Well done.Why does Bolt do it? Is it to curry favour with the Howard regime or does he really believe the rubbish he writes and mouths? In his frequent defence of the indefensible he strikes me as fearful of change and fearful of the future. He hectors and bullies and to me the impression he conveys is someone lacking in courage.
In my opinion he is in the same league as Alan Jones and lacks ability to bring the reasonable person to his point of view.He reinforces the prejudices of the converted and rails against those who question his soppy and polemical journalism. Its a fair bet that when the tide changes Bolt's voice will no longer be fashionable or required.
Last year on the ABC program, The Insiders,he was silly enough to assert that there was nothing published and no research to prove that the TNI was conducting a program of repression, amounting to genocide, against the West Papuans.
Bruce Haigh

Bolt belted? Did he reply or did he do the usual cowardly thing, ignore knowledgable critics?

Of course, this is hardly the first time that Bolt has misrepresented the facts in order to pretend his inanities have evidential basis. There's a chapter on Bolt in a recent book called _The War on Democracy_ (by Lucy and Mickler). It's a devastating critique of Bolt's lamentable "journalism" when it comes to reporting the "facts" on the aftermath of Chernobyl (not too mention his revisionist view of Australia's white-Indigenous relations).

What a dopey post followed by the usual suspects lambasting Andrew Bolt who is currently on holidays.

I'm with Andrew Bolt and good on him for exposing Al Gore whose ideas will not pass the test of time.

Its amazing how much the loony left have in common with Islam. They preach fear, hate those who expose their half truths and then use what they call science to back up highly suspect theories. No wonder they love hollywood movies so much.

Heh, the last two posters don't seem to actually have any interest in the facts presented in the article. Argue the points, not the people, guys! You may look a little...well...stupid, otherwise.

Sniggid's limp offering: "What a dopey post followed by the usual suspects lambasting Andrew Bolt who is currently on holidays." Not a fact or an idea in sight.

Runner's limp offering: "Its amazing how much the loony left have in common with Islam. They preach fear, hate those who expose their half truths and then use what they call science to back up highly suspect theories. No wonder they love hollywood movies so much." Again not a fact or an idea in sight.

When will you guys learn that throwing insults is doing your side more harm than good? Arguments please. Or have you run out of ideas?

Sniggid, seems like you are one of the modern front-of-the-mind smart-arses who believes that man has never hurt the earth but achieved only good.

As one who has thirteen great grandchildren and the oldest one going on seventeen, could reckon if you are still alive by AD 2100, reckon those 90-year-old former kids, will really have your guts for garters.

Could suggest you get out back of beyond by yourself and really reason a bit, matey, remember the old saying, that it is from deserts the prophets come.

I suspect that Lambert wrote this article with the intention of refuting Bolt’s refutation of Gore. Like Bolt, rather than attempting to objectively analyse each “inconvenient truth”, Lambert conveniently chose scientific papers that supported his own prejudice. What would politicians, journalists or computer scientists know about climate anyway?

Interestingly this piece by Tim Lambert was published at OLO today as it is considered one of the '40 best blogs' written in 2006.

Given its content, I can't imagine the judges of the '40 best blogs' know that much about global warming?

But they should have known Andrew Bolt has a great blog at the Herald Sun ... and they could have probably found a much better written and more factually correct piece at his site.

Maybe they will consider a piece from Andrew Bolt for the 2007 'best blog' anthology?

Cheers, Jennifer (Marohasy)

I'm not aware of all of the facts on Global Warming. Few members of the public truly are.

In such a polarised debate, everyone seems to adopt a viewpoint and hold on for dear life.

As nobody else here seems to be addressing the facts in the article, I'll just summarise the way I see this issue. As I don't know the hardcore science, I'll leave that aspect to other posters.

1. The fact that climate change is occurring is disputed by none. Whether it is man-made appears to be the question.

2. The vast majoirty of scientists have asserted that man has, at the very least, contributed to climate change.

3. Many of those who deny global warming have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.
May I ask, what are the vested interests of those who say it is due to greenhouse gases? Can it compare to the vested interests of the other side? (This is the main point for me. One side has clear motive, the other doesn't - whatever self gain they may have is dubious at best).

Overall however, I wish we could stop playing the blame game at least, and while we can keep canvassing whether it is caused by man, couldn't we have a separate discussion about what we can do about the effects of climate change, man made or not?

It's a bit disappointing that these comments have remained virtually content free, especially when Lambert makes so many gaffes himself that it makes handing out marks to Bolt laughable.

Just working from the top. Claim 1. So what if Peiser didn't count correctly. Just one scientist who doesn't agree negates Gore's claim. If you check the abstracts republished on Lambert's blog you get this quote from the first one: "More and better measurements and statistical techniques are needed to detect and confirm the existence of greenhouse-gas-induced climate change, which currently cannot be distinguished from natural climate variability in the historical record."

Claim 2. Doesn't really matter whether Revelle died in 1991 or not, if he didn't think the scientific evidence was certain enough, he didn't think it was certain enough and Gore couldn't have possibly been convinced of the dangers by him.

Claim 3. It doesn't matter what Severinghaus says, not only does the record show CO2 increasing after temperature increases, not before, but it also shows temperature decreasing as we go into ice ages, despite increases in C02. So, you can't hang Bolt on this one.

Claim 4. This is the first one where Bolt appears to be half wrong. Would appear that temperatures haven't changed in this area of Africa, but precipitation has, and precipitation changed around 125 years ago, so probably not global warming related. If he'd left the trees out he would have been OK

I could go on, but the word limit won't let me.

If Gore's agit-prop was half-baked, and it was, Lambert's is raw and barely digestible.

I'm not going to attempt to debate the correctness of the science that underpins the global warming theory (unlike some other people here), because I haven't read the studies cited, and I don't presume to be an expert.

However, I would like to pose a question. If global warming is real, so what? Are we not able to adapt to rising sea levels, changes in vegetation patterns, weather patterns, etc? If anything, it would be an economic boom. Whole new cities and industries would need to be built. This would create new work and therefore new jobs. Much of our infrastructure needs renewing anyway, so why not start building somewhere new? It is Keynesian economics in action :)

Yes, Gekko, why not be realistic in Australia, the world's largest island and with a desert in the centre where the sun is at it's peak most every day.

If a small magnifer can burn a hole in your arm in seconds what heat plus power might a magnifer the size of a footy ground collect propped up as high as the Eiffel tower and swivelled to follow the sun?

Not one but ten dozen of these?

It is also said that if rivers were kept from running into Lake Eyre, the lake with its glary white salt covering would also make the biggest and best solar collector in the world.

Furthermore if those northern rivers could be turned into a tube canal into the northern end of the Darling how much might this help water and productive problems in the south?

From Graham Y,
1. Peiser admitted one inaccurate interpretation of a paper but Lambert implied that Peiser admitted to widespread errors. Gore said "not one paper" but Lambert gave Bolt a zero for getting 33/34 right. Bolt 1, Lambert nil, Gore nil.

2. Bolt left out a date but Gore left out Revelle's highly relevant conclusion. Bolt 2, Lambert nil, Gore Nil.

3. Bolt gave an accurate quote, not disputed by Lambert and added to the partial information provided by Gore but Lambert used a straw man. Bolt 3, Lambert nil, Gore nil.

4. Gore claimed warming was only cause of glacier melt. Bolt mentioned land use change. Lambert links to real climate bumf that used the levels of Lake Victoria as a proxy for past rainfall. Really silly when most know that clearing trees increases runoff and will therefore raise the level of the lake. Bolt 4, Lambert nil, Gore nil.

5. Gore claimed 600cm sea level rise by 2100. Bolt said IPCC projected 14 to 43cm by 2100. Lambert claimed B was in error because the real IPCC projection was 11 to 77cm and then used realclimate claim of "eventual" rise of 400 to 600cm. Lambert made no mention of when this "eventual" rise will occur because, at current melting rates it will take 11,000 YEARS! Bolt 5, Lambert nil, Gore nil.

More to follow.

6.Gore claims there are already sea level refugees in the Pacific. Bolt quoted De Freitas' complete rejection. Lambert quotes a radio station beat up but ignores Islands like Niue that have 75% of their population now in NZ when their "lower terrace" is 27 metres above sea level. Ditto for other islands Bolt 6. Lambert nil, Gore nil.

7. Bolt provides legitimate perspective on the issue and can be neither right nor wrong. Bolt 7, Lambert nil, Gore 0.5.

8. Gore claims cyclones intensifying all over the world due to GW. Bolt quotes Dr Landsea of US Nat Hurricane Centre who says no evidence. Lambert quotes more realclimate bumf, with no evidence, that "most experts disagree". Lambert obviously has no idea of Qld experience over past 30 years with substantially fewer and milder cyclones. Bolt 8, Lambert nil, Gore 0.5.

9. Gore claims 30 new diseases due to GW. Bolt quoted expert that said Gore completely wrong. Lambert quotes a reference to a particular mosquito species and tried to imply that this refuted the experts "not one of the 30 diseases" claim. Lambert then quotes a study that merely stated that, among many other factors, GW could not be ruled out, as if that was proof of cause. Bolt 9, Lambert nil, Gore 0.5.

10. Bolt said Gore never hints at other explanations and gives solar activity as one of those explanations. Lambert attacks the example and claims that Bolt is wrong for giving any example at all. Bolt 10, Lambert nil, Gore 0.5.

Lambert has completely trashed his credibility with this defamatory diatribe masquerading as balanced assessment. It is pure casuistry.

Pers and Graham,

But the general impression that most readers will take away from the piece is that: Andrew Bolt is a dill and Tim Lambert knowledgable.

Why? Because the piece has been judge one of the best blogs of 2006 by presumably knowledgable folk (including an Australian academic) and OLO published it.

Hey, one slap in the face for Bolted Colt of no regrets, so what?
He trades in invective, bitchy, often deliberately cruel, hair splitting journalism, reap what you sow!

Jennifer, just because something appears in OLO doesn't make it right, it makes it arguable. OLO is a forum. It is about debate. It is about thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is about falsifiability. It is about giving consenting adults access to as much information as possible and letting them make their minds up. It is about publishing lots of material that its editor thinks is twaddle, but that other people think is insightful, because it would be arrogant to assert one's absolute rightness, not to mention stupid.

One of the problems with the mainstream media is not that they are biased, but that they don't cover the range of information that they should. We've probably published more anti-Gore material than anyone else, so I don't see what the problem is with publishing this pro-Gore piece. Any student using the site for research is not only going to come across this, but two pieces by Bob Carter that say the opposite. I think the only other piece that is supportive of Gore is by Brian Bahnisch.

And the comments section on two of these articles would give the reader a clear view of what the Chief Editor (me) thinks, so a researcher would know it's not some sort of house opinion (if they think that's important, which I don't).

Look at the huge amount of research and development into biofuels, wind, and solar, taking place world-wide today. The successful development of these alternatives promises to benefit consumers at the expense of monopolies. And if the motivation for this research (anthropogenic global warming and peak oil) turns out to be nonsense, then the consumer is still a winner. That cannot be said for some of the Australian initiatives, like the dinosaur resusitation that is geosequestration, the prospect of having expensive nuclear power stations that are obsolete before they are completed, the protectionist policy toward ethanol, and the abandonment of Australia's biodiesel industry. Perhaps some of the global warming denialists could comment on the waste of these initiatives?

Sea level rise is a more touchy subject, given the value of property threatened, though any trend is unlikely to become apparent for many years yet. But even if there is no sea level rise, much coastal development is still at risk from storm surges. A cyclone and associated storm surge similar to that of 1950 striking the Gold Coast today would wipe out 70,000 homes, for example. Another triumph of greed.

Perseus might note that the 11,000 year melt time (for the Greenland Ice Sheet?) was determined by a computer model. I guess that computer models should only be given credence when they give results that please you.

Jennifer I am glad you have come out in support of Bolt. You have outed yourself. Now what motivates you? Are you also seeking the warm glow (pardon the pun) of Coalition approval? In my opinion you have done harm to the debate on the utilisation of water in Australia and have not exactly distinguished yourself with respect to the climate change debate mainly, in my opinion, because of the intolerance and rigidity of your views. Think again, you are obviously not stupid. In my view you have a lot to give outside of your current ideological mindset.
Bruce Haigh

GrahamY:

1. That abstract was not published in a science journal and hence was not in the 928 articles Oreskes considered. After I wrote that post, Media Watch did an item on the same Bolt piece, and Peiser admitted that he got that one wrong:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/peiser_admits_he_was_97_wrong.php

And whether it was 0, 1 or 2 articles out 928 does not affect the point Gore was making: that the debate about whether humans are causing global warming that you see in the popular media just does not appear in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

2. You're missing the point. Revelle didn't doubt the existence of man-made warming -- after all he was the one who discovered it in the first place. In 1991 Revelle did not think that drastic action was needed yet. This does not contradict anything Gore says in his movie -- Gore said he learned about the existence of global warming from Revelle, not that Revelle convinced him that drastic action was needed in 1991.

3. Gore cited Severinghaus and Severinghaus responded "I would like it to go on record that Bolt's abuse of my science is not done with my approval"

http://www.scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/bolts_abuse_of_science.php

4. I guess you didn't bother reading the linked article by Eric Steig. Steig's area of research is ice cores, but hey, what would he know? Steig and other climate scientists have stated that Gore got the science right. Possibly because he listened to what the scientists said.

Graham, I'm curious: are there any other areas of scientific research where you think all the scientists are wrong?

I'll just deal with Perseus 5-10, since I already did GrahamY 1-4:

5. Sea levels are currently rising at 3mm/year. 11,000 years of that gives 33m of sea level rise, not 6m. And, of course, if Greenland starts melting in a serious way the rate of sea level rise will increase a lot. In any case, Gore did not say how long it would take to get 6m of sea level rise, so what he said was not wrong.

6. This is just incoherent. Because there are some folks who migrate for reasons other than sea level rise it does not follow that no-one is migrating because of rising sea levels.

7. Bolt didn't say that he was providing perspective, he claimed that Gore was wrong. And not even you are prepared to argue that Gore got this one wrong.

8. The RealClimate post, far from providing "no evidence" provides plenty. Those coloured, underlined bits of text are what we call "links". Click on them and you get taken to peer-reviewed journal articles and longer posts with references. You know, evidence.

9. Gore did not claim 30 new diseases due to global warming. Did you even see the movie?

10. I did say that Bolt was wrong for giving an alternative explanation -- I said that Bolt's alternative explanation was wrong and I explained why?

I think I'm running up against the word limit, so more at my blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/01/rotflmao.php

When reading Lambert one must always bear in mind that scoring political points is his primary goal; thus his science is consistently misleading.

As it will take only one error on his part to invalidate Lambert's contention that Bolt got none of his 10 points right, I will address only the point with which I am most familiar; no.6: Tuvaluans being forced by rising seas to flee to New Zealand. (This single but glaring error being cause to regard as dubious the inclusion of Lambert's post in a best posts round-up.)

Tide gauges have indeed indicated a rise in sea level. This in itself tells us nothing about circumstances on the ground in Tuvalu and Lambert fails to link to any such evidence. Such information is available, however, in an EU funded SOPAC study of coastal processes in Tuvalu published in April 2006, which summarizes the situation on the main island as follows:

"No difference can be detected between the overall position of the coastline in 2003 and 1984. However, additional work undertaken to determine longer term trends on this coast revealed obvious differences in the position of the coastline between 2003 and 1943 and 1941. It appears that Fongafale Lagoon coast has in fact prograded towards the lagoon some 25 to 30 m over the last 60 years."

Admittedly the study does not focus directly on sea level rise but it does pay special attention to sea water intrusion, which is blamed on local human activities and not on sea level rise. The study also finds that the islands of the archipelago are, if anything, growing.

Regardless, as the debunker it is up to Lambert to provide evidence proving Bolt wrong -- it simply isn't good enough for Lambert to offer sea level rise figures that are greater than Bolt's. Other than that Lambert cites nothing more than anecdotal evidence for Tuvaluans having fled rising seas (see part two following). Not good enough.

End part one. See: http://www.sopac.org/data/virlib/ER/ER0054.pdf

Because there is no hard evidence of Tuvaluans being forced to flee rising seas, scientist Lambert links to a transcript of a Living on Earth radio show -- do you reckon they might have an agenda? With his excerpt starting off "Seeing themselves as climate refuges..." it is immediately suspect. The transcript also contains the following:

"Over the last decade, the islanders have come [to New Zealand] for many reasons – better jobs, college, overcrowding on the islands – and to escape what many see as a threat of sea level rise, caused by global warming."

Tuvalu has always been an iffy place to live, its physical problems now exacerbated by social and economic problems related to its growing population. Tuvaluans are leaving for New Zealand not because they’re fleeing rising seas; they’re leaving in search of a better life.

As Lambert offers not a scrap of proof that a single Tuvaluan has fled the islands to escape rising seas, this one goes to Bolt.

Any comment from the editors?

1. After a long and tedious process Peiser has finally admitted that only one article out of the 928 "rejected or doubted" the scientific consensus for man-made global warming, http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1777013.htm . This was a non-reviewed committee report in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin. Peiser says he withdrew his criticism of Oreskes' study in March 2006. Oreskes said she analysed abstracts from refereed scientific journals, so I don't know how this committee report got on to Peiser's list. Gore was referring to reviewed scientific papers as stated by Oreskes when he said not one disputed that man’s gasses were mostly to blame for rising global temperatures (quoting from Bolt). Bolt 0. I'll continue when I have time.

“Pure casuistry” (to use Perseus’s term) on both sides, including from Perseus himself.

Surely global warming is too important to warrant a point-scoring game between OLO correspondents and apologists for a populist columnist.

Maybe Gore and Lambert exaggerated the case. Maybe Andrew Bolt sits in a pig-headed corner. Are we capable of debating the real issues with a calm examination of the evidence?

Benny Peiser told Media Watch on 12 October 2006: “I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact. However, this majority consensus is far from unanimous.

“Despite all claims to the contrary, there is a small community of sceptical researchers that remains extremely active. Hardly a week goes by without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory. (… see http://greenspin.blogspot.com/2006/10/do-i-detect-first-tiny-rumblings-of.html)

“Undoubtedly, sceptical scientists are a small minority. But as long as the possible impacts of global warming remain uncertain, the public is justified to keep an open mind. How decision-makers deal with these scientific uncertainties is another matter. But it is vital for the health and integrity of science that critical evaluation and scepticism are not scorned or curbed for political reasons.”

Yet an open mind may be a necessary, but not be a sufficient, response. If Gore is wrong, and nations have taken measures to prevent a catastrophe, what is the harm? If Bolt is wrong, and we’ve done nothing, what is the future of this planet?

Jennifer, you regret OLO has published Lambert’s piece because “the general impression that most readers will take away from the piece is that: Andrew Bolt is a dill and Tim Lambert knowledgable”. Are you being condescending in your assessment of OLO readers’ intelligence? A touch preemptive? A touch too ready to censor views that you disagree with?

FrankGol is quite succinct in his assessment; though the devil's advocate in me wants to point out the significant costs of investment that will be required to reduce the impact of global warming in any way.
Overall however, this investment would be a drop in the proverbially swollen ocean if even a fraction of the foretold damage occurs.

I just can't help but wonder what's in it for the climate change scientists who say we have just cause to be worried.
It's easy to see what's in it for the deniers. There are many people with a vested interest in the status quo.
Can anyone give me any reason as to why these scientists would do such a thing?
If I stretch my imagination I can conceive of a few, but they certainly don't stack up to
A: The obvious vested interests of powerful people in maintaining the status quo.
B: The number of scientists who fall on the 'global warming is happening' side of the argument.

I'm sorry, but the argument "they're all fundamentalist green lefties" just doesn't cut it.

So... if global warming is a farce, can anyone give me a convincing reason as to why so many scientists are convinced global warming is happening?

If not, then what on earth are we arguing about?

TurnRightThenLeft has got it exactly right with the question of motives. I can think of no rational motive to fabricate evidence in support of the suggestion that mankind is damaging the globe. There are, however, plenty of motives to fabricate the opposite.

Still, there's alot of uncertainty with the science behind understanding whats happening to the globe, which is upsurprising, given the fast array of potential causes and incredibly complex systems of the planet.

But it's definately not a matter of Left v Right. Its our world we're talking about. Its not politics, its the health of the planet. We should all be intent of finding the truth, whatever that may be, not searching for reasons to take stick with our 'team'.

Far be it for the green house gas bags to distort, cherry pick and misrepresent information in the promotion of their own agenda.

Noooooooooooooo, they are above such tawdry tactics, like quasi-celebrity fronted info-tainment stage spectaculars. Ohhhh, look at all those lights and graphics and numbers. Its sooooo compelling.

The 'global warming' debate is a larf. Each side has taken to criticising each others crticisms of each other.

Yet still, no actual proof. Ah, humbug, who needs proof when you've got a mountain of computer modelled correlation is causation spin.

As for argueing the presented fact(oids). bwahahahahha. Since when do overt interests with an agenda to promote ever place any importance on OBJECTIVELY and INDEPENDENTLY VERIABIABLE facts. Gore is a politician and so is Bolt... and these types deal in grey areas and opinions with just enough (but not too much) merit to keep the noise levels up.

Here's a fact... they could just appeal to peoples intelligence and say that pollution is a bad thing and we should reduce it, with diligence. Instead of patronising us behind a littany of cherry picked nonsense used to validate their political agenda. They could stop treating us like children who dont fundamentally understand the nature of politics and the deserved skeptism with which all politically motived offerings should be received.

Personally, l reckon the greenhouse facts are a bunch of hot air, none of which stops me from consciously reducing my personal contribution to waste and polution. The merits of reducing pollution are so blindingly self evident, l hardly need a bunch of factoid agenda driven reasons to justify it.

This is high jinx at its most paradoxical. Thanx for the larfs.

This bit of Lamberts response is very revealing.

"5. Sea levels are currently rising at 3mm/year. 11,000 years of that gives 33m of sea level rise, not 6m. And, of course, if Greenland starts melting in a serious way the rate of sea level rise will increase a lot. In any case, Gore did not say how long it would take to get 6m of sea level rise, so what he said was not wrong".

Note his capacity to extrapolate to a moronic extreme without actually bothering to check if there was enough ice to deliver that kind of sea level rise. The facts are that most of current ice melting is ocean ice not land based ice.

This ice will melt faster than land based ice sheets because sea ice gets warmed from above and below from the ocean. It is also much thinner (average depth of Greenland ice is circa 1500m) so there is less critical cold mass. And clearly, only the upper surface of a land based ice sheet is exposed to warmer agents (air) so the 1499m of ice below the surface cannot even begin to melt until the upper layer has melted.

So to extrapolate from existing sea ice melt rates, beyond the point when the sea ice has melted, is either ignorant or misleading. Some have even speculated that the melt rate could speed up when there is only land based ice left but this is highly improbable as the two types of ice have entirely different melting characteristics.

But Lambert's attempt to weasle out by suggesting that Gore did not actually say when this 6m rise would take place betrays a willingness on his part to misinform by omission. Either way it is still dishonest. And both Lambert and Gore have blown their credibility.

Tim, the answer to your question is that not all scientists agree with the "consensus" on this issue, so I'm not claiming this is an area of science where "all the scientists are wrong".

A quick read of the Media Watch site also reveals that Peiser does not admit that he was wrong in any fundamental sense at all. "Despite all claims to the contrary, there is a small community of sceptical researchers that remains extremely active. Hardly a week goes by without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory."

He also points out that from the 928 papers analysed by Oreskes (who is an historian, not a scientist, but I won't hold that against her), only 13 explicitly endorse the "consensus" view.

Your claims can only be characterised as deeply dishonest.

For those who think that it doesn't really matter if the science is wrong, or exaggerated, because phasing out carbon-based energy is a net benefit, I'd say "Think again". Human progress depends on good science. It's one thing for salesmen like politicians to lie or exaggerate, and another for people like scientists who are paid to tell the truth to do the same thing. You are sacrificing the integrity of the whole on the basis that the means justify the ends. Not only is that corrupting of the whole area of science, but it potentially means that things that we ought to worry about are being ignored to pander to your preconceptions.

If, for example, cosmic radiation is a better predictor of rainfall than CO2 climate models, then by concentrating on one when we should be looking at the other we risk the lives and livelihoods of billions to phase out a form of energy that may have limited, or no, net detrimental effects.

Perseus, you said "It is also much thinner (average depth of Greenland ice is circa 1500m) so there is less critical cold mass. And clearly, only the upper surface of a land based ice sheet is exposed to warmer agents (air) so the 1499m of ice below the surface cannot even begin to melt until the upper layer has melted."

Ice sheet dynamics is one area where the computer models have failed spectacularly. Yet, funnily enough, it seems to be a computer model that you give credence to. Nevertheless, you and other sceptics can have fun arguing for a few years yet.

But surely the billions of dollars being wasted on global warming prevention world-wide is of far more concern than a handful of AGW fanatics on OLO? Surely it is this expenditure that will adversely impact on living standards. My point is that there are areas of research that could be of benefit whether catastrophic climate change turns out to be real or a wild prediction, or anything in between. For example, I have read speculation that President Bush is about to announce a considerable increase in renewable fuels support. Such efforts could bring far greater peace and prosperity to the world than the United States Military ever could.

There is a fundamental difference between claims made in peer-reviewed scientific papers and what someone is saying is being said on a global-warming-denialist blog. Gore was referring to peer-reviewed scientific claims. Peiser no longer disputes Oreskes' study and thus Gore is correct to quote it. Peiser can talk about other, fundamentally less significant things, if he wants to but they are not relevant to Gore's statement. Contrary to Bolt's claim that "the debate is real", there is no debate in peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Regarding the original subject of this thread, I think the award is not just for the original posting but also for motivating the comments that it did. There were some very informative comments in that thread (far more informative than this thread).

BBGun,

Bolt claimed that the sea level rise was 0.07 mm/year, which is effectively zero, when it is in fact rising by 4.3 mm/year. He was wrong and you won't admit it. So sea levels are most definitely rising. Have Tuvaluans left the island as a result? I found you examples of Tuvaluans who said that was why they left and all you did was call them liars. Obviously there isn't any way to convince you of anything you don't want to believe since you dismiss all contrary evidence as lies.

Perseus,

You accuse me not bothering to check if there was enough ice to produce 6m of sea level rise. There is, and you can even check the calculations yourself. Take the average depth of the Greenland icesheet, multiply by the area of Greenland and divide by the area of the oceans and tell us what you get.

Then you start talking about melting sea ice. When sea ice melts it doesn't affect sea level. This is because of Archimedes principle, but hey, that just another one of those scientific consensuses so you probably don't believe that either. Why don't you try putting some ice cubes in a glass of water and seeing if the water level changes when they melt.

Gore didn't say when the 6m rise would occur because nobody knows how long it would take. It is typical of you that you would accuse him of dishonesty because, unlike you, he doesn't make things up.

GrahamY,

One of the things Gore mentions is the huge difference between the scientific literature and popular media on the global warming question. Gore reports the results of two studies. One, by Naomi Oreskes, looked at a sample of 928 papers in scientific journals and found that not one disagreed with the scientific consensus: that humans are responsible for most of the warming in the last few decades. The other, by the Boykoffs, looked at a sample of 636 news stories in major US newspapers and found that 53% gave equal weight to the view that climate change is exclusively caused by natural processes. The debate about the existence of AGW is only in the popular media.

Bolt's response to this is to claim that Gore was wrong because Benny Peiser said that it wasn't 0 out of 928 but 34 out of 928. But Peiser has at last admitted that he was wrong: he now says 1 out 928. And he's wrong about the last one, since it wasn't peer reviewed. So Gore was right when he said 0 out of 928, and Bolt was wrong when he said 34 out of 928. And Gore was right when he said that the debate in the popular media does not appear in the scientific literature and Bolt was wrong when he contradicted him.

And after Peiser admitted that he was 97% wrong in counting articles that disputed the consensus you conclude he must be 100% accurate in counting the articles that explicitly accept the consensus. He got that wrong too, you know -- there were many more than 13 and in fact most of the articles accepted the consensus just as Oreskes stated.

Oreskes is a historian, but you "forgot" to mention that she's a historian of science, holds a science degree, and her area of research is the development of scientific consensus. Peiser, on the other hand, is an anthropologist and this topic is not his area of expertise.

Finally, your abuse of me is evidence that you know you've lost this argument.

Oh a bitch slapping contest, what fun. Next time maybe we could do mud wrestling.

Bolt is a cool operator. He has a reasoned following and represents the counter view of the rabid left, thus he is a target for every control freak and wannabe despot in Australia.

I did comment sometime ago on this board about no articles of an Andrew Bolt origin being posted and one of GY's colleagues emailed me advising publishing same would be at a price, compared to plenty of articles which were free to use. That’s a good practical reason, sad though, I think if it were ever possible some “Bolt” would enhance the presence of this forum.

Doubtless Bolt could also conduct his own defense to Lamberts poorly presented argument but why should he bother? It’s a bit like being a male journalist equivalent of Linda Evangelista, sadly not in looks but in “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000”.

It would certainly stir the pot a little, not that I think "pot stirring" is a laudable thing for its own purpose, it is just a fun thing.

Lambert has clearly not done the very calculation that he suggested I do because, if he had, and divided it by the volume of current melting from Greenland, he would get the a simililar result to mine. The raw number suggests that it will actually take 14,000 years for the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt but when we apply the decadal increase in melting as a trend, we get 11,000 years instead.

And it would only produce a sea level rise of 6m. And that means that Greenalnd melting would only increase sea level by 5cm by year 2100. (assuming we are not doing some serious desalination for cropping by then)

His year 7 level science on floating ice also hardly informs. True, melting ice in water produces no increase in volume but this does not apply to ice shelves where most of the volume is above the equilibrium level. The reason for the dramatic footage of parts of the Ross Shelf in Antarctica is that much of the ice is above water level and when it breaks off it will contribute to a sea level rise. But of course, in other parts of Antarctica the shelves are actually getting bigger.

The most boorish part of both Gore and Lambert's ravings, is their implication that anyone who has any reservations about the extreme nature of the projections, is in denial of any anthropogenic influence on climate. Clearly, man does change his environment so man can change his climate. The issue in dispute is BY HOW MUCH.

It certainly does not mean that I will give a blank cheque to people who exhibit the full range of sleazy techniques of the shonks and spivs.

On sea level rise:

Based on some simple calculations, if the Greenland ice were to melt completely, the rise in sea level would be approximatly 7.2m (IPCC 2001). Based on current estimates, this would take up to 1000 years to complete, once a so called "tipping point" in temperature was reached. However, this is current quite contentious, as some measurements made by the GRACE satellites indicate that the loss is accelerating. In 1996, Greenland lost about 96 km3/year, while in 2006 239 km3/year (note, that since GRACE has only been operating since 2002, previous estimates may not be very good).

Also, remember that Greenland is not the only land ice mass in the world. However, currently observed sea level rise is not attributatble to glacial melt along. Most of it occurs due to the thermal expansion of water as the oceasn heats up (IPCC 2001).

On computer moodelling:

People outside science and engineering seem to have a poor knowledge of computer models and how they work. For one thing, a model is not just built and run. They first need to be verified by reproducing observations. As CSIRO scientist A. Barrie Pittock says:

"Climate models have been tested and improved systematically over time. There are many ways to do this. Modellers often judge models by how well they reproduce observed conditions... A popular test is to use a climate model with observed boundary layer conditions, like sea surface temperature... similarly test are made of how well a model reproduces natural variation, for example El Nino Southern Oscillation ENSO".

Climate models need to get good results before they are used to predict the future. The models are not flawless. But they are getting much better, and now simulate everything from ocean mixing to plant growth. Check out these sites for a good explantion:

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-60/iss-1/72_1.html

and my favourite:

http://climateprediction.net/science/model-intro.php

On sea level rise:

Based on some simple calculations, if the Greenland ice were to melt completely, the rise in sea level would be approximatly 7.2m (IPCC 2001). Based on current estimates, this would take up to 1000 years to complete, once a so called "tipping point" in temperature was reached. However, this is current quite contentious, as some measurements made by the GRACE satellites indicate that the loss is accelerating. In 1996, Greenland lost about 96 km3/year, while in 2006 239 km3/year (note, that since GRACE has only been operating since 2002, previous estimates may not be very good).

Also, remember that Greenland is not the only land ice mass in the world. However, currently observed sea level rise is not attributatble to glacial melt along. Most of it occurs due to the thermal expansion of water as the oceasn heats up (IPCC 2001).

On computer modelling:

People outside science and engineering seem to have a poor knowledge of computer models and how they work. For one thing, a model is not just built and run. They first need to be verified by reproducing observations. As CSIRO scientist A. Barrie Pittock says:

"Climate models have been tested and improved systematically over time. There are many ways to do this. Modellers often judge models by how well they reproduce observed conditions... A popular test is to use a climate model with observed boundary layer conditions, like sea surface temperature... similarly test are made of how well a model reproduces natural variation, for example El Nino Southern Oscillation ENSO".

Climate models need to get good results before they are used to predict the future. The models are not flawless. But they are getting much better, and now simulate everything from ocean mixing to plant growth. Check out these sites for a good explantion:

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-60/iss-1/72_1.html

and my favourite:

http://climateprediction.net/science/model-intro.php

Had the editors look closely at Lambert’s post they would have corrected this error in the original at his blog:

"The historical record from 1978 through 199 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year."

The quote above as it appears at Bolt’s blog:

“The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year.”

This uncorrected error indicates that the editors did not bother to do even a cursory check of Lambert’s post, much less verify Bolt’s claim, which is, by the way, correct: the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year. Whether or not this .07 figure is meaningful is another matter.

See: http://staff.acecrc.org.au/~johunter/tuvalu.pdf

In his transparently diversionary response to my criticism of his reliance on anecdotal evidence Lambert responds:

“I found you examples of Tuvaluans who said that was why they left and all you did was call them liars. Obviously there isn't any way to convince you of anything you don't want to believe since you dismiss all contrary evidence as lies.”

First, this is a pathetic attempt to elicit an emotional response in readers, drawing their attention away from the real issues. I did not call the Tuvaluans liars.

Second, at his blog Lambert demands that global warming skeptics (or whatever you want to call them) provide supporting data from peer reviewed journal articles. Yet here he relies on anecdotal evidence from Tuvaluans who see themselves as climate refugees. The next thing you know he’ll claim aliens are visiting Earth, offering as proof statements from those who claim to have been abducted by aliens (and are so convinced of their experience that they actually suffer PTSD).

Lambert’s original blog post and his response to my criticisms are both misleading. This is just Lambert doing what Lambert does.

Only two points to make … from a non-expert taxpayer without any further financial interest in the global warming debate.
(Nup, full disclosure doesn't hurt at all.)

1.
In December 2005 I reported a major water leak on public land to my local water authority.

After a series of follow-up calls (three from myself, plus Christ knows how many others), the leak was repaired in *August 2006*, coincidentally after I bypassed the seat-warmers.

In response to my demand for an explanation from the 'authority' for this deplorable delay, it advised me that two entities (from memory, a quango and a shire) had been busy disputing responsibility.

I suggested that they need to adopt the practice of FIXING the problem first and sorting the BLAME in due course, not indulging in displacement activities.

It remains to be seen if this advice transmutes into policy. (I remain skeptical.)
Meanwhile the 'water police' are out in Victoria, protecting our dwindling supplies by making sure I don't water my struggling lemon tree on the wrong day.

[Hopefully this analogy isn't too obtuse.]

2.
When it comes my personal search for credibility regarding the 'facts' about global warming, I just follow the money trail.
Lobbyists get paid to push an agenda and will simply swap their 'beliefs' (and their preferred sources) for money. (Hey, nice one.)
Shareholders in, say, fossil fuels, don't want to see their investment deteriorate.
Governments which embrace over-consumption are simply addicted to bloated tax and excise revenues.
And so on.
Stuff the grandkids - there's a dollar in this.

Having said all that, I usually take the skeptics' side. But isn't it pretty obvious there's a problem - and that we need to fix it? Or are those _without a vested interest_ still in denial over global warming?

BBgun says that:

"Bolt’s claim, which is, by the way, correct: the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year.

See: http://staff.acecrc.org.au/~johunter/tuvalu.pdf "

The executive summary of http://staff.acecrc.org.au/~johunter/tuvalu.pdf says:

"A cautious estimate of present long-term relative sea level change at Funafuti, which uses all the data, is a rate of rise of 0.8+/-1.9 mm/year relative to the land."

Next time BBgun, before you give a reference to support your assertion, at least read the summary of that reference. That way you reduce the chance of looking like an idiot.

Chris O'Neill,

The source I linked to says the following (it will come out looking a bit odd due to formatting):

"Probably the most widely quoted estimates of long-term sea level change at Funafuti
have been made by Mitchell et al. (2000) and by the NTF (2002). In particular, the
NTF (2002) reported:

"As at February 2002, based on the short-term sea level rise analyses, performed by the
National Tidal Facility Australia, for the nearly nine years of data return show a rate of
+0.9 mm per year.

and:

"The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of
0.07 mm per year.

"These results, which are based on quite short records and for which no uncertainty
estimates are provided, have unfortunately been quoted out of context and without
appropriate qualication."

I provided the link and qualified that the .07 mm figure might not be meaningful. It is difficult for me to comment on the context as this is a secondary source. The .07 mm figure is nonetheless correct.

What's with the idiot jibe? Having a bad day?

ChrisC

You said this about the Greenland Ice Sheet: “Based on current estimates, this would take up to 1000 years to complete, once a so called "tipping point" in temperature was reached.”

Computer models for ice sheet dynamics have been hopelessly inaccurate. Yet the likes of Perseus would seem to hold them in some regard, whilst dismissing many other climate change predictions on the basis that they were generated by computer models.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/science/earth/16gree.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5087%0A&em&en=2d09bdaa06e06428&ex=1169269200

It is very unsurprising to see such efforts to downplay the potential hazard from melting ice sheets. This article gives an example of how rapid the devastation can be from sea levels rising at their present rate:

http://www.thedanielislandnews.com/artman/publish/article_1695.php

With some scientists warning of the possibility of sea levels rising several metres in a century, dismissing the risk out of hand would seem to be foolish.

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2007/01/1733631.php

Now hold on a minute folks. In his posts above, Lambert has provided two figures for current sea level rise, the first was 3mm a year and the second was 4.3mm. Yet we have numerous links indicating only 0.07mm between 1978 and 1999. Lambert cought out AGAIN with more porkies.

And the comments on some claimed inconsistency on my part for supporting a model on greenland melting while contesting climate models is downright silly. One does not need a model to multiply the area of Greenland ice by it's thickness and then divide by the current melt rate to get the number of years it will take to melt. It is called a calculator. Ditto for sea level rise. Don't you people ever check the numbers you are told?

And this bollocks about tipping points which will cause a rapid melt of only 1000 years is nothing more than an excuse for suspending logic. They provide no explanation of what this tipping point may be triggered by but it sounds barely plausible to the bimboscenti.

But the prize goes to the bozos who consistently claim that all sceptics have a vested interest or are paid by oil companies. Give us a break. Do you seriously expect us to believe that scientists and bureaucrats would never exaggerate to get their hands on steady funding?

Let me spell it out for you folks, this particular sceptic spent most of his career in a job that hinged on his capacity to detect people's BS. I was paid very well for that skill. And observing the stunts of the Al Gores and Tim Lamberts of this world makes my flesh crawl.

Al Gore has backed out of a debate by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Wall St Journal is having some fun with that fact;

"Mr. Gore says that global warming will increase malaria and highlights Nairobi as his key case. According to him, Nairobi was founded right where it was too cold for malaria to occur. However, with global warming advancing, he tells us that malaria is now appearing in the city. Yet this is quite contrary to the World Health Organization's finding. Today Nairobi is considered free of malaria, but in the 1920s and '30s, when temperatures were lower than today, malaria epidemics occurred regularly. Mr. Gore's is a convenient story, but isn't it against the facts?"

http://users2.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?mg=wsj-users2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB116909379096479919.html

Okay Perseus, I take that back about you elevating ice sheet melting models above climate models. Instead, it would seem that you you hold a calculation by a calculator to be more reliable than climate models.

Again, I would question why there is little discussion of the wastage in pursuing CO2 emission reductions. Andrew Bolt has taken the time to criticise government grants for a thermal solar power station, a proven technology with the potential to utilise 80-90% of the incident energy:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/global_warming_hype_shrivels_our_wallets/

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=295228&area=/insight/insight__international/

Yet I have read no criticism by Bolt of the government's plan to spend $500 million researching geosequestration, a completely unproven technology.

Surely the most effective action by sceptics would be to lobby for technological funding which would be of benefit regardless of the truth of AGW. Instead, we have sceptics like perseus voicing approval for research into measures like geosequestraion:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=207

Tim. it's not "abuse" to suggest you are being fundamentally dishonest, just a dispassionate assessment from the editor of this journal. If you weren't included in the BB06 collection you wouldn't have got a guernsey for publication in OLO for this essay.

There is a debate in the scientific literature, and there are many scientists who question the magnitude of the effects of CO2 forcing, as well as how significant it is, and what other forcings may be acting. I deliberately raised the issue of cosmic radiation because it would appear from the latest scientific research that it has an effect on cloud and rain formation, which should also have a flow-on effect in terms of warming.

Presumably this research will appear in peer reviewed journals, even if Oreskes didn't get to count it.

Peiser checked Oreskes study on the parameters that she originally supplied. They weren't the ones she actually used, so he adjusted his critique when this was pointed out to him. He still maintains that she has miscounted and misrepresented, so you are wrong to say he admits he is wrong.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of an assessment that in the US the popular press gives skeptics around 50% of the coverage on the issue, but I can vouch for the fact that it is not the case in Australia.

I do know that when Ian Castles wanted to publish on the question of whether purchasing power parity or market exchange rates should be used for calculating CO2 scenarios I was one of the few publishers who would give him space, even though his position was obviously the correct one, and the IPCC now appears to accept his position, even though villifying him in the first instance. That's one reason I got specifically interested in these issues. When a former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics is being villified by UN bureaucrats for being right, something stinks.

Having now paid a lot of attention to the greenhouse debate, that something is plural!

I find that the greenhouse warming debate is still going through phases of ascertaining the intensity of the problem or if there is a problem at all by which conservative, right wing liberals such as Bolton would have us believe. I just find it astounding that although the evidence is there, there continues to be bickering as to how serious it is.. Global warming is a problem, which we have yet to discover its seriousness, but it is not some whimsical fantasy brought up by "Islamic extremist sympathising, left wing jingoist protagonists" but by actual scientific research.. its dangerous to mix politics with science as certain people stand to loose too much vested interests, due to the fact that if there is a serious problem found it would call for certain levels restructuring and economic shifts within political societies around the globe.

GrahamY you are absolutely right that there is new scientific research on the effects on cloud and rain formation, and i recommend viewing this documentary made by BBC about this newly founded problem called global dimming.
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=1027879546389218797

Only view this documentary as an informative piece, as I don't intend to present it as a scare mongering tactic.. as for one I am not a hardcore environmentalist, just someone thats concerned

BBgun says that:

"Bolt’s claim, which is, by the way, correct: the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year."

Where is this shown to be correct, or do you want to quote something that says it is not correct and look lke an idiot for doing so?

Chris O'Neill writes:"Where is this shown to be correct, or do you want to quote something that says it is not correct and look lke an idiot for doing so?"

The source I linked and quoted above says that the .07 mm figure is correct but also indicates, in the opinion of the author, that it is possibly inappropriate to quote the figure out of context. I acknowledged this earlier. If you want to prove Bolt wrong you need to find the 2002 report he cites -- Lambert cites a 2005 report -- and show that he got it wrong.

Your petty quibbling is meant to distract from the real issues here. Rising seas have not forced Tuvaluans to flee to New Zealand and Gore was incorrect to make this claim.

Again with the idiot jibe. Takes one to know one, so there.

Readers can get Peiser's response to Mediawatch's questions at the program's transcript http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1777013.htm rather than rely on what anyone says on this forum. Quoting from that transcript:

"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one.

(Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues: Annual report, by Gerhard LC and Hanson BM, AAPG Bulletin 84 (4): 466-471 Apr 2000)

Peiser says he withdrew his criticism in March this year."

This article, published in the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, was not peer-scientist-reviewed and thus was not on Oreskes' list of peer-scientist-reviewed articles, even though Peiser's list included non-reviewed articles. Thus Peiser no longer validly criticises Oreskes' claim that:

"Remarkably, none of the papers ("..published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003,..") disagreed with the consensus position."

The consensus position being that: "[M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"

Peiser's response now is that: "Hardly a week goes by without a new research paper that
questions part or even some basics of climate change theory." To support this he cites a denialist-blog article that says:

"The greenhouse effect must play some role. But those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification."

i.e. a blatant strawman, even if it was made by a person who calls himself a scientist. Newspaper quotes of strawman statements by someone with some involvement in scientific research does not amount to debate in the scientific literature, unless you want to call newspapers scientific journals.

Part 1
Fester:

Point well taken on ice sheet dynamics. I presume that your are refering to the unexpected break up of sections of the Larsen B ice shelf in 1998 and 2002, and accelerated slip of glaciers in Greenland. See the real climate post on this if you're interested:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/ice-sheets-and-sea-level-rise-model-failure-is-the-key-issue/

I confess the models have failed to predict this occurence, and may be underestimating the rate of melt. Point well taken, good spotting.

However, I'll take this oppertunity to point out that climate models have accurately predicted the increase in snow falling on the center of both Antartica and Greenland. Wikipedia has a good discussion of this:


Perseus,

"One does not need a model to multiply the area of Greenland ice by it's thickness and then divide by the current melt rate to get the number of years it will take to melt. It is called a calculator. "

You're making the (flawed) assumption that the melting of glaciers will remain constant. Reconstructions of past climate events, models and GRACE observations show that this is not, and has never been the case. Melting accelerates and decelerates. Snow accumulates and glaciers melt, move and calve ice bergs. Honestly, there are a bizzilion sources on this. Just google glacial retreat. The wikipedia site is a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850

"Ditto for sea level rise"
Are you including thermal expansion of water, subsidience of land as glacial mass is removed, melt from West Antarctica, melt from patagonia and tropcial glaciers, ...

My point is that climate is complicated. Assuming static or constant parameters can get you into trouble.

"And this bollocks about tipping points which will cause a rapid melt of only 1000 years is nothing more than an excuse for suspending logic. They provide no explanation of what this tipping point may be triggered by..."

Part 2
Really?

Quoting the abstract of Huybrechts (2005):

" There exists a point-of-no-return once Greenland ice sheet disintegration has set in beyond which complete removal of the ice sheet becomes irreversible, even if climatic conditions were to revert to present-day conditions. This point may already be reached after 250 years of ice-sheet melting under a medium greenhouse warming scenario"

Basically, should artic temperature increase by 3oC+, it would become difficult for ice to form. Also, as the Greenland ice sheet melts, the exposed surface would decrease in altitude, where it is warmer (due to lapse rate), increasing the speed of melting...

Then there is the possible slow down/ stopping of the gulf stream by an influx of fresh water. I think this is unlikely to occur in the near future, but it has happened in the past and is associated with the "youger dryas" climate event.

5 possible events are discussed in the IPCC, including the mechanics that may cause them.

"Let me spell it out for you folks, this particular sceptic spent most of his career in a job that hinged on his capacity to detect people's BS. I was paid very well for that skill."

Congartualtions! This particular scientist/engineer spent most of his career working in science, a job that hinged on my ability to conduct scientific research and interpret results obtained by others. And I'm still not paid brilliantly, but hey, it sure beats ranting on web forums. Oh... woops

ChrisC, there is a huge difference between saying, "there exists a point beyond which the Ice Sheet cannot maintain itself" etc, and plucking 250 years out of the air and implying, with the very pregnant use of the word "may", that it has been determined by sound science.

If you were a scientist, or any sound managers armpit, you would recognise that such a point can only be described in terms of probabilities. That is, probability of 0.02 of it being 250 years, 0.10 of it being 1000 years, 0.10 of it being 3000 years, etc.

For the record, if current melting was off the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which it is not, then the sheet would still be 1473 metres thick in 250 years. This is hardly enough to lower the altitude to a warmer level that would cause a so-called "tipping" and even if it was it would still have the very significant wind-chill effects that can reduce ambient temperatures to minus 50 degrees. In any event, snow is still actually accumulating on top of both the Antarctic and Greenalnd Ice Sheets.

So your little homilies about multiple variables is a bit rich, especially as my earlier posts made specific reference to differing melt rates of water and land based ice, and the fact that I adjusted my raw figure of 14,000 years back to 11,000 to incorporate an identified increase in trend.

But when people start incorporating a mere possibility into their calculations as an assumed fact then, frankly, I am inclined to request a blood test for THC and an MRI scan for either schizophrenia or substance abuse.

Chris O'Neill, there appears to be no direct evidence that Peiser has withdrawn his criticism - apart from Media Watch's assertion that he has. As they don't reproduce the email where he allegedly retracts all of his criticism and I can't find any other reference to it, I think this has to be put in the dubious column.

Peiser does include the Gerhard and Hanson piece in his list of 929 pieces which he says fit Oreskes' search definition. You say it isn't peer reviewed - I can't find any direct evidence of this, but as the document is the report of a committee it appears to me to be about as peer reviewed as you can get, outside of some possible quibble about the publication process.

I've scanned some of the list that Peiser provides of the articles that meet the Oreskes search definitions. She doesn't appear to have provided a list anywhere. In 1994 I come across this one from Hulme and Jones entitled "Global Climate-Change in the instrumental period" which says "Such detailed diagnostic climate information is a necessary, although not sufficient, prerequisite for the detection of global-scale warming which may have occurred due to the enhanced greenhouse effect." This appears to me to be an abstract which is sceptical.

It would appear to me that you, Lambert and Media Watch have all misrepresented Peiser's position. The original criticism is the one he has withdrawn. When pressed for evidence he points to one particular article, but as my scan shows, there are others. He presumably chooses his best example.

Anyway, I'm emailing Peiser to see what his considered position is at the moment. And the thrust of Lambert's and your argument, that Global Warming is established as a scientific "fact" with which no reputable scientist could and does disagree, is still a crock. A fact of which you must be aware.

GrahamY, you are not the slightest bit dispassionate -- you are a passionate supporter of the Liberal party and have run an election campaign for them. The On Line Opinion staff page tries to make you look objective by airbrushing over that part of your career, but you're not. Oh, and thanks for confirming that good science won't get a look in at On Line Opinion until the Liberal Party postion changes.

You accuse the IPCC of "vilifying" Ian Castles, but I'm pretty sure that they never wrote anything about him as vicious as your libel of me. As the editor, you set the tone here and I think that this forum contains lots of flaming and very little reasoned discussion.

Yes, there is lots of debate in the scientific literature -- scientists have a tendency to disagree with each other. But they don't disagree with the consensus -- it's getting warmer and humans are causing it.

Pieser has, in fact, admitted to making mistakes. In my post I provided a link to a direct quote: "I accept that it was a mistake to include the abstract you mentioned (and some other rather ambiguous ones) in my critique of the Oreskes essay.". And yet you accuse me of being "deeply dishonest" for stating this fact.

Gerhard and Hanson is not peer reviwed. If you think it is, you don't know what peer reviewed means. Hulme and Jones is not skeptical of the consensus. Peiser didn't even include it in his original list of 34 abstracts.

The great problem with Andrew Bolt and other climate skeptics is their rejection of science and objectivity, or to put it differently, they see only politics in the constant striving for scientific objectivity.

The scientific community needs some skepticism within its own ranks, however this has been exploited by politics. Results produced by thousands of experiments provides evidence. Any reasonable person would look at that evidence and say let's start looking for ways to reduce or eliminate this pollution problem.

In contrast, skeptics conclude that the CSIRO must have has been highjacked by the Green's Party! That's the political mindset at work blinding out all other considerations. They see it as follows:

Green's bad -> Scientists support Green's -> Scientists bad.

Al Gore provided a clear and consistent message in his film, because politicians are good at that, while scientists usually give nuanced or technical responses putting people to sleep. They are happier in the lab or field, not a press conference.

An Inconvienent Truth was a great film about a real scientific consensus, which the world would be Boltish to ignore.

On #2 Tim Lambert did not know it at the time, but Revelle's "co authorship" of a paper with Singer has a long and dirty history. You can read about it at <a href="http://home.att.net/~espi/Cosmos_myth.html">Justin Lancaster's site</a> and if you don't believe Lancaster you can read the depositions in a SLAPP suit that Fred Singer brought. Suffice it to say that Revelle's participation in writing the article with his name

The observed increase in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation into the future.

The prevailing scientific opinion on climate change is that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.

The main cause of the human-induced component of warming is the increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide (CO2). This leads to warming of the surface and lower atmosphere by increasing the greenhouse effect.

The current literature estimates sensitivity in the range 1.5-4.5°C (2.7-8.1°F). Models referenced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict that global temperatures may increase by between 1.4 and 5.8°C (2.5 to 10.5°F) between 1990 and 2100. The uncertainty in this range results from both the difficulty of predicting the volume of future greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty about climate sensitivity.

An increase in global temperatures can in turn cause other changes, including a rising sea level and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation. These changes may increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and tornados. Other consequences include higher or lower agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer streamflows, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors. Warming is expected to affect the number and magnitude of these events; however, it is difficult to connect particular events to global warming. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming (and sea level rise due to thermal expansion) is expected to continue past then, since CO2 has a long average atmospheric lifetime.

Continuation...

Continuation...

While many agree with these basic statements much is argued about the science of global warming. Many argue that there are known broader weather cycles prior to these past 50 years and some believe these cycles have played out in between the greater weather “ages” many times.

Others while believing that human activity has had an extreme impact on nature argue the methodology or modeling that projects future consequences based on these past 50 years.

Beyond the science it is assumed that anything the individual can do to lessen their personal carbon footprint can only go to reducing the human contribution to global warming.

Tim,
I would just like to point out that as editor of On Line Opinion it is my job to decide what makes the grade and what doesn't when it comes to publishing articles in the journal. Very occasionally I will confer with Graham Young; usually when I feel there may be legal implications for us. I don't belong to any political party and I judge what is going to be published by a number of factors. One of my most important tasks is to make sure, as far as is humanly possible, I give a balanced coverage to the really hot topics: climate change; abortion; education, politics; Middle East and so on. Of course there are many other considerations when deciding what to publish but I like to think here at OLO we can offer a huge range of opinions and a broad range of topics.
Susan Prior - editor

Regarding point 6.

Variables that affect land sea encroachment:

1. Tides - we all know there are low and high tides but that isn't the whole story. The gravity of the moon, the sun and to a smaller extent the other heavenly bodies are relevant. The distance of the earth to each of those can vary and any point is also subject to the earth's tilt. Also localised drainage dynamics come into play e.g. the capacity of an inlet to drain/fill (for open ocean conditions not much of a factor). A tide height/probability chart would given you a classic bell curve i.e. LOTS of different tide heights with extremes not very likely but they will happen from time to time.

2. Waves - the tide determines the flat water sea level, the wave adds additional encroachment. Wave heights vary alot, anything from a few centimetres to a few metres when you've had a fierce storm nearby. Again we have the bell curve to show the probability of a given wave height occurring. LOTS of different wave heights possible, LOTS of different wave encroachments possible.

3. Erosion - coasts are often made of soft sand, water moves sand, tides/waves move sand, water makes its way further in. Some areas have it, some don't, some might have the opposite (land run-off??).

4. Ocean volume - seems to be one variable at the moment affecting this, that is the ice/water ratio. Reports have it increasing at "a few" mm per year since 1900 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png).

In light of the above I make the following statement:

TBC...

...

Any person who currently has issues with sea encroachment in the current globally warmed high sea level environment was ALREADY STUFFED before global warming. Each time the extremes of the variables 1-2 came together, and/or the effect of 3 took hold, you were already finding yourself ankle deep in water. The only statement I expect to hear from such people now would go something like this - "It used to be that we only had water around our ankles 4 times a year, but this year it happened 5 times. Furthermore I noticed the water once hit my shin mole and that has never happened before. This is too much, we're moving to Kiwi land!".

I know the addition of variable 4 to the extreme occurence will add a bit more, but it is just a bit more, and it is only a very rare occurrence, I can't see that making people move countries who wouldn't have otherwise. Many people live in high flood risk areas nowhere near the sea and still manage to pull through after each occurrence. Also tide and wave extremes may not have changed over the years but erosion has alway been around and has posed problems for those living "on the edge" (I can't picture the local land management office on these remote islands amounting to much). One needs to ask why it is that where people have always had issues with high sea levels (http://www.freewillblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/7034/) they are now being surrounded by camera crews and shoved in our faces as "environmental refugees".

Of course, there may well have been some migrants to New Zealand that actually did calim they were victims of sea level rise. But there is nothing that pricks the ears of a prospective migrant like a good story that will get their foot in the door. Some of the stories they give would deserve a Booker Prize if they were published.

But those stupid enough to use the number of reported "political" refugees as evidence of the incidence of persecution would be just as dumb as those who accept so-called climate refugees as evidence of sea level rising.

Response to Perseus:

So take it your thinking is something like this:
Climate change is a myth --> Therefore any refugee who claims they were victims of a fictional change must be inventing stories.

As far as I am aware, it is unprecedented for refugees to use myths to justify leaving their country. How many refugees flee their homelands due to UFO incursions or voodoo curses? Don't just assume we already know this. What are these good stories?

Of course, if you are wrong about climate change (which you are) then your conclusion has no basis at all.

I dont know much about global warming. However on many topics that i am quite knowledgeable on, i generally find Andrew Bolt to be simplistic and misleading. So from that historical base, i suspect Tim Lambert is probably on the money.

I've written to Benny Peiser and received this response. It is in line with what I have surmised. He retracts some of his criticism of Oreskes' study, but not all. As these are the man's own words I hope we'll hear no more claims from Lambert et al that he has disowned his study. (This comment is in two parts because of the length of Peiser's response).

"Yes, I have indeed retracted part of my criticism of the Oreskes study. I made a methodological mistake in my initial analysis of her abstracts and have conceded that much.

Nevertheless, I do maintain that her study is flawed since her main claims are not backed up by the sample of abstracts she used. For a start, she cannot have analysed 928 abstracts as there are only 905 listed in the data bank she claims to have used. Her claim that "75% [of all papers] fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view" is certainly wrong as the majority of abstracts do not even deal with anthropogenic global warming. I have posted all the ISI abstracts Oreskes used on my website for those who want to check the core data: http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm

In my view, the consensus debate is mainly a political one. After all, I never doubted for a second that the vast majority of climatologists accept the IPCC consensus. The worry of environmental campaigners is that the very existence of a small minority of climate sceptics is used by politicians to delay policy actions that activists deem necessary. That, I think, is one of the key reasons for the in my view unjustified assertion that there is an unanimous consensus among scientists. In any case, there is no longer any government in the world that bases its objection to the Kyoto Protocol or other cententious climate policies on questioning anthropogenic global warming. The main objections in the field of national and international politics has long moved to economic, political and technological considerations...(cont next post

I would point out that one of the main fears of people living on low lying Pacific islands is the potential devastation from storm surges. Perhaps the sceptics could seek the opinions of a few Cyclone Tracy survivors to judge their willingness to sit through a similar cyclone and storm surge on a low lying island. It isn't necessarily a balmy day with the water around your ankles that will worry you.

From the Sopac study linked above:

"Paava and Fualifeke islets (see also next page) are good examples of ongoing soft shoreline movement. It is important to note that these islets do not have permanent inhabitants and little, if any, human disturbance of its shorelines has occurred. There is evidence of facilities built by the US military during the 1940’s (mostly concrete footings, etc.) however, there is no evidence to suggest these have contributed to any of the shoreline changes discussed below. Analysis of the 1984 and 2003 images combined with groundtruthing in September 2004 indicate that the erosion currently occurring on these islets is approximately equivalent to the degree of accretion (accretion = shore-line build up or increase in land area)."

Thus, islands in a natural state are staying the same size.

Here's a quick summary of the problems on Fongafale:

"It is interesting to note that the Meteorological Office and nearby areas on the eastern side of the airstrip are all positioned in or near what is identified in 1941 as upper inter-tidal ironwood thicket. This vegetation type occurs in the high inter-tidal zone and would have previously been subject to regular (at least 1 or 2 times a month) saltwater flooding. Similarly, the freshwater and/or brackish swampy zones correspond well with present taro pits and low lying areas which experience occasional flooding. Similarly, Tafua pond’s former extent was far greater and it appears to have extended west of the runway into what is now housing areas. The identification of these historically low-lying areas helps explain why some parts of Fongafale are vulnerable to saltwater flooding today."

Tuvalu has always been an iffy place to live.

Perseus

Instead of suggesting that ChrisC be tested for schizophrenia or drug residues for a dodgy estimate, perhaps you could enlighten the forum as to how you went from suggesting that atmospheric CO2 was not a cause of global warming,

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=3734#12199

to commend research into CO2 geosequestration,

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=207

to again being critical of the AGW hypothesis? Is this evidence of a multiple personality disorder, or merely a human being trying to make a balanced assessment of a complex problem over many months?

I do not understand Mr Bolt.
Editorials such as this do nothing to address the issue only to cause confusion and confrontation.
Do we need scientific results and projections to confirm how much the seas are rising or what the temperature will be in 2080?
One only has to go out the door to see the profound changes in our immediate environment.
We only need to understand how the destructive practices that are dissolving our natural habitats along with its unique biodiversity, never to be replaced.
We only need to realise how our continued addiction to dangerous consumption patterns are indeed literally eating the world.

Whilst denialist continue to flagellate the proponents, inaction remains unabated.
All this deferral moves us closer to the point of no return.

Peiser concluded:

"Finally, those commentators who maintain that there no longer any serious doubt among professionals about the science of climate change, I leave you with the recent survey conducted by the U.S. National Registry of Environmental Professionals (http://www.nrep.org/globsurv.htm). It makes interesting reading and seems to confirm a number of other surveys. Not that this would matter, one way or another, for the difficult choices we have to make in selecting the most cost-effective climate policy options."

BBgun first says:

"Bolt’s claim, which is, by the way, correct: the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year."

Now he says:

"The source I linked and quoted above says that the .07 mm figure is correct"

If Bolt correctly quotes something that says 1+1=3, does that make Bolt correct?

The statement of 0.07 mm/year is incorrect. Stating 0.07+/-2.6 mm/year, for example, MIGHT be correct if such an error bound has been determined in the measurement process. However, stating 0.07mm/year in a scientific document implictly means 0.07+/-0.005 mm/year unless bounds are explicitly stated. The document's statement means 0.07+/-0.005 mm/year. This is not correct. It cannot correctly follow from the measurements they made and this is not the only fallacy as John Hunter pointed out. You can say it's meaningless if you want to, but a meaningless statement is neither correct nor incorrect. It's just meaningless.

And BTW, I'm not trying to prove Bolt wrong, I'm just showing that there was no justification for saying he is correct.

Graham Y outed, for those that didnt know. Fantastic.Lib from head to toe.

According to M. Kerjman,
“All facets of a presentation constituting this highly informative doco [An Inconvenient Truth] fit perfectly a professional politician's statesman expertise gained at the top positions while working for the superpower the USA are.

However, picturesquely depicting the real threats to accustomed natural environment on this planet seemed subtly avoiding a question of the gradual ageing of the Earth itself.”

Yeah, AGEING Earth reqiores definitely a modern approach of tackling a very task of human surviving particularly.

Peiser:

"(Oreskes) main claims are not backed up by the sample of abstracts she used."

This is plainly not true as he only refers to the following claim and makes no mention of the claim that Gore (and consequently Bolt) refers to:

"Her claim that "75% [of all papers] fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view" is certainly wrong as the majority of abstracts do not even deal with anthropogenic global warming."

i.e. he says absolutely nothing about the other Oreskes' claim that Gore quoted, i.e.:

"Gore claims that a survey of 928 scientific articles on global warming showed not one disputed that man’s gasses were mostly to blame for rising global temperatures."

Peiser says absolutely nothing about THIS claim now (he just talks about other claims that Gore doesn't mention). We have been saying all along that Peiser has withdrawn his questioning of this claim. Thus Bolt is incorrect to say that Peiser has shown that this claim is wrong because Peiser no longer stands by that assertion, as his email demonstrated.

"I hope we'll hear no more claims from Lambert et al that he has disowned his study."

He has disowned the part of his study that Bolt relied on. The incorrectness of Bolt's assertions is what this thread is about.

Peiser:

"Finally, those commentators who maintain that there no longer any serious doubt among professionals about the science of climate change, I leave you with the recent survey.. http://www.nrep.org/globsurv.htm "

What's Peiser trying to do, proof by webpage that contradicts him? I see very little on that webpage that agrees with his position. In any case, that group has very few, if any, climate scientists. It appears mainly to consist of engineers.

I think a large part of the difficultly here is that many people don't understand what the scientific peer-review process is. I'd suggest people should google it and try to get themselves some knowledge about. (It's not a committee meeting BTW.) As I keep trying to point out, there is no debate in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

It's fascinating to have observed on this thread how the denialists are increasingly shifting their arguments, to the point of clutching at ever flimsier straws. Seems that some people don't know the meaning of

(a) consensus (hint: it's not the same thing as unanimity)
(b) scientific peer review (hint: as suggested above, it's not a committee meeting).

One wonders why some (e.g. OLO's chief editor) who have otherwise demonstrated their intelligence and rationality in this forum have compromised their credibility so much about this issue. If it's not for political reasons, what then? Chagrine at not being nominated for 'best blog'?

As Tim Lambert implies above, this does nothing to enhance this forum's credibility.

Bolt's a nong whether he's on holidays or not, Sniggid. Catch him on "The Insiders" sometime and you'll see what I mean.

Hmm... about 40 posts back I asked if anyone could give me a decent reason as to why so many scientists would support the science behind global warming. What's in it for them as opposed to the denialists.

As yet, nobody seems to have a practical answer.
This is at the very heart of the matter, and it would appear nobody can offer an adequate response.

I for one, believe that says one hell of a lot.

TRTL “if anyone could give me a decent reason as to why so many scientists would support the science behind global warming.”

I will have a go TRTL

Maybe some of these scientists live in pursuit of the public purse.

Step 1 create an apparent pressing need by deploying alarmist propaganda.

Step 2 float nebulous strategies and ideas for which a suitably terrified populous will pay someone to research a solution.

Step3 apply for funding

Step 4 Spend the money

Step 5 Publish and accept the acclaim, maybe get a patent or two out of the public funded research to retire on.

Whether the problem was real in the first place does not matter whatever, so long as someone can plot a nebulous benefit, in fact it makes life easier if it was all a myth.

The advantage, once one has the money is it is almost impossible to be proved wrong. The politically correct view will ensure those who gave the grants will do their utmost to ensure poor grant applications with zero outcomes are never discovered (such is the nature of bureaucrats who spend tax payers funds and the people who seek them).

All the global warming scenarios are so subjective and dependent upon so many independent variables that isolating what is due to man and what can be influenced by government amounts to pure guess work.

I see NZ have drawn back from taxing their farmers for cow farts, I think I can understand why.

In the mean time the economy goes to hell in a hand basket because the cost burden of suggested remedies, which were not needed or produced only marginal environmental benefit at best, has killed the economic viability of investment in both existing developments and new processes.

Or maybe I am just a skeptic.

I tend to think that there is more money floating around the academia for those who support the AGW theory than there is for those few brave souls who are willing to put their heads up above the parapets and say hang on a minute...
Go here http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/12/2006-bad-year-for-climate-fearmongers.html for a large selection of links that point out the nonsense of the global warming panic.

I seem to remember that when Tim Lambert originally posted this item that I wrote a long response in the comments attacking conclusions he came to about Andrew Bolt's claims It seems to have vanished from the comments thread there...
In any event I wonder why this post even qualifies as a "best blog post of 2006" the writing is nothing flash. Where are the posts that are even vaguely conservative on this topic or any other? Nowhere to be seen.

Fester, I will spell it out again for you. My scepticism is in respect of the scale and extremity of the projections being made on AGW. I have never doubted that some anthropogenic impact on climate is or may take place. I have zero respect for people who continually attempt to align AGW with motherhood with a view to obtaining a blank cheque for every untested whimsy. That is, zero respect for the Al Gores and Tim Lamberts of this world.

Thanks Perseus.

$500 million on investigating CO2 geosequestration seems terrible wastage to me. Surely technologies with multiple benefits would warrant more investigation? Biofuels are a good example. Technologies to harvest algae could offer the combined benefits of nutrient recycling, water treatment, and fuel production. Advanced pyrolysis technologies could offer the prospect of converting fire prone bushland into valuable fuel, mitigating the fire risk in the process. None can guess what might ultimately work, but with the exception of improving oil recovery, I cannot think of any other benefit from pumping CO2 into a hole in the Earth. Surely to a sceptic like yourself, the prospect of such folly can only be of greater concern.

Hello Col Rouge

Don't laugh. I once read an article on how it was the worlds cattle population that was responsible for most of the effects of global warming and GHG's. It was published by scientist who thought they could use the information to produce an alternate energy source.

Fantastic car mate. What's it run on? Umm, gas? :-)

As usual, majority of participants enjoy improving their English skills while giving a toss to others’ messages, TurnRightThenLeft.

“Scientists” support global warming because it's profitable rather than practical

I've carefully reviewed Dr Benny Peiser’s claims and the evidence on his website.

My conclusion: It’s a fraud.

I am happy to reveal how Peiser has tricked GrahamY and others so thoroughly, and why Andrew Bolt knows he is attempting the same on the Australian population.

The Oreskes hypothesis is that scientists accept the global warming "consensus". Papers which accept the consensus at least implicitly PLUS those providing a mitigation strategy, are included in the 75%. Papers not questioning the consensus are in the 25%. Oreskes claims no paper argues against the consensus. In other words, papers that refer to “climate change” without stating a cause are not against. It is a sensible approach, as being cause-neutral in an abstract is not evidence of “confusion, disagreement or discord”.

In contrast, Peiser only counts papers which support “anthropogenic” (man-made) climate change. He assumes that cause-neutral papers do not support. That is the fraudulent trick. Obviously, if you change the methodology, you change the results.

Bolt is aware of the trick. We all should be.

He writes "not one disputed" referring to Gore's film. He writes "explicitly endorsed" when discussing Peiser.

Think about it.... How many physics papers "dispute" the concept of gravity. Probably none. But how many "explicitly endorse" gravity. Due to a clear consensus: also none.

It is a very clever word-play. A very nasty fraud.

The trick is duplicated within Peiser’s original critique. The category “reject or doubt” is used for counting. Everywhere else in his critique this category is shortened as “rejection”.

Peiser invites us to look at the evidence on this website. He must assume that nobody goes to the bother.

Sorry Benny. I actually looked at your evidence!
(http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm)

I checked all abstracts from bookend years 1993 and 2003. Within this small subset, I easily found enough explicit support for anthropogenic climate change. Enough to dispute Peiser’s claims that only 13 articles did so.

Many abstracts spoke of global warming as a threat. Others focused on what we volcanos, err… I mean humans, could do to slow it. I would assume agriculture is anthropogenic.

Continued ...

Implicit support, the largest group, referenced use of climate change models and predictions. Much research was about readying us for the climate change to come – the consequences.

Of course many papers researched the existing effects of global warming without saying what caused it or assumed we already knew. A number of abstracts were about prehistoric global warming, unrelated to modern times. These would be in Oreskes’s cause-neutral 25% group.

I could not find any implying or questioning global warming was anything other than man-made. Oreskes was correct for the 190 I checked.

On the website, Peiser highlights a highly critical AAPG committee report. G is for Geology. A is for Association. A is for American. P is for Petroleum.

I have every reason to believe that Peiser’s effort was designed to get cologne out of a stone. The dispute about 905 vs 928 articles is a little distraction, in itself useless, but certainly useful to bog down debate into tangents.

Public debate is being polarised by tricks and fraud like this.

It encourages Col Rouge to forget progress, education and human achievement. And instead discredit scientists because he now thinks they just “live in pursuit of the public purse”. Where are these profit-hungry scientists who seek enough “public funded research to retire on”?

This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!

I was happy to put in hours of effort for this post. I did learn a great deal just from reading these abstracts. More motivation to support CO2 reductions, carbon trading and Koyoto. It is the morally right thing to do.

My prediction for the response to my stand against fraud is that those denying anthropogenic climate change will forget the question and defend the fraud. They’ll comb through the evidence like a defence lawyer and demand “what about this?” and “what about that?” And they’ll wait a week or two to repeat the whole sorry show again (or complain about tricky defence lawyers.)

This inconvenient truth shall not weary them. For their children as much as ours, some of us will need to do double our fair-share.

GrahamY, It is disappointing to see that to avoid admitting that you were wrong, you chose to misrepresent what I wrote in my article. I stated "Even Peiser has admitted his analysis was full of errors." That's true, and he's admitted it to you as well. So what do you do? You pretend that I claimed that I said he disowned his study. But I didn't -- that's just your fabrication.

Gore said that none of the 928 articles disputed the consensus. He was right on this point. Bolt said that there were 34. He was wrong and even Peiser has admitted this. But not you. It seems that you are so passionate in your support of Bolt that cannot, will not, admit that he made a single mistake, let alone the numerous mistakes he made here.

Now, Pieser has more criticism of Oreskes, but this criticism is wrong as well. You just have to read through the abstracts. Eli Rabett do so and can see how wrong Pieser is here:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/12/benny-and-dunk-tank-like-guy-at-carney.html

and here:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/01/dunk-benny.html

Aqvarivs – I saw a TV show where some vegan woman thought she could absorb energy directly from the sun.
She was a total fruit bat but I bet, somewhere there is a bureaucrat with a budget getting ready to throw your and my taxes at some “scientist” to research it.

Lets face it, we were to harness the power of photosynthesis, we would not need to bother growing cereals for food, we could convert the lot to bio-fuel and forget the oil crisis. Although photosynthesis might destroy weight watchers and all those awful “biggest loser” TV shows.

David Latimer “This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!”

I would like to hear more about this “parallel universe”. Do we have a expedition being organized to go there or even colonise it? If we get there before the Americans can we claim sovereignty over it or will we have to involve the UN?

Have you written a research paper or applied for research funding to further your studies of parallel universes?

Regarding what you said “I was happy to put in hours of effort for this post.”
And “It encourages Col Rouge to forget progress, education and human achievement.”

Since you choose to arrogantly dismiss my “skeptical view” and are so engrossed in proclaiming the merits of your own ”scientific opinion” -

I challenge you to prove, scientifically, that my skeptical opinion is wrong.

By that I do not mean just run off a couple of examples of things you might consider contrary to what I suggest but to actually “PROVE” I am wrong.

I am sure with a mind of such luminary brilliance as yours and a few “hours of effort”, you will be back with a response promptly.

And not being “churlish” about your pompous self remarks here is some research I have done to help you on your quest

home.pacifier.com/~dkossy/MIT.html

Chris O'Neill, despite the fact that John Hunter admits it's correct, you keep raving on about the 0.07 mm figure Bolt cited. You'e also critical of Bolt because there he includes no error range, when Lambert's 5 mm figure is also unqualified.

There are lots of sea level figures available. For example from 2002:

"Relative mean sea levels at Funafuti in Tuvalu have risen by just under 1 mm/year in the period 1977 to 2000."

From the same report:

"On average, global relative mean sea levels have risen between 1 and 2 mm/year over the last century and there has not been a detectable acceleration due to climate change."

These support Bolt's contention that global warming induced sea level rise is not a factor in Tuvaluans fleeing to New Zealand.

http://www.bom.gov.au/pacificsealevel/presentations/Suva_mitchell.pdf

Tim Lambert writes to GrahamY: "It seems that you are so passionate in your support of Bolt that cannot, will not, admit that he made a single mistake, let alone the numerous mistakes he made here."

Conversely, Lambert so passionately supports himself he is unable to admit he is wrong, ever. Let's see how he goes with a simple "yes" or "no" question:

Does your hearsay evidence, that global warming induced sea level change is forcing Tuvaluans to flee to New Zealand, constitute proof of this being the case?

It is not a joke, it is a usual mix-up of cases and reasons while being employed by mates playing near-perfect Aussie-English.

Did we really just observe Latimer state that he only checked 190 papers and then extrapolated toconclude that the rest of the 928 must be in accord, and then accuse Peiser of fraud?

"And then we do the bimbo rock, all around the bimbo clock"

How low can you go.

Perseus, if Latimer finds more than 13 articles that explicitly accept the consensus from looking at just 190 of the articles, he has already disproved Pieser's claim that there were just 13 in the entire set of 928.

"despite the fact that John Hunter admits it's correct"

You just don't get it do you. John Hunter said it was a correct quote but that doesn't mean it's correct. I pointed out how its only possible scientific meaning could not be correct but that's obviously too difficult for BBgun to understand. Scientific logic is too difficult for some people to understand so I'll have to look for documents and see what they say. I haven't been able to find the original document with the statement (NTF's South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project Quarterly Newsletter of January 2000) but NTF has been incorporated into the Bureau of Met which has some reports on its website. One of these reports http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDO60033/IDO60033.2004.pdf contains a section "Historical Sea Level Trend Assessment" which uses exactly the same data as the NTF used (refer to http://web.archive.org/web/20030415153655/http://www.ntf.flinders.edu.au/TEXT/NEWS/tuvalu.pdf ) to arrive at the quoted 0.07mm per year. Only problem is, the report at the BoM arrives at a figure of 0.9 mm per year. (They didn't bother with uncertainly figures because they're not claiming any useability for this figure.) If you read the report you'll see that the BoM points out that

"The UH gauge was designed to monitor the variability
caused by El Niño and shorter-term oceanic fluctuations, for which the high level of precision and datum control demanded by the determination of sea level trend were not required."

So even if you get the right figure from this guage's measurments (which BoM, the current incarnation of the NTF says is 0.9 mm per year), it is still not going to give an accurate long term trend.

So when someone says

"the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year"

they are relying on a suspect statement of claim for an inaccurate measurement in an out-of-date document that is no longer supported by any scientific entity.

Chris O'Neill,

Do you hope to bolster your position by calling me an "idiot" and stating that your argument is "obviously too difficult for BBgun to understand"? Gratuitous snarking -- commonly used by Lambert and commenters at his blog -- actually undermines your argument.

I have repeatedly stated that the 0.07 figure might lack meaning when quoted out of context. Bolt is a layman, not a climate scientist. He picked up the old 0.07 figure, which is by the way correct (see John Hunter link above), and used it. This tells me that Bolt is not the source to go to for the most accurate and up to date data on sea level rise in the Pacific.

The 5 mm figure supplied by Lambert is useless because the measuring period was too short. The .9 mm long-term figure is in line with sea level rise over the period of the 20th century, showing no indication of acceleration due to global warming. If global warming has not caused sea level rise to accelerate it cannot be causing Tuvaluans to flee.

Further argument of this point is pointless: Lambert's failure to answer my simple "yes" or "no" question above proves I'm right.

Oh Perseus you brave mythological creature. On the 22.1 Perseus wrote:" But those stupid enough to use the number of reported
"political" refugees as evidence of the incidence of persecution would be just as dumb..."
You are dumb Perseus,you have outed yourself. A statement like that says it all.Your intolerence and ignorance is writ large.You have invited the informed and resonable individual to write you off.From henceforth you speak into a vacuum with a mouthful of marbles.
As a diplomat from 1972-1994 I served in a number of countries producing refugees including twice in Pakistan and Afghanistan and also Iran,Indonesia,South Africa and Sri Lanka.From 1995-2000 I served on the Refugee Review Tribunal.
I note you make the common mistake of the intolerant and ill informed of confusing refugees with immigrants.
I have had the task of deciding who was and was not a genuine refugee
and let me assure you Perseus with experience, commonsense and compassion it is not that difficult.It has however been difficult for this government and for many of the people who support it.I think that is because this government and some of its more mindless supporters lack those qualities.
Perseus, what a funny little smokescreen,or would you prefer pseudonym.Were you once an ABC Argonaut? Anyway Perseus was a limited
and mean little bugger.Anyway as you will know from your pretentious little dabling into Greek mythology the name Haigh derives from Heracles.Please try and do something useful for someone else.
Bruce Haigh

Response to Col Rouge:
To answer my question "Who are these profit-hungry scientists?", you respond there is a scientist who researches a crazy solar-energy absorbing vegan. This is invention.

On "Monday, 13 March 2006" (OLO thread 4212) you wrote: [A]cademics are employees of universities or CSIRO or other institutions. Employees don’t get to share the reward available to the true entrepreneur but of course they do not take the same risks." Fair point.

But above, 23 January 2007, you write about the same employees being rewarded with "get a patent or two out of the public funded research to retire on."
Your own words prove you wrong.

Response to Perseus:
Checking more articles will not save Peiser. It will only confirm the fraud. Thanks for sugesting we do so.
Sofar, in 1999 and 2003 Oreskes reported faithfully.

As Tim Lambert mentioned, Peiser counted just 13 explicit references to global warming due to human activity. How easy is it to see this is wrong. Let's look into a third year: 2000 (http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes2002.htm)
1. Brewer 'Gas hydrates and global warming': "possible destruction by mankind of one hydrate by mankind" (refering to seabed CH4 retention)
2. Caldeira/Duffy: "high fluxes of anthropogenic carbon dioxide"
3. Canadell et al: "humans have severely disrupted the carbon cycle in ways that will alter the climate system"
4. Dowlatabadi: "socioeconomic and earth systems reduce the probability of success in keeping climate change within a pre-defined tolerable range."
5. Hameed et all: "SO42 observed [in] chemistry and transport processes [require] control strategies as there are serious likely effects on human health [and] on global climate change through direct and indirect forcing."

continued...

/continued

6. Hammitt: "... that human activities will cause substantial changes to global climate"
7. Kotze/O'Connor: "continuing anthropogenic loss of wetlands in the study area and global climate change"
8. McMichael: "cities contribute to the large-scale pressures on the biosphere including climate change"
9. Pittock/Jones: "Adaptation in response to anthropogenic climate change... "
10. Reaser/Pomerance/Thomas: "anthropogenic global warming has contributed to the extensive coral blenching"
11. Rosenzweig: "the soil can [contribute to] the impacts of climate change ... land management has generally resulted in [release of] CO2, CH4 ..."
12. Seacrest/other: "Global climate change [has] relevancy and urgency as a public policy issue [... The] general public holds surprising misconceptions ... including failure to grasp the fundamental connection to CO2"
13. Uri/Bloodworth: "Global climate change and the effect of conservation practices in US agriculture
14. Zorita/Laine: "Relevant atmospheric circulation ... forced with increasing anthropogenic green house gas concentrations."

Pieser's methodology exploits the pre-existing consensus. Scientists don't need to state the obvious in an abstract. Is there is any doubt that global climate is anthropogenic for all papers even though it is not explicitly stated. They built upon previous efforts.

And the real fraud by Pieser is his treatment of cause-neutral abstracts, like those exploring the consequenses rather than the causes of global warming. Suggesting such papers imply a lack of consensus in the scientific community is fradulent.

I have outlined a case, where a particular Benny Pieser used word-trickery and misrepresentation of evidence to hide the consensus attained by the scientific community. This is an issue of grave importance and where human life is at substantial risk. This consensus is so established that convervative polticians have belatedly, but thankfully, have joined it and there is bi-partisan support to find solutions. (Please read my post as of 24 January 2007. Be aware of the tricks.)

I care that the people we entrust to objectively study our world, educate the next generation and provide the basis for prosperity, our scientists, are being maligned as partisan scaremongers.

I care that the truth is being smeared. Does anyone else?

I think it unfair to refer to Benny Peiser or any other climate change sceptic as a fraud. I think it fairer to think of them as Iknowbetterists, commonly known as knowitalls. A good example is the sufferer who chose to ignore a report calling for tsunami monitoring of the Indian Ocean several years prior to the Boxing Day tsunami. But despite this potential for terrible consequences, the highly addictive rushes of omnipotence ensures that sufferers will rarely beat the affliction. I can only imagine the rush that comes from thinking that a calculation done with a calculator on a piece of paper has more validity than the coordinated research of hundreds of scientists.

So what of all the money being spent? $500 million on CO2 geosequestration and $6 billion fixing up the Murray Darling infrastructure, all on the basis of climate change predictions. Is this expenditure a tragic waste? And here is an article about a biofuel entrepreneur claiming to be able to produce biodiesel for less than fifty dollars a barrel. Is research like this not a potential boon for everyone?

http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2007-01-22-voa22.cfm

A dual (scientific and economic) critique of the Stern Review can be found in the current Journal of World Economics. It has many interesting things to say about the "peer-reviewed" literature of the "scientific community".

David Latimer
Your response to my request for further detail concerning "parallel universes" is inadequate.

Regarding “maybe get a patent or two out of the public funded research to retire on.”

Yep, it all depends on the timing of the patent and whether it can be construed to be associated with “public”, funds, regardless that they came from a public source.

However, you have deflected from the real point I asked

You will recall I described a cycle of events.

Your response to those events were “This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!”

I asked you to prove my skeptical scenario wrong.

You have not proved my views are from “a parallel universe” at all.

So come on, you made the comment, defend your own words and reputation, prove I am wrong and no scientist has ever applied for funds following the cycle of events I described.

And before you try to prove me wrong,

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/280/5370/1685b
http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=95
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/329/7471/922

All suggest that what I described happens frequently and often.

I await your apology.

The critique that Castles refers to gets the science badly wrong. See:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/01/khilyuk_and_chilingar_the_gift.php

"the old 0.07 figure, which is by the way correct (see John Hunter link above)"

Nowhere does John Hunter say this figure is a correct statement of sea level rise.

So when someone says

"the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year"

they should actually have said

"someone has claimed that the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year, they may or may not be right, but that's what they claimed"

BTW, quoting something out of context is usually intended to create a different meaning from the "in context" meaning. Not much point otherwise.

"The .9 mm long-term figure is in line with sea level rise over the period of the 20th century, showing no indication of acceleration due to global warming"

Aside from the fact that it takes a long time to get an accurate measurement of rate of rise from tide guages let alone acceleration, how do you know that this 0.9 mm/year is not due to acceleration from before the 20th century?

Tim, you claim that you didn't say he "disowned" his study. So how do I interpret these comments: "But Peiser has at last admitted that he was wrong: he now says 1 out 928. And he's wrong about the last one, since it wasn't peer reviewed." Peiser doesn't admit only 1 out of 928, as his response to my email indicates.

In any event, I found one in 1994 which disputes the "consensus", and you ignore it.

The issue here isn't solely whether Bolt is right - he's obviously wrong on a number of points - but whether both you and Gore are. Your responses appear to lose sight of this point. It's quite possible for all three of you to be wrong.

I'm also interested in your post about my political affiliations. You'd have to be pretty bad at research if you couldn't find out my Liberal Party past. As my author biog says "Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is a writer, and a former vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party." Check it out at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=3. In fact the reason why people pay attention to my views on politics is for this very reason.

I'm also interested as to why you should think that membership of a political party somehow obliges members to promulgate the party line; not to mention why you would misrepresent the Liberal Party's position - as far as I know it is not opposed to AGW, and in fact the Federal Government specifically endorses it.

It fascinates me why people like you try and align the arguments about science with politics - possibly a case of psychological projection?

Col Rouge:

I had a look at the links you provided (unfortunately, I couldn't accesss the science mag article, as I don't have a subscription). Cases of science fraud are nothing new, although the case of Henrik Schon, once the "golden boy of condensed matter physics", is one of the most extreme cases (along with a certain Korean geneists).

However, I note that the 2001 IPCC report (which is largely a glorified literature survey) had more than 2500 authors from 120 nations and industry. The report went through a review process taking more than a year, and is returned to governments for review before publication, including the US and Australia. There it is circulated through relevant national acadamies, uni's and the general public for review.

Famous contraian Richard Lindzen is a chapter lead author, and Fred Singer is a reveiwer.

"Many authors will attest that these are among the most extensive review processes that are carried out for any scientific document"

from
www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/the-ipcc-assessment-process.html

also, check out

http://www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm

As such, it would be a very, very, very grand conspiracy for a fraudulent research to pass through this reveiw process. Really, alomst everybody would have to be in on it, from the CSIRO, the the US national acadamey of science, to BP and Shell Oil (who have endorsed the IPCC).

I'm all for conspiracy theories, but I think AGW being a stunt to get public research funnds is going a bit far. You also ignor the plethora of industry funded contraian research. There is considerable evidence that exxon mobile, for example, is heavily funding research that agrees with their view. The Royal Society recently asked Exxon to stop sponsoring such research.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1876538,00.html

You can't claim such a vast conspiracy of both government and industry scientist, while silumtaneously ignoring a large body of evidence that the opposite is happening.

Chris O’Neill,

Why do you keep going on about the 0.07 figure when I admit it is possibly meaningless? John Hunter’s paper aims to discredit this and other figures showing a negligible sea level rise at Tuvalu. If the 0.07 figure cited by Bolt was of questionable veracity he would have challenged it directly. Instead he debunks the low figures through statistical analysis. In so doing he concludes that tide gauge records for Tuvalu lack significance owing to the brief observation period. This means that Lambert’s 5 mm figure is also meaningless (it resulting from a similarly short observation period).

It’s understandable for layman Bolt to cite the 0.07 mm figure without qualifying it. There is no excuse, however, for scientist Lambert not qualifying the 5 mm figure he cites.

Regardless, a 2002 presentation to the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project offers the following:

“NTF Australia (NTFA), established in 1989, operates as an autonomous unit of Flinders University and is the national facility responsible for the collecting, analysing, archiving and disseminating tide and sea level information and predictions for Australia.”

The main objectives:

“To identify long period sea level changes, with particular emphasis on sea level rise due to climate change.”

“To detect increases in the rate of sea level rise as predicted by the IPCC scientific assessment.”

Amongst the conclusions:

“On average, global relative mean sea levels have risen between 1 and 2 mm/year over the last century and there has not been a detectable acceleration due to climate change.”

“Relative mean sea levels at Funafuti in Tuvalu have risen by just under 1 mm/year in the period 1977 to 2000.”

http://www.bom.gov.au/pacificsealevel/presentations/Suva_mitchell.pdf

So, scientists looking for AGW induced sea level change didn’t find it.

Bolt gets it right; Lambert gets it wrong.

Lambert has posted two responses since my "yes" or "no" question went up. He refuses to answer because he knows he's wrong. End of story.

ChrisC, the Royal society are the turkeys who assumed that CO2 would only mix in the upper 100m of ocean in their eagerness to scare the kids on ocean acidity. The problem was that thermohaline circulation does exist and some of the eddies from the Gulf Stream are more than a km deep. So to make such an assumption in a projection that extends 500 years into the future is not just silly, but downright incompetent ideology run amok.

On the question of Tuvaluans seeing themselves as climate refugees:

About 1993 I attended a five-day international conference held in Townsville, a response to an earlier UNCED conference (the name of the conference escapes me). It was attended by government ministers from Tuvalu and Kiribis. These ministers formally stated that they were seeking a planned migration of their people from their islands to Australia (and elsewhere) because of sealevel rise and climate change.

Tidal ranges are not fixed but subject to a dozen or more factors including barometric pressure. On islands that have a max altitude of 3m, a small sealevel rise means higher high tides to inundate more garden areas. Climate change means more intense storms and greater erosion of sandy soils. It is not so much a matter of seeing the sea rise above the islands, but of the dramatic adverse impacts of salinisation and storm erosion on the ability of people to subsist there.

"the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year"

"the 0.07 figure when I admit it is possibly meaningless"

The first statement has a meaning. That meaning is wrong. "possibly meaningless" are weasel words. Bolt got it wrong. End of story.

Response to Col Rouge: For parallel universe see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe_%28fiction%29. And yes, this is the sense that I took your contribution. My last post has provided sufficient and reasonable response to this issue. Universities investigate misconduct and can take action. They do not need my help.

Response to GrahameY:
The disputed one I found in Pieser's list one was not scientific research but part of the annual report of the American Petroleum Geologists Association, who have a vested interest in downplaying the threat of climate change.

Think you found a disputing article in 1994?

If you are looking at Hulme, Zhao, Jiang, these scientists are saying that increasing temperatures in East Asia cannot be accounted for only by East Asian urbanisation. In other words, they are saying this is not a regional problem.

Perhaps you are looking at Lane, Nichols, Osbone. If so, this paper does not dispute anthropogenic global warming. It found the correlation between sunspot activity and temperature was weak (eg unconnected), but suggest more work to completely rule it out as a factor in determining anthropogenic global warming.

This is an example of scientific scepticism which allows us, as non-scientists, to have confidence in the objectivity of research.

I cannot find any disputing articles from 1994. Of course, this is a guessing game for us. Which article you have found?

And what is there to rely on in Pieser's email? Because he has deliberately misrepresented the abstracts and because he has altered the methodology he was supposed to test, and because of the word games played in his article -- Why expect him to be up-front and transparent in an email to you? He may have admitted errors to avoid scrutiny, but think he could still swindle you.

Did you know if a simple text search is done on "anthropogenic climate change" and "anthropogenic global warming" the computer will match 13 times? Perhaps that's how Pieser did his critique.

How can GrahameY take this sham with any seriousness?

And remember Bolt's change of words from "not one disputed" to "explicitly endorsed" shows he is in on the trick.

Is Poor old Andrew Bolte so far to the right that he may well step off his flat Earth one day?

If you are too far to the right or left you end up in a place labelled loony land.

If you don't believe in global warming and the dangers it has on our kids and grand kids then loony land you belong.

It is inconceivably illogical that people can't relate that the spewing of toxic pollutants into the environment will destroy the planet and that global warming will be a disasterous result of the opinions of balanced thinkers being out yelled by the loons.

We live in an enclosed little world and the more we pollute the more we put our futures at risk. Perhaps the people who don't understand the effects of pollutants on the planet are also those that pee in public pools... I wonder?

For those of you with a religious bent .... If your father gave you a new home and you destroyed it would he be pleased? Well in your beliefs God gave you this planet as home... try to respect his gift in the same way you trumpet you love him. I can't understand why religions aren't fighting the environmental cause on behalf of their God ... the alleged maker of planet Earth.

Chris O’Neill,

John Hunter corroborates Bolt’s claim that the 0.07 figure comes from the Australian National Tidal Facility. Hunter does not dispute the 0.07 figure’s validity, debunking it instead by attacking it via statistical adjustment. Along the way Hunter concludes that all sea level figures for Tuvalu are effectively meaningless owing to insufficient period of observation.

As a layman Bolt cannot be held accountable for dubious figures bandied about by scientists studying sea level at Tuvalu. If you have problem with the 0.07 you should take it up with the NTF.

"Peiser doesn't admit only 1 out of 928, as his response to my email indicates."

Well he wouldn't want to, would he? Conspicuous by its absence in the email is any mention of what the figure out of 928 should be. Peiser retreated to safer ground and only mentioned his opinion result: ""75% [of all papers] fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view" is certainly wrong". Peiser said nothing significant in that email about the Oreskes' claim that Gore repeated, other than a bare-faced and wrong assertion that it's "not backed up by the sample of abstracts she used".

"In any event, I found one in 1994 which disputes the "consensus", and you ignore it."

Just because Hulme and Jones point out that certain information is not sufficient on its own to prove AGW does not mean they are saying that such information does not exist anywhere else.

Opinionated2,
"We live in an enclosed little world and the more we pollute the more we put our futures at risk. Perhaps the people who don't understand the effects of pollutants on the planet are also those that pee in public pools... I wonder?"

Hey. It was only that once and it wasn't my fault. It was the warm beer.
It's not like I did it in the shallow end.

Perseus,

It generally considered good form to provide a reference when making a criticsm. This helps your readers ascertain what you are on about. However, I found the report on ocean acidity that (I think) you are refering to (in PDF):

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/document.asp?id=3249

I don't think your criticsm has much merit. On page 10 for example:

"However mixing and advection (vertical motions, sinking and upwelling) with the intermediate and deep waters of the oceans (down to about 1000 m and 4000 m respectively) is much slower, and takes place on timescales of several hundred years or more... Owing to this slow mixing process most of the carbon stored in the upper waters of the oceans will be retained there for a long time. This makes the impacts in the surface waters greater than if the CO2absorbed from the atmosphere was spread uniformly to all depths of the oceans "

page 17:

" When averaged for the oceans globally, about 30% of the anthropogenic CO2is found at depths shallower than 200 m, with 50% at depths less than 400 m, leading to the conclusion that most of the CO2 that has entered the oceans as a result of human activity still resides in relatively shallow waters.

You also neglect that the production of carbonic acid is an equilibrium reaction, and is likely to favour the production of CO2 bubbles at higher pressures (ie. in the deep ocean)

www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=169

However, despite this, the turkeys at the Royal Society took mixing between shallow and deep ocean into acount. Page 17:

"A more detailed analysis of projected pH changes has been done using an ocean general-circulation model...
The initial changes in the surface ocean pH are rapid, but as CO2continues to be absorbed from the atmosphere it is slowly transferred to the deep oceans (including ocean sediments) by mixing and through the biological pump, with subsequent changes in pH."

The report claims that reduction of the surface ocean pH of 0.1 units has already occured over the last 200 years, at a rate 100 times faster than has occured in a hundred thousand years.

GrahamY, you claim: "Peiser doesn't admit only 1 out of 928, as his response to my email indicates."

You are wrong. Peiser conceded to Media Watch that there was only one. You refused to believe them and that's why you emailed him. He confirmed that he had retracted that part of his criticism:

"I have indeed retracted part of my criticism of the Oreskes study. I made a methodological mistake in my initial analysis of her abstracts and have conceded that much."

I am amazed that you continue to deny something so plainly true. Here's a challenge for you: if Peiser now maintains that there is more than one, what are the other ones?

I did not ignore your claim to have found a 1994 article that disputed the consensus. Here's what I wrote: "Hulme and Jones is not skeptical of the consensus. Peiser didn't even include it in his original list of 34 abstracts." Feel free to email Mike Hulme and see what he thinks.

It nice to see you finally admit that Bolt was wrong on a number of points. It says something about your bias that you boast that you would reject an article that details some of Bolt's errors.

And how come the page about the editors of OLO does not mention your Liberal Party insider role? You are trying to pretend to be objective when you are not. You yourself admitted to Marohasy that OLO publishes more articles against the scientific consensus.

David Latimer: "I care that the truth is being smeared. Does anyone else?"

“Smokescreen” – a perfect word reflecting practice at diplomatic level also a steady notion that diplomacy needs human skills rather then applied knowledge, is terribly wrong.

Especially, while participants are short of any technical practical skills relevant to this topic but play English only, little abilities to generalize issues at all.

That is why I undisputedly support your notion mentioned above, bearing in mind that OWN production "smeared" lesser to producers.

Tim, you say the science in the critique is badly wrong. Then provide a link to a blog that says the science is badly wrong. Your point? My comment, however, was about the references to peer review in the critique. Do you have any comment on the difficulties independents have had in accessing data sets and methodologies in order to analyse or replicate findings, or on comments such as Mann's that he would not be "intimidated" into providing such, even to those who fund the research? There may be science that is wrong. But then there is just bad science.

Tim your whole approach is to try to confuse issues, not to illuminate them, and to smear people who disagree with you. You said that Peiser had withdrawn his criticism - something which can be easily verified. He hasn't. He has only withdrawn his initial criticism which was based on the bad information that Oreskes provided. I didn't "refuse to believe" Media Watch - I checked their information, which any half-decent researcher would do.

The issue is whether Gore's claim was correct. It wasn't. A plain reading of the abstract that I found indicates that it is skeptical of global warming. Just for the record I'll replay the quote: "Such detailed diagnostic climate information is a necessary, although not sufficient, prerequisite for the detection of global-scale warming which may have occurred due to the enhanced greenhouse effect". It's there in plain English, and to dismiss it by saying Peiser didn't find it is hardly a refutation.

You're still avoiding the issue of why you credited the Liberal Party with a position that it doesn't have, and why you think members of the Liberal Party are automatons!

The most interesting thing to come out of this debate is "What makes Tim Lambert tick"? What makes a computer scientist at UNSW with limited scientific and analytical skills set up a blog to take-on others on the issue of climate change. Why does he see political motive behind everything? It would seem to me that it's much more likely that you have a political end than me - afterall, I publish from both sides, but you run a propaganda site.

Enlighten us Tim.

GrahamY, do you now concede that Peiser told Media Watch that there was only one abstract that disputed the consensus? If so, since he originally claimed that there were 34, does it not follow that my statement: "Peiser has admitted his analysis was full of errors." is, far from being "deeply dishonest" as you contend, 100% accurate?

The Hulme and Jones abstract isn't even relevant to the preceding paragraph. Even if it disputed the consensus (it doesn't), Peiser still admitted to many mistakes in classifying abstracts.

Hulme and Jones does not dispute the consensus. You seem to be the only person who believes that it does. Oreskes did not think so. Peiser did not think so. Chris O'Neill does not think so (see comment up thread). And I really doubt that Mike Hulme, who was a lead author on the IPCC Third Assessment Report which sort of defines the consensus, thinks it does. But feel free to email him.

You ducked my question: How come the page about the editors of OLO does not mention your Liberal Party insider role?

I'll be happy to answer one of your questions about me if you answer my question about you.

Richard Castles, I'm surprised that you don't care that the Stern critique got the science wrong. As for sharing data and methodologies, that's a beat up. Michael Mann has published his data and methods, which is enough to replicate his results and several researchers have done this. He doesn't want to give out the computer programs that implement those methods. I wish he would, but scientists are often very competitive.

Perhaps, Melbournian writer is right: it does not matter what privileged to be paid for their theories think-it is a matter what is really going on.

Al Gore movie is a perfect example on the titanic collating of a particular data top bureaucrat had got access to as his conclusions are right just for a one narrow clause: climate is really changing; even the royal pets noticed it at Balmoral as understood from media

ChrisC, the RS modelling was over intervals of several centuries so why should they be excused for not including mixing that takes this long. And if 50% of CO2 is in waters shallower than 400m then, clearly, 50% of CO2 is found in waters deeper than 400m. So a decision to assume that CO2 is only mixed in the top 100m of ocean is plain silly.

It is also painfully obvious that if CO2 is mixing in a 400m water column instead of a 100 metre column then the actual concentration of CO2 in that water will only be 25% of the result for a 100m column. That is, the modelled concentration of acidification is overstated by 400%.

It should also be noted that the acidification that has been claimed to have already taken place over the past 100 years is a purely modelled outcome, based on the same false assumptions.

Tim Lambert, speaking of dodging questions, how 'bout you answer my "yes" or "no" question from above: Does your hearsay evidence, that global warming induced sea level change is forcing Tuvaluans to flee to New Zealand, constitute proof of this being the case? If yes, do you accept the accounts of alien "abductees" as proof that aliens are visiting earth?

Also, since you wrote this post the World Meteorological Organization issued (Nov 2006) a consensus statement on AGW and tropical cyclones. Point 1 from the statement summary:

"Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point."

http://www.wmo.ch/web/arep/press_releases/2006/iwtc_summary.pdf

So, it seems Bolt's point 8 is correct. Perhaps you should issue a correction -- at your blog you suggest those who so much as linked to Khilyuk and Chilingar issue corrections, so it only seems fair.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/01/the_khilyuk_and_chilingar_test.php

Response to GrahamY:

Out of all the 1994 abstracts you site Hulme/Jones: 'Global Climate Change in the Instrumental Period.' This is astounding!

According to its abstract this paper, in part, "establish[es] the variability of climate on the time-scale of decades, time-scales upon which it is reasonable to plan economic and socio-political activities." Economic and social-political activities are a reference to efforts by humankind to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. With respect to Oreskes survey, this report supports the anthropogenic global warming consensus. It belongs in the 75% group.

Any others? But please read them first. I have now checked about 300 abstracts. Oreskes has climbed in my esteem and while Pieser's effort is worthy of infamy.

BTW I don't agree that Tim should worry about your Liberal Party connections. Scientific evidence is neither right or left. Climate change must be tackled regardless of our politics.

Response to BBgun:
We should be well aware of Bolt’s tricks. They are obvious. The Bolt says: “America has this year had fewer hurricanes than usual.” Does that change the fact 2005 had the most active US hurricane season ever recorded?

Gore is supported by the WMO report you have referenced. It says that it “is likely that some increase in tropical cyclone peak wind-speed and rainfall will occur if the climate continues to warm. Model studies and theory project a 3-5% increase in wind-speed per degree Celsius increase of tropical sea surface temperatures.”

The WMO is also concerned that if “the projected rise in sea level due to global warming occurs, then the vulnerability to tropical cyclone storm surge flooding would increase.”

Like all good summaries, the WMO report provides a balanced report, explaining what is believed and/or understood and the limitations on that understanding. This is a fair report, but your quotation is on the limitations. It does not doubt anthropogenic global warming.

Once again the careful objectivity of scientific work is cherry-picked and politicized. The confidence we have in science is being eroded, not because the results and conclusions are wrong, but because they are right.

ChrisC” You can't claim such a vast conspiracy of both government and industry scientist,”

I am not claiming any “conspiracy”. If you bothered to follow the text of comments, you would see,
I was disputing the assertion by Latimer that “This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!”

Clearly we have established that such fraud does exist, not only in this “universe” but on this very “planet” and that Latimer if anyone, is the “bunkum artist”.

As his own response admits “Universities investigate misconduct and can take action. They do not need my help.”

I assume he refers to universities in this universe and not the universities of “parallel universe”, in which case I will acknowledge his complete and utter climb down as apology.

As for "I care that the truth is being smeared. Does anyone else?"

Clearly that is simply more pretentious bunkum. A person with any regard for the truth would accept, graciously, when he has corrupted it and clearly we are describing things which exist in this universe.

A more graceful spirit would have had character sufficient to leave his unfinished responses in a better state than he has done. That he lacks such character speaks volumes.

Graham Young asks the question: "What makes Tim Lambert tick"? What makes a computer scientist at UNSW with limited scientific and analytical skills set up a blog to take-on others on the issue of climate change."

Instead of providing some insight, Tim Lambert again falsely suggests that Graham Young is some how hiding his Liberal party connection because he only states at the staff page that:

"He ...has extensive experience in business and politics."
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/display.asp?page=staff

It is at his authors page that he elaborates stating that:

"He ...is a former vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party."
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=3

Graham tells us much about what motivates him at the staff page:

"On Line Opinion arose out of his perception that politically Australia was becoming a less civil and engaged society and that there was a need for a journal which published a wide range of views and encouraged a questioning approach to social policy and current affairs."

And also in his various pieces including 'Why On Line Opinion Hasn't Published Those Cartoons' which can be read here
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4149

In stark contrast to Graham's open approach, Tim Lambert gives the impression he is only interested in science, yet on closer examination the motivation for his writings could be political?

Tim Lambert refuses to give some insight into what motivates his always vicious and very personal attacks on those who dare to question the big myths of our time.

Jennifer joins forces with Graham Young to attack Tim Lambert. I would have thought Graham was intelligent enough to carry his own attack. And Tim is vulnerable on a number of points.

Graham and Jennifer attack Tim Lambert for attacking Graham Young's motivation - by themselves attacking Tim Lambert's motivation.

Anyone else find that incongruous, or just stunning hypocrisy?

Hi Perseus,

I'm getting sick of this thread, so this will be my last response. You can have the last word.

Judged on your response, I think you may need to re-read the report.

Firstly, you seem to think that the NS did not take into account vertical mixing. As I stated in my last post, they DID! Check out the graph on page 10 from Caldeira and Wickett 2003. They have simulated, using a General Circulation Model, pH changes to a depth of 4km.

Your claim that pH values were overstated by 400% doesn't really make sense given that more advanced oceanic modelling was used (icluding eddies from the Gulf stream and Humbolt currents).

What the RS did say is that pH values will be considerably higher in surface waters, and it will take hundreds, or even thousands of years to transfer to the depths.

Secondly, your claim that reduction in pH had been modeled ("based on flawed assumptions") is wrong. In actual fact, the pH had been both modelled and measured. For example, page 9 states:

"Based upon current measurements of ocean pH, analysis of CO2concentration in ice cores, our understanding of the rate of CO2absorption and retention in the surface oceans, and knowledge of the CaCO3buffer (Section 2.2.2), it is possible to calculate that the pH of the surface oceans was 0.1 units higher in pre-industrial times (Caldeira & Wickett 2003; Key et al 2004). This 0.1 pH change over about the past 200 years corresponds to about a 30% increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions."

This has been verified by models. Also see page vi, and the map on page 8, that indicates more measurements of pH.

If you could find some scientific criticsms of the report, please point them out.

Frank, And the original article by computer scientist Tim Lambert was an attack on journalist Andrew Bolt about an article never published by OLO reviewing a movie about a powerpoint presentation by former politician Al Gore in which Gore claims that there is a global climate crisis right now which can only be solved if we all work to stop climate change including by driving hybrid cars.

Response to Col Rouge:
To answer my question "Who are these profit-hungry scientists?", you respond there is a scientist who researches a crazy solar-energy absorbing vegan.

On "Monday, 13 March 2006" (OLO thread 4212) you wrote: [A]cademics are employees of universities or CSIRO or other institutions. Employees don’t get to share the reward available to the true entrepreneur but of course they do not take the same risks."

But above, 23 January 2007, you write about the same employees being rewarded with "get a patent or two out of the public funded research to retire on." Your own words prove you wrong.

Then 26 January 2007: "it all depends on the timing of the patent and whether it can be construed to be associated with 'public' funds, regardless that they came from a public source."

What does this mean? It is the suggestion that scientists are ready themselves to act criminally and immorally to defraud their own universities and institutes to get rich.

This is indeed a new world -- one where those who aspire to the highest ideals of public service act in contempt of the community trust and the true rewards of scientific endeavour.

By sounding the alarm bells, scientists have (perhaps naively) assumed their call to action, based upon the principles which have given us modern civiliation, would be easily distinguished from the left-right political divide.

For those left behind, their last refuge is to use word-games (eg Bolt), red herrings and personal attacks. Col Rouge tries to discredit the whole academic establishment. Never before has scientific sceptisism, which ensures reliable research, been so exploited and misrepresented eg GrahameY's claims about the Hulme/Jones abstract.

Responsible conservative politicians recognise the objectivity and consensus of the scientific community. They do identify with the moral imperative of this call.

Today's debate is how to find the best solution. Carbon Trading? Sequestration? Base Loads? Nuclear Power? Economic side-effects? Solar Cities? Developing Nations? Public Transport? Demand Management? Green Power? .... and many more areas.

David Latimer “Col Rouge tries to discredit the whole academic establishment. Never before has scientific sceptisism, which ensures reliable research, been so exploited and misrepresented”

In the beginning TurnLeftTurnRight asked

“if anyone could give me a decent reason as to why so many scientists would support the science behind global warming.”

To which I offered a series of actions which might contribute to reasons why some scientists might support the notion of “global warming”.

Concluding my post with an allusion to irony that

“In the mean time the economy goes to hell in a hand basket because the cost burden of suggested remedies, which were not needed or produced only marginal environmental benefit at best, has killed the economic viability of investment in both existing developments and new processes.

Or maybe I am just a skeptic.”

From which you claimed I was expressing a view which was akin to something from a “parrallel universe”.

I challenged your assertion to “parallel universes” and continued challenging while you ducked, waved and obfuscated through a series of pretentious responses.

You have concluded with reference to “It is the suggestion that scientists are ready themselves to act criminally and immorally to defraud their own universities and institutes to get rich.”

And I suggest such cases have and do exist, as someone else pointed out the Korean geneticist Professor.

And then “Col Rouge tries to discredit the whole academic establishment.”

No I have not!

I have, clearly established

That my view is not something from a “Parallel Universe”;
That “fraud” does exist in the scientific community;
That, to the series of motivations I responded with to TLTR original request, is both accurate and viable, based on the intensity of your responses and the extensive lengths you seem to be going to discredit my statements

So, I guess we should now all ask is

what possible personal impropriety are you trying to bury by your continual denial of known fraudulent events already perpetrated by the scientific community?

David Latimer asks (concerning the unusually light 2006 hurricane season): "Does that change the fact 2005 had the most active US hurricane season ever recorded?"

The 2005 season was indeed the most active hurricane season on record. This is virtually meaningless, however, as the accurate hurricane record is very short. It is conceded that an unknown number of early 20th century storms might have gone unrecorded. The light 2006 season is important, however, because it indicates that there is not a clear AGW related influence on Atlantic hurricane intensity and frequency -- the 2006 season proving less active than predicted.

The WMO support for Gore is qualified: "it is likely" and "if". If Gore did indeed claim that AGW is causing increased hurricane intensity and frequency, he is in conflict with the WMO's assessment.

Tim Lambert, I ask for the third time: Does your hearsay evidence, that global warming induced sea level change is forcing Tuvaluans to flee to New Zealand, constitute proof of this being the case? "Yes" or "no". If yes, do you accept the accounts of alien "abductees" as proof that aliens are visiting earth?

Tim, you're just compounding your error. Irrespective of whether Peiser is wrong or not, he does not admit to multiple errors. End of story. The issue isn't his reliability it is yours.

As for your attempt at beating up my political involvement, I'm still waiting for your evidence that Liberal Party policy denies AGW, and that Liberal Party members only push the party line. You might also like to explain how it is that there are 737 links in Google for the search term "Graham Young"+"Liberal Party" if I am trying to hide my links.

FrankGol, it is not hypocrisy to ask about Lambert's motives. I didn't say that he couldn't question my motives, just that he was setting up a straw man. Questioning someone's motives can't substitute for rebuttal of their arguments, but that doesn't make it an illegitimate field of inquiry. Lambert raised the question of motive and I'm asking him to expand on his own. As Jennifer points out, there is plenty of information about mine on the web (and in refereed articles!), but as far as I can see, none about his.

David Latimer, the paragraphs you pull out of the abstract have no bearing on the issue whatsoever - the fact that climate is variable does not prove that variation is caused by a particular factor. When it comes to causation the abstract uses the words "global-scale warming which may have occurred due to the enhanced greenhouse effect." "May" not "has". If Tim Lambert wants me to check whether Hulme thinks this abstract is sceptical, then he ought to allow surveys of scientists as evidence as to whether there is a consensus. If he does he'll find more evidence that the only "consensus" is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and no more than that.

Jennifer,

"Former politician Al Gore" is a recent dark horse prior to Democrats' preselection-2008.

And either attacking or securing Bold are unpractical because global warming is a natural historical process to which humans contribute insubstantially.

David Latimer,

"Today's debate is how to find the best solution. Carbon Trading? Sequestration? Base Loads? Nuclear Power? Economic side-effects? Solar Cities? Developing Nations? Public Transport? Demand Management? Green Power? .... and many more areas."

All these "debates" is playing English while as usual transferring funds from state -public- accounts into own -private- coffins, because a grounding approach to a problem is wrong,wrong,wrong

GrahamY, Peiser claimed that 34 abstracts rejected the consensus. Now he admits to one. That's 34 - 1 = 33 abstracts he misclassified, or a 97% error rate. So your position is that it is "deeply dishonest" do describe 33 errors as multiple errors.

Once again you have evaded my question. How come the page about the editors of OLO does not mention your Liberal Party insider role? You raised the question of your motives when you claimed to be a dispassionate editor.

Hulme and Jones did not dispute the consensus. You are the only person who believes it does. Apparently even the opinions of the authors of the paper about what they were saying don't matter.

Surveys of climate scientists do not support your claim that the only consensus amongst climate scientists is that C02 is a greenhouse gas.

Jennifer Marohasy: Graham Young responded to my article with a viscous personal attack on me, calling me "deeply dishonest" for making a true statement. But you accuse me of making viscous personal attacks? Naturally, you offer no evidence to support you slur.

"Irrespective of whether Peiser is wrong or not, he does not admit to multiple errors."

It's hard to get a written admission of error out of Peiser, but he has written one in http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000747politicization_101_.html where he says:

"I accept that it was a mistake to include the abstract you mentioned (and some other rather ambiguous ones) in my critique of the Oreskes essay."

Consider also the following facts:

Peiser no longer repeats his claim that "34 abstracts reject or question the view that human activities are the main driving force of "the observed warming over the last 50 years"" except insofar as saying that ONE abstract rejects or questions that view (and anyone who understands what scientific peer-review means knows that including that abstract was a mistake).

When asserting that Oreskes "study is flawed since her main claims are not backed up by the sample of abstracts she used", Peiser completely fails to say anything about the most important claim and instead launches a smokescreen about the lesser claim and an inconsequential difference in counting.

You have to ask, if Peiser still stands by his most important claim, why is it that when he is asked about it, he immediately launches a smokescreen with his other claim and an insignificant side-issue. If he just wants to stay silent and ignore criticism, why the smokescreen?

Peiser's email to Mediawatch says: "some of the abstracts that I included in the 34 "reject or doubt" category are very ambiguous and should not have been included."

continues..

Also in Peiser's email to Mediawatch, he says that "it is indeed the case" that "the 34 articles (he) found that "reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the observed warming over the last 50 years" may not have been included in the 928 articles randomly selected by Prof Oreskes" but were in the 1247 documents of Peiser's list (what an amazing coincidence). i.e. he accepts that the 34 articles were not on Orekes' list, just his larger list which is why he says "Which is why I no longer maintain this particular criticism". i.e. he withdraws his "reject or doubt" claim for any abstract on Orekes' list and claims it just applies to some additional papers not on her list but on his list.

Mediawatch said that when asked to provide the names of the articles (on his list and not on Oreskes' list BTW), he provided just one which was from a biased organization and was not scientifically peer-reviewed.

When you stand by your claim like that, it's hardly worth bothering to tell anyone you're withdrawing it.

Anyway, when Bolt says:

"(Peiser) found (that) of those 928 papers, 34 rejected or doubted man-made global warming."

he's dead wrong because by Peiser's own written admission, those 34 or whatever wishy-washy number it is, are not on Orekes' list "of those 928 papers" but are on Peiser's list of 1247 documents that he expects us to trust.

Chris and Tim, do you concede that Peiser does not concede or are you just going to keep on going around the mulberry bush repeating and repeating ad nauseum the same stuff? Either he concedes or he doesn't. It is immaterial whether you think he is wrong when it comes to the issue of his conceding. To say he concedes, when you know he doesn't, is not only "deeply dishonest", but blatantly so.

Tim, my editorial entry does mention my "insiders" role, what do you think an involvement in politics is, so I have no idea what you are going on about. Not only that but the Internet is full of references to my Liberal Party affiliations, most from me!

The more you try to make an issue of something which has nothing to do with the argument, the more it looks to me like you have a particular point of view which you are trying to prosecute rather than genuinely being interested in the science. It's quite common for activists to have political agendas, and it looks to me like you're one of those. The fact that you won't answer any questions about affiliations or motivations gives further basis for suspicion, as does your willingness to sacrifice logic in order to try to "win" an argument.

As for surveys - well we know that asking scientists what they think yields the fact that there is a substantial body of opinion that disputes major parts of the AGW thesis. We also know that there are refereed articles that dispute the consensus, as well as substantial criticism of the way refereeing works (essentially mates reviewing mates in a lot of cases). The whole concentration on Oreskes' study is to try to blur these facts; and the whole concentration on refereeing is to blur the fact that what we are dealing with in the AGW debate is scientific opinion, not science, as none of the models' forecasts can be empirically tested before the event.

Well said Chris!

Further response to GrahamY:
Good to get an insight into your thinking: We should ignore the part of the abstract which discusses anthropological influences, because you have found the word “may” in another sentence.

Nevertheless, let’s respond in good faith, so I can reiterate the theme running through all my posts – exploitation of the scientific method and scientific scepticism to generate doubt in the wider community.

Science is about disproof. It would be unusual for a scientific abstract to say “X is proven”, because that’s not science. A scientific consensus is not about proof. It is about a theory that is well tested and not disproved. Scientific scepticism isn’t an expression of doubt in a theory.

“All hypotheses and theories are in principle subject to disproof. Thus, there is a point at which there might be a consensus about a particular hypothesis or theory, yet it must in principle remain tentative.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method)

Read a scientific abstract as though it were a legal prosecution or political article and you “may” find yourself confused. OR would you prefer “will be confusing”.

You have hit upon the word “may”, as though that shows doubt. It does not. Notice how other scientists have used the word “may” in other abstracts. Every abstract concludes weakly with verbs such as “may”, “could be”, “is likely” or “is characterised”. This is an expression of the scientific principle just explained.

Within its own domain, scientific expression is well understood and Naomi Oreskes sets up her review of abstracts appropriately. An abstract saying anything like “global warming could be due primarily to non-anthropological causes” or “climate change is characterised by natural variability” was not found.

Of course, the disinterest science has for proof may be exploited for general consumption. Part of Pieser’s duplicity is to demand explicit causation when science works in terms of disproof. Until you acknowledge the scientific method, you’ll find it easy to believe the sweet but poisonous words of those who would like the general community to ignore the warnings science has objectively provided.

Happy to explain further if requested.

David Latimer:
"Today's debate is how to find the best solution. Carbon Trading? Sequestration? Base Loads? Nuclear Power? Economic side-effects? Solar Cities? Developing Nations? Public Transport? Demand Management? Green Power? .... and many more areas."

It's encouraging to see someone focus on the bigger picture occasionally.

… Hmmm. How about "reducing consumption" (and by implication reducing production)?
Or is this blasphemy? Perhaps someone can provide the PC weasel words.

As pointed out in a more recent article in OLO ("A buck-per-tonne is too cheap for our most precious resource"), our water is worth more than most pay for it.
I'd humbly suggest that our forests, our coal, our natural gas and our iron ore are worth considerably more than our trading partners are paying for it - on several levels (not least, the cost to future generations).

Why are current Western governments so obsessed with "productivity"?
Quite simply, it's a displacement activity driven by infatuation with market economics.
[Why are politicians exempt from productivity clauses and "market forces"? <sorry: rhetorical>]
The employment mantra may well satisfy that irrational beast "the market"; in reality it's just expanding the underclass of working poor and encouraging _all of us_ to over-consume, working ridiculous hours while bloating government revenues.

Where are the studies showing our society better off as a consequence of upgrading vehicles, computers, TVs every three or four years?
With Australian manufacturing in its death throes, and agriculture struggling against dumped produce, how much waste and pollution is generated by imports? (My local 'fresh food' supermarket sells stale Italian garlic for about $6 a kilo.)

Further, how much of the world's resources are wasted on military adventurism?
In turn, how much has warfare contributed to BOTH global warming and commodity shortages?
Imagine what we could do if this money were invested in education, housing, health! (Not just here or the US, but in "enemy" societies.)

From the "user pays" perspective, it might be more appropriate if we were taxed (non-deductibly) on our individual environmental footprints.

Cherry-pick all you like.
We're on the Titantic, somewhere mid-Atlantic, and people are throwing deckchairs.

Col Rouge you are not a skeptic you are a Goose. Please remember that.
Graham Y, you set up Online Opinion to assist you with message framing. You like to see the arguements against your nasty Liberal mates agendas, therefore enabling you to put a nice spin on it. Some times you write some absolute crap. Your article on the Queensland seat of Gaven is one such article that springs to mind.
Given that you were so wrong in that matter(proven at the Sept 9 Qulnd. Election) i have no confidence in your opinions on Global warming. At least you do appear to have some practice and experience in Political matters. You have none on enviromental issues.Niether do i. I dont know Lattimer, but his article has good support.Your intervention in this matter is curious to say the least. Accusing Lattimer of a political agenda is hilarious. This whole website has a political agenda.

GrahamY:

Here's what Media Watch reported:

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1777013.htm

"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one."

And yet you write: "To say he concedes, when you know he doesn't, is not only "deeply dishonest", but blatantly so"

Peiser conceded that there was only abstract that disputed the consensus. Why you continue to deny this is beyond me.

Yet again you have evaded my question. How come the page about the editors of OLO does not mention your Liberal Party insider role? It seems to have been carefully written to avoid mentioning your Liberal Party connections. I'll be happy to answer your questions about my motivations when you answer my question.

Here's the page again: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/display.asp?page=staff

And no, we don't know that surveys of scientists yields the "fact" that there is substantial dispute with the consensus. If want to make such a claim you need to cite some specific surveys.

Nice twist, Tim. I did not say I didn't care that the Stern critique science was wrong, or that I think it is wrong. I said there may be science that is wrong, naturally. Aways has been. That's part of the method, or at least, should be. Einstein said: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Compare Dr Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia in a beautiful Sir Humphrey Appleby impersonation: “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” Mann has claimed intellectual property rights and you say "scientists are often very competitive". Now what's all that stuff about agendas again?

Well, if Peiser was correct, GrahamY should be able to point to the abstracts in Oreskes 938 that did not agree with the consensus. The search string is known. Go to it GrahamY, show us you are no neener.

FYI, you can find the needed information at Deltoid. <a href="http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser/#comment-1652"> Meyrick tracked it down</a>

<blockquote> So to summarize, Dr Peiser has made 4 errors in his research:

1. Dr Peiser failed to replicate Dr Oreskes search properly. Dr Oreskes used (as far as I can tell) the following criteria:

TS=”global climate change” ;DocType=Article; Language=All languages;Database(s)=SCI-EXPANDED; Timespan=1993-2003

Dr Pieser used the following criteria:

TS=”global climate change”; DocType=All document types; Language=All languages; Database(s)=SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI; Timespan=1993-2003

2. Dr Peiser compounded the previous error by assuming that Dr Oreskes got her figures wrong rather than contacting Dr Oreskes to obtain her search criteria.

3. Of the 34 abstracts identified by Dr Peiser that reject or question the view that human activities are the main driving force of the observed warming over the last 50 years”, 12 are not in Dr Oreskes sample.

Of the remain 22 articles, 21 do not fit that description (one argues that natural factors have been underestimated still does not reject or doubt that human activities are the main factor). In other words Dr Peiser has misinterpreted the abstracts of 21 articles.

4. Only one fits Dr Peiser's category, but it does not fit Oreskes'criteria of being a piece of published peer-reviewed research, but is instead a statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Dr Oreskes removed this from her sample partly because the statements by the AMS, AOG, & AAAS are not in her sample either.</blockquote>

Hedgehog “Col Rouge you are not a skeptic you are a Goose. Please remember that”

And you are, by name, “road kill in waiting”, the only problem, the truck is running later than anyone would wish it to deliver your deserved demise.

Of course to forget being a goose is difficult when there is a turkey like you around to remind me. As I stated before, since you apply avian terms to me, why should I not respond in kind, you are a turkey with the as much debating prowess as turkeys have flying prowess, at least when compared to geese of any variety.

There is nothing to be gained in arguing point one from Bolt’s list of 10. Let’s assume Lambert’s right about point one and take a look at the rest of his post to see how many more he gets right -- to see if he can achieve a passing score (50%).

Point 2: the only way Lambert can get this right is to assume Revelle would have changed his view had he lived longer. This assumption is unwarranted. Lambert is wrong.

Point 3: Lambert’s own source says ice cores show that temperature lags behind CO2 increase. Bolt is right.

Point 4: Lambert’s doing so poorly, lets be gracious and say he’s right about the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Point 5: to cut research time Lambert can have this one as well.

Point 6: as shown in previous comments, there is no evidence Tuvaluans have been forced to flee.

See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5382#67867

Point 7: Lambert offers no evidence that AGW is causing coral reefs around the world to bleach. Lambert doesn’t show Bolt to be wrong.

Point 8: as shown in previous comments the WMO is unable to link AGW to increased hurricane intensity or frequency.

See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5382#68774

Point 9: tropical diseases specialist Paul Reiter says (Jan 2007) Gore is “deceitful” in linking AGW to the spread of disease.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/11/news/edreiter.php

Reiter refers to a recent study to support his position.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol8no12/02-0077.htm

Lambert’s link to an old article doesn’t prove his case.

Point 10: Bolt might have chosen a poor example of “other possible explanations” for global warming but this doesn’t mean there are no other explanations; there are, of course, others. Bolt is right even although his example might be questionable.

So, lets see how Lambert scores. He was right on points 1, 4 and 5 and wrong on the rest; 30% isn’t a pass in anybody’s books. Surely a scientist should have done better when mismatched against a “hack” journalist like Bolt.

Tim Lambert’s post is a pathetic piece of points-scoring fluff that’s riddled with misrepresentations but there’s no way he’s going to admit it.

BB, Nice summary. But will Tim concede anything?

Tim Lambert-

Please, consider my message of 29 January.

Response to Jedm: Very happy to add ‘reducing consumption’ to the list.

Response to BBgun:
Point 2: Bolt describes a co-written article the words in the quotation are not written by Roger Revelle in 1991 but by Fred Singer in 1990. We know this because the words were previously published by Singer in Environmental Science and Technology Magazine:
Index: http://pubs3.acs.org/acs/journals/toc.page?incoden=esthag&indecade=1&involume=24&inissue=8
Scan: http://home.att.net/~espi/Singer_article_solo.pdf

Bolt adds “And some warming might even be good, he added”, implying Revelle wrote these words, however it’s the 1990 Singer article which says this.

A NASA website says: “In 1957, Revelle and Hans Suess, one of the founders of radiocarbon dating, demonstrated that carbon dioxide had increased in the air as a result of the use of fossil fuels” and “Under Revelle's leadership, [there was publication of] the first authoritative U.S. government report in which carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was officially recognized as a potential global problem.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Giants/Revelle/revelle_2.html

Tim Lambert describes point 2 as “misleading”. If told that Albert Einstien wrote an article, just before he died, saying that E=MC2 is wrong, how would you describe that?

Point 3: Bolt asks a question by Professor Jeff Severinghaus, but drops the answer. Asking a question, Bolt claims nothing. This is indeed misleading, because a reader will assume the answer creates a problem for Gore. Only by knowing the professor’s answer do we discover it doesn’t cause a problem.

Point 4: Gore shows several glaciers in the film, but Bolt says deforestation has caused Mt Kilimanjaro to melt. Lambert says Bolt is wrong, but he is more silly than wrong. Here's why:

Take five icecubes out into the sunshine. Sprinkle salt on one cube to help it melt. All the icecubes begin to melt. What caused the ice cubes to melt?

In today's world all glaciers are retreating. Deforestation may or may not effect Kilimanjaro, but cannot explain the others, so it is falsified in the general case. Global warming explains why every glacier is receeding, so it can explain why any single glacier receeds.

More to come!

on a side issue, gore's point about the negative correlation between consensus in scientific papers and articles on global warming in the popular media is perfectly born out by Jennifer's exercise in selective referencing in today's Australian.

it is interesting to consider the differences between Jennifer's article and a previous ipcc report on the effect of global warming on coral.

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/regional/247.htm

the problem, which is symptomatic with many media articles on global warming is that Jennifer selectively excludes evidence contrary to her position. in particular the principal (backed by referenced studies in the ipcc report) that the benefits of sea level rise are outweighed by the negative impact of temperature and associated acidity of the water.

the fundamental difference is one of predetermined positions, the ipcc report highlights both the positive and negative effects of global warming and comes to the conclusion that the sum of the negative outweighs the positive. Jennifer, mentions only the positive effects and therefore comes to the conclusion she started with.

"Chris and Tim, do you concede that Peiser does not concede"

GrahamY, what part of Peiser's email to Mediawatch:

"Which is why I no longer maintain this particular criticism."

do you not understand?

(The above quote from Peiser's email to Mediawatch: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/ep38peiser.pdf )

Response to Col Rouge:
Yes, you have explained that global warming is a conspiracy by scientists in publicly funded institutions to get rich and investigate . Well done! The next step should be to ban scientists from our universities. We should get science undergraduates to read Andrew Bolt... by rote! Don't I feel stupid defending those frauds?

Well... No.

Response to MichaelK:
I think its very rude of the scientific community to ignore your common-sense opinion and rely upon their objective research.

David Latimer,

Although your opinion expressed was more than very much appreciated, a reality is much more worse: it is not only simply "very rude of the scientific community to ignore [a] common-sense opinion", but pursuing own "objective research" simply annihilates intelligence -and not intelligence only- of biologically inferior professionals with a very traditional help of playing English at rules-establishing places mates as clear for ones less subtle in mastering tautology.

Jedm,

"Why are current Western governments so obsessed with "productivity"? -because it is simply silly to produce own ammunition somewhere in the third world countries.

Eventually, this sentence needs no further clarifications.

Tim Lambert, there is not much point arguing with you because you don't argue you assert. I've now had a good look at your blog. It's a good example of what I call "argument by bibliography". You obviously don't understand the issues so what you do is link to articles, blog posts etc by people who you assume do know what they are talking about. When one follows those links they frequently lead to blogs just like your own. When one questions your assertions you don't argue, your refer.

The end result is a vortex of equally ill-informed opinions footnoting each other. No wonder you love peer review so much!

I've posted Peiser's email and he says that he doesn't retract his criticism of Oreskes study and your response is to pluck one comment where he concedes one point out of context. You also quote Media Watch, but of course, their claim is undocumented. Their word against his.

I note that you've also opened a post on your own blog this issue so as to take a swipe at me. No doubt there is security in operating in a space where only like-minds congregate.

The fact that OLO publishes varying, but quality, opinion is why we are as successful as we are. It is a space quite unlike your own blog. It's not a ghetto. I got involved in this particular debate because your article was so below par for OLO it was an embarrassment.

And it makes your criticism of my membership of the Liberal Party quite irrelevant. If I were some party hack I wouldn't be publishing a site like this, I'd be publishing one like yours!

If you want references to surveys of scientists showing a significant degree of doubt over Greenhouse, do a proper literature review for once. You might start with the many statements from formal and informal groups of scientists that dispute the "consensus". If that doesn't lead you anywhere come back and I'll see whether I can help you out.

David Latimer,

Scientist Tim Lambert's "debunking" of Bolt's blog post is a finalist in the Best Blog Posts of 2006. As such it should be able to stand on its own, being of superior quality, and all. It doesn't because it isn't.

If you read my comments carefully you'll note that I don't so much have a problem with Gore as I do with Tim Lambert's misleading crapola -- if Bolt's such a hack and Lambert has science on his side, he should have nailed Bolt, but didn't. The hundreds of words you've written attempting to explain and justify Lambert's post proves it’s nothing special.

Tim Lambert isn't defending the indefensible; why do you bother?

David Latimer, you're a gem. I did a word count on the 1994 abstracts to check your assertions about the type of language used by scientists and in the process found a second abstract that is sceptical of the AGW hypothesis.

Your account of how science works could only have come from a non-scientist. When I learnt science E=mc2 didn't mean "Energy 'may' equal mass times the speed of light squared", in a pre-post-modernist classroom "equals" equalled "equals", no ifs or buts. If you thought your experiment "might" have been right, then you started again!

Of course every scientist knows their thesis might be negatived, but until it is they take their glory.

I picked 1994 because that is the group from which I drew my example of scepticism. It consists of 46 abstracts, so if you want to search the whole 10 years you might come to different numbers, but I suspect no different conclusion.

The results are:

"May" appears in 15 abstracts (30 times in all, but some scientists over-use the word, so it appears multiple times in some abstracts).

"Likely" appears 3 times. "Characterised" doesn't appear at all. "Could be" makes its appearance 5 times.

So the words you say scientists use because they are never sure make their appearance in only a minority of abstracts.

And abstract 45 says we need to do more work to disentangle solar sun spots and CO2 as causes of global warming. Peiser's looking better, Lambert will be starting a new thread to explain it all away, and no wonder Oreskes appears to have disappeared in this debate.

"John Hunter corroborates Bolt’s claim that the 0.07 figure comes from the Australian National Tidal Facility."

Not quite the same as saying:

"the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year."

Bolt made a correct quote from a document of the former Australian National Tidal Facility (an organisation that no longer exists and whose documents cannot easily be checked). That is not the same as saying the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year, which is plainly false. Since we have now moved on to Bolt's actual statement, the issue is Bolt's objective in writing a quote whose meaning on its own is plainly false. Obviously Bolt's intention is to deceive people into believing the meaning of the quote, because if he was one-tenth of the journalist he seems to think he is, he would check that quote against other sources and at least make his readers aware of the discrepancy. Other sources than the global-warming-denialist websites where it is bandied about, that is. Bolt didn't actually tell a lie, but he wrote deceptive selective journalism.

BTW, GrahamY, I'm still waiting for you to answer my question. Peiser wrote his concession in his email to Mediawatch. Word against word doesn't come into it. Haven't you read Peiser's email to Mediawatch yet? It's time for you to stop being evasive.

A whole post just about me, gee thanks Col.

Chris O'Neill,

You will note that in his original post Lambert does not claim Bolt's 0.07 figure is incorrect, instead he gives different figures for a different period. He has made no further effort to make a case on point six, leaving you to do that for him. Why do you think he has done that?

None of the sea level figures for Tuvalu should be relied on, as both John Hunter's article and Tim Lambert's link indicate -- Lambert's link is a bit sneaky on this in that the 5 and 4.3 figures are only qualified deep in the text whereas the smaller 0.9 figure is deemed in the all important summary to be "less precise". Regardless, the short term figures (5 and 4.3) are from far too short a period to be trustworthy. The long term figure (0.9) is not to be trusted because the gauge is reagrded as unsuited to the task. If you are going to damn Bolt for citing a questionable, unqualified figure, you'll have to do the same for Lambert.

None of this alters the fact that the apparent areas of the various islands comprising Funafuti has, if anything, increased in recent years. Tuvalu would not be increasing in area if it is sinking beneath the waves. Further, Tim Lambert offers nothing better than anecdotal evidence that Tuvaluans are being forced to flee rising seas. Not good enough.

GrahamY, it's not Media Watch's word against Peiser's. Nothing in Peiser's email contradicts what Media Watch states: Peiser now says that was only one abstract that disputes the consensus. If you want to argue that Peiser says there are more than that, tell us which ones Peiser says they are.

You claim: "you don't argue you assert", and then proceed to offer a whole bunch of assertions uncontaminated by any arguments. Each of my points against Bolt was supported by an argument and one or more links to supporting evidence. While you just assert things like you claims that surveys show that most scientists dispute the consensus. Despite being pressed on this point you have failed to provide any supporting evidence or even named these alleged surveys.

I'm afraid that OLO does rather look like something that would produced by a Liberal party hack. You yourself admitted that you had only published one previous piece supporting the climate science consensus. You declare that you would have rejected my piece for stating something true. And you just published a piece by Jennifer Marohasy that says that Global Warming will be good for the GBR, but look at how she misrepresents her sources:

"The last global assessment of the coral reefs of the world"
http://www.aims.gov.au/pages/research/coral-bleaching/scr2004/

Look what it says:

"The coral bleaching in 1998 was a 1 in a 1000-year event in many regions with no past history of such damage in official government records or in the memories of traditional cultures of the affected coral reef countries. Also very old corals around 1000 years old died during 1998. Increasing sea surface temperatures and CO2 concentrations provide clear evidence of global climate change in the tropics, and current predictions are that the extreme events of 1998 will become more common in the next 50 years, i.e. massive global bleaching mortality will not be a 1/1000 year event in the future, but a regular event;"

BBGun, I don't respond to your nonsense because the others deal with you more than adequately and don't need my help. But you knew that.

Chris, I have read Peiser's email to Media Watch, and I have analysed it above. Nowhere does it say that he withdraws his total criticism of Oreskes. It only refers to a part of his original analysis based on the expanded number of articles in the database. Media Watch makes the claims you refer to on the basis of discussions that they had with Peiser after receiving that email, but they don't provide any documentary evidence, which is why I wrote to Peiser.

Tim Lambert, you just make it up. Peiser's email does not support what Media Watch says - you won't find words in there that say anything like "there is only one abstract that supports my conclusion".

I did not say that I would have rejected your piece for "stating something true". I said it wasn't up to standard, and that's been pretty comprehensively demonstrated over the course of this thread. You get some things right, but not enough to rescue the piece.

I never said that "most scientists dispute the consensus". I said that there was a "substantial body of opinion that disputes major parts of the AGW thesis". I've never "admitted [that I] only published one previous piece supporting the climate science consensus". In fact we've published numerous articles that do. Opposition to AGW is not a Liberal Party position, and I don't oppose it, so why am I "a Liberal Party hack".

I've also checked out your claim against Marohasy. She quotes the document you cite, but not on the issue of coral bleaching, but to support a claim that "Australian reefs are among the best protected in the world". So she has not misrepresented her source and you should retract that claim, unless you've got some other evidence.

Which all brings us back to the issue you keep avoiding - what's your motivation? It's obviously not finding the truth. If I were you I'd probably fess up to it being politics - better that than being an intellectual "troll"!

Response to GrahamY:

Scientific abstracts are not written for the classroom. Teachers don't explain theory in the same way scientists communicate between themselves. School and undergraduate courses usually deal with well-tested theories, and global warming is such a theory.

You've raised E=MC2 without considering that Einstein was a theoretical physicist. It was mathematical in origin, not experimental. Referring to the Maxwell-Hertz equations and his own theory of special relativity, Einstein wrote, "With these principles as my basis I deduced the following result." The concluding words were, "If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies". (http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/e_mc2.pdf, translated from German).

It's disappointing you chose to do a word count. Instead of exploiting scientific method, you've exploited the diversity of the English language. Did you consider that characterised can be spelt with a 'z'? If you insist on being mechanical in English comprehension, you should have checked for synonymous expressions like "indicates", "potential(ly)", "suggest(s)", "X% confidence level", "estimates" and "reflect". There will be others and it is not practicable to list all of them, as you well know. Secondly, how did you count abstracts primarily about model building, those saying more research is required and those absent of a specific conclusion? You treated those abstracts as against the concept of all theory being subject to falsification.

My critique of Pieser has already mentioned that a word count for "anthropogenic global warming" and "anthropogenic climate change" over abstracts for all years, gives the result 13, which is quite a coincidence. You’re word count approach is equally dubious.

I’ve already discussed abstract 45 in a previous post. The conclusions are a “Correlation of sunspot activity with global warming may be spurious but additional analyses are required to test this hypothesis”. I think they have used the word spurious with justifiable reason, given how you describe it.

I look forward to the next instalment. I feel good about it, because I get to learn both about the marvellous work of science and the tricks used by those trying to discredit or misappropriate scientific endeavour. Thanks!

"Nowhere does it say that he withdraws his total criticism of Oreskes. "

You are not getting the point here. Peiser states that he has withdrawn his criticism of Oreskes' 928 article main claim. Thus Gore's restatement of Oreskes' 928 article main claim is correct. Thus Bolt's criticism of Oreskes' 928 article main claim is wrong.

Bolt said absolutely nothing about Peiser's 1247 article survey which by the way is absolutely worthless because it gives articles with no scientific standing.

Response to Michael K:
The word trickery is available in English because it has many shades of certainty and vagary, compared to most other languages.

Response to Chris:
Thanks Chris for connecting us to the original claims.

This is the political mindset at work. The objective is to win the argument, not to get to the truth or prepare for the future. And science is at a disadvantage because it never attempts to "prove" something absolutely and no scientific theory is treated as beyond challenge.

Nevertheless, the whole set of above posts has been extremely informative, especially for those who went to the trouble to read at the actual abstracts http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm.GrahamY is content to just word count them and Peiser has appeared to do the same.

The headline today is 'Climate Scientists: More than 90 percent certain humans are to blame.' This does not mean 10% of scientists are disputing the consensus. It was not a vote in which the result was 90 to 10. It means that ALL attending scientists, including the representatives of 113 governments, are at prepared to give at least a 90% confidence value.

Allow me to put this in some context. Imagine you had a car and invited fifty mechanics to check the brakes. Some said they were 99% sure that the brakes were about to fail. Some said 95% and some said they were 90% sure of failure.

Would you say to yourself, these mechanics are all in dispute! Using these 5% and 10% differences, it should be OK to drive. Well, only if you are very foolish.

This is the crux of what Andrew Bolt and Benny Peiser are telling us to be. They exploit the science, in particular the methodology and language, to extract discord and dispute where, in fact, a scientific consensus does exist and is evident.

Tim Lambert says he is not defending his post because it is unnecessary to do so: “BBGun, I don't respond to your nonsense because the others deal with you more than adequately and don't need my help. But you knew that.”

Huh? As far as I know, all of my comments are essentially correct and I certainly haven’t tried to mislead, so I have no idea what Lambert’s talking about. Perhaps he will enlighten us.

Employing a frequent Tim Lambert tactic, he has attempted to draw the discussion off topic by focusing on GrahamY’s politics. Other than that he hasn’t said much. There are several reasons for his reluctance to comment. At his blog he and like-minded commenters mercilessly ridicule anyone not toeing the ideological line – calling dissenters “troll” is a favoured tactic but that would only look silly to On Line Opinion’s more diverse and sophisticated readership, although frequent Deltoid commenter Chris O’Neill did call me an idiot early on in this thread – maybe he thought he was commenting at Deltoid.

Another reason Lambert’s reluctant to comment in this thread is because he can’t control comments. He is known to moderate difficult Deltoid commenters, attempting to drive them away by holding dissenting comments for extended periods, posting them only when the conversation has moved on, or not at all. He frequently ignores especially difficult comments hoping his readers will take up the challenge on his behalf (as happens in this thread). It is not unknown for benign but dissenting comments to be surreptitiously removed. He’s obviously not very good at give and take discussion and does everything he can to avoid it.

Lambert also refuses to admit when he gets it wrong (or when he misleads). If he did, he’d spend so much time issuing corrections he wouldn’t have time to blog.

Response to David Latimer:

Yeah, “trickery” is a “trickery”, but democracy itself supposes separatong mere personal benefits from a national interest.

If Dark Ages traditions still substantiate nowadays “scientific approaches”, would for instance deliberating on this topic have been of any reasonable outcome

A few problems with Bolt:

Point 2: Bolt quoted Revelle: ""the scientific basis for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time (1991)". So what action did Revelle think was NOT drastic in 1991? Revelle's daughter in the Washington Post of 1992/9/13: "In private, he often spoke of a $1.00 a gallon tax as eminently reasonable, not "drastic."" So to Revelle, global warming was "only" certain enough in 1991 to justify a US$1 a gallon tax. Not very certain at all really. Yeah right.

Point 3: Bolt points out that "ice cores show the earth first warmed and only then came more carbon dioxide". He then asks the presumptuous question "So does extra carbon dioxide cause a warming world, or vice versa?" Well, both actually but non-scientist Bolt doesn't have the scientific imagination to realise that it could be both.

Point 4: Bolt says a 2004 "study" in Nature says that Mt Kilimanjaro was losing its snows more than a century ago largely because deforestation has cut the moisture in the air. This "study" was not a scientific article but a news piece about a proposal to save the Kilimanjaro glacier by wrapping it in a giant tarp. It casually mentioned that "researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit" but didn't give any references for this claim or who these researchers are. Bolt also pointed out that some glaciers are getting bigger but no-one is arguing that global warming has already overwhelmed natural variation everywhere.

Point 5: Bolt implies Gore is suggesting oceans could rise 6 metres (from Greenland melting) by 2100 when the IPCC contradicts him. Gore does not suggest Greenland could melt by 2100. Even though Greenland's ice will not slide-off for a long time (hundreds of years), Gore is suggesting we think about whether we want to cause this to happen because the consequences are so serious. Bear in mind that Greenland was mainly ice-free 127,000 years ago and that the previous ice-cap probably took less than 2000 years at most to slide off.

continues…

Response to Chris on point 2:

Bolt tried to make us think he was quoting Revelle, but infact these words quote Fred Singer. Again, look at how Bolt carefully uses words to describe a "co-written article", but only mentions the one name. The words in the quotation are not written by Roger Revelle in 1991 but by Fred Singer in 1990. We know this because the words were previously published by Singer in Environmental Science and Technology Magazine:
Index: http://pubs3.acs.org/acs/journals/toc.page?incoden=esthag&indecade=1&involume=24&inissue=8
Scan: http://home.att.net/~espi/Singer_article_solo.pdf

A NASA website says: “In 1957, Revelle and Hans Suess, one of the founders of radiocarbon dating, demonstrated that carbon dioxide had increased in the air as a result of the use of fossil fuels” and “Under Revelle's leadership, [there was publication of] the first authoritative U.S. government report in which carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was officially recognized as a potential global problem.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Giants/Revelle/revelle_2.html

Tim Lambert describes point 2 as “misleading”. Gore could have certainly learnt from Revelle about global warming.

Bolt is picking up sources and arguments from the anti-environment Internet sites and his writing style indicates he is aware of the weaknesses in his various points, because they are so purposefully papered over. But the weaknesses are also posted elsewhere, eg I've used NASA.

Is NASA "the counter view of the rabid left" Col?

Just in case OLO readers missed it, Bolt yesterday put up a new Lambert post.

See: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/so_what_was_lambert_really_reading/P0/

Instead of engaging Bolt on the issues, Lambert makes one waffly comment (on page two) and then retreats to the safety of his blog, where he posts a waffly response. Unfortunately for Lambert, Tim Blair and Glenn Reynolds have linked to his post so he’s getting some critical comments. Boo hoo.

See: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/02/ipcc_ar4_leaks_wrong.php#comment-332682

The moral of this story: never assume anything written by Tim Lambert is accurate; it probably isn’t.

Point 6: Bolt should have stuck to attacking Gore's use of anecdotal evidence to support the claim of adverse effect from rising sea level. Instead Bolt uses a terse quote whose meaning on its own is wrong and thus completely misleading.

Point 7: Bolt thinks most bleaching is caused by El Nino events but ignores the fact that the Great Barrier Reef experienced its worst coral bleaching event on record beginning in January 2002. There was no El Nino that summer.

Point 8: Bolt asserts that most hurricane experts agree with Dr Chris Landsea of the US National Hurricane Centre, who says "there has been no change in the number and intensity of (the strongest) hurricanes around the world in the last 15 years". Bolt doesn't say who these " most hurricane experts" are but Landsea is a sceptic who spat the dummy and left the IPCC. A list of scientific papers showing the increase in cyclone intensity is here: http://www.cleartheair.org/hurricanes.vtml . It includes a paper with Landsea as an author and statements from his co-authors about the problems with his assertions.

Point 9: Reiter refers to http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol8no12/02-0077.htm to support his position that Gore is completely wrong to suggest that warming allows malarial mosquitoes to move to higher altitudes. Reiter's reference shows that in a place where malaria has increased, there hasn't been significant warming. Reiter has his logic messed up, because to prove Gore wrong he would have to find somewhere that has warmed up but which has not had a significant rise in malaria. Reiter is the one being deceitful.

Point 10: Bolt suggests "just one" other possible explanation scientists have given for the warming globe, increased solar activity (the denialists never suggest anything more substantial). Problem is, the increased solar radiation since 1900 (0.28 W/(m^2 of earth surface)) is only a small fraction of the radiation forcing from increased CO2 (1.8 W/m^2). i.e. less than 1/6th as much. You don't need fancy computer climate models to work out the radiation forcing from increased CO2, just knowledge of its radiation physics.

Bolt gets 0/10 for journalism.

BBGun,

Bolt, Blair et al, have again embarrassed themselves by not understanding what has been written (ideologues tend to do that a lot).

From Realclimate

www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/the-ipcc-fourth-assessment-summary-for-policy-makers/#more-394

"Note that some media have been comparing apples with pears here: they claimed IPCC has reduced its upper sea level limit from 88 to 59 cm, but the former number from the TAR did include this ice dynamics uncertainty, while the latter from the AR4 does not, precisely because this issue is now considered more uncertain and possibly more serious than before."

So Bolt, Blair and Reynolds’s, GOTCHA, did nothing other than expose their ignorance. How embarrassing that these are the best the hapless denialists can wheel out.

Apologies for cross-posting, but I posted the following comment earlier today on the David Henderson thread and I think it's equally relevant here (N.B. I have made some minor edits to make the post fit the particularities of this thread):

I'm confused. On the one hand we have major reports released by the most authoritative international sources available, that indicate that global warming is real, is exacerbated by anthropogenic activities, and will have dire consequences on societies and the environment worldwide within decades. These reports include the Stern report and that of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released yesterday (see http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/world-wakes-to-climate-calamity/2007/02/02/1169919530831.html ).

On the other hand, we have a minority of mostly non-scientists who are promoted by some pretty obvious interest groups to present a countervailing view, which typically amounts to introducing some degree of doubt about the interpretation of semantic aspects of some report or article, and thus claiming that the overall theory is unproven.

Leaving aside for the moment the motivations of those who argue against the reality of anthropogenic global warming in the face of ever-mounting evidence of its existence, it's clear that this forum is generally biased in that direction - in the material that it publishes on the subject, in the quixotic battle by its chief editor to try and debunk evidence of global warming, and in the pedantic comments posted by denialists in this thread.

Chris, you're the one that's being obtuse. Peiser doesn't withdraw his criticism of the 928. He only withdraws his criticism of the 1247 article survey. It's immaterial what Bolt might say, the issue is with Lambert. I'm not trying to defend Bolt, I'm saying Lambert's critique is flawed.

David Latimer, you're making a straw case about doubt in scientific language. For what it's worth, in the 1994 abstracts "characterize" turns up twice (in Abstract 15), and neither have anything to do with doubt, so hoist with your own petard again.

If science thinks something exists it says so. You have Newton's Laws of motion, Newton's Law of Gravity, Boyle's law, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Planck's constant. I could go on and on. None of these say this "may" be the right answer. Anymore than scientists say there "may" be atoms, muons, quarks, electrons, protons etc. etc.

Thanks for importing Popperian concepts into this argument. The basis of Popper's theory of science is that for something to be science, the proposition must be falsifiable. This of course excludes climate modelling from the realm of science, because you can't falsify a climate model. There's no experiment you can do to test them, you just have to wait to see whether their predictions occur.

Warwick Hughes is running a score card on climate models to date, and assuming that he has done his figures correctly etc. we can say that earlier climate models have been falsified, therefore can't anymore be regarded as scientifically correct. To check his conclusions go to http://www.warwickhughes.com/hoyt/scorecard.htm. Of course, climate modellers will say that they have learnt from their past errors, and that they are getting better results with current models.

cont...

Now, all the scientists in the IPCC framework rely on these models for their forecasts of climate change. The 90% figure isn't some sort of poll of scientists, as you seem to think - it is an opinion expressed by the authors of the summary which has been released. Most of the scientists who have contributed to the 4th review wouldn't be competent to express an opinion - they didn't do the climate models and aren't modellers.

And, applying your argument about joint papers, the only person we should hold responsible for the certainty is the person who wrote that particular sentence! At least that should be the reading if Reveille can't be held responsible for something that Singer wrote in a jointly authored paper.

Who knows how they come to the 90% figure. It can't be scientific, because you can't assign probability to an event which doesn't recur regularly. It's just a guess.

Now, I don't dispute the usefulness of projections, but I do get annoyed when people claim a scientific label for something which is just opinion, especially when those people are scientists. It devalues science, and if they are shown to be incorrect (and I'd be willing to put a bet on the temperature staying below the IPCC projection for say 2020 - I want to be alive to collect) it brings it into disrepute.

Chris O’Neill,

The Tuvalu 2005 report Lambert links to says this about the 5 and 4.3 mm sea level rise figures: “A fundamental goal of the Project is to establish the rate of sea level change. It has been recognised since the beginning that this would require several decades of continuous, high quality data. However, in response to increasing requests from the region for information regarding the trends as they gradually emerge from the background “noise”, combined with concern that less experienced users might attempt to fit a trend line to the data without properly accounting for processes such as seasonality that can bias the result, the preliminary findings are now being provided. We caution against drawing conclusions prematurely, as illustrated in Figure 5 which shows how the trend develops as more data becomes available.”

There is no accurate figure for sea level at Tuvalu. Scientist Lambert had to know this when he posted the figures. Why do you continue to make excuses for him?

Alex the drummer,

So, you reckon Bolt, Blair et al get things wrong out of ignorance. Lambert’s errors, however, are often by design: he aims to mislead. Ignorance can be excused; deception cannot. In Bolt’s latest thread he challenges Lambert’s points on Tuvalu sea level rise and the frequency and strength of hurricanes. Lambert chooses not to discuss these because he knows he’s wrong.

C J Morgan,

Your “pedantic comments posted by denialists” jibe seems to be directed at me so I’ll field it. At no point have I denied the existence of AGW. My goal is simply to point out that Lambert’s entry in Best Blog Posts 2006 is misleading throughout and therefore undeserving of being honoured. Had Lambert taken a less cocky tone and given Bolt credit for his points that are valid and been more careful with his evidence I wouldn’t have bothered. That said, any reasonably knowledgeable layman with a bit of time on his hands could easily dismantle Lambert’s post. Nonsense like Lambert’s reflects rather badly on science and scientists.

Long discussion misses a very grounding point which is a Bolt's presentation of a global warming.

Interesting, the UNDP, as to my understanding, preferred kicking the USA and so-called "first class" world with some assertion of linking a climate change with human activities predominantely rather than simply accepting a reality of natural process, which is the Earth's ageing.

Response to GrahamY:

If you continue to do word counts, then you are going to get nothing but tireless objection from me. It is unacceptable that you examine scientific abstracts via a word count, as already explained. Those of us who are literate can readily see that scientists understate their conclusions when writing abstracts.

Is Karl Popper a disreputable name in your opinion? (For everyone else Popper (1902-99) was a respected philosopher who contributed to the definition of the scientific method) All the theories you list are subject to revision; eg Newton's theories were superseded by Einstein’s theories. And they are all models: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_(abstract).

Imagine suggesting that a climate model cannot be falsified! You say "no experiment you can do to test them, you just have to wait to see whether their predictions occur." Obviously testing in all experimentation and modelling depends upon predicted outcomes occurring.

Why should I take Warwick Hughes seriously? Just one of the anti-science crowd.

If you have an incorrect understanding of science and take counsel from those trying to discredit science, then it is no surprise that you appear so confused about the scientific basis of climate change.

You are so off-track about Revelle. Bolt used this joint-paper, as others have, to somehow discredit Al Gore. Fred Singer wrote those words, not Revelle. He died three months after the joint publication. In 1957, Revelle warned that Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment" by releasing greenhouse gases" (http://aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm). There is no reason to doubt Gore learnt about C02 increases initially from Revelle and the circumstances of the joint paper are irrelevant.

There is far more to probability than randomisation. Almost all experimentation and meta-analysis involves the mathematics of probability. It is not mere opinion. You deal with opinion and you are entitled to your own, but don't assume scientists think, write and work like a columnist, politician or lobbyist. They do not.

Finally, I point out that climate change is not a bet any person can afford. The wager includes coastlines, diseases, mass extinction, refugees and agricultural decline.

Well in all the preceding, the dialogue between David Latimer and Graham Y at least yields some useful insights into the misunderstanding and misapplication of scientific methods. Their dialogue at least has the potential to arrive at a better understanding of what makes a climate model a scientific model, and not just a scientist's opinion of what they reckon might happen. Graham Y, please take note.

Graham Y's statements about falsifiability shows a confusion between falsification and disproof. Falsification is a priori, disproof is a posteriori. All climate models can be falsified in principle, which was Karl Popper's minimum standard for falsifiability. All it would take to falsify a climate model is to find something in the paleontological record, or the laboratory, or the natural world, or in logic, that disproves one of the underlying assumptions on which a given climate model is based.

The paleontological record, the laboratory and the natural world are all open to experimentation that could yield data which falsifies current climate models. We could also examine the logic of the models for contradictions. So Graham Y, climate models certainly are falsifiable in principle. They're not just a scientist's opinion, they're robust models open to a priori falsification. We don't just have to "wait and see", as you believe.

This sheds further light on Graham Y's apparent self-contradiction where he said that one "can't falsify a climate model" and in the very next paragraph said that "earlier climate models have been falsified". Those earlier models haven't been falsified Graham, they've been disproved, and the distinction is crucial.

Climate models are both falsifiable a priori and open to disproof a posteriori. They meet all the relevant criteria to be valid scientific tools. I don't claim to know whether they are true models or not, but I know a scientifically valid model when I see one. As scientific models, they potentially present a more reliable and valid standard of knowledge than does my opinion, or yours, or Graham Y's, or Tim Lambert's, or David Latimer's.

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

It certainly clarifies things for me. However Mercurius, you have used the words "potentially present" so Graham may take comfort that his opinion is only "potentially" less valid or reliable that that of science. If it is potentially less valid, it is also potentially more valid.

Don't be surprised to find your words twisted over time. For example, in Graham’s view a 1994 recommendation (art 45) to do further research on sunspot activity, even though it may be "spurious", was a rejection of anthropogenic global warming.

The art of political debate is well understood by Graham. Credibility and integrity are the targets. Is just your opinion vs mine. In defence, never, ever waiver. Given the standing of politicians, journalists, lobbyists and telemarketers is so high, what a wonderful methodology to replace the principles of science.*

(* MichaelK, please take this last paragraph to mean: People do not trust politics and its games. If science became similar, all real progress would halt.)

"Chris, you're the one that's being obtuse."

Sure, if you say so.

"Peiser doesn't withdraw his criticism of the 928."

This is what Peiser writes in his email response to Mediawatch's questions:

"MW: > do you know whether the 928 articles she studied were included in the 1117 articles you studied?

Peiser: Yes

MW: > This indicates that you selected your own sample group.

Peiser: As I explained above, I included all documents (i.e. 1247) whereas Oreskes only used "articles" (however, there are only 905 abstracts in the ISI databank)

MW: > It implies that, given this methodology, the 34 articles you found that "reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the observed warming over the last 50 years" may not have been included in the 928 articles randomly selected by Prof Oreskes. Is this possible?

Peiser: YES, THAT IS INDEED THE CASE. I only found out after Oreskes confirmed that she had used a different search strategy (see above). Which is why I NO LONGER MAINTAIN THIS PARTICULAR CRITICISM."

So Peiser no longer maintains that his 34 articles (or whatever number he now claims) were actually on Orekes' list of 928 articles. His claim is now that the 34 or or whatever number of articles he currently claims were on his (new improved :-) list but not on Oreskes' list.

Bolt was talking about the 928-paper, i.e. Oreskes', list, not Peiser's list. Peiser states that he no longer maintains this criticism of this 928-paper list, so Bolt is dead wrong.

Thanks god this thread has been crowded with posts discussing something gloriously interesting and not Andrew Bolt.

"The moral of this story: never assume anything written by Tim Lambert is accurate; it probably isn’t."

The moral of why this thread exists: never assume anything written by Andrew Bolt is accurate; it probably isn’t.

Latimer “Response to Col Rouge:
Yes, you have explained that global warming is a conspiracy by scientists in publicly funded institutions to get rich and investigate . Well done! The next step should be to ban scientists from our universities. We should get science undergraduates to read Andrew Bolt... by rote! Don't I feel stupid defending those frauds?

Well... No.”

“global warming was a conspiracy” I would like you to quote where I made such an assertion.

I did claim that fraud perpetrated by some scurrilous supposed scientist occurs. I would further note such fraud is not limited to under-graduates.

I would conclude, therefore that anything which a scientist states should simply be treated with skepticism and not accepted as fact simply because someone is a scientist and supposedly has the peer approval of his fellow scientists, especially when public funds are at stake.

Now your feeble attempts at dismissal of my right to express my view gives insight to how skeptically we should treat any statement which you make and how stupid we would be to accept your word as credible.

Col - I agree that you have every right to express your views.

However, you should be aware that when you exercise this right you often look really silly. Particularly when you expostulate on matters to do with scientific method, the practice of science and the understanding of statistical analysis.

It has been said in this forum that you are a goose. In my experience of owning geese and other poultry, geese tend to be cantankerous and greedy while alive, and somewhat greasy and over-rated in their posthumous state.

With respect to global warming, you'll most likely be in a posthumous state within a decade or two (save the intervention of medical... er... science), and you therefore will not have to suffer the consequences of your lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. Unfortunately for them, your precious daughters and any of their progeny will most likely inherit a much diminished natural environment than that which you and others of your ilk have blithely squandered in a century or two of orgiastic consumption.

As I've said before, you ought to stick with the loopholes and fine print. Big ideas seem to stretch you a bit.

But if you want to look like a silly goose, then of course you have as much as anybody to provide entertainment for the rest of us :)

One of the themes of this thread has been the question of vested interests.

TurnRightThenLeft began by saying global warming skeptics had a vested interest to maintain the status quo and asked "Can it compare to the vested interests of the other side?" (18-Jan-2007)

Col Rouge thought yes: "some of these scientists live in pursuit of the public purse." They "create an apparent pressing need by deploying alarmist propaganda ... float nebulous strategies ... apply for funding ... Spend the money ... maybe get a patent or two out of the public funded research to retire on." (23-Jan-2007)

Chris O'Neill pointed out that this "would be a very, very, very grand conspiracy" ... "Really, alomst everybody would have to be in on it" including the CSIRO (27-Jan-2007)

Col Rouge just said "I am not claiming any 'conspiracy' ... I was disputing the assertion by Latimer." (29-Jan-2007)

Well for my part, I assert that Chris O'Neills interpretation of Col Rouge's slur against the scientific community is correct. It is now many weeks since Col Rouge made those comments, which I find are unjustified and offensive to Australian science. Does he stand by them or not?

Unless he can establish a vested interest by the scientific community in propogating "alarmist propaganda" and "nebulous strategies", then TurnRightThenLeft is correct. As spendocrat put it (19-Jan-2007):

"Its our world we're talking about. Its not politics, its the health of the planet. We should all be intent of finding the truth, whatever that may be, not searching for reasons to take stick with our 'team'."

CJMorgan “However, you should be aware that when you exercise this right you often look really silly. Particularly when you expostulate on matters to do with scientific method, the practice of science and the understanding of statistical analysis.”

That is your opinion and one which, based on the history of your posts, is instantly ignorable.
Your own posts have illustrated a lamentable lack of substance, beyond the snide innuendo and second hand sarcasm.

I guess if you want to get up close and personal, with your reference to geese, I suggests
Birds of a feather stick together and you are best suited to goggling with the turkey.

David Latimer “which I find are unjustified and offensive to Australian science. Does he stand by them or not?”

I see you now claim to speak for “Australian Science”. I stand by my claims as long as you stand behind your self-aggrandizement and self-elevation to Spokesman for Science.

Having seen over many years how trolls of every persuasion, just love to latch on to public funds, like leeches on a teat, I would expect to be doubly vigilant toward anyone who proclaims, with such self-righteous indignation, their representation of an entire technical class of Australian.

"Its our world we're talking about. Its not politics, its the health of the planet. We should all be intent of finding the truth, whatever that may be, not searching for reasons to take stick with our 'team'."

Any “team” which expects unfettered sanctity and protection from objective analysis and criticism are merely a bunch of powder puffs, unsuited to the hurly-burly of real life. Your strategy was popular several hundred years ago when the Inquisition threatened Galileo for disputing their view of “science-theology”. Your protests and accusations merely reflect the same ignorance toward those of us who have not bought into the theological-science of Global Warming. Damn, I always barracked for the heretics and here I stand as one.

Your and CJMorgan pontification style and is simple bullying and to be condemned by all folk who value freedom of speech and support rational reasoning

Words, words, words on this page ...

And making science more credible the predominant majority should be provided with a "kangaroo education".

That is a simple solution to a complex problem, David Latimer, as practised in Australia from the dawn of the first fleet.

Col, you're no Galileo. Get your hand off it.

(the keyboard, I mean)

:-)

There we have it: "I stand by my claims". Col Rouge is telling us global warming is a either a fraud or conspiracy (or some such thing) by many or most Australian scientists. Why? Because they are like so many he has seen; they "just love to latch on to public funds, like leeches on a teat."

My view of Australian scientists is far different. I do not find them dishonest, profit-seeking, wasteful or ineffective. I believe they are intellegent, hard-working, honest and innovative. Their work is necessary and often ground breaking. It is through our scientists that we train our university science students. They do astonishing work under difficult conditions and financial constraints; constraints which are increasing, not decreasing.

So when they tell us about global warming and, as far as can be assertained, it's anthopogenic origin , I think we should listen. The public role of a scientist should not be moral or political. Their job is to provide the best possible explanation, and they have done that.

The message is in the public square.

Carbon Trading? Energy Conservation? Solar Cities? Sequestration? Base Loads? Nuclear Power? Economic side-effects? Developing Nations? Public Transport? Demand Management? Green Power? Wind Farms? Agriculture in the Australia's North? Clean Coal? Emission Caps? Ice-free Artic? International Co-operation?

Hey OLO! Lets move this debate forward.
We got some BIG decisions to make!

David Latimer here declares “My view of Australian scientists is far different. I do not find them dishonest, profit-seeking, wasteful or ineffective. I believe they are intelligent, hard-working, honest and innovative. Their work is necessary and often ground breaking. It is through our scientists that we train our university science students. They do astonishing work under difficult conditions and financial constraints; constraints which are increasing, not decreasing.”

I guess that would be all well and good if we could ignore the William McBride
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/89ta.html

Some stuff about salinity
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001392.html

Dr Ashoka Prasad
Health Report - 17/08/1998: Scientific Fraud and Defamation

The Views of Dr Frank Gorman
http://www.coca.com.au/newsletter/2000/dec0012ac.htm

The Activities of Messers David Williams and Wolfgang Wüster
http://www.smuggled.com/pr60.htm

Professor Michael Briggs, (work carried out at Deakin University)
http://briandeer.com/social/medical-fraud.htm

I could go on, the list is almost endless.

My expressed view was; anyone who seeks funding from the public trough needs to be considered skeptically and with independent suspicion to the merit of their claims and applications above and beyond mere peer review.

David Latimers view seems to be, our Scientists are Australia’s equivalent to India’s Mother Theresa.

As for “So when they tell us about global warming and, as far as can be assertained, it's anthopogenic origin , I think we should listen. The public role of a scientist should not be moral or political. Their job is to provide the best possible explanation, and they have done that.”

Clearly, whilst some scientists might qualify for the scientific equivalent of beatification, an inclusive and universal claim that

“Their job is to provide the best possible explanation, and they have done that.”

Is, clearly flawed, one might say to the point of “recklessness”.

So I guess, regardless of our individual background, a skeptical view is a healthy view, especially when some so called “scientists” are prepared, as the web links I have posted prove, to go to any lengths to suckle, like leeches, on the public teat.

And any debate has to consider the views, not simply of the scientists cloistered in academia but people who live in the real world too.

Chris, the issue is whether Peiser has withdrawn or not. There is no dispute that he has withdrawn his original particular criticism on the basis of the 1117. That doesn't logically mean that because he has narrowed down the search from 1117 to 928 does not mean that 34 becomes zero, which is what would have to be the case for him to withdraw his general criticism of Oreskes. Media Watch say that he has, but don't document it. Lambert asserts that Peiser has withdrawn. I write to Peiser and he says he hasn't. Bolt is wrong, and so is Lambert.

David Lambert, I am tired of the smears that I am somehow anti-science. Your post demonstrates that you are the one who is anti-science. You dismiss Hughes' work on the basis that he is one of the "anti-science crowd". Hughes is in fact a scientist who is prepared to go looking for the evidence for the pronouncements that others make. He is an empiricist, and empiricism is at the heart of science. What makes him "anti-science" to you? It appears to be that the evidence he finds doesn't concur with your prejudices.

Neither does the quantifiable evidence on how scientists write papers and abstracts. The reason I did the word count was to demonstrate that.

You also appear to have problems with the concept of joint authorship. If you jointly author a paper with another academic, as I have, you do not have the luxury of walking away from the conclusions just because the other author wrote them. Whatever was in that paper, it doesn't matter whether Revelle or Singer wrote it, they wrote the piece together.

Mercurious, nice word play, but completely beside the point. "Falsification" and "disproof" are exactly the same thing in and they don't have different temporal aspects. I'm not sure that you understand exactly what climate models are.

Some parts of climate models definitely meet the Popperian criteria (and no David Latimer, I don't have a problem with Popper, that's a pretty strange assertion to make). Those parts are things like the ability of CO2 to absorb and re-radiate energy in the infra-red spectrum. But there are a whole lot of assumptions about relations between phenomena and mathematical fudges that don't meet those criteria. A model is more an experiment than a scientific theory.

The Fraser Institute has just published a (peer reviewed for those of you who think this matters) summary of the IPCC papers http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/admin/books/files/Independent%20Summary.pdf. These pars from it might help:

" The hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions have produced or are capable of producing a significant warming of the Earth.s climate since the start of the industrial era is credible, and merits continued attention. However, the hypothesis cannot be proven by
formal theoretical arguments, and the available data allow the hypothesis to be credibly disputed.

Arguments for the hypothesis rely on computer simulations, which can never be decisive as supporting evidence. The computer models in use are not, by necessity, direct calculations of all basic physics but rely upon empirical approximations for many of the smaller scale processes of the oceans and atmosphere. They are tuned to produce a credible simulation of current global climate statistics, but this does not guarantee reliability in future climate regimes. And there are enough degrees of freedom in tunable models that simulations cannot serve as supporting evidence for any one tuning scheme, such as that associated with a strong effect from greenhouse gases." p.8

Models are indeed subject to scientific doubt, and any discussion about them should use words like "may" and "probably". That doesn't mean that all scientific discussions do. There is no doubt that CO2 re-radiates infra-red spectrum energy, for example. "May" indicates scpeticism, beyond the general proposition of falsifiability.

Although I appreciated YOUR personal opinion of Australian scientists very much, David Latimer, some personal acquaintance with relevant issues forces me to admit that a language-accent-as-a-criterion-of-intelligence fighter, Col.Rouge is much closer to the Australian academy reality reflecting a pitiful state of socio-political affairs in general.

As already mentioned on these pages, Australia's scientists are on a wrong path if a recent UN report on a global warning, a brainchild of Melbournian professor, had been supported by them overwhelmingly.

You need to be fair Grahame. You are not anti-science, but I am critical of your description of scientific abstracts as doubting anthopogenic global warming, when they do not. I suggest this is NOT dishonest but perhaps coloured by the political debates which surround us every day.

EG today, Labor is making hay from John Howard's gaff. This unfair, as the PM's explanation was prompt and reasonable. OK, politicians will be politicians, but we do not want scientists to write abstracts adopting or adjusting to political circumstances.

Grahame asks why I think Warrick Hughes is anti-science. According to his website he is a "free lance earth scientist from Australia. Exposing situations where unsound science is used to prop up fashionable and expensive policy notions, usually policy coloured a shade of Green."

He is as entitled to declare himself an (amateur?) scientist as anyone, but as I have reiterated in post after post, science is not political. In the Soviet Union, academics were forced put Bolshevism before all else. Real scientific work was dismissed as "bourgeois" or "fascist". The result was Lysenkoism, a rejection of Genetic theory for a set of impractical notions, resulting in great famine.

So, I'll defend science whether it explains inheritance or climate change.

Grahame wants to stand by his idea that using the word "may" indicates doubt. Great! Let's see where that takes us: According to Grahame 15 abstracts from here "http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes1994.htm" use the word 'may'. There are 44 abstracts listed, so in Grahame's interpretation at least one-third of papers doubt their own conclusions. Wow!

After more than 180 posts, we are in a good position to refect on how we have responded to scientific literature. We'll see if Grahame wants to go round in circles, but he has yet to come up with one abstract showing doubt in anthopogenic global warming. The irony is that Chris and I have already pointed to that one abstract from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists which expresses clear doubt. From 900+ well-reviewed abstracts, is there another?

David Latimer:

"So, I'll defend science whether it explains inheritance or climate change."

Lysenko was then explaining his ideas with not less conviction than local university minders did/do their politically-motivated seemingly-scientific delusions: a big Nth.America-originated deception called "twin boy to a girl sex-change" lasted about thirty years, and resent scientifically-looking tales, up to the UN level, are a synonymous continuation of.

Mr Morgan, you say "we have a minority of mostly non-scientists who are promoted by some pretty obvious interest groups to present a countervailing view, which typically amounts to introducing some degree of doubt about the interpretation of semantic aspects of some report or article, and thus claiming that the overall theory is unproven."

I think Robert Lindzen, Prof of Meteorology at MIT, for one example, qualifies as a scientist, is not promoted by some obvious interest group, and is not motivated by semantic pedantry simply to confuse or introduce doubt. Have you ever considered that maybe he just actually disagrees with a lot of the science, from his expert position, and has an honest duty to stand by what he believes? Scientists of his standing should not be summarily dismissed because they happen to disagree

GrahamY, so now you are accusing Media Watch of lying? Don't you think that if they did Peiser would have called them on it? And if Peiser really does maintain that there is more than one abstract that denies the consensus, how come you can't tell us what they are?

David Latimer “Carbon Trading….

Hey OLO! Lets move this debate forward.
We got some BIG decisions to make!”

OK you can start by explaining to us how you intend to ratify the mathematical integrity of carbon production, on which to base “certified carbon trades”.

When Australian carbon is emitted it does not carry a label which say “Aussie made”, so how do you distinguish it from New Zealand or Indonesian Carbon emissions?

I do not accept the notion that “periodic estimates of carbon output” are an acceptable method of “accounting” when the outcome of such calculations is going to effect the transfer of a significant part of GNP (or GDP) value between sovereign nations.

An old accountancy expression “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”.
With all the will in the world, sufficiently timely, accurate and reliable measurement of carbon emissions does not exist.

Therefore, whilst an assumption of total carbon emissions might be possible as a basis for "pseudo-science computer modeling"; as a basis for assuming Australia will pay (say) India for carbon credits, or vice-versa, such physical measurement to support or ratify the integrity for actual exchange remains non-existent.

Furthermore, If the games and tricks of dodgy trading in the European (EU) olive oil, butter and other "physically measurable" markets (distinct from etheral cabon emmissions), by Mafia and other less reputable nation states (ex Eastern Europe) is anything to go by, the whole house of cards of carbon-trading will be a cesspool of corruption within a year of opening.

Now, I may not have the "scientific" credentials of some on this OLO thread but I an not completely devoid of "reasoning skills" plus I have a intuitive sense to know when something stinks.
Carbon trading, regardless what the scientists of academia might dream about, will not work and any attempt to make it work will end in disaster.

So David Latimer, what BIG decision do you intend to make for “Carbon Trading” which guarantees some shonky Russian Mafia scam will not mess with Australia’s “Carbon Trading Account”?

"Bolt is wrong"

I know. That is the reason this thread exists. Discussions about the proven incompetence of Peiser are irrelevant.

Bolt gets more right than does scientist Lambert.

Response to Col Rouge:

I appreciate that you take a view on carbon trading, and whether it would work or not. You make some decent points. Obviously, a carbon trading scheme requires thorough accountability and that is difficult to achieve, especially internationally.

I listed a whole lot of discussion points. And would not be shy about discussing a carbon tax. Such a tax could be revenue neutral. For example a state govt could abolish payroll taxes. All taxes act as brake on the economy. Replace taxes on employment with a tax on pollution. Isn't that why industry prefers automation to skilled workers anyway?

OLO: There is plenty to discuss. Can we have a few articles on these points please?

Carbon tax is as much useful as taxing the sunset observers for a sunset occurrence, David Latimer.

If Col.Rouge was right in something, this is his attitude towards the predominantly technically illiterate money-greedy so-called Australian universities' theoretics inherited their posts in colonial academia.

MichaelK: You prefer payroll tax? That as useful as taxing companies for employing people.

Another thing:
GrahameY tried to slip one past us. He suggested I had "problems with the concept of joint authorship."

This is an astonishing slight of hand. Here I am, complaining that Andrew Bolt tells us that Revelle wrote something in that paper. (Bolt uses a singular pronoun.) GrahamY tries to turn it around, by accusing me of the same thing.

It is Bolt who has attached this words to a single author. My theory is that Bolt deliberately mentioned one name, deliberately used the singluar pronoun to mislead the reader. I assume that GrahamY has editing skills. An editor would know that for a jointly written paper, one can only say "they wrote ...". If you are going to attach an individual writer, then it should be the person who wrote it. Fred Singer, recounting his version of this story wrote: "I undertook to write a first draft". Later he says "I agreed to prepare an expanded draft, and in the following weeks I sent three successive versions to my coauthors and to other scientists, receiving comments and completing a near-final draft in late 1990." http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817939326_283.pdf

If it is good enough for Fred Singer to say that he wrote something, then its good enough for me too. Furthermore, Singer published a version with the same quoted words in an earlier 1990 article. http://home.att.net/~espi/Singer_article_solo.pdf

Which all leads to the idea that Andrew Bolt mislead. Because either those words are jointly written (using the word "they") or they are individually written in which case Fred Singer is the writer, by virtue of his earlier article and/or by his own account of the drafting.

No, Grahame. I am not misleading. Just laying out the full story. Andrew Bolt misled, and Tim Lambert was correct to point that out.

David Latimer,

I am hardly surprised with Mr. A.Bold's very general approach to both this more technical and many other socio-political issues he writes of: publicist is not obliged to scientifically sustain a path to the reality but just drawing attention to an issue. To my understanding, this is a major writers' tribe task.

A money-suckers of consulting mob is a different story.

And trading the licensed volumes of pollution exhausted differs from playing any form of taxes, where GST as usual benefits government for a money turnover with no product produced physically at all.

Unique situation: the higher price-the more beneficial a particular service to GST collectors only is.

Such a perverted mentality -a sure part of "Australian values" eventually- does not allow the simplest solution: unified Australian standards of which non-compliance should be punishable not at corporate but managerial levels, protecting customers from accustomedly meeting a financial burden of companies' fines and "representative expenses" growing dramatically.

David Latimer Stated “Carbon Trading? Energy Conservation? . . . . . Wind Farms? Agriculture in the Australia's North? Clean Coal? Emission Caps? Ice-free Artic? International Co-operation?

Hey OLO! Lets move this debate forward.
We got some BIG decisions to make!”

I responsed to “Carbon Trading” (your first cab off the rank)

David’s response to my concerns regarding a carbon trading system and its fiduciary responsibility to those effected -

“Obviously, a carbon trading scheme requires thorough accountability and that is difficult to achieve, especially internationally.”

Some observations

Your response is one of the most lamentable understatements I have ever read.

It is not the sort of response which accompanies an expressed desire to “Lets move this debate forward.”

It is a response which is inconsistent with the expectation “We got some BIG decisions to make!”

So having backed away from “carbon trading” you suggest a “pollution tax” instead of a “employment tax”.

I would observe GST, as a consumption tax, effectively taxes the end users of products which create pollution in accordance with their desire to consume/pollute.

Personally, I would rather see even a half –assed attempt to answer the issues surrounding “carbon trading” which you are deflecting from, than a non-response as you have offered here.

Why?

Because the world is on the cusp of following the irrational, illogical, immeasurable lunacy of creating a carbon trading system and I know, as a consumer, one way or another, I am going to get screwed with higher prices for the right to peacefully cohabit with a bunch of scientists and bureaucrats who want to tell me what I am allowed to do with my life and how many taxes I am duty bound to pay.

Want to give “International Cooperation” a try (last cab in your list)? Assuming your responses to the other “big decisions” are as small and limp as your response to “carbon trading”.

Footnote: Michaelk is a moronic troll. I, like many others, make a point of never responding to any of his posts (it only encourages him). My considered advise, a similar strategy might suit yourself.

"...the world is on the cusp of following the irrational, illogical, immeasurable lunacy of creating a carbon trading system and I know, as a consumer, one way or another, I am going to get screwed with higher prices..."

Regardless of whether we impose a carbon tax or not the price of energy is going to increase. It might be next year, or the year after, or the one after that, but no way can we expect to get away without acknowledging there's a price to pay for cleaner power.

The paucity of debate among our federal politicians has led to people thinking Australia is an island in the environmental as well as physical sense. Listen to parliament and you'll realise the government's attitude is so one-dimensional - how it will affect the government's record on employment - it's little wonder we get our pants in a twist about how this will affect the economy. Whatever we do the effect will be profound. Unless we take a more wholistic approach there will be little upside.

Meanwhile, existing technologies that might help us adapt are being forced offshore for want of investment or government endorsement, or scuttled in parliament on behalf of localised opposition.

One thing is certain about the comments on Bolt's article-that is that there is no certainty either way about the effect on global warming of human activity. What is certain is that if the measures proposed by the activists are implemented the result would be the complete collapse of our socio-economic system. One point-Greenland is mentioned in connection with the effects of the ice melting. Why is an ice covered island called Greenland and not Whiteland? Because in the 12th century it was verdant and colonised by Scandinadians.

Hemstitch

Response to Col:

I am trying to encourage OLO to get on with the debate. Our political leaders accept the scientific consensus and I would prefer us to not be left behind in the debate.

As for the rest of your comments, I cannot see what you are getting at. I have not backed away from the suggested topics of debate - topics of important public policy. But, I remind you we've achieved a double-century for this thread. It not practical to discuss five or ten major policy ideas here.

Response to Hemstitch:
Actually, the comments show that Bolt systematically misprepresented the evidence and used every debating trick in the book. If you are envoking rainforests and woodlands, your comment about Greenland is just another one of them

Hemstich, on the assumption you make, namely: "that is that there is no certainty either way about the effect on global warming of human activity", you assert (with not a scrap of evidence or argument in support) that "What is certain is that if the measures proposed by the activists are implemented the result would be the complete collapse of our socio-economic system".

"No certainty either way" would suggest prudence, wouldn't you say?

Suppose for one moment that the scientists who warn that human activity is having a dire effect on global warming are correct. What would be the effect on our socio-economic system if we do nothing about it?

Greenland wasn't given that name because it was green -- it was PR to attract settlers

Scientist Lambert's explanation of the source of the name "Greenland" is, like most everything he writes, misleading.

The etymology of "Greenland":

"After settling there, [Eric the Red] named the land Grænland ("Greenland"), possibly in order to attract more people to settle there. Greenland was also called Gruntland ("Ground-land") on early maps. Whether Green is an erroneous transcription of Grunt ("Ground"), which refers to shallow bays, or vice versa, is not known. It should also be noted, however, that the southern portion of Greenland (not covered by glacier) is indeed very green in the summer, and was likely even greener in Erik's time because of the Medieval Warm Period."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Etymology

It's little wonder he blogs instead of writing academic papers; he'd have trouble getting anything past peer review.

Wikipedia is not a primary source.

From the Saga of Erik the Red

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17946/17946-h/17946-h.htm

'In the summer Eirik went to live in the land which he had discovered, and which he called Greenland, “Because,” said he, “men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name.”'

David Latimer “I cannot see what you are getting at. I have not backed away from the suggested topics of debate - topics of important public policy. But, I remind you we've achieved a double-century for this thread. It not practical to discuss five or ten major policy ideas here.”

You pompously declared one of my earlier posts “It encourages Col Rouge to forget progress, education and human achievement – This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!”

You then went on with some snotty, emotional tirade about “I care that the truth is being smeared. Does anyone else?”

Having challenged your bullying arrogance over suggesting a parallel universe, smearing the truth and gratuitous snide remarks like “Is NASA "the counter view of the rabid left" Col? “

you moved on to you making grandiose suggestions to debate“Carbon Trading, etc etc “ and

“Hey OLO! Lets move this debate forward.
We got some BIG decisions to make!”

When I commented on carbon trading you tried to escape moving the “debate forward” or evolving the reasoning behind “BIG Decisions” by suggesting some amateurish tax policy, which
I immediately dispensed and the classic line

“I am trying to encourage OLO to get on with the debate. Our political leaders accept the scientific consensus and I would prefer us to not be left behind in the debate.”

You are not “Trying to encourage OLO to get on with the debate”

You just want to thrust your ratbag theories around and denigrate anyone who challenges your arrogance.

As for “It not practical to discuss five or ten major policy ideas here.”

If your pompous dismissal of “Carbon trading“ is anything to go by, it would seem it is not practical to discuss a single major policy idea here.

You might consider it expedient for dissent to be silenced and we follow your pretentious edicts, like lemmings but I see “carbon trading” and a lot of the other sci-fi-politico babble on global warming as the edge of the cliff and I am not going to stay silent while you try to drag us over it.

The best I can work out, the "Saga of Eric the Red" is not a primary source and certainly can't be relied on as an accurate historical record. Eric lived roughly 950-1000 AD, whereas the first of two versions of the Saga were prodcued long after his death. The author(s) is unknown.

You peeved at Wikipedia for pulling your page? Playing fast and loose with the facts isn't going to get it back.

I wish it is more practical responding to Col.Rouge redneck's posts if even a notion of my messages on trading/taxing pollutions not only similarly rejected these stupid approaches but provided suggestions sometimes incomprehensible for technically illiterate players with English, David Latimer.

That is why Australia in a few decades to become an islamist state - Anglo-racism and -arrogance disserve.

Response to Col Rouge:
All the tricks and word play which has been identified in this thread has encouraged you to think that science is not about progress, education and human achievement. It encourages you to think science is discredited and that scientists just “live in pursuit of the public purse”.

Where are these profit-hungry scientists who seek enough “public funded research to retire on”? Only in your parallel universe!

It is a parallel universe where science is misleading and profit-hungry, and where PR is balanced and idealistic. Where the public sector is rich and the private sector is struggling. This is a fictional universe which mirrors our own.

Rather than supporting Australian science, my prediction for the response has come true. Those denying anthropogenic climate change will forget the real questions, ignore the real issues and defend the fraud. They will attack the messengers.

"This inconvenient truth shall not weary them." I said.

Indeed, it is 200+ posts and you are still here getting ridiculous responses like "expedient for dissent to be silenced and we follow your pretentious edicts, like lemmings"! The only reason you feel this way is your own inertia, resisting the consistent case in support of "scientific consensus" and in support of Australian science in general. You feel like this because there your rhetorical ammunition has finished ... and each one was a blank anyway.

If effect, you have tried to discredit science in general, and because this is entirely unjustified, it follows that such an effort was doomed to be an embarrassing failure.

I do encourage OLO to get on with the debate. If John Howard said the “jury” has definitely accepted the link between human activity and climate change is real, then it is time that we get on with the debate.

Response to MichaelK:
Your posts are difficult to understand. I suggest that you use simpler English and short sentences. In English, simple and direct language is good. Complex English is a problem. If you use simple English you may be understood and feel part of the debate.

David Latimer,

Non - Anglos-es are always OUT of debate in this xenophobic racist Anglo-colony, where Col.Rouge-likes -- car-dealers and real estate agents supposed to be IT in any debate for their English-as-native-language only

David Latimer “only reason you feel this way is your own inertia, resisting the consistent case in support of "scientific consensus" and in support of Australian science in general. You feel like this because there your rhetorical ammunition has finished ... and each one was a blank anyway.”

Your entire post contained lots of judgments of me, no productive comment to Carbon Trading or any other of your list of grandiose schemes.

To my “inertia”, as you call it, I am the very opposite.

I declare the invalidity of your asinine proposals and pompous lecturing to accept, without question what you dictate as “scientific fact” but what is really “nebulous scientific theory based on dubious modeling practices”.

I am far from “Inert”. I, humbly, consider myself to be a “thorn of reason” in an otherwise moribund debate about the human fallibility of scientists. That it seems to annoy the crap out of you is merely a small bonus.

You are the one who wrote

“Hey OLO! Lets move this debate forward.
We got some BIG decisions to make!”

Yet you lack the courage to debate “carbon credits”, in any detail and excuse debate on any topic on the basis of “thread expediency”. Doubtless, you are as shallow in real life as your post are here. I think the phrase is

“Talking the Talk but lacking what it takes to go Walking the Walk”

Btw the “ammo” is still plentiful, Reason is an inexhaustible resource, far more abundant than “dictatorial dogma”.

Inert means non-reactive... like Helium.

Inertia is the tendency to continue at the same speed and direction ... like a railway carraige.

Internet posts are all talk anyway.
I hope that clears things up.

Response to MichaelK:
I think I understand this. Do you mean?

"Non-Anglos are excluded from debate. They live in a xenophobic racist Anglo colony. People with similar views to Col Rouge are car dealers and real estate agents. They think they are superior because their first language is English."

If so, it does not correspond with my experience.

So, David Latimer, you are some chosen to be an exempt from a rule.

David Latimer “Internet posts are all talk anyway.”

I am pleased you agree with my previous observation of you

Re

“Talking the Talk but lacking what it takes to go Walking the Walk”

I see your up to your armpits in the semantics of inertia and inert. Yep, go sweat the small David, its about all you will ever be up for

Bye now

David Latimer,

Wake up to a reality: not FIGHTING the global warming but ADOPTING to new planetary conditions is the most - and so-called "Australian scientists", that is predominantly a bunch of pro-apartheid era South-Afrikaners employed by synonymously short of any practical clue in subjects but some English relatives of them at the local unis, are of no idea as usual about.

Michael K: That is complete nonsense!

Well, there we have it. Col Rouge keeps on with his upteenth empty personal attacks on science and those who support science.

Col Rouge, Andrew Bolt and other climate skeptics effectively reject science and objectivity. They see only politics, politics, politics.

The objectivity of the scientific community is alive and well and the results produced by thousands of experiments provides sufficient evidence so any reasonable person would say let's start looking for ways to reduce or eliminate this pollution problem. In contrast, skeptics conclude that the CSIRO must have has been highjacked by the Green's Party! That's the political mindset at work blinding out all other considerations. They see it as follows: Green's bad -> Scientists support Green's -> Scientists bad.

It is silly and unrealistic to expect scientists to dumb-down their concusions based upon political considerations.

Al Gore's 'An Inconvienent Truth' was a great film about a real scientific consensus and an important global problem. It is highly recommended for all.

Dear David Latimer,



As Internet provided, you are involved in computing with emphasis on economical patterns.

With due respect to your opinion, I dare suggest that my both education, knowledge, professional expertise and degree of ENGLISH proficiency do allow analyses of and embedding the nature-related problems from very professional engineering grounds, as Al Gore's movie was a perfect doco reflecting a real climate change in progress - a NATURAL process taking place upon ALL the natural history.

Moreover, with some relevant worldwide accepted scientific achievements, your not-so-polished-in-playing-English thankful for attention modest respondent dare once again draw your priceless attention to a very possibility of a next epoch of the planetary COLD might surely follow the recent relatively short (from a view of a planetary longevity) period of warming as all natural history based on indisputably-scientifically-collated data existing testified to.

Nonsense is manipulating the politicians by having their places inhereted at academia - by a kind of so-called "scientists" Australia is one of the most perfect examples of, and even the bigger nonsense is imposing the figures of delusive imagination on nations for, one could say so, mere personal political gains only.

Of course, advisers rather than advised might probably be blamed for such a nonsense, - if the advised themselves not wanted being manipulated in reality.

The global warming enthusiasts have a slight problem.

When reputable scientists give an honest assessment of global warming
the alarmists immediately come up with some specious attack on the scientist. It works, because the majority of Australians believe the myth of global warming from human activity.

The United Nations, probably the most enthusiastic of the doomsayers, is the darling of the AGW faith. IPCC is the highest authority, to them, on science.

UN does employ top scientists to produce reports, but then publishes a Summary for Policymakers, prepared by UN employed publicists.

A recent case in Queensland, Australia, was brought by conservationists against Xstrata, a large mining company, to oppose an approval for coalmining on the basis that coal produced greenhouse gases, which produced global warming.

The United Nations summary was taken into account.

By carefully reading the key to one of the graphs, and scrutinizing
the graph itself, the judge found that it showed that there has been no global warming since 1998, but there has been some cooling.

The total warming of the globe in over one hundred years to 2006 is one half of one degree.

The web address of the case is:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/qld/QLRT/2007/33.html

Relevant extract from the case :

"[17] ...A close examination of the global mean temperature chart (Fig SPM-3), reveals that the last 106 years had 3 periods of cooling (1900-1910, 1944-1976, 1998-2006) and 2 periods of warming (1910-1944, 1976-1998) and that temperatures rose only 0.5°C
from 1900 to 2006. The largest temperature change in the 20th century
was a 0.75°C rise between 1976 and 1998, But the fact that very
similar rises have previously occurred (1852-1878, 0.65°C and 1910-
1944, 0.65°C) was not specifically mentioned or causally explained in
the Summary. Also not mentioned or causally explained is the fact
that temperatures have actually fallen 0.05°C over the last 8 years.

[18] ...With all respect, a temperature increase of only about 0.45°C over 55 years seems a surprisingly low figure upon which to base the IPCC's concerns about its inducing many serious changes in the global climate system during the 21st century."

We've read attack after attack on the work of the scientific community in this forum. In some cases scientists have been accused of delibrate corruption by members of this forum because the scientific community provides the evidence for increasing temperatures and carbon emissions as the primary cause.

There is a scientific consensus on this fact, and work continues to gather further evidence and investigate every aspect of the world's climate provide even more reliable predictions, anticipate the long-term effects and provide solutions.

So in this context we have the bizarre post of Leo Lane saying "When reputable scientists give an honest assessment of global warming
the alarmists immediately come up with some specious attack on the scientist."

The author of the article, Mark Lawson is a journalist not a scientist. It is a weakly argued and misleading critique on the scientific work done by the IPCC.

Local scientists have been affected with modern IR as much as anyone other being lucky to be employed in Australia, and being a journalist is not synonymous to not being capable to collect and analyse scientific data on environmental change -to my modest opinion, of course.