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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I will be gone for a week, so if you have any responses, I will get back to you after 28 Feb.
Max
This paper (from The Taxpayers’ Alliance) sets out how the UK’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) spent £8.6 million in about 18 months (2006/8) on 83 “climate change” engagement projects in England. To get the full impact of this, I suggest skipping the “Notable examples” and going straight to the table that starts on page 12.
The TA asks “have climate change communications crossed the line into political propaganda?” I think it knows the answer.
Robin, re your #9652, there are nevertheless some encouraging signs:
“While Red Redemption found that schoolchildren were usually excited about the prospect of playing a game, they were sometimes then disappointed to find that the game was about climate change.”
There’s hope for some of the kids yet.
Someone drew my attention to this:
Although the issue here is presented as being a turf war with the coal industry, rather than the principles of climate change legislation, the mention of BP, supposedly the greenest of the oil giants, is interesting.
Tonight’s debate.
The result of the (admittedly meaningless) online poll is now almost exactly the opposite of what it was 3 days ago. It now stands at 16.8% for the motion (that “global warming prophets” were guilty of scaremongering) and 82.7% against. Makes this evening potentially more interesting. I just hope I can get there: it’s a 2 hour journey and it’s snowing heavily at present. Just as well I’ve got a 4X4!
Oh the irony……is Al Gore in town?
Curious how the warmists can’t see a poll without trying to stuff it. They must be awfully insecure.
James P,
You say “Curious how the warmists can’t see a poll without trying to stuff it. They must be awfully insecure.”
Max,
You say “If I had idle time (but don’t you? -PM) on my hands I’d toss in a few thousand votes ‘for’ and even the score again.”
Maybe you were a 3rd world dictator in a previous life! That’s the sort of thing they do when they are feeling “awfully insecure”!
Peter
You seem to have missed the bit about evening the score. There would be no need if the ballot had not already been sabotaged by the warmists, as also happened with the Science Museum poll.
Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/21/sea-level-geoscience-retract-siddall
The Guardian has a terrible article about climate deniers by Jeffrey Sachs at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/feb/19/climate-change-sceptics-science
Watts has a reply at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/22/the-most-slimy-essay-ever-from-the-guardian-and-columbia-university/#more-16615
What makes this different is the very moving personal nature of Anthony Watts’ reply. I really feel anyone who hasn’t been banned from commenting at the Guardian should get over there and tell them what they think.
This 5 minute video (in German, but easy to follow if you don’t speak it) is a beautifully done survey of the IPCC today. The closing seconds are splendid.
PS: pity Max is away!
Robin,
What happened at the debate?
Brute:
I sent a note summarising the debate to our kindly and accommodating host earlier today. He said that, if possible, he’d put it up as a new post some time this evening (UK time). So watch this space.
Robin
Just saw the German language critique of IPCC, which you posted (on a borrowed PC).
It cites sloppy work, using non-reviewed papers that have been prepared by activist groups as evidence, exaggerating claims, outright errors, etc. and closes with the question of whether IPCC should be scrapped.
Pretty strong stuff.
Max
geoffchambers
Jeffrey Sachs is an ideologue who does not shy away from emotional scaremongering and openly lying to get his message across.
I saw him in a TV debate with Bjorn Lomborg on CNN moderated by Fareed Zakaria (who was trying to tread the PC line on AGW, which was still prevalent during those heady, pre-Climategate, pre-Copenhagen days).
Toward the end of the debate which centered on the question of spending our money wisely, Lomborg backed Sachs into a corner with his statement that all the efforts being proposed to curtail CO2 emissions would result in less that 1 degree F reduction in warming. To this statement Sachs had no direct reply but played the “destruction of our planet if we don’t act now” card. A pretty sorry performance.
Max
Brute (and others):
Re my 9664, my note on the debate is here. Comments welcome.
Note that I’ve tried to provide an objective view of the event – without personal comment on what was said. I took notes but, inevitably, they were rather sketchy and, to an extent, I had to summarise and to rely on memory. Nonetheless, I think it’s a reasonable record.
I’m no longer a fan of Hitler Downfall parodies. But this one is worth watching.
Of course it doesn’t take any wit to say that Jeffrey Sachs has written a “terrible” article or that he is “lying”.
Just what has he written that has caused you such grief?
He’s said that there is common thread of organised opposition to established science which started off with smoking curbs, later moving on to the opposition to curbs on SO2 emissions, CFC emissions and other dangerous pollutants, asbestos, smoke particulates and e-waste, and later moving on to oppostion to the science behind the Global warming effects on unlimited and uncontrolled GHG emisssions.
If anyone thinks this is a lie, they need look no further than the activities of people like Fred Singer or the Heartland institute.
So waht is Anthony Watts getting upset about? Hes saying that AGW shouldn’t be compared with tobacco smoking. He’s saying that though Fred Singer and Heartland were wrong about tobacco, they are right about AGW. No doubt there were people who argued the same about acid rain and tobacco. Or asbestos and tobacco.
If anything else crops up in the future, no doubt we’ll hear the argument that the opponents of the science on that new issue shouldn’t be compared to those dreadful climate change deniers who did so much damage in the early 21st century. “This is different!” they’ll say.
Sorry Tony.
Can you resize it?
Peter (9669)
Interesting that you should mention CFC’s as an example, as they tend to reinforce the argument against alarmism.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_cfc_ban_global_warmings_pi.html
This paragraph seems apposite:
The CFC ban was a perfect pilot for the anthropogenic global warming fraud. It established all the characters: the eco-left NGOs, the environmental “scientists” (both real and self-proclaimed), and big industry poised to make huge profits and political control over human choices and behavior. It had buy-ins by governments all over the planet. It was based on an unproven (and probably unprovable) hypothesis. Many industries stood to gain at the expense of consumers. To this day, research continues to be funded to study CFCs in the atmosphere. Most significantly, the “ozone hole” hasn’t changed appreciably. It remains stable…as if we ever really knew what “stable” was.
JamesP,
There you go again using that word “unproven”. Its quite a sneaky tactic. You, and people like Robin, don’t say the science is wrong. You just raise an impossibly high barrier.
Molina and Rowland were in 1995 awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of the CFC-ozone depletion link.
This article shows how the tactics used by vested interests to try to discredit scientific concerns were exactly the same as currently used over CO2 and global warming.
1) Launch a public relations campaign disputing the evidence.
2) Predict dire economic consequences, and ignore the cost benefits.
and more! You guys may want to look through the article below to see if you can pick up any tips!
http://www.wunderground.com/education/ozone_skeptics.asp
Peter #9673
I recently posted some research by Qing Bin Lui who has been testing the hypothesis that cosmic rays are an important ingredient of ozone hole depletion. The basic fact is that despite action the hole has not ‘healed.’
Do you remember that last year I asked the top people at Cambridge University and the Max Planck institute whether they knew if a hole existed before instruments picked it up in the 1950’s and they said they had no idea?
The hole today could be around the largest ever (due to our activities), or it could be nothing out of the ordinary. We simply don’t know. What we do know is that our actions over the last twenty years has had little effect on its subsequent behaviour which might be telling us that we got the original diagnosis wrong, or don’t know the whole story.
Tonyb
PeterM:
It’s interesting that you should think (#9673) that I “raise an impossibly high barrier” re the dangerous AGW hypothesis. Interesting because as recently as 18 February (here) I requested (for the umpteenth time) that you “refer us to empirical evidence that (a) man’s CO2 emissions were the main cause of late 20th century warming; and (b) [assuming you can provide (a)] that further such emissions will cause dangerous climate change”. In other words, I requested that the hypothesis be subject to standard scientific practice – as determined by the Scientific Method. It seems, however, that you now admit that standard scientific practice sets “an impossibly high barrier” for the dangerous AGW hypothesis.
As I said – interesting.