia
Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
moronic adolescents all of them eh ?
Max/Tonyb,
I’ve been considering the discourse surrounding the photograph of three naval subs surfacing @ the North Pole.
What it amounts to is photograph evidence, (recorded long before Arctic Ice melt was a concern), that there was open sea @ the North Pole in the past………….Photographic evidence that casts doubt on the eco-chondriac’s agenda……………and they dismiss it.
Not exactly proof that Anthropogenic Global Warming isn’t occurring, but documented photographic evidence that is contrary to one of the cornerstones of their agenda.
It’s finally happened…………verifiable evidence of open sea at the North Pole 50 years ago……………and the Alarmists deny that it occurred while they are seeing the photographic evidence in front of their own eyes.
Even if London and Washington were buried under mountains of ice these very same people would still proclaim that the Earth was warming.
They are completely disconnected from reality.
Max/Tonyb,
Off topic Tony, but worth discussing.
I was viewing a documentary last night concerning the mass dinosaur extinction that occurred 65 million years ago. The conventional wisdom is that a large asteroid impact caused the mass extinction. This woman and her team dispute the theory and present convincing evidence.
All of this is beside my point……… being………………
I never realized how cut throat and ruthless the scientific industry can be. The scientific industry isn’t what I thought……………a bunch of be-speckled, bearded, old men huddled around volumes of scientific literature and microscopes searching for “the truth”…………
No, there are massive amounts of money involved, entire departments within these institutions whose only mission is to secure funding for these institutions at any cost.
Billions and billions of dollars, (public and private) being funneled into these budgets….. channeled by marketing agents and lobbyists……………their only function to secure donations to continue research……even if it is non-productive, outdated or previously proven unreliable or fraudulent……incredible.
Anyway, this woman and her team have been slandered and persecuted because she dared to question the theory that a single cosmic event caused the mass extinction.
She dared question the scientific “consensus” and has been crucified by the industry because her research threatens their sources of funding.
It’s a business…………a BIG business………and these people will go to any lengths to protect their financial sources from interruption.
I don’t know if she’s right or wrong. The point being that her research was dismissed outright because she decided to “tug on Superman’s cape”…..to present research that was unpopular and threatened the cash cow of the larger scientific industries.
Comments?
http://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/keller/chicxulub.html
http://hoopermuseum.earthsci.carleton.ca/saleem/keller.htm
Brute,
I suppose you feel I’m a Godless zealot! I do miss that sort of community involvement that my mother would have experienced with her involvement in her church which was also Methodist.
My Dad was too fond of a drink and a bet to get too much involved in all that so maybe I take after him. They, the Methodists, are pretty much against both with no compromise. I’m confident in my ability to enjoy the minor vices of this world without it being a problem but I do know from personal experience that both can destroy marriages and even lives too. Alcohol can be just as much a drug as cannabis or even heroin. If it was generally and democratically agreed that they should be banned for the common good then I’d reluctantly go along with it.
Not there is much chance of that ever happening, in Australia at least. Both industries are so powerful that they’d do their utmost to put a spoke in the wheel of anyone of who was threatening their interests.
Just the same way as those with vested interests are trying to spike the arguments of those of us who are warning against the hazard of AGW!
Hi Brute, everyone, re the USS Skate, I note that there was a book published in 1996 – Surface at the Pole: The Extraordinary Voyages of the USS Skate, by James F Calvert (who I understand was the commander of the USS Skate at the time. According to Amazon it was published by the US Naval Institute Press in May 1996 (ISBN-10: 155750119X, ISBN-13: 978-1557501196.) My library has a copy somewhere and I now have it on order. It looks like interesting reading, and I hope it will shed some light (!) on the context of the photo.
Mind you, even then some might still argue that the whole episode was part of a shadowy cold-war conspiracy by the nefarious military-industrial complex. Skategate? :o)
Brute reur 6258
Fascinating stuff. To add the a parallel i think you’re trying to draw. I was taught about the K-T single impact theory at Uni, always made perfect sense, evidence at the time seemed to back it 100%, all the available bits of information seemed to fit the theory nicely.
Now we have (on the face of it) an equally good theory, that may in fact fit the data better, and it’s being shouted down out of hand. Bit sad really, but thats science for you, not even as though there’s serious money involved here :)
Want to know how your region/town compares against its 30 yr average?
http://www45.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weather+england
(very impressive, don’t know what the data source is though)
nefastus
Of course the institutions you listed (6256) are not composed of moronic adolescents, nor are the many scientists who have gone against the majority party line and openly stated that they do not support the premise that AGW is a real and serious threat.
You know full well who these moronic adolescents are, nefastus.
They are not the scientists, meteorologists and engineers or the serious debaters of the open issues, but the guys on the sidelines of the blog scene, throwing their senseless drivel into the debate without really contributing anything yet thinking all the time that this is cute and cool.
Max
PS And hey, nefastus, maybe one or the other of the moronic adolescents I mentioned even have a degree in science. Wow!
But that certainly does not mean that a significant percentage of moronic adolescents are also scientists (or vice versa, for that matter).
It is probably a very small exception.
Excel rubbish entirely unconvincing rubbish to scienists. Like me.
A scienist, eh? Who knew? :-)
social scienist ? :)
Seriously, what’s wrong with excel? It’s a perfectly valid mean of presenting data. What particular package do you prefer for presenting data then?
Hi Brute,
Yeah. Scientists are often pretty hard-nosed and territorial about it when they are defending their own paradigms against possible rivals. I’m sure TonyB has first-hand experience in this regard.
Witness the story of Alfred Wegener, the first to propose the theory of continental drift, from which the current plate tectonics theory was evolved.
At the time he was ridiculed by all the scientific societies, and symposia were even set up to refute and discredit his theory (which went against the prevailing paradigm of the time).
There was not much money involved in those days (possibly some minor research grant funding).
That is the major difference today, particularly in so-called “climate science” (a field that is really still in its infancy).
Despite the fact that this science is still quite young, the AGW paradigm has become very strong and “cast in concrete”.
Witness the fact that it has become non “political correct” to question a major human impact on our climate, and that the political leadership of most scientific organizations (even those that have nothing to do with climate research at all) have endorsed the “mainstream” paradigm.
This paradigm is based on the premise that AGW is a real and serious threat. It is supported not so much by actual physical observations, but by climate model predictions, which are accepted as scientific evidence.
The tens of billions of tax-payer dollars of “mainstream” research grants are part of the equation here.
But even more important are the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of potential carbon taxes (or cap and trade scheme revenues), which will give the politicians of this world obscene amounts of money to shuffle around, with the excuse that they are doing something to “save the planet”.
Follow the money trail! And read Mencken’s commentary on the politicians’ use of fear to control the populace.
As an optimist, I am convinced that science will win out over vested interests in the end in our democratic society, and that the current AGW paradigm will eventually be replaced by a new paradigm.
But, because of the fact that politicians and extremely large amounts of money are involved, it will not die an easy death.
What could kill it?
– Conclusive confirmation of the cosmic ray / cloud hypothesis of Svensmark et al. at CERN
– A few more years of extremely low solar activity
– A few more years of global cooling, rather than warming, despite continued all-time high human CO2 emissions
It will be painful for the many climatologists who have hung their hats on this paradigm to make the switch, but like the geologists after Wegener’s death, I am sure that they will do so and that science will win out in the end.
Max
Brute and Barelysane,
If what you were saying were true about the scientific consensus being fixed and unchanging, the Asteroid impact theory wouldn’t have got up in the first place. It wasn’t the favoured explanation for the K-T extinction prior to about 1980.
Its still considered to be the most likely explanation but perhaps not the complete explanation, and yes the issue is debated heatedly. This NASA article treats the issue pretty fairly:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1243.html
So. Majority opinion? Yes. Scientific Consensus? Not quite yet.
Peter
The KT boundary ME event by asteroid strike was proposed by Alvarez et al in a paper in 1974.
Since then a vast amount of work (principally by geologists) has been done on a global scale. That’s 30 old years of work done to find evidence of a theory. A lot of the work involved the examination of Iridium deposits (very rare on earth, relatively common in asteroids). They found a great deal of Iridium globally, at the geological time of the impact, which seemed to confirm the theory.
But, now we have a new idea, that may better fit the timeframe. While all the other work of the last 30 yrs helped confirm the original hypothesis, it may be that that original hypothesis was flawed (i.e. the strike was too late to have initiated the ME, but may have finished it off).
There is a substaintial parallel with AGW that i think Brute and I are trying to draw here.
“Majority opinion? Yes. Scientific Consensus? Not quite yet”
1. Consensus, as we’ve discussed to death previously is not a scientific concept.
2. Your statements seem mutually exclusive.
Pete,
If I remember correctly, there really wasn’t a “good” explanation regarding this mass extinction before the asteroid impact theory; it was enigma that no one seemed to have solid explanation for. After reviewing the information, it seemed plausible/sensible in my mind.
Dr. Keller [Sp?] and her team, seems to have found an Iridium layer that predates the mass extinction by 300,000 years in the geological record that refutes the conventionally held theory……………a “fly in the ointment” if you will. Her work is much more extensive than I can, (or should) get into here, but there may be something to it and it should be reviewed, not dismissed offhandedly by snobbish, big business scientific elites……Wouldn’t you agree?
But all of that aside, they can hash it out.
My point here is that she has rocked the boat and she is being vilified for it by the “mainstream” scientific industry (that will have egg on their faces and potentially a loss of confidence in their research) which could impact their ability to solicit funds.
I guess my naive inclination was that scientists from all stripes would welcome debate and alternate scenarios for the “advancement of science”; but these guys are as partisan as they come when there is big money at stake.
So don’t think for one minute that these institutions are pure as the driven snow and “open minded”. When it comes to protecting their financial interests these guys are as merciless as they come.
That’s all I’m saying, (writing).
Pete,
Please elaborate.
You seem to be writing that the impact theory is not quite “settled science” and the global warming theory is? I would say that science has been studying the mass extinction/geological record for a much longer period of time than the “climate record”……………
but, here you are certain that Al Gore and company are rock solid correct and the asteroid impact theory is up in the air?
Max 6267
This article below says it all. Frauds (or misunderstanding) peer jealousy, the need to gather more money and prestige for your dept are all major drivers in science these days.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/5345963/The-scientific-fraudster-who-dazzled-the-world-of-physics.html
“Schön’s fraud was the largest ever exposed in physics; he ended up without a job, and was forced to leave America in disgrace. But the ease with which his fraudulent findings and grotesque errors were accepted by his peers raises troubling questions about the way in which scientists assess each other’s work, and whether there might be other such cases out there.”
We are being dazzled by reputations, unproven theories and computer models (which even the IPCC admit are flawed) whilst we set aside history and observational evidence. Yet still some believe everything they are told. I’m going to have a Mencken moment here…
Tonyb
To those guys in Oz
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8057528.stm
How does our definition of heatwave stack up to yours?
Barelysane, that’s a rather frightening BBC article you’ve linked to. Once the Met Office heat wave alert sirens go off in the London area, I plan to return home immediately in order to do emergency house painting and shrub planting, also to purchase vital supplies of cooling alcholic beverages to assist survival. I’m sure my boss will understand. Then will proceed to take shelter under a large beach umbrella in the back garden. Blimey, the Blitz must have been like this! Good old BBC…