Excellent article. Only baulked at the end to read the author was a Lennonist until the fine print became apparent and it was the British musician, not the Russian revolution fellow. On that basis I am a Marxist. Groucho's one-liners beat Karl's turgid drivel by a country mile.

"Of course when they say ‘climate change’they actually mean ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’(CAGW)"

They don't even mean that. They mean "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that politicians, by power of the State, can improve at a worthwhile cost or downside, considering all relevant human evaluations now and indefinitely into the future."

Ask them how they prove that and they go quiet and slink off.

Of course what En Passant has in mind is socialism. The idea is that by giving total power to the State over all production and all human freedom, we're going to end up with a fairer, better and more sustainable society. Ask them to justify their theory of the State and again we just get shrieks of silence, or self-contradiction.

And these guys call their critics "denialists"?

Well.
I agree with most of the article, save that we are powerless to deal with climate change!
If it's just part of natural variation, and or a natural trend to a warmer future, that eventually becomes too warm, even for warm and comfortable frogs being slowly brought to the boil!
We still can send a large solar umbrella aloft; and as a finally cooperating world, suddenly understanding, there is not yet an effective exit strategy, for it's denizens/frogs!
If there's a genuine desire to deal with and end poverty, wherever we find it?
Then, we have no better model than China to follow; political systems aside.
China quite massively reduced poverty, lifting millions out of it, all while reducing its overall population numbers, and via the capitalist free market system.
We need to finish somewhere between extremes,and that is cooperative capitalism comrade!
And accompanying free enterprise, save for cash cow essential service.
We gain little through privatization, if were merely exchange one monopoly, for a much more expensive one.
I mean, all business costs need to be contained, and given energy transport and water, number as the greatest costs of doing business; they, like the tax system, must be contained.
Logically, you wouldn't privatize tax would you?
The lowest costing energy options also happen to be carbon free, like cheaper than coal thorium, coupled to very local micro-grids; and would cost industry less than half that they're shelling out now.
Making and using locally produced biogas onsite, via ceramic fuel cells, cuts the cost by half again, given an energy coefficient of 80%! The best in the world!
Parenthetically, when one uses NG in this solid state technology, the exhaust product is mostly water vapor!
If one wanted a smog free city, then all transportation would need to be electric, battery or NG/biogas powered, super silent ceramic fuel cell systems. It helps if it's also the cheapest to run!
In an already overpopulated world, the only way left to grow the economy, [as proven by the Chinese model,] is to reduce/remove poverty, wherever we find it!
Rhrosty.

Peter

King Canute is reputed to have said:-

“All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial, and that none is worthy of the name of king but He who commands the heaven, earth and sea to obey his eternal laws”

Or in somewhat less flowery modern terms we can not alter the laws of nature.

As a matter of fact you have failed to understand the lesson of King Canute, he could indeed have stopped the tide from rising by giving his engineers orders to build a wall to keep the sea out, what he could not do was make it happen simply by wishing it so. This is exactly the mistake that so many climate change deniers make when they wish that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere won’t have an impact. The laws of nature make it abundantly clear that if we add GHGs to the atmosphere the climate will warm. It is a simple engineering problem to reduce the amount of GHGs we add to the atmosphere to the point where it will not have any impact on climate and the only obvious impediment is greed. Reducing emissions of GHGs will not impact on the poorest or the poorly educated, but not doing so puts them at grave risk from a changing climate.

JK.K
I think you have just invented the schizophrenic strawman argument with quote:-

They mean "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that politicians, by power of the State, can improve at a worthwhile cost or downside, considering all relevant human evaluations now and indefinitely into the future."

By the way have you been taking lessons from Sir Humphrey Appleby?

warmair

Notice how you don't join issue with anything I say, don't prove anything you allege, don't make any point about climate or climate policy, and make nothing but mere snide sarcastic personal argument, complete with fake psychiatric diagnosis? Oh and you JUST HAPPEN to be a warmist. Pretty much says it all.

"The laws of nature make it abundantly clear that if we add GHGs to the atmosphere the climate will warm."

Even if all the issues of climatology were conceded - which they aren't - all you would have established is a tendency for temperatures to rise.

So what? You still haven't begun to establish that the result would be worse rather than better, or how you would know.

For example, the micro-climate between where I live and 5 km away is significantly different, including in its effect on production possibilities. So how about you show us how you have calculated those ecological variables, and then do the same for the rest of Australia, Eurasia, the Americas and Africa, for the scenarios both with and without policy action.

Or admit that you have no rational basis for your belief system in favour policy action.

"It is a simple engineering problem to reduce the amount of GHGs we add to the atmosphere to the point where it will not have any impact on climate and the only obvious impediment is greed."

You are not understanding, the problem is not the merely technical one, the problem is
a) knowing whether or not policy will produce a net benefit considering its downsides, and
b) the economic calculation problem.

And the data set you need to prove both is human evaluations in the status quo versus policy action.

Go ahead. Prove what you're assuming. Show how you calculated all the relevant ecological variables in establishing a problem, and how you took in to account all the relevant human evaluations in establishing a solution.

A simple admission that you can't do it will suffice.

It has been proved by people far beter qualfied than me that adding GHGs to the atmosphere will reduce the rate at which the earth cools, this logically leads to the conclusion the earth will warm. Why would I want to reinvent the wheel?
http://www.science.org.au/sites/default/files/user-content/resources/file/climatechange2010.pdf

The consequences of a warming climate are not difficult to predict nor for that matter is the cost. Again this is a subject that has been well studied and does not need to be reinvented by me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review

warmair I'm not going to be sent on an errand to construct your argument for you.

You have only demonstrated that you've got nothing but appeal to blind unquestioning faith in absent authority - the opposite of science, so you are only proving my point that you have no rational basis for your beliefs in climate policy.

"There seems to be a moderate consensus among ‘climate scientists’ that the outcome is now inevitable, the tipping points have been passed, the climate will change, with all the dire predictions now certain."

The supposed climate scientist consensus is about ideology, not science. 'Pseudo-science' is the closest it gets to 'science'.

JK.J
I see no difficulty in relying on absent authority, for example I trust Newton’s equations of motion despite the fact that he is long dead. A typical science paper will give references to various sources, which have been checked and tested by others and will attempt to build on that work. It is entirely reasonable for me to rely on climate scientists to form my views on the subject, which is very different to basing ones views on some blogger on the internet with no expertise on the subject.

If I wanted too I could do an experiment to prove that CO2 absorbs infrared light but why would I bother seeing as how the experiment has been done 1000s of times by others. This is all I actually need to know to prove that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase global temperatures.

As to the degree of impact on climate there are two simple independent approaches, the first is simply to check to see what impact of CO2 has been in past climate. The second is to calculate the energy changes for any particular level of CO2. The results are consistent and thus give us a fair degree of confidence that the amounts of CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere will indeed cause average global temperatures to rise.

warmair
I repeat, even if all that were conceded, all you would have established is a positive tendency for temperatures to rise. So what?

You still wouldn't have established
a) any problem whatsoever
b) any reason to think that government has the knowledge, competence or disinterestedness to make the situation better than worse, even in your own terms, by means of policy.

What you have is necessary but not sufficient, that's all.

You still haven't joined issue, all you've done is gone round in a circle and ended where you began.

If, according to you, you don't have to "re-invent the wheel", you're only telling us you're satisfied you're right without being able to show any reason to support what you're contending for. In other words you have nothing substantive to add to the discussion but only to tell us what you believe, and so need either to learn to be quiet when proved irrational, or to prove what you're alleging.

Go ahead. You haven't even started. Your mere circularity proves my argument, not yours.

All
Don't think the circularity and vacuity of warmair's methodology is unique to him. It's a feature of all warmist argument which we keep consistently demonstrating in here.

None of them can prove what they're alleging. They're not even aware of the issues. They think, like warmair, that by pointing to a mere wodge and heap of temperature statistics that they've proved their case in favour of policy, without even cognising, let alone proving, the all-important issues as concerns human values.

Total vapidity.

Jardine K. Jardine: None of them can prove what they're alleging. They're not even aware of the issues. They think, like warmair, that by pointing to a mere wodge and heap of temperature statistics that they've proved their case in favour of policy, without even cognising, let alone proving, the all-important issues as concerns human values.

Indeed! They show their arrogance -- correction, ignorance -- by claiming that the science is settled.