This article hits a new low in viciously emotive language, irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria, and parades some of the usual egregious myths about the science. The local Alf Garnett fan club will love it of course, the ones who would agree with old Alf that Jesus was an Englishman (have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWKy4RHf5tQ ).

Just a few points:

Many 'global warmers' agree that biofuels are an irresponsible and ineffective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Haiti is one of the most grossly misgoverned countries on the planet, and it's a bit of a stretch suddenly to blame poverty (resulting from centuries of imperialism, greed and political thuggery) on global warmers.

The NSW Government's reasons for restricting land clearing were more to do with salination and water than with global warming.

Scientists, like myself, who are not specialists in one of the many global warming topics nevertheless have a great deal of experience evaluating theories and data, whereas this hereditary lord, according to his bio, has none.

Monckton's tour will be another step in the continuing trend to establish ignorant screaming as equally deserving of 'equal time' as careful, evidence-based rationality.

Well said Geoff

spot on Geoff, thanx.

Thanks Christopher for again exposing these fraudsters only interested in their own religion. As can be see by the response of a couple of the disciples they hate being exposed. Thankfully the lies can now be seen clearly by the gullible public because a few people have been willing to seek out the truth. The big freeze in Europe and US will need the doctrine makers to change a few things. The strange thing is that many of these fraudsters still continue to push their myths or made up lies.

Geoff and Christoper,

As either scientist or politician you should also be interested in scientific research that shows that a doubling of current atmospheric CO2 from fossil-fuel use (excluding feedbacks of warming on peat stores etc) is not possible due to limitations on accessible fossil fuels. See the media aricle by Prof. Kjell Aleklett of Uppsala University, Sweden:

http://www.energybulletin.net/50905

(Christopher will also be interested in Aleklett's comments on food production here:
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/the-climate-works-can-create-hunger/ )

and watch also this excellent lecture on the topic of climate/fossil fuel limits by Prof. David Rutledge of Caltech in the USA:

http://rutledge.caltech.edu/

Enjoy!

Geoff Davies and supporters...... How would you like you own home being declared a " Carbon Sink "or , to use your own words "The NSW Government's reasons for restricting land clearing were more to do with salination and water than with global warming "?

All this without real compensation or your being able to flog your property to some other Mug .

But, NIMBY really does mean " As long as it's not my Backyard " nowadays , I suppose

Geoff Davies you have just shown how and why you people are no better than those you criticise.

Unless I read it incorrectly then the most egregious comments were those Monckton was quoting as having been said by others, namely Hansen.

As for the failure to pay just terms for preventing someone from using their property it had nothing to do with the land being salty.That was an excuse, not the reason.

As for the precious dears who pass themselves off as GW scientists in this country, it might help their cause if they were more consistent and displayed a reasonable ethical and moral base.

They didnt mind being photogrhaped attending the screening of Al Gores AIT and rated it very highly as being consistent with the science, but have been remarkably silent since it was exposed as a flawed and exaggerated nonsense.

Al Gore is an unmitigated crook who blatantly used the AIT as an prospectus to increase his personal wealth ..and still the scientific community remained silent... as they did also with Mann's infamous hockey stick.

Naturally we wont mention the shonkiness being exposed by the Climategate CRU affair, involving as it does, fraud and corruption of the Peer Review system,as well as bastardry of the highest order.

So if Monckton has upset your delicate sensibilities ..tough. He probably has good reason.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/10/un-ipcc-chief-pachauri-under-fire-in-india-for-conflicts-of-interest/#more-15101

Not only Gore but Pachauri as well .. and he is the Chairman of the IPCC and ha so many conflicts of interest it is simply unbelievable.

Monckton is doing us all a great service by coming here and raising the profile of just what the hell has been going on.

Doesnt look that flash to me.

Isn't it nice to see some balance in this debate.I can hear the grinding of teeth and seething venom from the AGW religion from some of the posts here.They are feeling a bit frustrated since the whole charade is coming asunder.

Not only should Kevin Rudd be charged with crimes against humanity,he should be charged with treason for trying to sign our freedom and sovereignty away at Copenhagen in the name of this Global Govt.

As I said in the email Christopher Monckton,you will be more than welcome.There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth from the AGW worshippers.Can you find them a new religion to comfort them?

The only sensible point made in this diatribe from Lord Monckton is his reference to biofuels, particularly their potential to divert land from food production thereby creating scarcity and increased prices, a subject I wrote on last month. He might have pointed out that their production and use has more to do with the escalating cost and scarcity of oil than it does with reducing greenhouse gas emissions produced by burning it.

Monckton tells us that starvation in Haiti is due to diversion of land away from food for production of biofuels. He claims this is due to an international conspiracy led by the IPCC and fiendish scientists cunningly placed world-wide in meteorological offices calling for reduction of greenhouse gas (CO2-e) concentrations in the atmosphere.

Simply asserting that global warming is not occurring and that CO2-e emissions or their level of concentration in the atmosphere is not causative, does not make it fact. Nor do his other claims. They need to be supported by evidence and cogent argument which Monckton does not provide.

Australians are not fools, even if Monckton chooses to treat them as such by using vituperative language coupled with disjointed and irrational thinking as a substitute for supporting evidence, facts and data. We have seen the way he has previously presented “supportive” material. From this we could rightly conclude that he is by no means averse to distorting and misrepresenting facts, even making them up.

Anyone has the right to be skeptical about global warming and its causes or. hold the view that climate change is simply not occurring, as some do. However, they must be prepared to defend their position by at least calling into question by showing that the scientific basis on which an increasing number of people base their beliefs is wrong.

Lord Monckton does not do this. He does a disservice to those who genuinely believe that global warming is either not occurring or has nothing to do with CO2-e emissions. Their position is not supported by the use of extreme language to express extreme views, the best that Monckton offers.

Geoff Davies, Snake, E. Sykes (surely not the comedian?) and Jedimaster seem to have been taught that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Suggestion, hold your breath for sixty seconds every minute and you will start reducing that life supporting gas.
Jedimaster accuses the more intelligent, less gullible readers of OLO of abusive responses. I doubt very much that he has had very much education because it is the AGW alarmists that have been abusive.
To listen to Kevin Rudd last year was to hear a great list of abuse. With the holocaust in mind, those of us who are not gullible well remember the German death camps of WW2 and we remember those in the world that deny that six million people were ruthlessly exterminated. We are not to be confused with them.
It is the AGW religious zealouts that have set the standard for abusive language.
So I will finish in their language.
What you claim is a brain is fooling you into believing that humans are so powerful that we can alter our climate. Your brain is telling you that a CPRS tax will reduce the frequency of CO2 in our atmosphere. It is sending you into a religious frenzy where your pathetic beliefs are highlighting your ignorance.
If you know how to use a search engine, search SEPP or NIPCC. When found, settle down and try and understand that therein lies the truth.
Finally, congratulations OLO on your enlightened position on this crime against humanity. Well done indeed.

A POINT OF ORDER

I assume Monckton is referring to James Hansen's article in New Scientist explaining why he (Hansen) believes that huge sea level rises are possible – not certain – within the next century. The article was posted on the New Scientist website on 25 July 2007. Here is a link (subscription required)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming--unless-we-act-now.html?page=1

It is a carefully reasoned article based on the mechanics of ice melts. Hansen freely admits that most glaciologists do not agree with his analysis.

Quote from Hansen article:

"Indeed, the palaeoclimate record contains numerous examples of ice sheets yielding sea level rises of several metres per century when forcings were smaller than that of the business-as-usual scenario. For example, about 14,000 years ago, sea level rose approximately 20 metres in 400 years, or about 1 metre every 20 years."

In other words much gentler warming than the one we are now experiencing caused rises of 5 metres per century.

I do not know enough about the mechanics of ice melts to judge whether Hansen is correct. All I can say is that from a strictly mechanical point of view his hypothesis of a catastrophic DISINTEGRATION of the ice shelves appears PLAUSIBLE.

Were the ice sheet in Greenland to disintegrate entirely it would cause a 7 metre rise in sea levels. A catastrophic Antarctic disintegration would produce a much greater sea level rise.

As is ever the case when climate change deniers rant the basic physics underlying AGW theory is ignored.

The situation in Haiti is tragic. Diverting agricultural land to produce biofuels could rightly be described as a crime against humanity. Not sure what this has to do with the basic science of AGW.

I can find no reference to Hansen calling for anyone to be killed. If he did it would be appalling and he would deserve the sack.

If Monbiot's allegations that Plimer lied and fabricated are correct then Plimer definitely deserves the sack. I do not think that tenure should protect Plimer if he is guilty of deliberate falsification.

So far it appears Plimer will not sue. 'Nuff said.

I haven't read such hogwash since Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods.
Von Daniken dealt with his material in a much more persuasive manner for those not already committed in belief.

I shall be willing to give some credence to the predictions of the IPCC and other climate change scientists who are still pushing the global warming barrel, when they come up with a decent explanation of the causes of the 'little ice age'_ why it happened when it did and why it fizzled out a few hundred years later.

Currently the general community is expected to believe that they can accurately predict climate changes 50 and 100 hundred years into the future when they are in disagreement about a well recorded event in recent history such as the little ice age!

Dear Phoenix94

The tone of your response vindicates my comments and those of Agnostic.

And to allay your doubts re my education- I have a PhD in Physics and 40 years of experience in research, innovation and public policy development. I am not a climatologist, although these issues have been central to my work.

....and yours?

I don't mean to brag, but I'm not a climatologist,

(or climate scientologist, which is probably appropriate for the practitioners, given their similarity in behavior and lack of openness about data and methods - they both attempt to resemble religions too)

Much as I like the colourful language (Rudd conducting a “gruesome gibbering publicity stunt"), I have to agree with Agnostic. Chris Moncktons’ outburst has done nothing to reinforce the contrary view held by a dwindling number that CO2 has nothing to do with global warming and there is no such thing anyway.

But try telling Arjay and his buddies that and all you get is strident hand flapping and irrational claptrap. As for nonsense claims that CM has plenty of scientific facts to prove his case try http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/moncktons-deliberate-manipulation/ The URL says it all – “Moncktons deliberate manipulation”. That’s is all you can expect from CM.

It's 41C here in southwest Tasmania, something unheard of way back in the last century ie just a few years ago. Summers here are typically in the low 20's. Perhaps it's global cooling with half pike. Lord (different kind) help us if today's kids have to put up with worse as they grow older.

We seem to have some erudite AGW exponents commenting here.Now here is a chance to put your knowledge where you mouth is.

I have searched the WEB looking for a simple practical experiment that tests the potency of CO2 in terms of heat retention.There seems to be none.All we need is a number of controlled,enclosed environments that have a constant temps and the capacity to vary and acurately measure CO2 concentrations.There of course be a control that has 300 ppm of CO2 equal to pre-industrial concentrations.Why rely on computer models when there are practical experiments that are better.Is it they cannot fudge the results as with computer modelling?

I bet that given 1 million molecules of ambient air,we add 87 molecules of CO2,that temps will not go up measureably.CO2 is supposed to be 11,500 times more effective in retaining heat energy than all the other gases.Since 2000 CO2 concentrations have gone from 369ppm to 387ppm.This is a 26% incease in 10 yrs.Why have temps gone down since 1998 when we have an expodential increase in CO2? Have a look at the satellite photo of GB,it is totally covered in snow.Coldest winter in 31 yrs.

So there is the challenge Keith Davies and others;find me this simple experiment.All we here from critics of C Monckton is ad hominem attacks but no analysis of the science.Here's your change to prove your point and keep your Govt funding.

One thing that Geoff Davies, snake, E.Sykes, Jedimaster, and Agnostic avoid is the basic truth that there is no scientific basis for the assertion that human activity causes other than negligible global warming.

There is evidence that the production of CO2 by human activity is so small as to be negligible. There is not even evidence that when there was warming, up to 1998, that it was caused by CO2.

The depths to which the fraudsters and their supporters will sink is frightening. There has been no global warming since 1998 and to that date there was .7 of a degree. Seven tenths of one degree is all that these criminals had, upon which to base their predictions of catastrophe, and no acceptable basis for ascribing it to civilization.

Nooa now has to be added to the accomplices, along with Hadley, in this attempted fraud, because it has recast its information to “hide the decline”. One has to go to Roy Spencer’s site for true figures, cast in the form in which they were formerly displayed by these miscreants.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

stevenmeyer, as you say “Hansen freely admits that most glaciologists do not agree with his analysis.”. This is because it is wrong. The conformation of the Greenland ice sheet makes Hansen’s assertions laughable, but why would that worry Gore’s right hand man. Lying is a way of life to them.

As to Plimer suing, you display extreme ignorance in asserting that there is any significance in this, and it is for the opposite reason that Gore does not sue his critics, who are more forthright than Moonbat.

Colinsett, you are right. the warmer’s hogwash is much less convincing than the hogwash of Von Daniken. Speaking of hogwash, Gore now says that ony 40% of global warming is caused by human activity, so he is only 40% lying now, compared with the assertions in his scurrilous 35 lies in 90 minutes film, where he was 100%.

Thank you Christopher Monckton.

Leigh, if you read this (and if you really exist):

even you would be embarrassed to have written this.

So much hot air! What about the starving people who cannot afford to buy food. How many times have developed nations reneged on their promises to third world peoples! And now they have found another way to rip off the poor. Shame on you all who persist in trumpeting the perils of global warming.
Even if it is happening, we must deal with the needs of the poor and oppresded in our world first, both here in Australia - aka Peter Spencer, and out there where they are eating mud pies.

This heavy weight dude is supposed to be one of the leading propagandists for the so called skeptics. But who are all fully paid up true believers in the now dominant religion of scientism. With sometimes some Judeo-Christian religiosity thrown in.

You know, go forth and multiply and SUBDUE the Earth. That is turn everything into rubble hamburgers.

And yet his "argument" such as it is, is a string of straw man arguments, emotive buzzwords, and the making assertions which are completely out of context.

If this rant were submitted to any respectable academic journal it would be thrown in the rubbish bin. It would also be given an F triple minus fail in even half-way decent sociology or politics 101 class, whether at a university or secondary college.

Of course the young liberals would love it and probably publish it on their website(s) too.

Plus the good "lord" hangs out with and is promoted by "conservatives" that (at least when its suits them) make much of the use of closely reasoned arguments based on careful research and the use of factual information (as much as that is possible). They also (when it suits them) decry the use of emotionalism and irrationalism.
They also decry the decline of academic standards in the academy altogether.

And yet this rant breaks all of these parameters--by more than a country mile.

Note too, that Quadrant, the "leading" Australian journal of culture and ideas is advertising all of the good "lords" Oz speaking venues.

Geoff Davies. You would enjoy reading (if you haven't already done so) Peter Doherty in the December "Monthly".

Ho-Hum, I couldn’t agree more with your comment that “This heavy weight dude is supposed to be one of the leading propagandists for the so called skeptics --- and yet his ‘argument’ such as it is, is a string of straw man arguments, emotive buzzwords, and the making assertions which are completely out of context. --- If this rant were submitted to any respectable academic journal it would be thrown in the rubbish bin.”

If it wasn’t so toxic in its presentation, it might rate as material for a novel – in the style of Gavin Menzies’ 1421 or, as I commented earlier, Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods.

Depending on Monkton for support on a science-based issue seems a tad rash for the denialist camp.

At last! A contribution from Lord Monckton is well overdue. Of course he has the disadvantage of being a British Peer and, therefore, is lambasted here by the usual suspects just for that alone.

I'm sure that he is used to more intelligent critcism than has come from OLO posters and, if he bothered to read anything they wrote, he wouldn't blink an eyelid. Monckton, despite being a British nob, is a very intelligent man who has consistently and correctly opposed the man-made global warming scam and its proponents ever since the whole plot was hatched.

The little sqeaks from those who feel that they can rubbish such a man are pitiful.

Monckton is attempting to expose an immoral international wealth redistribution scam which is now co-ordinated by the IPCC. Many naive and well meaning individuals have been duped and consequently recruited along the way. Yet people starve, regimes continue to be corrupt but the UN strangely is obsessed with carbon and funding the proponents of a crazy theory.

The 'scam' was originally designed in the 1970's and began with an attempt to create a Global Cooling fear which was not successful. James Hansen, Scientist and Al Gore, self assigned unqualified climate expert, who both formerly touted Global Cooling due to man's emissions, suddenly switched to a what was to become a more successful campaign with Global Warming when the first campaign failed dismally.

It has never adequately been explained how a Scientist like James Hansen with all the data from the 19th century onwards could see a Global Cooling trend and then suddenly discover a Global Warming trend with the same data.

The UN is now co-ordinating the new enterprise with Rajendra Pachauri, railway engineer and economist, former board member of the Indian Oil company, now the Head of the IPCC and reportedly looking to make bug bucks from the venture.

Individuals and corporations have invested HUGE amounts of money in this idea and won't let it drop easily now matter how dodgey it is.

And you are going to pay for it - big time. If you doubt it is an industry in itself, check the following link.

http://www.carbon-financeonline.com/

I can just hear the chatter now between the AGW proponents attempting to explain away the severe cold weather in Europe. Global Cooling fell flat, Global Warming is slipping, what's next?

Will Rudd press forward with the ETS our eternal carbon tax to the UN? Probably, after all, he wants to graduate to the UN in his next life and is happy to do their bidding.

This is a warning. I've been reading this thread just now and have already deleted one post. I will be deleting more, so the thread may become a little disjointed. Flaming is outside the rules of the forum, and a number of posts above are flames. They are particularly discourteous as they involve the author. Anyone flames on this thread in the future, for whatever reason, and I will apply a suspension.

And in case you are wondering, no I have not received a complaint from this author. I have however received complaints from a number of authors in the last few days. If you want good quality contributions to this site from a variety of points of view, then you have to show some respect to the authors, no matter how strongly you disagree with their views.

Unfortunately this thread started off on the wrong foot and has been hopping along on it ever since. Feel free to disagree with specific points, but don't play the man.

Graham

Well done Lord Monkton, about time someone turned the bleeding heart tables on the green hypocrites; and you managed to get climate alarmists accusing a climate sceptic of “viciously emotive language, irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria”! Which is a bit like Bernie Madoff accusing Martha Stewart of being a swindler.

Monckton also believes that everyone in Britain should be compulsorily screened for HIV every two months, and those with the virus should be imprisoned for life: http://mediamattersaction.org/blog/200912110006

Regular readers of OLO will know that criticism of conservative commentators is more heavily moderated - not to say censored - than that of liberal contributors, so decide for yourselves if airing Monckton's views on infectious disease is "playing the man", or an indication of his nuanced and informed approach to crises.

Because of the embarrassing scientific deficit of the inactivist argument, they need their loudest voices to be able to scream without opposition, just in case reason and evidence get in the way.

Sancho - wasn't that back in 1987 at the height of the AIDS fear? When a lot of people didn't know what AIDS was or how it was transmitted, when we had media campaigns here with the grim reaper with a bowling ball, killing young teens - everyone feared an epidemic, you probably did too. The UN was gearing up for one of its pandemics from memory, a bit like swine flu wasn't.

What possessed you to dish up something like that, 33 years ago? Jeez you folks must be worried to try crap like that? What was that, shrill skeptics, no I think shrill and desperate "climate scientologists".

Come on, what's that to do with the excellent job Lord Monckton is doing giving some balance to the subject of Climate Change and expose the UN for the biased position they hold?

At least he gives some air to the skeptical side of things, a bit like you all tolerating Al Gore, because he brings attention to the AGW end of the world hysteria, so I think people like Dr Ian Plimer and Lord Monckton bring attention, whatever their personal faults, to the counter side of things and the mixed profiteers like the UN and "climate scientology" industry.

An excellent and refreshing article, I enjoyed it very much, it is such a change from the gloomy, end of the world, all in CAPS "MY BIG PROBLEM IS .. ", yes we know, whatever it is you don't like about skeptics, or some particular person.

As if politicians are ever going to do anything worldly, we can't even get a decent and reliable water supply in Australia. Not because of a lack of water, it floods regularly enough, but the lack of infrastructure.

Graham Young issued a timely warning. If this forum is to be relevant, shrill and unreasoned posts directed at people personally, ought to be banned. Lord Monckton made some rather good points. We currently have nine scamming cheating governments in Australia, breaking the law every day, and a sadly ineffective and ineffectual Federal Government. When the compact that created Australia was given a Royal Identifier, the blessings of Almighty God were free to flow down from above, and the people free to flourish and prosper in freedom.

In all Christian Churches of all denominations in Australia today, the same message is passed on to the people. Almighty God is King. This fundamental principle, is undermined by the assertion of State Sovereignty. The fate of Peter Spencer is held in the hand of the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police. If he cannot convince Peter Spencer that he, the Commissioner has the power under S 8 Australian Federal Police Act 1979 to ensure that when Peter goes to court again, he will get a fair trial, then he should give a better man a go at the job.

The assertion of State Sovereignty, by the State of New South Wales and its use by the Howard Government, to scam the world about Australia’s global warming credentials, not only from New South Wales but all over Australia, is a crime against humanity. No one should be sent to prison except on the judgment of his peers. Sentencing is a farce, in Australia because Judges do it, not the judges prescribed by s 79 Constitution.

Its not just Peter Spencer it is everyone who is affected. An organized crime gang has taken over Australia, and its roots are in the legal professions that exercise monopolies in every State. From cradle to grave we are governed by lawyers, who say they follow the laws made by Parliament. They are very selective about it, just as the AGW people are very selective about what data they accept. I am sure right now the Northern hemisphere could use a little more global warming

It seems that "This article hits a new low in viciously emotive language, irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria, and parades some of the usual egregious myths about the science. The local Alf Garnett fan club will love it of course, the ones who would agree with old Alf that Jesus was an Englishman (have a look:"

including its references to "Alf Garnett" does not constitute "flaming" but responding to it does.

So, in sanitised form I repeat

AGW and Climate Change are frauds

An excuse dreamed up by the collectivists who infiltrated the environmental movement 20 years ago (or so) and have found the panic button for international hysteria needed for their cause

Vis as Lenin said “A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.”

“AGW / Climate Change” was simply the “revolutionary situation” needed for the left to foment their little revolution, now it has been seen as a fraud and has failed, just as their policies and politics always fail.

Of course they (the collectivists) will try again.

30 years ago the fear of “global warming” was a fear of “global cooling”

I wonder what barmy bulltish the "left" will hang their hat on next?

Almost everything Christopher Monckton says about climate and climate science is wrong. More astonishing than how much he gets wrong is how many commenters are so willing and eager to accept his rantings as relevant.

Andy1 what utter rubbish you go on with yet again, there is no "war on science" that's just you being melodramatic, there is skepticism about climate science, since we've discovered, after much suspicion that the measurements you go on about are all tweaked, and "brought into line".

There is no war against medicine, physics, mathematics, cancer research, any other field, nor is there a war against climate science, those in climate science though are bringing it into disrepute, and try to justify this as someone else's fault - it's not, you are your own worst enemies.

Try to get off the hysterics and be rational, give out the raw data to people who ask for it - reposition the temperature sensors so they collect true measurement - the satellites currently are the only trustworthy sources. Don't try to win arguments by authority, it just seems like a cosy club you keep company with.

Too many people in the AGW community have too much to gain to be trusted as independent or objective and greed is a strong driver. Billions are available to climate change research, and yet you seem to think there is no problem with every piece of research being tainted with, "and the effects of climate change" tacked on to get that precious grant, or PHd or promotion.

"Climate change snalyses consistent with the basic laws of physics and chemistry", so climate is simple is it, why don't the models forcast the future then, why isn't weather predictable, if it is "simple"?

"With consequent rise of CO2 and methane during the last part of the 20th century and first part of the 21st century at rates which exceed any known in the geological record of the last 55 million years", so what - what does that prove, as Lord Monckton says, there is nothing more than coincidence.

You're asking us to gamble with the world's future because you can't back up the "climate science", no thanks. Please don't whine about being called out, when you clearly are trying to be adversarial to skeptics.

Who is financing Viscount Monckton's tour of Australia?

michael_in_adelaide: http://www.energybulletin.net/50905 , http://rutledge.caltech.edu/

Two excellent sources of information. Thanks.

Graham Young's warning is not at all timely - it is months late, and he seems to have a pretty loose definition of flaming. About fifty percent of today's posts on this article are insulting and should, in the interests of fairness, be removed or edited. The same applies to other articles I have read during the last year. Although some posters valiantly engage in reasonable and civil debate, there are far too many who seem to think that abuse equals argument. I seldom read OLO these days because of them. So please, Graham, come down hard on all flamers. Perhaps an anti-flaming warning where we click on to comments would help too.

candide, I kind of agree with you, but then what does Graham do when some articles are clearly in your face insulting people?

You have to expect some robust feedback.

Take Andrew Glikson's recent article with its description "A denial campaign waged by contrarians supported by fossil fuel interests is holding the world to ransom.", so he's flamed a portion of the population, much like our dear PM Rudd.

He's called people "denialists", a deliberate insult, called them "contrarians", another insult, and accused them of being funded by polluters to commit a "criminal act", does it get any worse in this day of emotional eco blackmail?

Should we just turn the other cheek, or challenge that sort of narrow minded emotion and lack of objectivity?

It's easy to know what posts to delete until you have to actually do it. It's frequently reasonable to question someone or their motives, so a blanket ban on talking about authors or other commenters would be absurd. But then, once you accept this, am I being abusive if I refer to the "soft racism" of an article, or is that fair comment? And if fair comment, where is the line drawn?

Then there are issues of context. I left the Geoff Davies reference to Alf Garnett, that Col takes exception to, because without his post the rest of the thread doesn't make a lot of sense, at least at the beginning, but I took others out in the same vein afterwards because the cumulative effect was abusive and by that stage people had been warned.

One of the commenters who had a post deleted is intending to start a general thread about flaming (and presumably moderation) and, assuming it doesn't breach any rules, I will be approving it. Suggest we continue debate about flaming etc. there as it is really off-topic here.

Graham

Amicus, I think its gone beyond turning the other cheek - insulting other posters, individually or collectively, now seems to be the norm. Col Rouge, for example, ended his 'sanitised' post with
'I wonder what barmy bulltish the "left" will hang their hat on next?'

Everyone is entitled to their viewpoint, broad or narrow, but I think OLO should, belatedly, put its foot down in relation to downright rudeness in the Forum.

The European/US freeze is so so funny. The manipulating, excuses and squirming has reached new heights. After a prediction of a warm winter in England we now have this. Don't forget however that the 'science' is settled. Yea about as settled as the 'science' that evolutionist keep updating. We get one or two hot temperatures in the middle of summer and our PM and others try and use it to win a hopelessly flawed arguement. Maybe the global coolers of the 70's were right. The 'science' was settled' then.

Runner - In AGW doublespeak cold snaps are just "weather" and hot periods are not weather. They are evidence of "global warming". Cold weather is apparently not evidence of anything and should just be ignored. They are currently busy concocting more doublespeak in an attempt explain away the current 30+ yr lows in the Northern Hemisphere.

I'm sure Europeans are really keen to pay bigger taxes to their governments for their imaginary carbon related global warming sins while people are dying from the cold, and in the UK, elderly pensioners burn books to keep warm.

Funny thing is that many Alarmists believe climate modellers' predictions of 20 yrs in advance though none were able to predict the European cold snap six months in advance.

OK, I'll admit that my comparison of some people to Alf Garnett was over the line. I have tried to be scrupulous in the past, in contrast to many here, and I slipped that time. I apologise.

For those who questioned the opening sentence "This article hits a new low in viciously emotive language, irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria, and parades some of the usual egregious myths about the science", that is, in my opinion, a reasonable description of the article.

Regarding flaming, this article is one of the worst examples of flaming I've seen in a while. I've seen such things as comments, especially on OLO, but not as an article on an 'edited' site.

So why was the article posted? As some have noted, it is clearly substandard in its emotive language and quite arguably substandard in the connections it fails to establish between its examples (poverty, biofuels, land clearing) and advocacy of the global warming threat.

Oh and I think this comment relates to this thread, not to a general discussion of flaming.

Candide “Col Rouge, for example,….. Everyone is entitled to their viewpoint, broad or narrow, but I think OLO should, belatedly, put its foot down in relation to downright rudeness in the Forum.”

Yes, I so agree!

Because that was my original point regarding the first comment posted by

Geoff Davies, re “This article hits a new low in viciously emotive language, irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria, and parades some of the usual egregious myths about the science. The local Alf Garnett fan club will love it of course, the ones who would agree with old Alf that Jesus was an Englishman”

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

The collective ranks of AGW zealots have no greater right to consider those of us who see AGW as a scam of the first order, “downright rude”,

than I do to consider expressions by those who adjoin my views to those of “Alf Garnett” as “downright rude” also.

Anyway since we are debating the fact that AGW is a complete and total deception,

Being used to harness the “useful idiots” (Lenin’s description) of the “science and environmental studies” community and designed by the left wing entryists (following the collapse of communism /USSR and the transition of China from a communist state to a quasi-capitalist state) to inflict their “collectivism” upon the rest of us,

I add the following to the debate

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2009/11/the-new-road-to-serfdom

it is called here “the new road to serfdom”…

reducing us to “chattels of the state”

but does also reference the following quote

“The Rudd regime’s climate change policies are a local instance of a world-wide campaign to achieve a highly centralized form of global socialism by stealth, using climate change panic as a stalking horse.”

Krudd & Co were hell bent on impose ETS upon us, without a mandate and his suggestions were ignored in Copenhagen…

I wonder why no one else was as gung-ho about Krudd’s “Socialism by Stealth”?

I trust Monckton will “maintain the high volume” on this dispicable socialist deceit

I also think that this is an idotic and fact-devoid article, but it maintains the standard of Monckton's other offerings elsewhere.

Monckton lacks any credibility on AGW, except amongst the denialist contingent who will seemingly accept any tendentious twaddle that seeks to counter the vast weight of scientific evidence for AGW. Numerous critiques by actual scientists of Monckton's prolific offerings can be found at

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_warming/monckton/

Geoff Davies: << Regarding flaming, this article is one of the worst examples of flaming I've seen in a while. I've seen such things as comments, especially on OLO, but not as an article on an 'edited' site. >>

That's exactly the point I made to Graham Young in response to his email informing me that my previous comment in this thread had been deleted. Indeed, my words were "I’d have described Monckton’s entire silly article as a flame".

I think that the article is deliberately offensive trash, designed specifically to elicit strong responses from those who accept the overwhelming evidence for AGW.

When I have had articles on OLO I have been called all sorts of things. No I do not enjoy that, but no, I do not fall over in a heap and weep about it. I assume always that if I get into the kitchen I had better be able to stand the heat. Frankly the nastier the attack the more superior I feel!

Many of the comments on this article have been of low standard and aggressive. However that is what has been going on re AGW for a year or more (and not just on OLO, pollies have been good at the rudeness too).

It is interesting to just go back a week or so and look at the good comments re Thorium reactors to see how feeble the discussion always is re AGW. I suspect that the pro AGW people had it so easy for so long that when contrary approaches are given they react in a more violent than is usual.

Incidentally I am sceptical re AGW and regard this article as a poor effort in many ways - I would rather it had not been posted because I think it could do more harm than good.. However I support absolutely the right of OLO to publish it because the author is well known on the issue.

eyejaw, that's very perceptive actually "I suspect that the pro AGW people had it so easy for so long that when contrary approaches are given they react in a more violent than is usual."

I do agree that previously to the whole CRU thing that AGW believers had a holier than thou, lofty and sneering view of skeptics and it seems since the outing of data, that their patience and comfort has been seriously challenged.

Skepticism was dismissed as quaint, irrational and irrelevant, now they sense it actually does matter and that there are a lot around of skeptics around. In their 'fightback" some have even tried to requalify what a skeptic is, in the search for more biting insults.

The realisation that people are not just willing believers when the old mantra, "peer reviewed!" is thrown up has certainly rattled many.

People are questioning what was thought to be decided, and anyone who delivers that message gets pretty severely dealt with.

We have the good Lord (Monckton) to thank of course (sorry, it was just begging to be used)

Viscount Monkton:
supposes that the fact that a scientist profits from his/her activity is relevant to a discussion of his/her reasoning;
presupposes that the correct penalty for crimes against humanity is execution, and attributes that view without evidence, to James Hanson and anyone else so foolish as to echo Hanson’s views;
declares falsely, and contrary to the evidence, that no one supporting the existence of human caused climate change bats an eyelid when people on their side of the debate make stuff ups or exaggerate beyond all reason;
refers without any specifics to a group of scientists whose research “amply demonstrates that the chief conclusions of the United Nation’s climate panel are nonsense”;
exaggerates the effect on food prices of the production of biofuels (I accept that there is a problem about biofuels);
supposes, without evidence, that the promotion of biofuels is endorsed by (some? a few? most?) climate change scientists;
gets the Australian Constitution wrong;
gets the law under which Peter Spencer’s land was restricted wrong;
gets the purposes of that restriction wrong;
asserts without evidence or specifics that unspecified numbers of persons supporting the existence of human caused climate change are calling for Western economies to be shut down;
blames the entire set of views supporting the existence of human caused climate change on a conspiracy of a few malevolent, radicalised scientists; and
asserts falsely that there is no scientific basis [at all] for concern about climate change, when the greenhouse effect is well established science, as he effectively accepts in his fourth and third last paragraphs.

Only in those two and the next paragraph does he start on the real scientific debate.
Really, chaps—and Graham Young too. You could all find better arguments denying the seriousness of human caused climate change than this.

I notice that no one has addressed the banner issue with this article by Monckton namely that the IPCC is overstating the climate sensitivity factor by large amounts.

I notice also that the very first post by was by someone purporting to be a scientist (at ANU no less) who provided no evidence to support his criticisms of Monckton, on this or any other matter.Just trust me I am a scientist of long standing

I notice also that some days before this, Glikson a self declared professor of climate whatevers, also from the ANU, published an article here in, that was savage in his criticism of unnamed people in industry who were conniving to pull down the AGW edifice to the detriment of the atmosphere. He also produced no evidence to support his belly aching..despite being asked to by several responders.

If what is being posted in response to an article is to be monitored then surely the same applies to the Article writers as well.

Self professed academics more than anyone else should not be allowed to get away with sweeping and unsubstantiated assertions.

Bigmal,

There is of course a limit on how much substance (and time) goes into a comment. My opening comment was not a fully referenced scientific paper. If you want to see my views with sources, then go to my blog site http://betternature.wordpress.com/.

I particularly commend to you my post on what I think the real issues are in the AGW debate:
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/for-global-warming-sceptics/

You'll find a lot more sources there than Mr. Monckton provided, and in my several articles on OLO. You'll also see comment on the role and credibility of IPCC.

I don't know how much more 'purported' my scientific credentials could be - forty years practising, over 100 papers, two international honours ... No I'm not trying to strut, you raised the question. And yes, I do think I have more experience evaluating scientific issues than Mr. Monckton.

Regarding Andrew Glikson's statements about the well-known efforts to discredit climate science, try Googling "exxonmobil climate sceptics". The first entry I got was "ExxonMobil 'funding climate sceptics' - ABC News": http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/03/2615551.htm
They employ former tobacco marketers whose slogan was "Our product is doubt". Not truth, doubt and confusion.

You people don't have to slag the ANU just because you don't like what a couple of us are saying. It's a credit to your country (and mine). Grow up.

Col Rouge,

You chastise me for my opening comment (and did you even see the post right before yours at 2:42 pm today) and then proceed to refer to "AGW zealots", "useful idiots" etc etc on the way to your grand lefty conspiracy.

Alman and others, you’ve obviously got so used to the “viciously emotive language, irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria” that climate alarmists trot out as a matter of course that you take that as your standard. So you interpret mild skeptical questioning as being outrageous, and Monkton’s robust but basically valid arguments as being such “viciously emotive irrelevant hyperbole and hysteria” that they should be censored.

But just because you hear stuff all the time, that doesn’t make it so. The climate alarmist crusade has no scientific, economic, political or moral justification. The imposition of climate treaties, carbon “pollution” reduction legislation and the like will drastically reduce our chances of prosperity and in poorer countries their chances of survival. So the onus is on anyone proposing such impositions to justify them, the onus is not on us skeptics, because we aren’t the ones demanding the right to regulate or manipulate how everyone else lives their lives.

In other forums where he has more space Monkton has backed his arguments with facts, figures and logic. If the alarmists are so sure he doesn't know what he's talking about, why won't they debate him? Al Gore sure as hell won't, he knows Monkton would chew him up and spit out his Rolex

There is not one critic here of Christopher Monckton who has acknowledged that without his efforts ,we would not have known of the agenda for a secret World Govt without repesentation,that K Rudd would have signed on our behalf.Copenhagen Treaty Annex 1 par 36-38 mentions world Govt several times.This is totally outrageous.Name one totalitarian Govt on the planet that serves the people? They all become self serving.

Maurice Strong the ex-secretary of the UN has been open about his belief that the world pop needs to be drastically reduced.Strong is a protege of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.They finance and have a big say in the Green Movement.Strong is also heavily invested in the Carbon Credit business.We now have very powerful people in the Global Banking and corporate world with very extreme views and they can justify these with the noble notion of saving the planet.

Once Obama signs that treaty,they then have access to the most powerful military machine on the planet.What country with the exception of China,Russia or India could stand up to this power if they felt wronged?

C Monckton has rightly raised the need for a new political party based on the principles of freedom.We in the West now have Govts of oligarchy,whereby both the major parties are controlled by corporate donations and influence.Any new parties must have in their constitutions,provisions for no corporate donations whatsoever.

Tree clearance on the scale seen in the Amazon basin, is one tragedy
of course. But strip clearance leaving some land cleared and then adequate spaces of original forests or wild life corridors, etc, can be less harmful. However, cleared forest's soil needs to be renourished, as forest soils can leach very quickly when there isn't enough ground cover present. Soil degradation is generally caused by deep ploughing, erosion, salinity levels can rise, as well as poor managerment of water sources. And now Australian farmers are increasing their soil fertility and pasture land using
organic fertilizers and compost. This increases the soil's carbon sequestration, increase animal health, reduce the use of worming
products, pesticides and herbicides, all that are hazardous to the
environment if not applied prudently if at all.

So I agree with Viscount Monkton... The Copenhagen farce just proved a point... developed countries were being blamed for some countries political mismanagement and perceived future destruction demanding we pay for their mistakes. (Thanks Al Gore?) Natural disasters are one thing, poor management and political corruption is another. The climate alarmists are causing a crisis when their isn't one, however, that doesn't mean all countries should not improve their environment by reducing pollution, concentrating on water conservation, and investing in alternative fuel and renewable energy resources. And following sustainable agricultural methodology.

You only have to see the SBS TV ads. They change of course but the
message is always the same. Latest - Even if CO2 emissions ceased
tomorrow, the methane produced by cattle and sheep would still result
in global warming.... Eat Veg not meat and Save the planet..

So give up your steak and lamb chop and save the planet, because if
this goes on ... you won't have any meat to eat! Wake up to the biggest scam ever produced by people who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Davies

You have the gall to tell me to grow up because in your view the ANU is a world class institution, but then quote an ABC piece by Emma Alberici as evidence of this global conspiracy against the atmosphere.What a joke.

You have the gall to tell me to grow up when it is you and Glikson who as scientific members of this world class institution make sweeping assertions and unsubstantiated allegations about people in some industries, to justify your own paranoias, and perhaps to counter what you percieve may be happening in political spheres.

If thats the way people in this world class insitution behave as a matter of course then god help us.

Hey Guys.

First of all it was Greenhouse gases that were warming the earth. Then
Global warming then it went on to be Climate Change. To me and I have
studied this at University, not one of the academics I studied under
accepted human activity was creating the increase of CO2 and/0r Greenhouse gases. We were enhancing it though. Fossil fuels and tree clearance as in South America were altering pollution levels around large populated urban areas, and altering precipitation patterns.

Greenhouse gases (the largest being water vapor or clouds) does keep
the earth's temperature from freezing. WE ARE A ICE PLANET! This is good. For those in temperate or colder regions do you notice frost doesn't form when there is a cloud cover? Or if you have adventured into a desert area note that the day is bleeding hot, and the night bleeding cold? No cloud cover! As there are no greenhouse gases or water vapor there in that micro climate.

However, think for once! Should a mini ice age or longer ice age develop who will be most affected by this? Northern America, Northern
Europe and Asia. They would not be able to grow crops as seasons
will be too short. Water vapour will be reduced, so less rain.
Although, in the Southern Hemisphere things won't be so bad. (Come on down to Australia, no forget that, we have too many here already! LOL)

The Greens are against land usage and animal husbandry, and desalination water plants. They want to ban electric cars? And nuclear electricity plants. All for solar thermal, geothermal and wind generated electricity. Fine but even Denmark can't sustain
their electricity supplies purely by wind generated electricity. They depend on coal fueled electricity plants. Yet Denmark is the biggest oil producer in the world (running out) and the largest wind generator manufacturer in the world. Sold millions I suspect during
the Summit?

That's why people are skeptical about the Al Gores et al, they have corrupted the data to suit their hypothesis.

Viscount Monckton

I'm deeply moved by your compassion for the poor people. Would you consider acting on their behalf to prevent the ongoing crimes against humanity and the pillaging and plundering of their lands by the West's fossil fuel and mining industries:?

1. The Euro/US companies have carted off Haiti's natural resources, by digging its mountains right now, and before that, by razing whole Haitian forests to the ground for lumber to meet Western profit needs, along with the destruction of Haiti's peasant economy (elimination of Haiti’s indigenous black pigs and dumping of US rice that destroyed domestic agriculture) so that the peasant could not afford other fuel, are the primary reasons for the environmental degradation in Haiti.

2. “My name is Benny Wenda

“I am a West Papua Independence Leader and Chair of the Koteka Tribal Assembly. I am from the area where your Company has its mine.

“You just care about your Company and your Business. You only want our Cooper and our Gold. You never care about us Papuans as Human Beings just like you.

“Rio Tinto and Freeport MacMoran just bring disaster and death in West Papua. You destroy our Sacred Mountain. You filled our rivers with rubbish.

“You give millions of Dollars to the Indonesia Military. These are the people who are killing, raping and torturing us.

“You are dealing with Robber - Indonesia - who has stolen our Land. When will you stop thinking only about money and what you can take for yourself from my Country?

“When will you start thinking of us West Papuans as Human Beings? We are Human Beings just like you!”

3. AngloGold, Barrick Gold of Canada and Newmont Mining. were financed by major banks such as UBS of Switzerland and France's Societe Generale. and their mining operations in Africa have created an ecological and health time-bomb and failed to help local people out of poverty.

No doubt you are well connected with the mining industry Viscount Monckton therefore, on behalf of the poor and oppressed, please accept my eternal gratitude in anticipation of your most worthy assistance.

Am re-posting this link as it is pertinent to the post above by Protagoras - especially since the subject of Haitian poverty was used to enhance Christopher Monckton's argument.

http://www.celsias.com/article/the-food-crisis-misery-is-profitable/

Geoff Davis “Col Rouge,

You chastise me for my opening comment … and then proceed to refer to "AGW zealots", "useful
idiots" etc etc on the way to your grand lefty conspiracy.”

So, what is your point ?

You can hardly claim the “moral Highground” when you characterise anyone who might disagree with you as an “Alf Garnett”

Do you assume I should ignore your offensive diatribe and degenerate characterization because you happen to work in “academia”?

Do you assume that, because I hold an opinion contrary to your own, an opinion which has rapidly
growing public support, that I must stand silent whilst you denigrate my view?

If you wish to avoid people like me “chastising” you

I suggest you start by lifting your game

Re “You people don't have to slag the ANU just because you don't like what a couple of us are
saying. It's a credit to your country (and mine). Grow up.”

Speaking personally, I did not slag off the ANU,

As a career academic, you might benefit from considering the merit in listening to those who are
taxed to generate the funds from which your tenure is paid,

After all the old adage

“Those who can DO and
Those who cannot TEACH”

Still holds true

Re “Useful Idiots” refers to a phrase ascribed to Lenin

Those of the “collectivist left” are first to demand that dissent be stifled, whilst
the “libertarian right” seek to preserve the rights of the individual to express their views freely and
openly.

I see the lefts desire to censor dissent at work on this thread, particularly in your “Alf Garnett” attack but I will not stand silently by whilst people like you try and ride roughshod over the rest of us.

Margaret Thatcher said

"Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic
considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always
seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag."

Some things never change

Why does bread rise when baked? Essentially, because in the process yeast releases CO2. So every loaf of bread we eat is contributing to CO2 levels.

So is the world expected to stop baking bread?

Does membership have its privileges?

The brief bio of Monckton on OLO states:

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a British politician, business consultant, policy adviser, writer, columnist, inventor and hereditary peer...., which is identical to his entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley).

However, the Wikipedia entry goes on to say:

Although an hereditary peer, Monckton is not a member of the House of Lords.[3] He was an unsuccessful candidate for a Conservative seat in the House of Lords in a March 2007 by-election caused by the death of Lord Mowbray and Stourton. Of the 43 candidates, 31 – including Monckton – received no votes in the election.[4] He was highly critical of the way that the Lords had been reformed, describing the by-election procedure, with 43 candidates and 47 electors, as "a bizarre constitutional abortion."[5]

Reference 4 is the official result from the British Parliament, verifying the above statement http://parliament.uk.

Unlike climate data, these results are not open to personal interpretation.

Or is a "politician" somebody different from a "member of parliament"?
Definitions vary- Princeton Universitity's Wordnetweb http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=politician defines "politician" thus:

"Noun

* S: (n) politician (a leader engaged in civil administration)
* S: (n) politician, politico, pol, political leader (a person active in party politics)
* S: (n) politician (a schemer who tries to gain advantage in an organization in sly or underhanded ways)"

So opinions vary, but as the nineteenth century Italian politician (actually Minister for Finance) said:

“L’aritmetica non è un’opinione” (arithmetic is not an opinion).

Many thanks to ozbib for listing most of the many flaws in this appalling article.

Yesterday's Crikey had a good piece on Monckton:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/01/12/hamilton-viscount-monckton-of-benchleys-over-egged-cv/

On reflection, I think it's probably a good thing that the denialist camp has spokesmen of Viscount Monckton's calibre as its public face. He's even more effective than Plimer :)

I can't wait to see him on Lateline.

jedimaster,so what's your point, apart from posting search results?

Wiki, most people get severely flamed for mentioning wiki on OLO, particularly in AGW discussions, why do you feel it suddenly relevant?

C J Morgan

Why was Clive Hamilton's article good? It merely tells you how the right will utilise the Viscount.

What are you worried about? If the Viscount is so flawed , do you not have faith that people will see the flaws or strengths of his argument.

As for those who can't handle attacks by global warming sceptics, what sort of democrats are you. Battles over ideas are hard won and may take years or even generations.

Sure, I do believe that global warming is real and human influenced, but I also deplore know alls telling us how it is. If you believe in democracy, then one side will always need to win the debate; albeit that environmental degradation is a most urgent issue (perhaps unprecented).

Dear Amicus

If you are to criticize Wikipedia, then you are implicitly criticizing the OLO Editor and/or Monckton himself, for as I pointed out, the words are identical. I accept that Graham Young used his bio in good faith.

You will also note that I corroborated the Wikipedi claim about his parliamentary status by going directly to the original source- the British Parliamentary record.

I use Wikipedia a lot as a starting point. As a trained researcher and librarian, I know that all references need to be corroborated. This is probably the main point that Geoff Davies, Ozbib and I- as well as others- are making. Scientific research is not salesmanship or showmanship or believership- it is about trying to make a statement about things that can be tested and verified. Nor is science about absolute truths- measurement and theory can only make the knowledge more reliable in a probabilistic way.

So when someone commences their statements with something that is ambiguous, we feel that we have a duty to point it out. When they continue to make unverified statements and/or statements that are not amenable to verification, then the probability increases that they are likely to be an unreliable source of knowledge.

We simply want to know what methodology Monckton and his followers use. Is it science or is it religious faith or is it the assumed authority of inheritance?

Amicus: "Wiki, most people get severely flamed for mentioning wiki on OLO, particularly in AGW discussions"

If you mean people get flamed here for quoting Wikipedia, and in particular flamed by "experts" for using Wikipedia, then could you give examples with links?

I follow most of these threads, and I don't recall seeing it.

CJ writes with his usual humility

'On reflection, I think it's probably a good thing that the denialist camp has spokesmen of Viscount Monckton's calibre as its public face. He's even more effective than Plimer :)'

People who are not blinded by the Greens religion don't need Monckton or Plimer. They simply need to listen to the predictions and see the outcomes. They need only to observe. Many 'leading scientist' would of been stoned to death long ago if they lived in a different era. In the UK BOM has got it so horribly wrong due to pressures from having to prove warming. Listening to politicians like Mr Rudd, Ms Wong and Mr Obama cherry pick weather is also a give away. At least Mr Bob Brown believes his own fantasy.

The deceit uncovered at the highest levels of the gw scam was not necessary to convince anyone with any sense of the fantasy. All it did was change the fantasy to fraud as many expected.

chris lewis, you might have a general point, that reason will win out, though there's problems there.

but here, i don't see that c.j. morgan is worried at all. the point of the crikey article is that monckton is demonstrably a conspiracy-hunting fruitcake, and with no credentials to talk science at all. i'm concerned that murdoch hacks will take monckton seriously, and encourage others to do so as well. but i think c.j. is probably correct, that monckton will be laughed out of the country.

as for whining about people (including myself) flaming monckton, i think graham young has jumped the shark. this was a silly and nasty article from a silly and nasty man. it was inflammatory: who on earth posts such an article and doesn't expect a flame war in response?

There will be increasing personal attacks on C Monckton because of his effectiveness in presenting the alternate view.The true believers in AGW caused by CO2 are too wedded to their cause now to change course,even if presented with the facts.Losing face and Govt finance will take prescedence over all else.

Instead of attacking the man,critics here should just simply go to http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/ and disprove the science and facts.

There is no doubt we have been lied to about the hockey stick,falling temps even with a 26% increase in co2 in just 10yrs.Trying to hide the Medieval Warm period, doctoring data,not acknowdging that the ice core data reveals that CO2 concentrations in the past follow temp increases by 800 yrs.They are a result rather than a cause.We even have evidence of them moving temp recording units near aircon units,lower to ashphalt to get higher temps etc.

No one here can site can find on the WEB a single simple CO2 experiment that I've described earlier,with a control and imputs of CO2 equal to man's 87ppm.

The true believers have lot of flaws in their theory and unless they address those,instead of ad hominen on the messengers,they will come under increasing suspicion and disbelief.

To those concerned about AGW being a cover to set up a world government, what about the World Trade Organisation? And Howard’s “Free Trade” agreement with the US? They have been overriding the sovereign rights of nations for some time now. The WTO’s deliberations are conducted in secret, and they have a great deal of power. Do any of you have concerns about that too?

Arjay, just two of your points:
There is no problem and no secret about the temperature not always rising, it happened twice since 1980, for reasons understood, then the warming roared back. See
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/global-cooling-since-1998/
Neither is the CO2 lagging in the ice age a problem. The mistake is to imagine that CO2 must always be the dominant cause, but in the ice ages it was an amplifier. The trigger was variations in solar heating. See
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/co2-lag-during-ice-ages/
The other points could be addressed with more space. It’s too bad these spurious points keep being recycled over and over.

Col Rouge,
My point is that I was called out for ‘flaming’, by the moderator and by you, I acknowledged it and apologised, then you just kept on flaming me and anyone you disagree with. And you keep it up in your last response (“those who cannot teach”; as a matter of fact I mostly do). Recycling other people’s insults is still insulting. So apparently it’s OK for you and your side to flame, but not OK for me and my side to flame. If you don’t like it, stop doing it.

If asking you to stop flaming is asking you to be silent (which I’m not doing), then apparently you don’t have anything worthwhile to contribute.

Bigmal,
You asked for substantiation and I offered some. Apparently you only glanced at the first thing before raging back still claiming ‘unsubstantiated allegations’, apparently because you don’t happen to like the first source mentioned. I indicated how to find plenty of evidence using Google, and I offered my own blog with plenty of sources quoted. If you’re not willing to look then you certainly won’t see the evidence.

CJ Morgan et al

I watched the U Tube and Lord Monkton's response to a group of American
Greens interrupting a live web coverage of a meeting held at the UN Climate Change Summit in which he was to be one of the presenters. No wonder he referred to them as 'Hitler Youth' They behaved like them
in times gone past. Screaming down the speakers, parading banners
hitting one speaker with a small American flag, and generally behaving
like a mob. Then another U Tube coverage of them taking off their clothes in public... as a protest for clean energy demands. Talk about negative attention seekers?

CJ - Hamilton's article was libelous. What he quoted was totally incorrect... Lord Monkton does suffer from Graves disease he's never
said he found a cure for it. He was outspoken in the early days
of the AIDS epidemic saying HIV sufferers should be kept together
to avoid contaminating the rest of society. Well he'd reneged on that
as at the time there wasn't the numbers of sufferers as there are today. I don't know about the Nobel prize bit? I find it hard to
believe he thought he won the Falklands war? He was only born in 1952
but he is a world acknowledged journalist. But a typical aristocrat
that isn't his fault, he was born into an old title.

The Green and Gore youth deserved everything they got from him, in my opinion... and these Fascist type behaviour (as they demonstrated) proves they are on a shaky foundation for their beliefs. So ridicule, debase and character assassinate anyone who doesn't agree with them.
If they were to behave like that in Australia, I reckon they will be all arrested

Geoff Davies.The WTO is an arm of the Globalists.They have subjugated 3rd world countries through debt,but now their holy grail is the middle class of the West.This is the last bastion of resistence.If you read any of Webster Griffin Tarpleys exposes,the intent of the WTO was to destroy production in the West and that they have achieved with the backing of the Green movement.

So CO2 lagging by 800 yrs is not a problem.How does Co2 act as an amplifier? A catalyst in a chemical reaction in which electrons are exchanged can be considered to be an amplifier,since it accelerates the reaction.CO2 in the atmosphere has no such chemical reaction.Would care to explain? How does CO2 excite all the other atmospheric molecules to retain heat energy?

My challenge to you and your supporters is to do a very simple experiment.Have several controlled environments,ie one with pre- industrial co2 of 300 ppm and then the others with various added levels above 300ppm,with temps and all other environmental considerations of temps etc, being constant.We could do this on international TV.We could replicate the real world by having proportions of salt water/land,reflecting reality.

This will put an end to all the conjecture.Take up the challenge!

Davies

Got it wrong again pal.I did follow up your first suggestion as representing your evidence, which is what I asked for.

Worked my way through the Heritage Foundation and then the LSE and the Grantham Research Institute and Nicholas Stern ..well all that doesnt auger well.. then hit on a Prof Geoffery Heal doing a Press Release under the LSE banner saying...

" Leading US Researcher says vested interests from the coal fuel company are active in the political debate".

He is really smart this bloke ...wouldnt be at all obvious would it ..noooo.... I need to be a fully fledged Professor to be able to say the bleeding obvious. Every bar fy from here to Broome would take that as a given.

If one is responsible for billions of dollars of shareholder funds of course they are.They would be derelict in their duty if they didnt.

Only out of touch publically funded academics would think it was other wise, or that such behaviour was out of court.

You people are truly unbelievable.

Geoff Davis “then you just kept on flaming me and anyone you disagree with.”

Maybe you could point out the “others” I “flamed”

because as I read back, I agreed with Candide and referred to no other poster .

“So apparently it’s OK for you and your side to flame, but not OK for me and my side to flame. If you don’t like it, stop doing”

Like I said, you can hardly claim any moral superiority, based on earlier and latest attempt to diminish my posts viz

“If asking you to stop flaming is asking you to be silent (which I’m not doing), then apparently you don’t have anything worthwhile to contribute.”

That’s a common trick, you simultaneously pursue the very thing which you claim you do not want to do.

It might work with your students but I have no papers which need to be marked, so I regard your comment as somewhat bereft of the authority your posturing attempts to assume.

To matters of AGW and modeling

I have based part of my career on developing computer models.

I know the rules to apply

I know both the basics and the more refined techniques and

I know that bodgey data produces bodgey predictions (the GIGO principle)

I also know that any model which cannot reflect the events experienced historically, has no basis for even presuming that it can be applied to predict the future.

AGW is littered with more “acclaimed”, until found to be dud and doubtful, models (computer or otherwise) than almost any other activity.

The credibility of the “science of Global Warming" disappeared down the proverbial toilet some time ago.

On that basis, my assertion that the whole global warming theory is a collective scam and merely an exercise in

Socialism by Stealth

has more credence in justifying all the efforts to invoke international hysteria than any supposed "Global Warming" theory.

Like Lenin said “A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.”

For the insideous collectivists, “global warming” just represents their “revolutionary situation”

Lord M - I admire him. Refer to his U Tube address to St.Paul University in America. His letter to PM Rudd dtd 1.1.10, his examining the Inconvenient Truth movie, and the 35 errors in it, that he explains.
Maybe Al had been incorrectly advised but capitalized from it. And
if he and others are promoting a big fat lie with a hidden agenda
then in my opinion he is guilty of a criminal act and so are his advisers. Particularly the hidden in small print in the UN draft Climate change treaty regarding forming a global UN Government to control climate change responsibilities. One wonder's now that this climate change lie has far reaching and dangerous implications than meets the eye. And the lies being expressed to character assassinate
Lord M, are even worse in my mind, talk about shooting the messenger for telling the truth! And if people are found being paid to promote a lie that is criminal.

Good article Poirot – thank you. I do believe that western societies need to be ever-vigilant. Australian owned or based miners alone have a disgraceful record overseas and have desecrated the livelihoods and trashed the environment of many indigenous groups around the planet – South Africa, Niger Delta, Philippines, Chile, Papua , Indonesia, Madagascar, Amazon, Chile, Rumania, DRC etc etc. It appears that miners delight in doing business with governments whose only regulatory process is the bullet.

Nevertheless, I’m confident that Viscount Monckley will, out of decency, raise these issues of crimes against humanity with our mining industry during his visit.

After reflecting on Viscount Monckton’s article, I got to thinking that when a journalist claims to be an expert on climate change, society is entitled to have evidence supporting those claims before they form an educated opinion. After all if you had your appendix removed by Dr Sawbones and then discovered during recovery that he was in fact a travelling salesman, you would be concerned about your innings.

1. Viscount – Why did you blame Jackie Kennedy for deaths from malaria in the third world and state last October that: “40 million people, nearly all of them children, died of malaria solely and simply because DDT had been banned for no good scientific reason or environmental reason whatsoever” when DDT was never banned in third world countries?

http://www.alien-earth.org/forum/message.php?message=57654&showdate=11/25/09

2. Why do your letterheads contain the title “Lord” when you are not?

3. The blog, Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who advise that they are all physicists and astrophysicists. Have you responded to their allegations?:

“He (Viscount Monckley) goes on to make outrageous and unsupported claims about global warming, selectively quoting (and sometimes misquoting) experts in the field and taking on the actual science in a way that is just plain embarrassing. He makes historical claims (like there are reliable reports from sailors that there was little or no arctic ice six hundred years ago) and does a thoroughly dishonest job of representing James Hansen’s claims.”

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/11/14/the-perils-of-poor-science-journalism/

contd.......

Contd......

4. Why did you claim in your SPPI article “The Unwisdom of Solomon: Bad logic, bad science, and bad policies” that $40 billion had been spent on climate research in 2008 in the US when the climate change research budget is less than $2 billion, and that includes the NASA space-based observing system hardware?

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/viscount_monckton_denialist_dujour/

5. Al Gore gained recognition because of his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and for alerting nations to the potential ramifications of climate change. A cursory glance of his blog indicates that, while he quotes reputable scientists, he does not publish scientific papers, nor does he speak in scientific lingo but rather writes in general terms, bringing the reader up to date on political and climate change progress (or regress!)

Since he is a lawyer by profession and does not pretend otherwise, I have respect for his integrity. You are a journalist, therefore, shouldn't you advise how you manage to arrive at the conclusions in the scientific papers you publish when you lack the necessary qualifications?

6. You claim that “there has been no warming for fifteen years.” How have you arrived at this conclusion?

7. You are quoted as stating: …“Greens” are killing millions by starvation in a dozen of the world’s poorest regions….If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama’s stated ambition ..... " Please substantiate this claim and explain why you call Obama "Osamabamarama" and do you have any objections to the people who call you "Marty Feldman?"

8. For the sake of transparency, could you advise who is sponsoring your world-wide trips to speak on climate change?

I trust you will let us know of the response from our mining industry and respond also to my questions, prior to leaving the country?

I keep asking this question without getting a satisfying answer? The Prime Minister said the last ten years have been the hottest but others have said we are now cooling. What? How and who does this?
Surely this should be a "Fact"? I am stumped that this nub of the argument is a debating point.
The temperature in Melbourne right now is an ascertainable fact. I have read the New Zealander's changed their data on temperature to help the, what is it again, global warming, AGW or climate change? You tell me!

JBowyer

<< I have read the New Zealander's changed their data on temperature to help the, what is it again, global warming, AGW or climate change? You tell me! >>

Yes, it really is all about getting your facts right.

To repeat yet again, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition made the NZ warming trend ‘go away’. They did this by treating measurements from different sites as if they came from the same site.

They also claim that New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research wouldn’t explain how they adjust the data for site changes. That is simply untrue, another lie by the so called 'sceptics' in pushing their own agenda.

If you look deeper JBowyer, it's all there for you and anyone to see – but most people don't, they believe what they want to believe, regardless of the facts.

As to the 'Lord Chris', I have better things to do.

Thank you Q & A but I am still unsatisfied but you go and worry about "better things". My challenge is still unmet, lets see who has the time to address why there is an argument about the facts?

JBowyer,

The estimated global temperature, averaged over the Earth's surface, has indeed been higher this decade, averaged over the decade, than in past decades.

The global spatial average (i.e. the average over the surface) has nevertheless not increased since about 2005. This is seized upon by sceptics as "proof" that there is no global warming, but we know the temperature does not always increase, because it slowed in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, only to resume its upward climb. You can see all this more clearly in plots at my blog
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/global-cooling-since-1998/

The reason for the recent slowdown is that there are other influences on temperature, such as the el Nino cycle. There was a strong el Nino (warming) in 1998 and a la Nina (cooling) in 2007-8, which worked against the main warming trend. Heat from the sun has also declined a bit over this period. As la Nina eases off and as the next el Nino comes on we can expect warming to resume.

The average temperature over the Earth's surface is not simple to estimate, because it is not measured everywhere, especially over oceans, in the southern hemisphere, and over the poles. Therefore people have to make sure the averages aren't biassed by the many measurements in places like Europe and North America. Care also has to be taken that each of the thousands of measurement places is not locally biassed. There is thus some acknowledged uncertainty in the final estimates. Sceptics love to claim this means they can't be believed, or that data have been "tampered" with (as in NZ), etc etc, but they overstate the problems.

Reading Geoff Davies post certainly show the arrogance of those who claimed the 'science' is settled.

JBowyer, re the confusion between heating and cooling, 1998 was the hottest year on record. So all other years are not as hot, or 'cooler'. The long term temperature trend is rising, and if you take any year but 1998 as your start date, there is warming. Unsurprisingly, if you take the hottest year on record as your start date, subsequent years are less hot so can be argued to show evidence of 'cooling'. However, climate is measured over 30+ year periods, so the best that the 1998 date can actually do to support AGW skeptics is show that the weather has not been quite so hot since 1998.

Candid, Geoff thanks for your explanations.

Geoff "There is thus some acknowledged uncertainty in the final estimates. Sceptics love to claim this means they can't be believed"

Then why is the uncertainty never admitted, this is the first I have seen from anyone on the AGW believer side that there is doubt about the measurements - usually they are defended feriously. That's what concerns a lot of skeptics, the lack of openness and the defence to the death in the face of what many of us see is reality.

It's a bit like Robin Williams defence of his 100 meter sea level rise " you have to exagerate to get people's attention" which he bitterly admitted on Triple J.

candide, we all accept that the world has been warming continuously since the last ice age, not a problem. The issue a lot of skeptics have is whether mankind is contributing, and how much, or whether man's contribution is trivial int he scheme of things. Another worry for some skeptics is the claim that man can control climate by tweaking this gas by that much in such a time as to effect this result - that just reeks of fantasy.

Prophesizing is a poor art form whatever your field, but for some reason climate science has attempted to ride the warming trend, happily predicting they know exactly what's going on, right up until it flattened out a bit and they can't explain it - then they try to adjust things so they look like they are still on top of it.

It smacks of cover up and deceipt - but that' just my opinion.

Odo

"Then why is the uncertainty never admitted, this is the first I have seen from anyone on the AGW believer side that there is doubt about the measurements - usually they are defended feriously. That's what concerns a lot of skeptics, the lack of openness and the defence to the death in the face of what many of us see is reality."

Uncertainty is ALWAYS admitted, at least in the scientific papers that are published in reputable journals and in the IPCC reports. Surely, you must have seen error bars or confidence levels in such papers and reports?

Yes, results are defended "ferociously" until they can be shown to be in error - that is how science works. Indeed, there is much "debate" in the scientific community about attribution and climate sensitivity, but the results are very robust in favour of AGW, believe it or not.

Odo, there is a lot of "openness" - you are just not looking in the right places. The blogosphere and main stream media op-eds is rife for opinions, but that is all they are. If you (or anyone) don't like the IPCC methods of reporting the technical papers, please ... suggest a better way of collating and disseminating the findings of the 1000's of published and peer reviewed scientific papers.

Q&A I could have been more specific there - I meant, no one admits uncertainty or doubt on these forums, all we get are in your face accusations of stupidity for not "believing" the consensus, and insults for not siging up to group think.

"Surely thousand of scientists support this so it must be true", type statements. Needless to say to you that of those thousands of paper, many are by the same author and many are not research into climate change, but to effects, such as the recent paper here on OLO, "'Evergreen agriculture' wins for climate and hunger".

Most of the posters seem not to understand as you do, that all the papers they refer to are caveated with doubt, uncertainty and error, but they still thrash skeptics about the head with them.

Which leaves many of us - skeptical, not just of the science but of the motives of the thrashers, (as is Chris Monckton.)

A better way to addres the community of non climate scientists, yes - when you see errors in newspaper articles or posts on forums like this, it is your duty if you are a scientist in this field to correct ALL misconceptions, not just the ones you feel don't help your particular case.

A better way to deseminate information, no, I struggle in my own narrow little field to stay abreast. I do think the climate science field is in trouble though, regardless of what you and Geoff say or do, the perception is out there now that your field is not completely upright - rightly or wrongly, you guys have been overly clever and have hitched your wagon to the IPCC, if they come under doubt, so do you - pity that it is.

Those of you on this thread who live in Brisbane might like to go to this debate http://brisinst.org.au/event-details.php?event_id=625 on the 29th Jan. It features Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer, Barry Brook and Graham Redfearn.

At $130 a head it is expensive, but you might get your chance to have a shot at both Plimer and Monckton. Or those on the other side might like to take aim at Brook or Redfearn.

Q & A says
"If you (or anyone) don't like the IPCC methods of reporting the technical papers, please ... suggest a better way of collating and disseminating the findings of the 1000's of published and peer reviewed scientific papers."

Thats not hard at all old son,try these ten only suggestions for improving the IPCC process:

1. All those involved are required to sign a Declaration of Interests Document, as is standard practice elsewhere. This would apply to all;
• Members of the IPCC Board, including the Chairman.
• Lead authors and contributors.

2. No one is to be involved in any matter, or subject of discussion and evaluation, where a conflict or potential conflict may arise. They would be required to leave the room, and not be involved by any other means.

3. No assessment/discussion of any selected Peer Reviewed paper (by any Journal) may be undertaken and adjudicated upon, when any of the authors involved are present.

4. Any paper that has been rejected for further considerations as part of the IPCC assessment process should be identified, and the reason for rejection published.

5. Dissenting reports are permitted.

6. A new Board of the IPCC be created, and a new Chairman selected/appointed.

7. The HQ office and support facilities are relocated to another country, not in Europe.

8. Support staff to be turned over, with at least 30% of new appointments made.

9. SPM to be written after the Technical Evaluations have been completed, and signed off by all senior scientists involved.

10. Scientists who have received money in the last 10 years from any oil or coal company are to be precluded.Similarly greeny NGOs are to be completely excluded from the process.

There, that should solve every ones problems. Whats the betting that the outcome and advice is totally different.

If no changes whatever are made, then the next assesment is doomed before it starts by having zero credibility.

Feel free to add your own.

Would Q&A or Keith Davies care to explain how CO2 acts as an amplifier? Now we know how a catalyst in chemical reaction enhances their union,but no one it seems can explain the exact mechanism by which CO2 does this magical trick.How does it excite all the other atmospheric molecules to retain heat energy?

Perhaps CO2 is the sexiest gas on the planet.It not only gets the humans excited but has the rest of atmosphere on heat as well. Jennifer Marohasy's T shirt "I Love CO2" may be a prelude of bigger things to come.

I think Arjay's questions are important, since they question the basic science. (Arjay, have you used Google Advanced Scholar? A very basic explanation is here
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/greenhouse.html--and I don't mean to insult you by suggesting you start there.)

Bushbunny, you remark about the earth being colder without CO2 relies on exactly the science that Arjay wants to know about. Can you help him--and me?

Geoff Davies, could you use your access to scientific data bases to point us to the science, which I understand has been well-established for many decades, concerning the greenhouse effect--I don't mean the statistical stuff supporting views about recent warming, but the old material about the way the earth is kept warm?
Thank you.

Virtually every scientist, and every academic, has an economic interest in getting their work published. This is particularly the case where tenure depends on a certain number of publications per year, or where university funding depends on publication. If we were to ignore all scientific research that is not totally disinterested, we'd have to ignore virtually all science.

The judgement of the reliability of a scientific publication depends, not on disinterest, but on academic integrity. If a scientist misquotes sources, conceals evidence, falsifies data or argues irrationally, people will properly cease to read his/her work.

Every so often, there is a scandal where a piece of work on which other research has depended, turns out to be spurious. It is then often a large task to trace the full effects of the fault, through a succession of articles and books written by honest people who have relied on the spurious findings in their own work.

That apart, judgement of a particular piece of work depends on the correctness and reproducibility of the research procedure, and the cogency of the argument, including the reliability of the theories presupposed. So far as I can see at this time of night, that is all.

Arjay - I found this interesting. Not sure if the site is a good authority, but reads OK.
http://timeforchange.org/radiation-wavelength-and-greenhouse-effect

I'm delighted to read this article by his Lordship. Because it confirms what I'd previously only suspected - that he's not much bothered about the truth of what he writes.

In his blathering on the Australian Constitution, he says

Article 51 of the Constitution of Australia lists the 31st of 39 legislative powers of Australia’s Parliament as follows:

“The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws.”

(this is correct)

The principle, therefore, is that if the national government (or, a fortiori, the government of a State or Territory) takes over a person’s land, it must pay just compensation, or else.

The "(or, a fortiori, the government of a State or Territory)" is complete nonsense. The clause in question gives powers to the national parliament (without the Constitution, it would not have any powers at all). It doesn't take power away from the State parliaments (only a few clauses in the Constitution do, and they are expressed clearly, and quite differently).

Since it's the work of 5 minutes to find the judgement in the court case Monckton mentions, and to observe that it doesn't mention the Constitution, an honest and responsible writer, who would have looked at the court case, might suspect that his knowledge of the Australian Constitution was somewhat lacking!

In any event, since when are land use regulations "acquisition of property"? Every landowner knows they're a perfectly normal aspect of land ownership, and suffers from them. What seems objectionable in the case of Mr Spencer is that they impact different landowners so unevenly (ie, no commensurate disadvantage for those whose land is already cleared)

Thanks again, your Lordship, for showing your true colours. I'll bear it in mind if I ever read anything else of yours!

Arjay: "Would Q&A or Keith Davies care to explain how CO2 acts as an amplifier?"

Right now it doesn't. CO2 acts as more of a trigger than a amplifier.

Back when Geoff described CO2 as am amplifier, the amplifying effect was caused by rising concentrations of CO2. I presume this was triggered by rising temperatures, which in turn look like they were triggered by changes in the earths orbit.

I don't know why arising temperature could cause a rise in CO2 levels. One possible cause is the release of carbon from the soils. We face this problem ourselves. There is a lot of carbon locked up in soils (1500 G ton now maybe?). But it only remains as carbon where it is cold - ie where the soil spends most of its time frozen. Of course during an ice age most of the soil is frozen so there is huge amounts of carbon locked up under the ice. When the ice starts retreating the soil heats up, the bugs become active and start breathing, and the carbon in the soil is released as CO2.

Another possible causes is release of methane trapped in ice and hydrates (a mixture of cold pressurised water and CO2). When the water heats up the methane is released. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas in itself it is short lived. In the atmosphere oxygen and sunlight transform it into water and CO2.

Whatever the cause, there is ample evidence that the end of the ice ages was followed by a rise in CO2. And no one disputes that a rise in CO2 will cause the earth to heat up if all other things remain the same. Thus it would act as an amplifier.

rstuart, I think you will find that the CO2 most likely comes from outgassing of the oceans. As water warms gases are less soluble in it. I don't understand Arjay's question. It is clearly established that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and no-one serious in the scientific community disputes that. If the IPCC just went with the theoretical increase in temperature from the increase in CO2 there would be much less argument. The real argument is about climate sensitivity and the extent to which the small theoretical effect of CO2 is claimed to be magnified by water vapour.

I don't know how Geoff can claim as a fact that the CO2 is a singificant amplifier as it comes into the atmosphere. The interesting thing for me is that CO2 peaks on the Vostock temperature graphs after temperature does, indicating that its amplification, or forcing, is much smaller than other forcings in the system. I also have a graphing issue with the way CO2 is tracked against temperature in the Vostock graphs. As its relation to temperature increase is logarithmic it oughtn't to be graphed on the same scale as temperature, but on a logarithmic one - it's the heat effect that is significant, not its atmospheric concentration per se.

Jeremy is more or less correct about the states and acquisition of property, although property in the constitution doesn't just refer to real property. I think Monckton has garbled Peter Spencer's legal argument which, as I remember the relevant part of it, rests on the proposition that the states were acting on behalf of the federal government, and so should be subject to the requirement to compensate on just terms which does apply to the Commonwealth.

Irrespective of Monckton's sloppiness I think Spencer has a good point - if his land use has been changed to effectively create carbon credits for the rest of us he should get compensation. It is a blot on the Howard Government that it acted in this way.

I don't know what Vostock temperature graphs you are looking at Graham, but the CO2 peaks don't look like they "graph after temperature" at all, at least to me.
http://www.daycreek.com/dc/images/1999.pdf

Perhaps you could explain which graphs you might be looking at?

Hi Ozbib & arjay.

I watched a very good DVD 'The great global warming swindle.

I especially liked the lecture given by a Canadian scientist. The commentators were all credited scientists. One the founder of Greenpeace that resigned after Greenpeace took on the political stance they have.

Another said he for one, was mentioned by the UN IPCC that he approved
of their report. He did not, in fact the opposite. Threatened legal
action got it removed.

CO2 is one of the lesser greenhouse gases, and water vapour and clouds
are are the largest 90%. Cloud cover keeps the Earth's temperature warmer at night and cooler during the day. Warmth seems to suit most living organisms as frost kills. You will note in temperate regions where frost is likely to occur cloud cover will prevent it forming.

The founder of Greenpeace stated in his opinion the Green faction
are politically motivated. They brought up a case for the undeveloped nations. The climate change believers are trying to undermine
industrialised countries blaming them for something that doesn't compute and disadvantages third world countries. Yet undeveloped countries need electricity to advance.

Gore said Malaria was moving Northwards into colder climates. Not true deaths from it have be noted in Russia and Siberia were millions of people died back in the early 1920s.

The principal point made by the Canadian scientist, was cosmic rays
help create clouds, and sun spots and solar activity result in
in a surge of solar radiation that puts a barrier to divert cosmic
rays from hitting the earth. Hence the planet warms with sunspot activity that seems to suit agriculture and biodiversity. Look I am no scientist, but the DVD did enforce what I know about this climate change scam. And the political motivations including some scientists who are driving this belief. CO2 does not amplify global warming, the sun does!

Monckton is coming to Australia and the cost to attend his and Prof.
Plimer talks is $20.00 Get onto JoNova website and read for yourself

Q & A was asking for suggestions as to what would be better way of doing an IPCC, and I provided 10 imrovements that could be made to the current system.After some reflection there are several more that can be added assuming that he was really interested and not just floating another straw man. These are:

1. No paper can be assessed for inclusion and be part of in the IPCC process if the authers have not complied with the data storage and release requirements of the Grantors, to fully enable their findings to be replicated.

2. Broad scale data collection series such as a countries temperature and rainfall records, should be the responsibility of a separate body to the researchers.ie a complete separation of powers and responsibilities. Hansen being resonsible for the GISS record is not on.

3.Role of new Chairman (to replace Pachauri) and indeed role of Board should be re-defined, and the name of the organisation changed to send the message that things are different.

So that make 13 sensible changes IMO, which if undertaken might retrieve some credibility in the eyes of tax payers and decision everywhere.If they make no changes then they are stuffed.

Let’s see if I have this right.

When the complete tropospheric degradation of, let’s say, the 120 different volatile organic compounds (VOC) occur, these products are in turn degraded, resulting eventually in the products of CO2 and H2O.

Water vapour (H20) is a very significant warming gas, therefore, the more VOC, the more CO2 plus the more water vapour.

The degradation of VOCs contain in excess of 7000 reactions and 2500 chemical species. What the hell are they up to while they’re all mating with each other?

In addition, as surface temperature increases, so does atmospheric humidity which amplifies the warming from carbon dioxide which by the way hangs about for >100 years.

Of course, the earth doesn’t care whether you believe the data or not. Data is what scientists call observable phenomena that simply is, but oh Man, reality sure is a hard pill to swallow for the deniers. I mean let's face it - any reputable climate scientist who jumped camp now and became a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry would become an instant millionaire. But they haven't!

The stark reality reveals that all things connect and that we also have the very nasty carcinogenic VOCs - industrial benzene, toluene, methyl benzene, napthalene, xylene etc being stored in our underground drinking water sources and we are drinking them.

Underground hazardous plumes of hydrocarbons from industry have invaded our rivers and oceans. Toxic harbour and river sediments are killing marine life.

The results last year revealed that the Swan and Canning rivers in WA are polluted with toxic levels of cancer-causing heavy metals, pesticides and hydrocarbons. Mass fish mortalities are unprecedented -far beyond the natural rate.

Therefore, I think Mr Monckton should be engaging in dialogue here to elaborate on the evidence he has to the contrary, and that is that “we should do nothing.” Someone over at Crikey has provided this link published by the Americans:

http://www.alternet.org/story/144990/the_14_most_heinous_climate_villains which claims Mr Monckton is a climate villain. Surely he needs to clear his good name?

With just this short exchange,we can see how ordinary punter is totally confused.Ozbib thanks for the link but it failed to enlighten me.

After the ice core data revealed that CO2 concentrations followed heating by some 800 yrs,out came the theory that CO2 was an amplifier.I thought that they'd discovered some new property of CO2.Hence Grahamy could not understand my questioning.rstuart says that CO2 is now a trigger rather than an amplifer.Has someone moved the goal posts?

I can understand that we reach critical temps in which accelerated amounts of CO2 is released,but for every CO2 molecule, we have 2600 of other molecules that make up our atmosphere.Man has only added 29% of this.Now this gives CO2 a lot of creedence in terms of heating capacity.

The reality big disaster for those of integrity who have faithfully studied the science and believe in AGW by CO2,is that they have hitched their barrow to people who have ulterior motives of absolute power on a globalised scale.These powers under the auspices of AL Gore have grossly exaggerated the threat to gain personal advantage in terms of taxes and carbon derivatives.

Whether you like or hate C Monckton,he is the catalyst that will bring the debate back to an even keel.

We need to get the entire scientific community involved with indpendant finances.The UN,IPCC and their apparatchiks,have failed the test of truth and integrity

I am moved by some ignorant people who post on OLO and suggest that the States are sovereign entities. This presumes that they coexist with a higher power, and that that Higher Power, can without a referendum let them. The ignorance about the Australian Constitution, expressed by even KR and TA, is appalling.

The Highest legislative power in Australia is the Parliament of the Commonwealth, but even that is subject to the checks and balances on absolute power, imposed by Ch III Constitution. Those who are slightly ignorant of the total scheme of things that makes up government in Australia, should check out this website and the statements on the Judicial Power, contained in this link.

http://www.community-law.info/?page_id=238

The bloke who wrote this article lifted some comments from Henry Abraham, a professor of law in the United States, some from a judgment of the Late Lionel Murphy when a High Court Justice, and more from Holdsworth’s Commentaries on the laws of England. The English themselves are starting to be rebellious. They gave the Irish home rule in 1922 over three out of four provinces in Ireland, and the Anglican Church, the Church of the oppressive English, lost its privileges, but since, the Irish Catholic Church, now no longer the focus of resistance to the English, has lost its influence too.

In Australia the sixty five percent of the population that is actually Christian, is starting to wake up that the lawyers have conned them. S 116 Constitution is not a licence to be an Atheist, as Mark Latham thought, but in reality is inserted to preserve the Christian System of Government, that characterized English Freedom, since 1297. We thought we would get and were promised a Christian Prime Minister. In 2007 that was supposed to be the result, and 23 seats worked from right to left. We simply got a very wealthy, through his wife, same old same old. We got John Howard’s government under Labor Leadership. Monckton’s visit lifts the debate to a whole new level. Peter Spencer came down. He lifted the debate to a whole new level too

Hi all,

This is my second post in 24 hours. Please Google 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' from there you should be able to get on to the producers official website www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.com.uk and then the complete 8 part DVD is available through U Tube.

The website has an index to mull over, before you watch the complete
visual DVD. As far as I am concerned it disputes Al Gore's DVD and theory. And Lord Monkton isn't one of them, but there is another member of the House of Lords who is. Yet all the commentators and subscribers are not only working in the disciplines they support but
are actually all some awarded scientists. Check out the lecture by
the Canadian scientist too. He was employed by the Fisheries dept
to try and fathom why anchovies and herring seemed to fluctuate and
discovered why by deep core drilling. That's all for now folks,
enjoy the DVD. Geoff your science is off a bit I believe, but you have a website of course. There are many parts of Australia, Lord
Monkton and Prof Plimer are visiting. Most of the lectures for the public are only $20 per person, all welcome. No need to register, although one in Brisbane Qld, does require pre-registration etc., and
probably dearer to attend... Check JoNova blog Monckton and Plimer
dates and venues for contact. I'm putting in my apologies at each one.

Lord Monckton is a Viscount - son of an Earl, he is entitled to call himself 'Lord' or Sir. Nothing to do with whether he is a member of the House of Lords.

It is clear that the UN doesn't really take CO2 and climate change seriously and have simply developed a scheme to fleece the West to fund Chinese and developing nations to 'catch up' to western standard of living and shift the economic power base to totalitarian China. Its the result of Marxists ideologues having had too much power in the UN.

The climate cannot tell the difference between Chinese CO2 and Indian CO2 and American CO2 so allowing some nations to continue to emit at an astounding rate while limiting others can only be part of the economic levelling out process as the CO2 levels are still going to rise significantly.

So Australia, which emits about 1.2% of the world CO2 will be taxed heavily while China which emits 20%+ of the worlds CO2 can keep emitting freely. CO2 per capita is not the issue as its the total amount that matters to the atmosphere.

So, the atmosphere can apparently handle CO2 if its Chinese or Indian.

'Animal Farm' here we come.

It's not only the content of Viscount Monckton's diatribes about global warming that make me pleased that he is seen as a leading spokesman for the denialist position, it's the quality of the supportive comments that he attracts.

Like I said, I can't wait see him on Lateline.

A modern hi-tech air-conditioner allows the user to set the desired room temperature to within 1 degree C. It does not always get it right!

The climate change fanatics now believe that they can control global temperature to within 0.5 degree C. It is as if Al Gore and the IPCC have a dash-board with magic key-pads allowing them to input ‘Desired Global Temperature’, ‘Desired increase/decrease in sea-levels’!!

Does anyone detect a serious case of megalomania creeping in?

Most of the hot air that was spent at Copenhagen was precisely about this_ whether global temperature should be allowed to increase by 2 degrees or by 1.5 degrees C!!

Of course, the reason they get away with such claims is that the details are fudged, which is exactly what happened with the ‘hockey-stick’ and other projections.

How long will it take for the temperature to get to the desired level? One, two, three hundred or maybe a thousand years?

Just as they conveniently switched from 'global warming' to 'climate change', they will now conveniently forget their own prediction of 'global catastrophe by 2015 if binding reductions were not agreed to at Copenhagen'!

And of course, if global warming does materialize realistically, then places like Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon and North West Territories of Canada, Greenland and other places would become habitable and stand to benefit. The Prime Minister of Greenland was on BBC recently proclaiming that they were looking forward “to a great future”!!

Unfortunately there will also be losers, probably including Australia.

But, make no mistake about it_ those magic key-pads do not exist! We can only adapt as best we can.

bigmal

Some very sensible suggestions there old son of which most only need to be tweaked.

______

Arjay

It's easy to conflate so many issues so that it then becomes a tangled web. CO2 can act as both a positive, and a negative forcing. In terms of your other molecules, try looking at their radiative or heat absorbing capacities.

______

LATO

You have to differentiate between global and regional averages. Some regions will be much worse off than others e.g. Antarctica might get 10 degrees C warmer, but will still be below zero; some Australian regions are already topping the 2 degrees C on averages; others less so.

True, there will be some benefits. However, in the long term the costs outweigh the benefits.

Ha, CJ, you wish, he can go represent the deniers if they need representation.

The skeptics out there will go on without need for heros or high priests and the AGW believers go on needing their tomes and structural hierarchy, IPCC, along with their precious "tweaked" graphs and holy hockey stick.

Lord Monckton represents himself, we watch amused at the gnashing of teeth from believers, the cries of "heresy" the digging up of articles so obscure it must take a lot of gleaning from the internet.

Demands he "MUST" defend himself against all and any scurrilous claims from bilious articles such as "The 14 Most Heinous Climate Villains". Look, anyone who reads and believes such stuff has got to be away with the extreme fairies. Most people see articles like this poisonous bile as extreme, and expected from the religious fanatics describing their mortal enemies, but now we see it from the extreme AGW believers, what does that indicate?

Someone is going to have a wonderful time in 100 years studying this period of mass AGW believer delusion.

Lord Monckton has done nothing but flush out yet more debate. He doesn't even care about all the insults and slurs.

He has brought his own opinions to Australia, you can ignore it, but you all amplify it in your haste to pour scorn. I don't subscribe to all he says, but it's fun to watch the outrage that someone could have such a POV and be popular!

It's just not fair is it, that he gets media coverage and a slot on Lateline you say CJ, excellent, the more exposure the better.

I must admit I'm also skeptical about the objectivity of the comperes on the ABC, but everyone knows they are biased and accepts it will be the same sort of attack as if he was from the federal opposition.

If it is all false and rubbish, why worry? I'm surprised any of you felt the need to post, or even read this article.

This post has become a comedy. Arjay declares: “With just this short exchange, we can see how (the) ordinary punter is totally confused.” “We?” Well please do not speak on my behalf Arjay since it was you who asked the question which is a clear indication that it is you who’s confused.

Speaking for myself, I believe that your repetitive “egg or the chicken” question on warming has been done to death and has become so passé. Why ask we “ordinary punters” when you can obtain an answer from a climate expert?

Molecules indeed Arjay! The global warming potential depends on both the efficiency of the molecule as a greenhouse gas and its atmospheric lifetime. As an “ordinary punter”, I can understand that. In addition I can grasp the concept that, on a molecule-for-molecule basis, methane is about eight times stronger a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but is present in much smaller concentrations so that its total contribution is smaller. The radiative forcing for CO2 is 1.46 W/m2 and methane is 0.48 W/m2 so that’s good enough for me too.

Furthermore, we plebs can also understand that emissions of carbon dioxide have risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to some 35 billion tons a year now.

Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year. Astonishingly, human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes - the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea!

These inconvenient truths have little impact on the combined conscience of the troglodytes and the shills in the fossil fuel industry and pathetically, their major mouthpieces are old, selfish, ignorant and shortsighted - hilarious!

Now does anyone know of the whereabouts of the elusive Mr Monckton?

Protagoras,

Thank you for the clear and concise post above - much appreciated.

Q&A, I'm interested to know how CO2 can act as a negative forcing?

Also what studies are you relying on to say that the "do nothing" scenario is more expensive than the "do something" scenario? I'd be interested what sort of "do something" is costed in, who did them, who commissioned them, and what discount rate they were using. The only reputable independent studies I am aware of say the opposite.

Protagoras;

Should that have been 1.46 w/m3 ?
It is by volume ? not area ?

Here is a laugh for you;
The latest suggestion from the rumour mill is that the reason
politicians try so hard to ignore peak oil is because global warming
is a cover for peak oil.
The pollies figure that the public will accept petrol rationing if it
is because of weather, but not if it is caused by a shortage of oil.
The interesting thing is some take it seriously as it is a good
explanation for the political attitude to peal oil.

Has anyone seen an expert reply to Monkton's letter to Kevin Rudd ?

Yes, there's a nice little article in Today's Australian that deals with costs and the prohibitive pro-con factors for China. We may as well forget about preventative action, it's not going to happen. It's not economic--neither profitable nor affordable. The cost to the biosphere is of course beside the point!
The salient point of the article is that R&D into clean and affordable alternatives that make fossil fuels obsolete, is the best way to drive compliance. Of course an ETS handicap, even a moderate one, that at once funded R&D and gave these new technologies a chance to be competitive, makes far more sense than doing nothing.
The developing world has to be subsidised to some extent, though their emissions still have to be taxed. If there's no compliance or monitoring permitted, then the West should impose an arbitrary tarrif on their exports.
I've softened my view on this issue; a very modest ETS initially, that gradually increases, is better than no action at all. If climate change deteriorates as a result, hopefully without crossing a tipping point, it will at least have the beneficial effect of decimating the human population, which would be a very effective measure.

Q & A

" bigmal

Some very sensible suggestions there old son of which most only need to be tweaked."

I would be grateful if you would do some tweaking. I have the view thst irrespective of whatever gets played out over coming months, or years, the IPCC cannot just blithely carry on using all its old business rules, and organisational arrangements.They have clearly been called into question.

The most competent and ethical thing that could hapeen that these new arrangements are put into effect before any work on the next AR is undertaken.

If you think my 13 changes are near the mark, then what needs to done to make them closer.

I’ve been doing other things and only just back to respond to some comments.

odo (14 Jan, 12:12)
Your question raises a key distinction that is often not made, and that would avoid a lot of the argument. The distinction is between debating the science and debating policy.

The science of global warming is not settled. It’s complicated and there are many continuing debates, trying to sort out many aspects that are still not well understood.

On the other hand, a policy response can’t wait until most of the debate dies away, because we know by then it will be too late to do anything effective. This is because it takes a decade or three before the full effect of CO2 emissions is felt in the climate. If we stop emissions tomorrow, warming will continue for some time. If we wait until things start going seriously awry, it will very likely to too late to stop it running to extreme warming.

This means we must act without complete knowledge. We do this all the time anyway (politicians not being the most informed people around). In this situation, the best we can ask is “What is the collective judgement of those who know the climate system the best”. The IPCC’s job is to collect that judgement. The answer is very clear: the vast majority of climate scientists think humans are causing global warming, and that we are approaching a dangerous amount of warming.

This is NOT the same thing as saying the science is settled. It IS saying that the best professional judgement of most climate scientists is that we are close to dangerous warming and had better start cutting greenhouse gas emissions very soon.

Of course there are many, on both sides, who overstate things, or who haven’t appreciated this distinction.

Arjay,
The amplification during the ice ages is not due to chemical catalysis. I’ll say it again: the sun’s heat increases a little bit, the ocean and soils warm a bit and release some CO2. The CO2 causes more warming, which causes more CO2 to be released from the ocean and soils. This causes more warming ... You end up with a lot more warming than you would have got just from the slight increase in the sun’s heat.

GrahamY,
there is a question about the end of the warming phase. Something other than CO2 seems to have cut in. Because of various other factors (e.g. cloud cover), we should not expect a one-to-one relationship between CO2 and temperature, so this question does not automatically invalidate the standard theory as some claim. See previous post regarding continuing debate.

Arjay and ozbib,
Regarding the ‘experiment’ you want, Arjay this bit of science is so well established it’s hard to find anything about it on the web. My guess is you’d have to look in textbooks on atmospheric science. Candide’s link is good, though perhaps only part of what you want. And just because there's not much CO2 doesn't mean it can't do the warming. That's why we have science - to figure these things out properly instead of just guessing.

Q&A and GrahamY, regarding costs of doing something, you can be sure The Oz will say it will be hideously expensive to change anything, they don’t want anything to change. My posts http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/cut-emissions-and-boost-economy/ and http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/energy-efficiency/ give a contrary view, very briefly but with links to sources.

Bazz

I think you will find that radiative forcings of atmospheric gases are measured in watts per square metre (W/m2). Have a look at the chart on the last page here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/ where I notice that their measurements for CO2 are higher than the measurement I quoted – must upgrade my archives!

“Greenland and other places would become habitable and stand to benefit. “

Indeed LATO. Already Australian miners are over there rubbing their hands in glee.

The Kvanefjeld deposit in Greenland is now recognised as one of the largest known occurrences of Rare Earth Oxides in the world. Reports indicate that the deposit contains 4.91Mt of total rare earth oxide, 990,000 tonnes of zinc, 120,000t of uranium oxide and 3.09Mt of sodium fluoride.

Much of the oil, gas, gold and diamonds the island holds will no doubt become accessible so wherever they put their shovel in…..voila!

However, rumour has it that Greenland has not yet been allocated a carbon dioxide quota - a mere peccadillo in the world of mining.

Additionally it appears Greenland’s government will give the go ahead to Alcoa's aluminium smelter (if not already) which they say will effectively double Greenland’s CO2 emissions (you think these guys might have heard about melting polar caps and global warming?)

The good news (for some) is that if the pickings are good in Greenland, Alcoa may cease trashing the Amazon:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aEmubrLsu.ro or even the jarrah forests of Western Australia? Nah……..only kidding!

So by the time Greenland has just enough ice left for a Bacardi and coke, the place should strongly resemble the ravaged moonscape of the Eastern Goldfields in WA's Kalgoorlie region.

Geoff Davies: << The Oz will say it will be hideously expensive to change anything, they don’t want anything to change. >>

Oh so true. I only buy it on Saturdays lately, and today's edition of the 'Opposition Organ' contained possibly even more anti-environmental bile than OLO.

I'm seriously reconsidering my $2.60 weekly investment in my decades-old practice of reading 'The Australian'. And Rupert wants to put up a paywall on his online dross and tattletale?

He's dreamin'.

Thank you, Graham Y, CJM, Protagoras and Geoff Davies for assisting in my efforts to understand the science. I have looked at some serious material, but I have a long way to go.

My specific concern in commenting here comes, in spite of my ignorance, from this: Some prominent, influential people, Cardinal Pell and Senator Minchin amongst them, have been asserting that human action does not and cannot make any difference at all to climate. Referring to established science and what all serious scientists accept is not going to counter this kind of widely publicised claim. For thanks to the efforts of successive governments from Hawke's to Howard's, the pronouncements of experts in most fields are treated as suspect by a good many Australians. The situation is being made worse by the current clamour about scientists cheating, or having vested interests in misleading people.

What is needed, in my view, is a concerted effort to explain how we know about greenhouse gases. Not the statistical arguments, which I think people find confusing and which are lost in the clamour; but really, really basic stuff, at the 'why is it so?' level, if you are old enough to know what I mean. Some nice graphic experiments on TV would be good, followed perhaps by an explanation of how CO2 and H20 and CH4 get to absorb and emit infra-red waves.

I find it amazing that there appears to be no modern day practical experiments being done on the heat retention capacities of CO2.This is the most crucial issue facing man kind today yet we rely on computer models that cannot possibly reflect this complex science.

Over 100yrs ago Neils Bohr found that CO2 did not absorb sufficient heat energy to be a problem.Heinz Hug made a similar discovery.http://www.nov55.com/ntyg.html

Surely with the technical expertise we have today,these experiments can be done without any margin for error.

Why don't both sides of this debate get together and devise a series of practical experiments that test the heating capacity of CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere?

If the AGW true believers refuse to go there,then I can only assume that the science was settled by Neils Bohr over 100 yrs ago.

NB. In case you are wondering about CO2 traditionally being called a greenhouse gas,it was because CO2 was put in greenhouses to make the plants grow.It had nothing to do with it's heating capacity.The green house effect happens because the glass reflects some of the infra-red light back inside and the air is trapped within the glass surrounds.

Mitchell;
>The salient point of the article is that R&D into clean and
>affordable alternatives that make fossil fuels obsolete, is the best
>way to drive compliance.

There is a lot of argument that the alternatives currently available
are not up to the job.
A very recent example; the output from Britain's windfarms during the
current freeze has been negligible over a couple of weeks.
The research needs to concentrate more on storage.

Geoff Davies;
>Something other than CO2 seems to have cut in.

Could it be the non-linearity of CO2's effect and that the curve has rolled over ?

Bazz: "There is a lot of argument that the alternatives currently available
are not up to the job."
That's just the point; current alternatives can't compete with fossil fuels for energy production. Thus we need research and development of more efficient and even new alternatives--as well as more efficient and conservative "use" of energy generated. It may be that clean technologies as efficient as polluting-fossil-fuels will never be found, though I'm optimistic enough to think that they will, or might be given the political and popular will. Putting a man on the moon was mere inspirational rhetoric before the technology was developed. But then, the space programme didn't have to contend with an army of cynics, and mouthpieces funded by those with a vested interest in failure; the whole Western world, with very little (publicised) opposition, got behind the dream.
Perhaps that's what we need, a Kennedy kind of approach to fixing climate change that captures the imagination. Even the hard-boiled cynics, who know we're wrecking the planet, might get inspired!
Current alternatives, as you say, are probably "not" up to the job; that's why the problem needs R&D, ergo an ETS that both raises funds and creates a level playing field. In any case, more expensive clean energy that's offset by more efficient and conservative energy consumption, can certainly match, or better, the cost of profligate generation and consumption hitherto.
The challenge inspires me! It might even inspire China if the Western world took it up---China wouldn't want to be left behind, any more than Russia did when Kennedy announced his dream.
Rhetoric is still the most efficient way to get things done--or to scuttle a worthy aspiration!

Arjay (Graham, quite right) my apologies.

In my previous post, I should have said clouds (or aerosols) can have both positive and negative forcings. And yes, CO2 is an amplifier. A feedback acts to amplify, or dampen, the initial forcing.

The important distinction is that a 'forcing' pushes the climate into a new state. A 'feedback' is simply a response mechanism (pushing the system further in the direction of the initial forcing (positive feedback) or alternatively, dampening the response - which brings the system closer to the initial climate state (negative feedback).

The primary radiative feedbacks are water vapor, lapse rate, clouds and surface albedo.

mitchel, you seem to think anyone who is a skeptic is automatically a keen polluter, why is that?

I have no problem with pollution reduction, sustainable energy and other systems, for the right reasons.

But "fixing the climate" sounds more like extreme belief that something is wrong, that you know the exact cause, and that it is in our power to correct - with no other side effects even though it becomes more clear day by day that we do not understand climate very well at all.

I'm all for throwing a lot more resources at understanding climate, but we need some rigor in the methods, away with tweaks and in with direct measurement. The trouble with tweaks or application of "fudges" is they are someone's best guess that they then backfill with some help from their mates.

"Fixing the climate" to clean up pollution sounds as sensible as renovating your house by replacing a fence.

Can someone, anyone, tell me what's the probability of altering the climate by tweaking CO2, by whatever amount, over what time? Will that have any other effects? When will we see the effect?

We have no idea what it will do but it is being sold as a panacea, and of course governments who want to look like they care are jumping on it and shaving off a bit for themselves.

You say you're inspired, join a climate club, but if you want to really contribute, actually do something, don't just sit around in conferences and meetings demanding others do it for you and becoming nags and scolds.

Good luck, I hope you accomplish something positive

I agree. Sustainable living is better than doing nothing at all.
ETS schemes are a band aid anyway, and so are the type of laws Peter
Spencer has encountered. From what I learned at Uni, the earth's atmosphere is warmed by the planet's surface radiating back into space? Not the sun directly. Clouds trap this to a degree. And a hotter climate generates more rain, and humidity. And it depends
where you live, what height above sea level one is, etc. The amount of urbanisation etc.

Solar energy, wave generated electricity, even windmills, might be
great for smaller communities, but industry has to have something more
powerful to operate. It will come one day, probably in the next 25 years. Pollution will be cut down, as In UK. Anyone living in
London or working there during the 50s. SMOGs evil yellow stuff killed around 6,000 people, and they made a fortune selling SMOG masks. Then the smoke free zones, and within 10 years dolphins were swimming up the Thames. However, didn't stop the Thames from freezing over in 1963 at Windsor? Coldest winter on record since 1947. Now this one from what friends say, is like 1947. Even though the atmosphere is much healthier. And some scientists are saying
greenhouse gases are keeping the planet warmer than it would be.
Clouds keep the planet warmer at night and cooler by day. Whether CO2
methane or whatever is present. But we need rain don't we.

Best of luck trying to find an equable solution that suits every country.

Certainly the natural environment and atmosphere will benefit, but will it be enough to control the climate. No I don't think so. But
not to penalise western or industrialised countries for providing a
better living standard for their citizens. Or making that living
standard a lot more expensive than it already is?

Arjay: "I find it amazing that there appears to be no modern day practical experiments being done on the heat retention capacities of CO2. This is the most crucial issue facing man kind today yet we rely on computer models that cannot possibly reflect this complex science."

The heat retention capacities of CO2 are very well understood. We can explain how it works, and the precise effects it will have right down to the sub-atomic level. Thus we know how much of the temperature change is due to CO2 alone, probably down to fractions of a decimal point. And we know it is small - not worth worrying about. None of this is under dispute.

What we don't know with anywhere near as much certainly is how this small temperature rise triggered by the rise in CO2 will effect the overall temperature of the earth.

The overall temperature is regulated by a surprising number of feed back loops (well surprising to me anyway). The climate scientists are saying in the short term the biggest effects are driven by water - the ice, the sea and its currents, water vapour in the atmosphere and clouds. A small temperature rise means less ice and more water vapour. Both these will cause a further rise in temperature - and thus we have a positive feedback loop driving the temperatures up. (Water vapour is a very strong greenhouse gas.) A small temperature may also mean more clouds, which can drive the temperature both up and down, depending on the droplet size and how high they are.

Even so, the heat retention capacities of water (that you call for more research into) is very well understood and not in dispute. What isn't well understood is how water moves around in the atmosphere and sea, when and where it changes between vapour, liquid and solid. This is because it is chaotic, like eddies in water flowing down a stream. So it is unlikely it can ever be understood or predicted in the way you call for. Instead we use computer models to simulate it.

Rpg: “mitchel, you seem to think anyone who is a skeptic is automatically a keen polluter, why is that?”

I certainly don’t think that, rpg. In fact I’m a great admirer of healthy scepticism; it becomes morbid, however, when it degenerates into minimifidianism (sorry, one seldom gets to use such an outrageous locution). At the end of the day nothing is certain, except that nothing is certain, but that’s hardly a good reason not to act when the overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that one should (if one is obese, it doesn't take rocket science to determine that a weight-loss diet is called for). There are also good ethical reasons why we should clean up our act, since we are destroying habitats and entire ecosystems, and not merely threatening our own survival.
I agree with you that “fixing the climate” sounds a tad arrogant, though I haven’t heard anyone credible put it quite like that. The scientific consensus seems to be that we can hopefully “mitigate” GW by reducing the amount of CO2 and other GHG we release into the atmosphere---that is reversing the trend we’ve maintained since the industrial revolution.
We might have to resort to more radical means to save our precious skins, and that would be cause for extreme caution, but at the moment we’re talking about reducing anthropogenic ghg emissions, whose provenance is not in doubt. It’s confronting to think that we’ve dangerously affected the composition and balance of the atmosphere in such a short time, and only reasonable to hope that by reducing our emissions--tantamount to retracing our steps in a minefield--we might avoid destruction. This is hardly “tweaking” the atmosphere, and no one is selling reducing our emissions as a “panacea”—at best we hope thereby to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Surely this is reasonable?
I’m a sceptical individual too, but I’m persuaded that the climate science overall is strenuously rigorous---always allowing for human contamination and bias in any findings.
In any case, we’re just talking about cleaning up our excrement; it’s as simple and salubrious as that.

How can one diagnose the problem when the data is corrupted. Check
out John Coleman's latest discovery. The NASA data was corrupted.
They were correlating temps by hand picking areas, then crediting these
temps with areas that weren't tested. eg. Taking warm weather points
and reporting the temperatures tested were actually from cooler weather points. Google John Coleman's NASA temperatures doctored. Or something. It seems the global thermometers were reduced from 6000
in 1998 to 1500 present time. Now why would anyone go to trouble
of willfully corrupting data? That is what worries me!

Money and governmental control seem to be my first choices, but on
a third, some hidden agenda to place developed countries at a political disadvantage. Any other suggestions?

Q&A. Thanks for the clarification on CO2. I was hoping that you would give me the details on those economic studies. I think you are using a unique definition of "forcing".

Geoff, thanks for your response on CO2 and temperature in the ice cores. I think there is a fundamental problem with the claim that they show CO2 is the major forcing agent after it increases in the atmosphere as a result of outgassing caused by an initially warmer climated state. If, as you say, you don't know what causes the temperature decrease, then you can't be sure that that factor (or factors) in reverse didn't cause the increase, and so can't be sure to what extent CO2 is implicated.

This underlines the fact that over millions of years there is a very poor correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature.

No-one can really explain why Climate Science rather suddenly in the last 20-30 yrs, realised that there had been a massive 'hockey stick' like increases in temperature since 1850?

Somehow prior to the mid to late 1980's Climate Scientists 'missed' 130 years or so of dramatic warming and even touted global cooling as recently as the 1970's. Strangely, the recognition of this formerly unnoticed increase coincides with new social and political forces emerging and not new data.

Perhaps they will change recorded history again to prove otherwise.

“Strangely, the recognition of this formerly unnoticed increase coincides with new social and political forces emerging and not new data”

Wishful thinking Atman and try to keep up because by the 60s, Keeling from Scripps (bereft of "political forces,") was on to something and recognised that the rise of C02 had been relentless and it showed a remarkably constant relationship with fossil-fuel burning, which can be well accounted for based on the simple premise that 57% of fossil-fuel emissions remain airborne.

Regardless of the uncertainties over AGW, CO2 is a pollutant. Industrial emissions which oxidize to CO2 are among the most dangerous known to man including the man-made chlorinated hydrocarbons. CO2 from fossil fuel sources, are the progeny of these industrial pollutants. As a consequence, the state of the environment is seriously degraded. Time for action regardless of global warming.

So while GHGs elevate, the planet cooks and the irrelevant stuff goes on about ice cores, the deniers are insidiously fiddling the books:

On Page 217 of Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth book, Plimer claims to be citing Brasseur and Granier, and states that the Pinatubo volcanic eruption released "very large quantities of chlorofluorocarbons, the gases that destroy the ozone layer."

A lie!

Chlorofluorocarbons are not found in nature and are man-made:

"These changes could affect atmospheric circulation. In addition, heterogeneous chemical reactions on the surface of sulfate aerosol particles render the ozone molecules more vulnerable to atmospheric chlorine and hence to man-made chlorofluorocarbons." (Brasseur and Granier.)

https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/257/5074/1239

In 2007, the Heartland Institute published a paper by Mr Monckton:

“As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.”

“Contributor,” “Peers,” “Nobel Peace Prize,” "Co-laureate" "Comedy Horror," Your Lordship?

Could someone please direct me to his Lordship's whereabouts?

Ice cores indeed!

Oh dear, the IPCC in yet another embarassing moment "THE peak UN body on climate change has been dealt another humiliating blow to its credibility after it was revealed a central claim of one of its benchmark reports - that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 because of global warming - was based on a "speculative" claim by an obscure Indian scientist" http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/united-nations-blunder-on-glaciers-exposed/story-e6frg6n6-1225820614171

"Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Professor Lal admits he knows little about glaciers."

Easy, when you want so much something to be true, you'll do anything to try to make it so. No "peer" review was there? Which the pundits all demand everyone take note of, when it suits the supposed science of climate, you just slip one through, eh? Anything else you'd all like to 'fess up to? Now would be a good time.

Don't worry about little errors by some of the little people, worry about the errors and complicity by the people demanding the world redistribute wealth.

So please do go on demanding that everyone hold the IPCC as the world authority./sarc Those that do risk further ridicule, and rightly so.

The skeptics are certainly correct to doubt the supposed science, melting glaciers indeed!

What on earth are you all doing supporting an organization that includes a quote from a phone interview as "science"? Also the WWF, scientific organization, oh please, they are a lobby group and eco club at best.

Lord Monckton, "The big lie peddled by the UN", yep, that sure looks correct doesn't it?

RPG, the problem with insisting that the science is settled is that when anything you say proves to be wrong all of your assertions and all of your credibility come into question. It's an all or nothing assertion to say the science is settled.

If this report is correct it is an indictment not just of the IPCC but of the thousands of journalists and science advisors who swallowed the story on glaciers. Given the cold temperatures where they are found the claim was obviously tenuous or bogus or both. In fact lack of precipitation rather than increasing warmth was a more likely explanation of shrinkage in these areas.

More of the science touted by the IPCC is exposed in today's Australian_ " United Nations' blunder on glaciers exposed ".

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/united-nations-blunder-on-glaciers-exposed/story-e6frg6n6-1225820614171

The IPCC should resign en masse!

GrahamY,LATO, Q&A, Geaff Davies et all

There is no point just saying that the IPCC should resign en masse, or that it has been shown to be repeatably disfunctional etc.

The fact is that it is gearing up for another AR, and cannot and should not, be allowed to do so under the existing rules of operation and engagement.

I have under two previous posts herein, provided thirteen suggestions for change and improvement.

There may be more.

The thirteen need input from others as to the wording and finessing,which once done may provide a good basis for lobbying for change.

No matter where the balance of the judgement is as to the veracity of AGW, if the IPCC does a repeat performance under the existing rules, it will have no credibility at all, and just be a source of trouble, and a means for people like Gore and Pachauri to line their own pockets, at everyones expence and for there to be no real outcome either way.

Even as of this day there is more coming to light as to the extent of Pachauri conflicts of interest,for one example.

As a past Presidng Member for Statutory Board of Government required to declare at every mtg my pecuniary interests etc,( as is common practice ) what Pachuari is getting away with is stunning in its ramifications and just reflects upon the absolute incompetence of the UN.

We seem to be in a period of having doubt piled upon doubt.
In any other circumstances, whether it be in a court or in any other
area of decision, the protagonists would be sent back to do their work
again.

No matter how much anyone says there is plenty of supporting science
it seems that contrary papers have been suppressed, or their authors
not treated fairly.
Now we have glaciergate !

Considering the amount of wealth about to be poured into CO2 reduction
we really need to be sure what we are doing.
Set against taking CO2 action there are those that say it will be a
lot cheaper and easier to mitigate the effects as they occur.

protagoros - "Could someone please direct me to his Lordship's whereabouts?"

Sure, just Google "Monckton & Plimer Tour Australia: Dates & Venues"

Hopefully you'll be somewhere where you can get along to see his Lordship speak.

good luck!

For OLO-ers who may be interested in how the debate on this article is shaping up (and before the crowd departs for Geoff Davies 18 Jan OLO article on “Climategate”), here is my fairly close analysis of the first 133 posts from 49 different authors:

60 pro-Monckton’s views, 52 con-Monckton and 18 neutral (3 N/As).
Of the 60 pro-Monckton, 9 were about technical issues, 34 were only negative (“personal”) about other authors, scientists the IPCC or other institutions and 17 were both technical and personal. Of those 52 con-Monckton, 32 were technical, 7 were personal and 13 were both technical and personal. None of the neutrals were personal. 17 pro-Monckton referred (either directly or by implication) to other information sources such as URLs, books, videos etc whereas 25 con-Monckton had references and 6 of the neutrals had references.

I infer from this analysis that pro-Moncktons tend to state personally directed, unsubstantiated opinions and con-Moncktons tend to keep to the main subject in the article and cite other sources to support their views. However, there is a fair bit of cross-over by both groups that have made this a pretty lively debate.

By the way- my contributions were con-Monckton and were both personal and technical and both referenced and unreferenced.

jm, you might ask Graham how many flamers he removed, or didn't allow to post, for your interesting analysis to be valid in any way - otherwise, without that data it is cherry picked (and incomplete), is it not?

Isn't that what skeptics continually complain about, the incomplete or "tweaked" datasets?

Amicus

I was hoping that the Editor might elucidate on the matter of the contributions that were removed or didn't make it at all. I know that my first contribution was removed and Graham said that he was removing others as well.

As I have no idea as to the content of the others, it could hardly be said that I was "cherry-picking", which Wikipedia defines as:
"..the act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking) Other definitions are essentially the same.

If you carefully read my analysis, I am neither taking a position with the data (although I have a position re Monckton), nor ignoring a significant portion of related cases that may contradict that position.

As I quoted before: "Arithmetic is not an opinion"

It's the minimifidianists that "cherrypick", for heaven's sake! And the glaciers "are" actually melting, btw.
All science is fraught by human contamination. The science is never settled--though inferences are legitimately drawn.
On the lag between Co2 and warming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWJeqgG3Tl8
Interesting results, Jedimaster. Monckton is of course himself a celebrated flamer and purveyer of hysterical nonsense, yet we are expected to treat him with respect. The flamers were no doubt merely trying to communicate in his native tongue?

Thank you Mitchell. Your link is an excellent account on how the science works on C02.

Currently, this “little known scientist” the Australian rag refers to, who the Indian press describe as “India’s leading glaciologist and Padamshree recipient,” Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain, is thankfully studying the effects of black soot on the Himalayas:

http://beacononline.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/environment-soot-clouds-pose-threat-to-himalayan-glaciers/

An article published on Roger Pielke Snr’s blog states:

“According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist: Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents.”

The document referred to says this on Page 66:

“The extra polar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates— its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350."

But the gaggle of geese, the devotees of the Australian tabloid are feasting on the grub that the rag has thrown at them.

For the time being and until the IPCC publishes an account, I shall give credit to the article at denialist, Roger Pielke Snr’s website. Tut tut IPCC. Was the blunder that of the author or is your office typist dyslexic? All will be revealed but dishonest – No! Careless? Perhaps, yet the science on climate change remains sound. That’s good enough!

Naturally any catastrophic events in the year 2350 is of no concern to the denialists and their representative blowhard windbags who eat from the same poisoned tree as the fossil fuel industry.

Before I believe any climate prediction about what will happen by 2350 ( by which time we would all be 400 years old!!), I would like to see an explanation for the causes etc. of 'the little ice-age' _ a well recorded period between 1310 and the mid 1800 i.e. something that actually happened!

I am looking for an explanation which has the consensus of climate scientists.

For a 'science' that still has to prove itself, making predictions well into the future is the easiest game in town!

Jedimaster: In your dreams. You and some others are obviously politically biased. I've read your posts though. Then been directed
to some really corrupted sites like crikey or whatever. Plimer was
right and you have to only google and see Volcanoes do spew up more
clorine than CFC's. Twisted it a bit haven't you. How do you see
now in the Australian The Ice Caps aren't melting. UN figures are
corrupted and gone to watch John Coleman's site.

However ones political viewpoint will never convince some people that
what they believe is biased and based on falsified or corrupted data.
The means to an end, eh? However, most skeptics are not total deniers nor not suggesting do nothing. Obviously pollution certainly in some countries is a health hazard. In stead of saying environmental pollution will cause climate change, lets start on How to clean up our mess! The danger of overstating a point, as it appears to be, is people fear some political conspiracy and do nothing.

“Volcanoes do spew up more clorine (sic) than CFC's. Twisted it a bit haven't you.”

Can I presume you are referring to me Bush Bunny? If so, may I suggest that it is you who is doing the twisting? Is this twisting through ignorance or is it a blatant attempt to corrupt the science?

Volcanic eruptions inject chlorine in the form of hydrogen chloride into the troposphere but they also spew out huge amounts of water vapor. Hydrogen chloride dissolves in water. The chlorine from an eruption rarely reaches the high stratosphere where the ozone layer is. The massive eruptions of El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 and Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 produced very small increases in stratospheric chlorine.

Man-made chlorofluorocarbons are not soluble in water, are long-lived and are the primary source of chlorine in the stratosphere. In fact, their path of destruction is so well demonstrated that even the companies that make those chemicals (after peddling propaganda to the contrary) had to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence .

I am well aware of Plimer’s endeavours to dupe the public but are you suggesting that reputable scientists don’t know the difference between hydrogen chloride and chlorofluorocarbons?

I repeat: Chlorofluorocarbons are man-made and do not exist in nature. Ian Plimer, a self-professed climate expert, lied, therefore supporting proven liars is very bad for one’s reputation!

I have questioned some of the attitudes you express protorgas. If you want to argue about CFC's it is still not proven they destroy the ozone level. Now point me to Prof.Plimer's suggestion that volcanoes spew out CFC's. You have to argue that he lied that the volcano he picked to mention did spew out Clorine whatever more than the
CFC's that are human contributed. Personally I feel you all are afraid that Prof Plimer and Lord Monckton have more to promote the lies that the climate change promotion by Al Gore et al now you are trying to discredit them for it. A counter argument is not enough I'm afraid. Show me where he said CFC's were spewed out by that volcano, or did you twist what he said?

I have studied it, I have found that some of the suggestions proffered
are not consistent to my knowledge, now I'm no scientist, but if I'm
no scientist then I have learned from scientists at University that don't agree with the Al Gore referendums. Since 1998. There
has always been doubt...now it has been found the whole science or basis for this hysterical politically motivated almost fundimentalist
or religious movement associated with Climate Change, C02 emissions is not only doubtful from scientific corrupted data, but
a big fat lie! So don't get on your high horse, nit pick and then accuse me of doubting what we are supposed to swallow without question. We aren't ignorant fools without education ... However nor do I feel we should do nothing to right some of the environmental abuse that serves to degradate our planet.

Protagoras - Your statement only reinforces my argument merely lessening the "unrecognised warming" time by a few years. Keeling's paper was not about Global Warming and said nothing about being caused by industrialisation. That is all your hype.

Keeling placed his CO2 probe atop of an active volcano, Mauna Loa, which erupted 33 times between 1954 and 1983, and has been erupting continuously since 1983.

Very questionable science, but then that's what this whole sham is based upon.

Protagoras - Had to post again so quickly as I just realised your argument is a complete and not a partial scam.

In response to my question about why Scientists only became "aware" of the drastic 160 yr temperature increase 25 yrs or so ago you quoted a 1960's graph measuring CARBON DIOXIDE (atop an active volcano!) not TEMPERATURE.

Must say very typical of the baseless arguments pro AGW people present.

My question remains unanswered.

Protagoras, your error is common.

Plimer is right, although he attributed it to the incorrect source. Understandable in the first edition of a book with 2300 footnotes.

The following is a quote from Timothy Casey, a geologist who has researched the topic:

“In spite of numerous erroneous academic assertions, CFCs are naturally occurring chemicals and are a significant component of active volcanism. Volcanic CFCs are emitted in the presence of compounds that raise the residence time of volcanic halogens in addition to intensifying their ozone damaging effect. This would suggest that volcanoes have had a significant impact on the ozone layer.”

His basis is set out at:

http://cfc.geologist-1011.net/

The comments on this thread do not take a steady course. The point of this article is that the global warming scam is based on pretend science, and on the ceaseless efforts by scientists involved to corrupt information as it becomes available.

There has been no warming since 1998, and there has been cooling since 2001. CO2 has increased throughout the period, while temperature has declined.

There have been frantic efforts to hide the decline, and both Hadley and NOOA present the information on temperature in a misleading way, differently to the way it was presented by them during the warming years up to 1998.

Copenhagen was the latest step in this massive attempted fraud, and its failure seems to have redoubled the efforts of the supporters of the fraud, rather than discouraged them.

Geoff Davies has written an OLO article asserting that the Hadley emails do not mean what they say, and the scientists were simply doing their job.

No one is able to show that human emissions have any discernible effect. They are an insignificant part of the same carbon cycle which has been run by Nature for millions of years. They do not justify any proposition to tax the Western world, or to run trading schemes in spurious carbon credits to enrich Gore and the UN.

well well well, Plimer didn't lie about CFCs.

So he's not a liar, on that count, and I'm sure protagoros will be big enough to post an apology. A lot of the "believosphere" seems cluttered with all these clumsy attempts to drag down any "heretic's" reputation, what a waste of effort.

The "believosphere" looks worse, day by day, for the supposed science they grimly try to support.

It means that the entire science is flawed if we have reached this point, what with glacial melt predictions now based on comments off the cuff to journalists ending up in IPCC reports, it is a farce.

We'll probably see them glom onto this even harder, even as the yellow stuff sticks to their faces eh?

Must say my original text was both entered apparently but was scrubbed out because it didn't make the grade.

Anyhow here goes again.

If man wants to make the grade in the future world, he'd better treat the whole world more kindly, otherwise he will find the world not being so kindly to him.

Probably just commonsense will do it, but all one mostly finds is one mind trying to destroy the other.

Dear o dear!
To all the bonehead denialists: I'm flaming!--to myself. But I want you to know that I'm embarrassed myself by the invective that comes to mind; I'm "licking the chops of my own malice"!--to quote someone who might characteristically be taking your side. You conjure images of fattened locusts after a plague. One says laconically to the other, "It wasn't anythin' I done, mate".
...Nah, she'll be right!

Leo Lane, you keep doing it, don't you?

"There has been no warming since 1998, and there has been cooling since 2001. CO2 has increased throughout the period, while temperature has declined." Followed by:

"There have been frantic efforts to hide the decline, and both Hadley and NOOA present the information on temperature in a misleading way, differently to the way it was presented by them during the warming years up to 1998."

Oh please! Have a look at 2005. Besides, we all know you think global warming means increased temperatures every year. I'll go further, what's your definition of warming, or cooling?

You still don't get it, you never will ... why the Qld Supreme Court Appeals Judge in the Xstrata case called Bob Carter's claim that global warming ended in 1998 um, er ... crap.

So, you think "hide the decline" refers to temperature? If you do then you obviously don't know what you are talking about, or you are playing games - my guess, both.

LATO: The mini ice age - Hi. From what I remember from Uni. The Earth is an ice planet, most of the last 2.5 years. However, it does fluctuate from full glacial, mini ice-ages and interstadials. (warm periods like we are experiencing now) One common thing (if I can call
it that is that?) is that before an ice age or mini, temps do warm up
and there have been times when temps have been warmer than today.

From what I learned of the last time the Northern Hemisphere for some
reason I can't remember is harder hit than the Southern Hemisphere.
The last time it was cold in the 14th Century. Wine making was badly
hit, in UK and in Europe it stopped. But they used the wine presses to convert into printing presses improving communications via books etc.

Fresh water from the Artic settles over sea water, and it diverted
the gulf stream so those countries and continents that are prevented
from freezing does effect the ability to grow foods, particularly grapes. I believe the gulf stream has been effected now... 15 continuously cold winter susually heralds a cooling period. And scientists know this...or they should. CO2 emissions do not have much to do with it. But humans must adapt and I feel causing hysteria and AGW falsified data is not the way to take appropriate action. The Australian comment on Monckton is just saying he tells it like he sees it. That's his persona, I do not object to it, just as Al Gore had his style and if you watch his DVD towards the end, he blames CO2 for heralding in a new ice age. I wonder why?

Q&A, your remark about Carter and the Xstrata case is delusional.

After dealing with the fact that the IPCC Fourth Summary misrepresented the science, the Judge pointed out that an important critique of the Stern Report by Robert Carter had not been brought to his attention, although relevant to the hearing.

Carter did an excellent job of showing that the Stern Report, relied upon by Professor Ian Lowe in this action, was false and baseless.

During the hearing, Professor Ian Lowe admitted, in the witness box, that his evidence was exaggerated by a factor of 15 times. I think that categorises him as a liar, although the Court was too polite to use this term to describe him, in his shabby presentation.

The case makes good reading for those interested in the mendacity of the IPCC, Ian Lowe and Stern, of Stern Report infamy.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/qld/QLRT/2007/33.html

How does your false statement about Robert Carter categorise you, Q&A?

I acknowledge that some of your post was true, but only where you quoted me verbatim.

What amazes me, is that the Hadley emails were necessary to demonstrate the dishonesty of the warmists. It has been obvious for a long time, certainly since the fraudulent Gore first presented his dishonest film.

Leo, I think that both you and Q&A are wrong. He is referring to the appeal against the Land and Resources Tribunal decision that you reference, not the decision itself. The appeal was to the Supreme Court. The appeal is at http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/qld/QCA/2007/338.html?query=title%28xstrata%29

I remembered the case, and the odd thing was that the tribunal brought the Carter paper in after the case had been heard and had not taken submissions on it. The major ground on which the appeal was upheld was that this was a denial of natural justice. The matter was sent back to the Tribunal for rehearing. Interestingly one of our authors Stephen Keim SC appeared for the Queensland Conservation Council.

As far as I can see, and I've only skimmed it, as well as doing a word search on "Carter", there is no discussion of the accuracy of Carter's paper, and no finding, to quote Q&A's elegant phrase, that it was "crap". That doesn't surprise me as appeals courts don't normally re-examine the evidence.

In which case, the only judgement on Carter is the Tribunal President's comments, where he significantly accepts Carter's argument. He also picks up an error in Lowe's evidence where the figure that he gives is out by 1500%.

I was waiting for Q&A to come back, but he appears to have disappeared. Perhaps he can point me to something that I've missed in the appeal judgement, or retract his statement.

Graham, I acknowledge that I referred to the initial case, and Q&A referred to the Appeal. I was wrong as to a reference, while Q&A was wrong in the sense that he did not know what he was talking about.

It does not change the substance of my reply. The Appeal Court found that the Applicant had not been given the opportunity to make submissions in respect of Carter’s paper, and referred the matter back for rehearing.

At no point was there any criticism of Carter’s paper, in either Court. The lower Court obviously considered it an effective criticism of Stern's flawed effort.

Queensland legislation was passed which put an end to the case, which was interfering with Xstrata’s development of a coal mine, on the spurious ground that it would cause global warming.

As we all know, but the warmists will not admit, there is no scientific evidence that human activity contributes in any significant way to global warming. Running their line in a Court case is a waste of time and resources, so the Government was sensible to legislate as it did.

Bush bunny:

Thanks for your comment about my earlier request for an explanation of the Little Ice Age.

The reason I keep asking for an 'explanation' is to illustrate how poor the predictive capabilities of climate science are.

The Little Ice Age (LIO) is a well recorded sequence of events roughly dating between 1300 and the early 1800s. Basically, global temperature dropped significantly very quickly and did not return to what it was before until the 1800s.

Through modern scientific measurement techniques, the climatic condition that existed prior, during and after the LIO are well recorded.

Consequently, one would expect, that for a subject that claims to be a science, it should be possible to come up with an explanation as to why the LIO happened when it did, that is agreed to by the mainstream if not all those who claim to be climate scientists! And yet, there is no such explanation. Some say that the LIO was a result of cyclical lows in solar activity, others say that it was due to volcanic activity, others still blame changes in ocean currents etc. etc. What sort of science is that?

And these same people expect the world to believe their long term predictions about global temperature, sea levels etc., which they claim to be accurate!!

In a more serious subject, such as physics, when some phenomenon cannot be explained by current theory, physicists put their minds to revising the theory until a proper explanation is arrived at_ and only then can one proceed to make serious predictions about that phenomenon.

A very well known ilustration of this, was the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which clearly showed that the then accepted theory about the speed of light etc. did not explain the results of the experiment.

This difference between theory and experiment generated new thinking which ultimately led to Einstein's theory of relativity and which went on to very accurately explain this and other physical phenomena.

To me that is science!

Jedimaster: "For OLO-ers who may be interested in how the debate on this article is shaping up ..."

Jedimaster, that was very useful. Thanks.

Graham Young and Leo Lane

Bob Carter appeared as an “expert witness” for Xtrata in the initial Land and Resources Tribunal hearing … claiming global warming ceased in 1998. Indeed, the president (of the tribunal) was persuaded by Carter’s court room antics, exemplified in the findings (Leo).

However, at the conclusion to the appeal (to those findings) Justice Mackenzie states:

“There was also reference to the period 1998-2006 which the Tribunal’s reasons describe as another example of a period of cooling. The year 1998, selected as the starting point for the period of cooling (in Bob Carter’s graph) was, according to the graph, significantly warmer than any of the years preceding it and any which had followed it up to 2006. Had either of the following two years been selected as the starting point, and the result for 1998 been treated as an aberrant spike, the period to 2006 would have demonstrated an increase over that period larger than the alleged cooling relied on by the President.”

I am bemused that for the last few months, Carter and his cohorts (Leo) now choose 2001 as the year that global warming ceased. It would not surprise me in the least that some will say 2005, or 2010, or 2015, or ...

The simple fact remains, those who are not trained in time series statistical analysis really don’t know what they are talking about when they state global warming stopped in 1998, or that the globe has been cooling since then.

I find it abhorrent that people of the likes of Carter can “spin it” in a court of law with obvious contempt for the real experts in statistics. Thankfully, Justice Mackenzie picked it up.

Graham, yes - the matter was sent back for re-hearing. However, within 4 days of the decision, the Qld government “changed the rules”, effectively over-riding the Court’s decision. Xstrata and the Qld (Labor) government both got what they wanted – it was always going to end that way, imho.

Q&A you wonder why I have trouble taking anything that you say seriously when you do things like this. You refer to Carter being an "expert witness" and his "court room antics". Yet we all have access to the documentary evidence and it is, unlike some of the issues to do with climate change, unequivocal. In his finding the president says:

"The Carter-Byatt critique of the Stern Review was not mentioned at the hearing. I became aware of it a few days later, at about the same time as the IPCC’s 4th Report Summary was released."

No "court room antics". No expert witness. A document that was not even mentioned at the hearing (but that is the reason that the appeal succeeds). In fact XStrata accepted the IPCC view of the world, so why would they have brought Bob Carter in as a witness?

Then you selectively quote from the appeal judgement. It is not Carter that Mackenzie J is questioning, but the president of the tribunal. He goes on to say:

"It is not the function of the present appeal to express a conclusion whether or not the methodology and analysis relied on by the President of the Tribunal is valid or not."

So, no finding that what Carter said was "crap". He explicitly says it is not his role to judge whether Carter is right or not.

Unless you can do better than this you must retract your accusation.

Q&A, you had better retract any accusation that Graham wants you to, the last person I saw who he said that to was hit with the banhammer when they were unrepentant.

He only pounces when he thinks he has a watertight case against you and you happen to disagree with him. It's the Christian way.

Repent now Q&A!

Lato, I may be woefully ignorant about the science of climate change, but I did know quite a bit of the history and philosophy of science--at least I did six years ago.

You say 'In a more serious subject, such as physics, when some phenomenon cannot be explained by current theory, physicists put their minds to revising the theory until a proper explanation is arrived at_ and only then can one proceed to make serious predictions about that phenomenon'.

Scientific procedure is more complex and more tortuous than that. An outstanding example is Newton's theory of motion. After he published the first version of his theory, a number of anomalies were noted. Some of them were resolved by his subsequent work on optics, some by changes taking into account the effects of the planets on each other. But several were not resolved during his lifetime; and the orbit of Mercury in particular was never explained. Yet scientists continued to use the theory, and relied on it in developing explanations of many other phenomena. And yes, they did predict the orbit of Mercury on a statistical basis. It took Einstein's theory to explain it, however.

You are right that serious scientists seek to explain anomalies--and do not hide them. Good explanations have further implications, which enable their assumptions or the new pieces of theory involved to be verified. (An explanation of the orbit of Mercury which relies on the existence of another planet in the same orbit on the other side of the sun implies that we should be able to detect it. When some Monash University scientists thought they had done so, Einstein's theory had a new anomaly. It was soon resolved.)

The process by which one theory is replaced by another, and the principles which should guide those processes have been the subject of extended historical and philosophical discussion. Understandably, the scientists find themselves caught up in the philosophical debate, as well, in arguing their cases.

Mathematics, too, is not immune from methodological dispute. Even arithmetic.

Ozbib,
excellent.
Evolution has also been the subject of constant revision, though the fundamentals remain unchallenged, except by creationist loonies/intelligent designers. Off topic, I know, but there's an obvious parallel with those who deny the fundamentals of AGW. It should be changed to AGD (anthropocentric global destruction); warming is of course only one of the many related symptoms of the catastrophic human induced biospheric malady under way.
But no, there ain't no such animal, is there.

Q&A, GrahamY,

"The simple fact remains, those who are not trained in time series statistical analysis really don’t know what they are talking about when they state global warming stopped in 1998, or that the globe has been cooling since then." (Q&A)

I don't know anything about the court case, but I do know you don't have to be a statistics expert to sensibly interpret the temperature time series of the past few decades.

Bob Carter takes 1995 or 1998 as the start of his graphs, both relatively high years. See Fielding's graph (attributed to Carter) at
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/global-warming-not-cancelled/
If you just include back to 1980 or 1970 you see there has been an obvious increase, which Carter's version obscures.

There have also been temporary small decreases in the 5-year moving average - See
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/global-cooling-since-1998/
It is then obvious that the recent small decrease is nothing unusual, and no reason to proclaim the end of global warming. If it lasts another decade, then you'd have a case.

Also if you pick plots other than Hadley (which don't include polar data and so miss some of the more recent warming) you see the recent small decrease is less pronounced.

In other words, Carter cherry-picked the data in a blatantly obvious way. Either he's incompetent, or he's blinded by his cause, or he's flat-out dishonest. Sorry, but that's the straightforward conclusion.

Ozbib,

Nice discussion. I think there's a way to be even clearer. My own criterion for a theory is not "truth" or "proof" or "disproof" but whether a theory is *useful*. Thus Newton's theory had an inaccuracy, but it was still very useful. Einstein's theory was more accurate, therefore *more useful*. But Newton's theory is not therefore *wrong*.

Science is not about truth or proof, it's about finding useful guides to how the world is observed to work.

Well said, Geoff. One would assume that most OLO-ers could understand what you have written and would agree that "usefulness" is a useful way of looking at the scientific method. A similar approach is thinking of science as "reliable knowledge". For a good exposition see John Ziman's "Reliable Knowledge" (Cambridge University Press 1978).

"Proof" is also not an absolute, except in situations of constrained logic, like mathematics, where all the axioms and operations are agreed upon, so the "proofs" are just corollaries, or outcomes.

By thinking of "reliability", we can then ask "how reliable?", which leads into statistical probabilities and measurement uncertainties (unhelpfully called "error bars", which sets the deniers running) etc.

Thus, as statement about global warming such as "at the present trend, it is likely (ie a high probability) of a 2 degree global temperature rise within a century" is couched in terms of probability. One cannot "prove" global warming, as it is inferred from data. Similarly one cannot "prove" AGW.

And by the same token, one cannot "disprove" these things. The most that deniers can say is that the data correlations are not sufficient to give them cause for worry.

So it boils down to issues of "reasonable doubt", which assumes that all parties to the debate are reasonable.

Personally, I think the Copenhagen Summit killed any unilateral agreement on Carbon Emissions. I have heard beside Australia other
countries are following suit and not voting for Carbon Emissions
because of the doubt thrown up allegedly by Al Gore and now the anti
Al Gore et al movement denial that the science is flawed. And it is!

What worries me is that this will stop any movement towards greener energy and fuels, soil science technology to improve carbon sequestration, land use generally, not reduce the destruction of rain forests in South America and elsewhere, and other worthwhile sustainability measures.

I mean those TV ads in Australia on SBS - "Even if CO2 emissions tomorrow ceased, the methane from cattle, sheep are enough to continue
global warming. Save the Planet! Eat veg not meat". That's enough
to warn anyone interested in 'Saving the Planet' environmentally to
question the questioners.

In my opinion, wind generated electricity is a worthwhile venture,
provided as some critics suggest, that it can sustain small communities. However - like solar it is not been proven so far to
be able to exist without major problems, either by continuance of supply when there's no wind available, and if they break down, the windmills cost more to repair than to replace. And in cold countries
solar is not an alternative to nuclear or coal fired electricity plants. I am initially was against nuclear thinking about Chenobly
however, that plant was old, badly run, etc., and the newer plants
are less hazardous (So we are told?). Water driven plants or wave
geothermal, solar thermal even, might be an idea for the future, when
fossil fuels run out, and we aren't held at ransom by foreign oil producers.

Without any decent electricity supply we are gone!

Bugsy

It seems only others can use the 'metaphor', so yes … I do most humbly repent. The Supreme Court Appellate Judge Mackenzie did not use the word “crap”. He said:

“There was also reference to the period 1998-2006 which the Tribunal’s reasons describe as another example of a period of cooling. The year 1998, selected as the starting point for the period of cooling (in Bob Carter’s graph) was, according to the graph, significantly warmer than any of the years preceding it and any which had followed it up to 2006. Had either of the following two years been selected as the starting point, and the result for 1998 been treated as an aberrant spike, the period to 2006 would have demonstrated an increase over that period larger than the alleged cooling relied on by the President.”
_____

Geoff Davies http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9906#160445

"In other words, Carter cherry-picked the data in a blatantly obvious way. Either he's incompetent, or he's blinded by his cause, or he's flat-out dishonest. Sorry, but that's the straightforward conclusion."

The point I was trying to make - of course, you are right. If I say things like that I get threatened with suspension (if not banned altogether) or get rapped over the knuckles.

Have you seen these ‘Nature’ pieces?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/463269a.html

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html

They are not 'pay-walled' and are worth a read, by everyone. Nonetheless, the ‘deny-n-delay’ brigade will no doubt cherry-pick and use them for their own agenda.
_____

Jedimaster

<< So it boils down to issues of "reasonable doubt", which assumes that all parties to the debate are reasonable. >>

Hmmm … thing is, science “debate” is not judged as in a court of law (guilty/not guilty) but rather on weight of evidence, by their peers.

Indeed, “debate” is rather a loose term when discussing scientific nuances. This is why it is ludicrous for (most) scientists to indulge in public debate with articulate show-ponies (those damn metaphors again) with an averse agenda, or people who only believe what they want to believe, regardless of the science.

Btw, do you know who is funding the Monckton-Plimer “road-show”?

Q&A

I've tried to find out who is sponsoring Monckton- it seems like it's ad hoc with Plimer helping. It would be nice to know- in the name of transparency- if their are any specific corporate sponsors.

John Ziman, to whom I referred in an earlier blog, once made the distinction between law and science as being "advocacy" compared with "evidence". Both Law and Science require the "facts" to be presented. With Law, the judge and jury weigh these facts on the scales of justice, which are calibrated according to "beyond reasonable doubt" or "on the balance of probability". As the tilting of the scales gives rise to "penalties" to one of the parties, there is great motivation to not disclose all the facts or use rhetoric, sophistry and other devices of debate to emphasise the subjective nature of the facts. In my experience as an expert witness, I found lawyers constantly promoting "remote possibilities" as "distinct probabilities".

Science, in its best practice, only talks about probabilities- leaving it to the reader to decide what course of action they should take, given the level of probability (or uncertainty) expressed.

In summary, it seems that we have a clash of cultures going on here- the "advocates", who seem to think that scientists are putting our modern lifestyle on trial, and for whom "anything goes" in their discourse versus the "evidentialists", who are hobbled by the ethos of science and are condemned for having less than perfect knowledge.

Q&A: "Btw, do you know who is funding the Monckton-Plimer road-show?"

Interesting question.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/high-priest-of-the-sceptics-lured-to-tour/story-e6frg6n6-1225821410477

http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2010/01/lord-moncktons-australian-lecture-tour-dates

If I were Smit & Smeed I would not want Monckton's visit to be seen as a dog & pony show put on by corporates, so I'd go to some trouble to hide any donations from them. And if it is corporate dog and pony show they have been successful so far, because it sure doesn't look like it.

To me the most interesting titbit from those links is Monckton is charging them $20K for the four weeks of his time - above and beyond expenses of course. I wondered what he did for a living, and I guess that goes some way to answering the question. As Hamilton pointed out in his Crikey article, Monckton makes a habit of taking contrarian positions on contentious topics. I guess if your main talent is public speaking this is one way of getting paid for it.

Q%A and Jedimaster, google "Funding Monckton Australia",(tricky query there, how did you both miss that, or did you not try?) you will get the press release with the names of the 2 retired gentlemen who have put up the funding.

Ozandy will now try to link them to the fossil fuel industry, another conspiracy theorist.

They are

Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM
Noosaville Qld. 4566
07 5473 0475
case.smit@gmail.com

John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ
Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567
07 5474 8928
johnsmeed@adna.com.au

They put up some money and the rest is to come from donations, not Big Oil, not evil corporations, just some concerned citizens who are skeptical and decided to do something about it.

Like the academics who got Al Gore out to speak at their funfest in Melbourne last year (who funded that eh, must have cost a bomb, Al is not cheap! Was big green involved, which eco clubs funded it, I heard some big doners got to meet the man himself! They had an AGW clinic and workshop, clearly conspiring to deliver the world to a UN overlord - you guys crack me up with your conspiracies and I can only laugh when I see you all try to justify the way you behave)

Geoff, Q&A makes a number of allegations, none of which are borne out by the material that we have. Nowhere in the court documents is Carter quoted as saying that global warming stopped in 1998. All of that is a red-herring.

The court documents refer to Carter's critique of the Stern Report, and it is the President of the Tribunal who makes the comments about the temperature increases, which he bases on IPCC4, not Carter.

Now I accept that Q&A has no expertise in law or science so it's possible that he made his claim innocently. However, it stops being innocent if when his error is pointed out he fails to admit it.

Can you point me to the place where Carter says that global warming stopped in 1998? My understanding of his case is that climate changes and that current climate fluctuations are well within what we might expect from the historical record.

He appears to be well-aware of the dangers of cherry-picking as you can see if you look at this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI. In fact, I'd say that he would claim that you are cherry-picking.

Are you going to retract your claim that "Either he's incompetent, or he's blinded by his cause, or he's flat-out dishonest. Sorry, but that's the straightforward conclusion," or do you have a evidence to support your claims of fact?

Amicus
Thank you for that information re Monckton’s sponsors. I am interested to note that you have more confidence in Google than you do in Wikipedia. They seem to have made a profitable investment- if they are profit sharing.

Monckton’s fees seem to be quite modest by today’s standards for entertainment celebrities. Most scientists are lucky if they can get their airfares paid to international conferences if they are keynote speakers.

I am also pleased that the Editor got onto the earlier version of your blog pretty quickly- before I could respond to your offensive smears. I would assess that it was very close to the legal edge. It adds one more data point to my previous analysis of this debate- this time I saw the cherry before Graham picked it.

As for my “motives”- nothing sinister, as you seem to suggest. From more than forty five years of wide experience, I have seen it all come and go many times. I simply make decisions based on the probable risk/return ratios derived from the data- sometimes with a moral bias from my Judeo-Christian heritage. In this case the data indicates that AGW is more probable than any other explanation. No amount of personal abuse adds any useful data to either side of what seems, probably, a very important debate

Apologies all.

Whilst Bob Carter has claimed to be an expert witness, he was not called in the Xstrata case (although his graph appears to have been used).

His claim that global warming stopped in 1998 is well documented - just google:

"bob carter" + "global warming stopped in 1998"

Graham is half right, I have no expertise in law.

_______

Thanks rstuart and Amicus (no, I didn't bother) re: funding the road show. I wonder if Gina in WA is contributing too?

The simple fact is that global warming stopped in 1998 after which temperatures plateaued until 2001. Cooling started in 2002.

It is no wonder that it is so difficult to get facts straight on this topic, with the unrelenting efforts of the IPCC, and the Hadley gang working to present lies, and to obscure the truth.

Sites like Wikipedia will not allow a truthful article on global warming to remain for more than a few minutes. It still has an entry on Naiomi Oreskes ridiculous finding on the non existent "consensus".

I outlined the difficulties faced by anyone seeking the truth here:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9947#160487

Carter is one of the few honest sources in this sorry mess, and he is targeted by people, many of whom are innocently manipulated by those seeking to commit the greatest fraud in history, the IPCC and Al Gore.

Even Google was manipulated in the immediate aftermath of the release of the Hadley emails. I could not believe my eyes when, on googling “climategate” the top result was the Realclimate, run by one of the Hadley perpetrators, Mann, of “hockey stick” infamy. Nothing on the Realclimate site gives genuine truthful information about climate or the emails.

The journalist who brought about correction of this travesty, was unable to obtain any information from Google, about how such an interference with the search parameters came about, or even an admission that it had happened.

The terrifying part is the reach of these miscreants, particularly the interference with the data from the sattelites, so that the drop in global temperature, at the time when greatest human output of emissions is alleged, is obscured, and a false warming, for some of the years, subsequent to 1998, is shown.

Q&A, I have looked at the first three references Google provides and none of them has Carter saying that global warming stopped in 1998. Can you provide a specific source? If not I'm looking forward to the other half of your retraction.

You might also like to look up the meaning of "expert witness". It is not something you claim to be, it is something you are, by virtue of being asked to give witness in court. If you were asked to give witness in court and did, then you would be an expert witness.

In this case Carter did not give witness, although I would imagine he probably has given evidence in other cases in his career, so your reference to him "claim[ing] to be an expert witness", is just an attempt to make your accusation sound plausible, denigrate Carter and evade your misrepresentation.

If you read the Xstrata case you will see that the graph that was referred to was the IPCC graph. There is no mention of a graph by Carter, and in fact I have not seen Carter once refer to a graph that he himself constructed - they are always graphs from the peer-reviewed literature.

I know you claim to be a scientist, but that claim has to be bogus. You are extremely careless with facts (see the rest of this exchange) and lacking in knowledge of basic scientific principles. Your contributions here are more or less just trolling.

Well I'm not taking a backward step, the issue remains contentious at best from the minimifidian (the minimifidianists inhabit an island neighbouring Lilliput and Blefuscu) point of view. I watched the Carter films and they are persuasive, but being a bit of a rhetorician myself, and not a scientist, I'm far from convinced by that. Anyway, my position on AGD (anthropogenic global destruction) is surely not in doubt; there ought to an ethical injunction to clean up our act, including Co2, whether or not we are sure that it's a baddy in the unprecedented concentration it's currently at. As for ETS, as I tried to reason earlier, it is in fact the only sensible course, providing that the revenue finds its way to R&D into cleaner energy production and more efficient consumption. These can only be pluses in terms of the finite fossil fuels on the planet.
Finally, Q&A, congratulations on your humility; it is certainly the height of pig-headedness to try to defend an ambiguous position.
So what makes the Minimifidianists so cocksure? Do they ever stop to wonder, I wonder, whether there might be something in AGW. Like the other cultures from that archipelego, they will no doubt give themselves credit for their rigour rather than their prejudice, and are far from seeing the merit of preventative or ethical or sustainable, or thrifty ways of inhabiting the planet. Such "sentimentality" merely arouses their scorn and derision.
I wait to see what will come of it all. Somehow, I don't think Carter will have the last word.

Mitchell, you might consider the danger of conflating a concern for the environment with concern for global warming. Action on the false premise of AGW is then seen as beneficial for the environment, when in fact quite the opposite is the case.

The unproven AGW case is asserted for the purpose of giving underserved profits to the very people who do the environment great harm by diverting resources to facilitate a fraud, when those resources could be directed most effectively to assisting the environment.

Carbon is not pollution; all life on earth is carbon based. The natural carbon cycle is important to all life, and has worked efficiently for millions of years.

There are great benefits to increased carbon dioxide in the air, and the assertion that more than 350 ppm is detrimental has no basis.

Plant life is not only stimulated by CO2, but made less dependent on water.

The greening of millions of acres of the Sahara comes not just from better water technology, but from the increase in the proportion of CO2 in the air.

There is an assumption that the increase comes from human activity, but this as yet has no scientific basis. If it is ever proven then we should take credit for the benefit to the Earth.

People who oppose a fraud on a scale never before attempted are not anti environment. They are anti criminal activity, as attempted by Gore and the United Nations, with their proposal of an expensive solution to a problem which does not exist.

GrahamY,

Following Q&A's suggestion, I googled. The first one I tried (which happened to be the 9th result) was
http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/09/12/spot-the-recycled-denial-v-–-prof-bob-carter/
where Carter is quoted from a Courier-Mail OpEd:
"One important test is that global temperature has failed to increase since 1998 despite an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide of almost 5 per cent since then."

This fits what Senator Fielding has been saying, and the graph he parades. Fielding relies on some "independent" scientists in his argument with Penny Wong, and the first listed is Carter. See my account near the end of
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/global-cooling-since-1998/
with link to Fielding's website.

My other source was Four Corners some weeks ago. Carter addressed a bunch of cockies (Courtesy Senator Joyce) and made the same claim. As I recall, he had a graph on the screen similar to Fielding's. At the time I know I called to the TV "Show them the earlier data too Bob". Unfortunately he didn't respond. But I think my recollection is pretty clear that he claimed warming stopped in 1998 or thereabouts.

So no, no retraction. And if you reckon I'm cherry-picking, tell me how, don't just make a vague innuendo.

Leo Lane,
Climate scientists make a distinction between "short-term fluctuations" (i.e. fluctuations over 1-5 years or so) and "climate change". It is that distinction, which has a sensible basis, that allows climate scientists to say there is no clear evidence that the climate is no longer warming. You are correct that average temperatures have not increased since around 2005, but that does not mean the long-term trend is gone. The next couple of years are likely to tell, if the warming resumes. 2009 was warmer than 2008, and the second-hottest, after 2005, in the NASA data.

However I doubt you are really interested in this distinction, since it is made by scientists, and you seem totally committed to disbelieving anything a scientist says.

Leo Lane,
the allegation of a deliberate and widespread "fraud" remains unsubstantiated and therefore an innuendo; indeed independent analyses have so far found the hyperbole over the leaked emails to be unfounded. And I don't believe there's are global conspiracy going on (except on the side of the denialists); it's impossible to fix a cricket match without the truth getting out!
Thanks for the tips on the salubrious properties of Co2; though I'm not a scientist, I have some rudimentary understanding of photosynthesis. A lot of scientists are saying that Co2 is tantamount to a pollutant at the current and growing concentration. Interestingly, Carter said nothing to refute this hypothesis, he merely waxed lyrical about its beneficial effects.
They are not "assumptions" that the unprecedented levels of Co2 are anthropogenic, they are well documented. As for proof; there ain't no such animal!

Graham, you mustn't be googling exactly what Q&A suggested, here's a tip:leave in the quotes.

The second result returned by that search is this link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3624242/There-IS-a-problem-with-global-warming...-it-stopped-in-1998.html

The title:"There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998" by Bob Carter.

Oh no Bob, say it isn't so.

Now, can you please stop pretending that Bob Carter has never said these things, or pretending that indeed anyone serious is saying them.

Mitchell

Re: “ indeed independent analyses have so far found the hyperbole over the leaked emails to be unfounded”

You might like to have a read of this on a parallel thread:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9947#160557

By the way, who was this -–independent-- arbiter who found the charges unfounded?

Bugsy, that is exactly the reference that I get as the second entry on Google, but there is no claim in it from Carter that global warming stopped in 1998. The headline says that, but it is not in the article, and is not consistent with the article.

Headlines are put on articles not by the author, but by a sub-editor. One of their major purposes is to get readers to look at an article. They are never reviewed by the author who doesn't see them until after the article goes into print. They cannot be attributed to the author.

If this is the basis of Q&A's claim then we can add a third area where he lacks expertise. But perhaps there is a quote from Carter where he says exactly this, so I'm prepared to wait for Q&A, but not trawl through a whole lot of Google links because he is not prepared to do the work himself.

Geoff, it is a mathematical fact that the temperature has cooled since 1998, assuming that the temperature datasets being used are accurate. There is no conflict between a cooling since 1998 and the last decade being hotter on average than the preceding one. They measure two different things. One measures what has happened during the decade and the other what has happened between decades.

I didn't say that you had cherry-picked, I said that I would say that Carter would make that accusation against you. In the video I referenced he chooses a number of different start and end points to demonstrate how trend lines can support either warming or cooling. You seem to think that choosing a start point that disagrees with your world view is cherry-picking when you attack his observation of temperature decline since 1998. You then go on to select a start point which is just as arbitrary.

But Carter picks his points to demonstrate how easy it is to come to different conclusions about direction depending on where you start and end. His point is that the variability we are experiencing is within normal tolerances.

I think that you are being a bit precious here Graham. You may blame that headline on an editor and claim that Bob Carter never claimed what it says, but none of his comments are at odds with it, indeed they are all consistent with the statement. Perhaps you should ask him who wrote the headline before making assumptions and demanding retractions by it's repetition here Graham.

Also, nowhere do I see him distancing himself from that headline on his own article or explaining the difference between what he wrote and what the headline claims. He has not written anything saying that he doesn't stand by it.

Before you claim that he doesn't have to, may I remind you that it was on his own article.

Geoff Davies says: “Science is not about truth or proof,”

That might apply to you and the Hadley gang, Geoff. Honest scientists regard truth as an indispensible element in reporting observations on how the world works.

Geoff seems to think that a starting point which shows a warming trend is valid, while a starting point which shows cooling, is “cherry picked”.

Robert Carter has explained that trends are dependent on the starting point which is chosen. A starting point of 700 years ago, gives a temperature trend which is down.

If a point of emergence from the mini ice age recently experienced by the Earth, is selected, then the trend is up, and (fortunately), the globe has warmed since that time.

The point is that from 1998 there have been no higher temperatures, and a quibble about whether warming has stopped does not mean much in practical terms.

Whatever the statistical arguments, the current warming is less than half that of the peak warming of .7 of a degree in 1998, and there are points since 1998 where global temperature has dipped into cooling.

The point of the warmists is that until the whole of the .7 of a degree is gone, some warming is still there, so technically it is not correct to say warming has stopped, but it is certainly cooler than the paltry peak temperature in 1998.

The point of the Realists is that there has been no unusual warming, and the predictions of the IPCC now appear nonsensical.

The prediction of the IPCC about glaciers in India, was certainly nonsensical, and its insertion was contrary to the IPCC assertion of a scientific base for their Summary. This is simply another example of the untrue assertions constantly exposed in the IPCC Summaries.

Geoff Davies, who claims to be a scientist, is an excellent example of the mentality which backs the warmist house of cards. Perhaps he is a postmodernist, which would explain his disdain for the truth.

I do not know what would explain his failure to withdraw his scandalous and baseless remark about Professor Robert Carter.

Once again, Leo Lane's contribution gives weight to my hypothesis that there are two cultures arguing using different languages.

Those in the science/evidence culture accept that empiricism/positivism (observation and recording of sense-data with agreed metrics) provides probabilistic statements, with more data usually increasing the probability that future observations will accord with their statements. Unfortunately, science students are drilled with notions about "the laws of physics" -Newtons Laws etc.These laws are actually "highly reliable hypotheses". Scientists might talk loosely about the truth, but the notion of "truth" is about absolute certainties, which science accepts it will never attain. The scientific culture also harbours many people living the (Russell's) paradox that they absolutely believe that nothing is absolutely believable. Resolving this paradox is not easy.

The other culture seems to be based on belief/advocacy. To them, there is no paradox to resolve- absolute truth is possible, and it is provided by an authority that is beyond the realms of reason. Their advocates presume to have a direct connection with this higher authority, and seize upon the inherent statistical variabilities in science as "proof" of the failure of science. The followers of these chief advocates seem to crave for the comfort of absolute certainty.

Milton summarised it thus:

Chaos, Umpire sits
And by Decision
More embroils the Fray
By which He reigns
Next Him, High Arbiter Chance
Governs All.

BTW if you want a cogent analysis of glacial retreat se http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/a-global-glacier-index-update/

GrahamY,

"it is a mathematical fact that the temperature has cooled since 1998". Well I said essentially the same thing to Leo Lane in the same post, except I use the NASA data in which 2005 still holds the record. So let's debate something useful. (btw, why is everyone still using the now-much-reviled Hadley data? Because it makes a better story to say cooling since 1998, rather than cooling since 2005?)

I'll leave to you the subtle distinction between "the globe has cooled since 1998" and "global warming stopped in 1998".

In the quote I gave, to which you did not respond, Carter is implying the straw-man argument that CO2 and temperature should always increase in lock-step. Climate scientists do not claim that, they know that there are important short-term effects like El Nino that cause the temperature to fluctuate around the long-term trend. How many times do we have to explain that here? So Carter is making a parody, a straw man, and knocking it down. My earlier assessment of him applies to this to.

Graham, I know what you wrote about cherry picking, I can read. You managed to slip in the implication/possibility without having to justify it. Foul Graham. Speaking of foul, Leo Lane sprays defamatory comments in all directions, and of course he's not the only one here. Of course Mr. Monckton's characterisations are among the foulest of all.

Leo Lane,
trust you to totally miss the point I was making about philosophy of science, and twist it to say I'm not an honest scientist, in other words a liar. And then to claim I have "disdain for the truth". Bye.

Jedimaster: "Once again, Leo Lane's contribution gives weight to my hypothesis that there are two cultures arguing using different languages."

You might enjoy this. It ponders the same observation from a slightly different viewpoint.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/01/climate-uncertainties-and-the-problems-communicating-them.ars

Leo Lane: "Robert Carter has explained that trends are dependent on the starting point which is chosen. A starting point of 700 years ago, gives a temperature trend which is down."

Odd. Here is one graph of temperature (moving 5 year average) for the last 2,000 years. It doesn't matter where you take the starting point. At no time has it been it hotter than now.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

As for Bob Carter's argument - I have never understood it. The main claim of the climate scientists is they have developed models that "predict" the earth's climate for about the last 1 million years or so. Here "predict" means it was calculated from some formula. On that basis they say their models should do a reasonable job of predicting the next 100 years or so. I think it is a fairly strong argument. The only problem is, as far as I can tell no one has seen fit to put all the evidence on one page. At least I have not been able to find a page the lists the models, their basic assumptions, their outputs and compares them to the real thing.

That aside, strip away the noise and Carter's argument must boil down to "the models are wrong". If so, it should not be difficult to show it. Just present the output of a few models used by the IPCC and illustrate they are indeed wrong. As far as I am aware, he has never done that. Instead all he says is what is happening now it not historically unusual. Maybe he is right in saying that, but regardless it is utterly beside the point. It is a bit like pregnancy. The question is not whether "unexpected" pregnancies are unusual or not, but whether we can predict whether they will happen, and perhaps use that information to do something about it.

Horus,
there's this on the hacked emails: http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/denier-myths-debunked/climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/ or this from New Scientist: http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/denier-myths-debunked/climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/
And there's factcheck, who claim to be disinterested and independent: http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/ . Official assessments are pending but I'm confident they'll exonerate the alleged miscreants.
But let's face it, no assessment will be valid in your eyes unless it agrees with your prejudice.

Geoff says:

“twist it to say I'm not an honest scientist, in other words a liar. And then to claim I have "disdain for the truth". Bye”

You may not be dishonest, Geoff, you may be just incompetent.

Did you also have disdain for Robert Carter’s explanation of trends, which I carefully set out above?

I thought it would settle you down, because it clarifies the issues upon which you appear to be confused.

Mitchell,

There we have it again.
AGWers show A-M-A-Z-I-N-G prescience.

1) They can tell the inner workings/motivations of their opponents minds:
“But let's face it, no assessment will be valid in your eyes unless it agrees with your prejudice.”

2) They can tell the outcome of reports before they’re concluded:
“Official assessments are pending but I'm confident they'll exonerate the alleged miscreants”.

3)They can predict the climate decades ,even centuries into the future.

And yesterday on ABC radio, one was even able to divine that sceptics were unemployed layabouts! "They have nothing else to do. They don't have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public” http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/25/2800992.htm

As for your independent sources:
Having been a long time reader of NewScientist I would never characterise it ( on AGW issues) as “independent” i.e. “ Free from the influence, guidance, or control of another or others; self-reliant…Not determined or influenced by someone or something else; not contingent… Affiliated with or loyal to no one political party or organization…not dependent on or affiliated with a larger or controlling entity” http://www.thefreedictionary.com/independent

Likewise your other sources
i) Greenfyreword Press and
ii) Factcheck.org
Both appear zealously committed to the AGW cause.
All they've seemed to have done was skim-read the emails and declare them of no consequence ; no interviews , no hard drive forensics –just a Delphic Oracle-like determination .


And Factcheck lip-syncs the IPCC apostles creed:“ The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments. Consequently, there is at every stage full opportunity for experts in the field to draw attention to any piece of literature and its basic findings that would ensure inclusion of a wide range of views. There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed.” [ROFLMAO]

All rather hollow in the light subsequent events:
1) GlacierGate http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/un-apologises-for-flawed-glacier-prediction/story-e6frg6so-1225822246312
Which was used to manipulate opinion and extract funding
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/glacier-claims-won-grants/story-e6frg6nf-1225823060661

2) DisasterGate http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece

Bugsy

Of course Carter’s comments, in numerous public speaking engagements, in the mainstream (and not so mainstream) media, and on blog spots - are NOT at odds with his own article “There IS a problem with global warming – it stopped in 1998”.

Graham knows this and is just playing with words (and resorting to his usual ad-hom and personal attack) to justify his stance. But, let’s wait to see how he replies to your post - if he does at all.

Google “Bob Carter” + “I did NOT say global warming stopped in 1998” returns zero results.
Google “Bob Carter” + “global warming stopped in 1998” returns > 28,000 results.

I am not surprised by this.

Marc Morano, James Inhoffe or our own Steve Fielding certainly wouldn’t retract what Carter says... why would they when Carter himself links to his own article as a chest-beating gesture on his very own web site?
_______

Geoff,

<< why is everyone still using the now-much-reviled Hadley data? Because it makes a better story to say cooling since 1998, rather than cooling since 2005? >>

Precisely, although I’m of the understanding that 2009 is now tied with 2005 using other data sets. And all this when Carter says the “cooling" is due to low sun-spot activity. House to a brick, Carter will spruik in years to come something like global warming stopped in 2015.

I agree, the moderator does slip in the odd foul slur and sprays defamatory comments himself from time to time, particularly on memes close to his hobby horse. It’s a shame he doesn’t stick to his own rules, but then – one could hardly admonish or suspend oneself, could they?

Horus,
it's just too tedious to debate the vacuous argument you try to make. I can't read minds, but if you look at the emails as these scrutinies do, there is no substance to the so-called scandal. Can you show me a fair analysis that 'can' sustain, via line and verse, that the emails do substantiate a climategate scandal? I'd love to see it! Those who claim they have tried to look impartially so far say that the quotes are misrepresented and taken out of context. Unless you can show otherwise, you have no evidence, just prejudice. I am confident about the outcome of the official findings because the conspiracy nutters are unable to make their sh!t stick, apart from an inevtiable residue. No one claims, do they? that they "can predict the climate decades ,even centuries into the future.". Well not with any degree of acuracy. I don't make any predictions, but the experts are doing their best to make forecasts based on the evidence. Their overall diagnosis of AGW makes logical sense to me.
As for the rest of your last; there's nothing there mate, so I'll let you fret about it.
Have a good day

For those bloggers who prefer to take their data neat, it's hard to go past the Website Realclimate.org (http://www.realclimate.org) particular, there is an extensive article dated 17 Jan 2010 "If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?"by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo. It has at this date, 681 responses, which are exemplary of people trying to clarify this particularly abstruse area of knowledge. The article addresses the issue of the very cold December experienced in much of the North America and Europe (but not Alaska)

I've printed off the article to check with Monckton's comments at lunch on Wednesday. Yes- I'm prepared to pay $60 to experience his performance and the response of several hundred other adults.

Bugsy and Q&A, one of the reasons that I am skeptical of the claims of global warming alarmists is because of the rhetorical tactics that they/you use. Google can turn up 28,000 results for "Bob Carter" + "global warming stopped in 1998", yet you can't point to one of them where he actually says it. A closer look at the results shows that a fair proportion of the results are from people like yourselves misrepresenting him on the basis of the newspaper headline and trying to fit him up as a nutter. So you use the extent of your own misrepresentation as proof that it must be true!

One of the links even has Tim Lambert riffing on this tactic and trying to extend it to Richard Lindzen because Lindzen points out, as Carter does, there has been no temperature rise in 10 years. You must think that pinning this accusation on an opponent is devastating.

And yes, I can see Marc Morano doing the same thing on the other side, which is just the sort of thing that happens when one side starts to play this sort of game. The other side thinks they need to be in it too, or they will lose the war - it's called escalation.

Then when I point out this is dishonest you will claim that as an ad hominem attack on you! Shall we put logic down as another of your areas of weakness?

The fact that Bob Carter hasn't put out a media release denying he said it doesn't make it true that he did. That it is listed amongst 148 opinion articles that he has written using the title it was published as doesn't prove anything either, except that Bob is a diligent and accurate curator of his own material.

As you no doubt understand, Carter's point is about the degree of correlation between CO2 and temperature, not whether there is one.

Actually Graham, I too am sceptical of global warming alarmists - you do know this. As I have said many times before, there are extremists on both sides.

Unfortunately, far too many "sceptics" think that the vast majority of scientists (who publish their work leading to the robustness of AGW) are somehow global warming "alarmists" - they are not.

I only comment here under a nom de plume because I feel less constrained in my personal opinions (as opposed to the usual dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's). Certainly, if I comment under my true identity (it is well disguised) I would be more circumspect - but then you would not be reading my personal opinions. While OLO is an opinion site, it is probably one of the best in Oz.

Having said that, I will freely admit to being 'loose' sometimes, and that I do have a bias. The former due to my frustration at "sceptics" inability to understand the basics, the latter due to my qualified experience.

Moreover, I (really) do acknowledge Bob Carter as a true sceptic (in the scientific sense) - as well as Dick Lindzen and Roy Spencer for that matter. However, Christopher Monckton (and Al Gore) is another breed or kettle of fish altogether - and I am depressingly disappointed with Ian Plimer, for that matter.

Now, how about replying to the comment:

Geoff << why is everyone (sceptics) still using the now-much-reviled Hadley data? Because it makes a better story to say cooling since 1998, rather than cooling since 2005? >>

I would not trust any of the data coming out of the IPCC,NASA etc because of the power and influence Wall St and the Global Banks have over our Govts and the UN.They want the carbon derivatives/taxes since this will make energy more expensive for the consumer,while they make more profits.

As C Monkton says,even if all the doomsayers are right,there is nothing in the short term that we can do about it,since the likes of China and India will be given an amnesty to burn carbon to manufacture our consumerables.

There are better ways of tackling the problems of pollution and environmental degradation,than making the elites all powerful.

The reality is this,fossil fuels will run out soon and as the technology gets better with solar,people will become more independant with sourcing their energy supplies.The elites have small window of opportunity to effect their World Govt and have total control.This is why Copenhagen was such a rushed affair and luckily it failed.

The two big things that control us today is energy [fossils fuels]owned by a few large Corporates and the generation of money from nothing by the Global Banks.With the imminent collapse of the $ US,the next agenda will be a global currency owned by this World Govt and it's bankers.

The corporates like the Rothschilds heavily finance the Green Movement and they only want to advance their own power base with the noble cause of saving the planet,hence we have the perversion of climate stats to suit their agendas.

I have tried three times to post to the blog. Once I got a pop up
to say that I was disallowed because of the Australian government stopping my posts... I signed in then it dropped out.

Lord M and Prof P lunch cost $130 in Brisbane has already 440 prepaid
participants. There is a cheaper talk at $20 in Brisbane. The Canberra venue, the press have now agreed to attend. Hurray!

I got a warning that this website was off limits, and my emails were
being monitored by the government. Well Kev - Hi there.

If what they have to say is so controversial why the protection on this website for preventing people of every point of view from voicing
their opinions.

I am hoping this post gets through.

Note: Evil will truimph if a few good men (and women) do nothing.

ajay: I totally agree with you, but am afraid our emails are being
monitored by the Australian Government... who cares. 'Hello Kev et al!"

Science is the study of natural things and phenomena. Via accepted scientific processes and experiment, etc. The data has been corrupted. The political census is obvious... some want to by foul means or fair want to change the global status quo. And Australia has been pulled in.

If undeveloped countries often through their own governments mismanagement, want to receive taxes controlled by a global administrator to ostensibly pay them at a developed countries' expense
and their citizens ultimately to equalize monitory means, then it's a scam. We are not to blame for their status quo why should our citizens, farmers or industrialists pay for some undeveloped country's dictator to feather his own nest? We expect the standard of living we have, we pay taxes and although pay aid to disadvantaged countries we shouldn't be taxed because we have a better standard of living?

CO2 is not causing climate change. Methane gas emitted from our dear
old cow and sheep, is not causing climate change and the Greens wish
to make everyone a vegan or vegetarian as meat eaters are contributing
to climate change, even 'if' all CO2 emissions stopped tomorrow?
As per SBS ads on 'Save the planet' Don't all people sense something
is dreadfully wrong with the science proffered by climate alarmists?

Q&A, Leo Lane,

I've put the recently-updated NASA plot, including 2009, in my post
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/global-cooling-since-1998/

It shows (reading off the graph) 1998: +.57; 2005: +.62; 2008: +.43; 2009: +.58. 2009 is second-hottest, though essentially tied with 1998, 2002, 2007 (.56-58). So 2008 was cooler, as expected with the La Niña operating then, and 2009 is back up, as expected. 2010-2011 will be interesting - will warming resume with a vengeance (my tip) or will it stay steady or decline?

Leo Lane,

Wasn't going to bother, but you're slightly less offensive. Though why did you think implying I'm dishonest would "settle me down"?

Regarding your 25 January 2010 11:27:06 AM post,

My criterion for choosing a 'starting point' is not which answer I'll get Leo (another flame from you). There is a warming trend since about 1975. The immediate question is whether there is any clear indication in the data series that the trend has changed. Since the recent levelling/slight decline is similar to other temporary declines in the 1980s and 1990s, the evidence is not yet clear that the trend has changed. That's pretty much common sense. So I won't wear either your "dishonest" implication or your "incompetent" claim.

The scientific literature does not show temperatures higher 700 years ago than now. The 'hockey stick' is being refined, and is not discredited in the scientific literature.

"The point of the warmists is that until the whole of the .7 of a degree is gone, some warming is still there, so technically it is not correct to say warming has stopped, but it is certainly cooler than the paltry peak temperature in 1998." Well I can't speak for mythical "warmists", though I do try to speak for the science. This is another straw man. The argument is not simply that it is still hotter than the long-term mean, so warming is still in place. The argument is that there is no evidence the upward trend has stopped (see above), and there is much evidence that the mechanisms promoting warming are still very active, and getting more so.

Geoff,
this is probably a stupid question, but is it possible that the spike in temperature during WW2 is due in part to massive militarisation and industrialisation for weapons of war, beginning during or before WW1, and ultimately leading to worldwide conflagration? Emissions must certainly have topped anything previous due to industrialisation and agriculture. An idle fancy?

Thanks Geoff, here's another link putting "global warming stopped in 1998" (or it has been "cooling since 2001") into perspective.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/hottest-year/#more-2180

To qualify my previous post:

1. I only wish Bob Carter would publish his "research on global cooling" in the (reputable) journals. He doesn't.

2. Roy Spencer should do more research into negative feedbacks ('i's and 't's) BEFORE he publishes in (reputable) journals AND most definitely before he "publishes" on WattsUp.

3. Dick Lindzen should refine (or give it up) his IRIS hypothesis taking on board the debunking it has received.

Q&A, I'm not sure why anyone uses the land-based temperature record. It isn't transparent, it is subject to all sorts of adjustments, many of which are admitted by the various record keeping organisations to be subjective, and the datasets don't actually appear to be homogenous. And this applies to all of the commonly used temperature sets. If you want me to comment on why various sceptics might use the Hadley data perhaps direct me to specifics.

RStuart, I'd be interested to see the computer model that accurately reproduces climate for the last one million years. I've never heard of it. If you look at the video I referenced from Bob Carter you will see that one of his major points about the last 10 years is that it is not what the models predicted (although the modellers will tell you they aren't predictions, merely projections).

As CO2 has a logarithmic heating effect the major reason temperature hasn't gone up is probably that a 4% increase in CO2 has a negligible effect at these concentrations.

Yes, like GrahamY, I'd also like to see the nitty gritty of these computer models, together with their 95% or 99% confidence intervals for their projections of the mean. Typically, the more variables that go into the model and the further into the future that the projection is made, the wider these intervals become, thus rendering the main estimate to be practically useless.

Lato wrote;
Yes, like GrahamY, I'd also like to see the nitty gritty of these computer models,

Well someone a while back asked to see the source code of the model
program that the IPCC uses, but was refused. It might have been Michael McIntire of email fame.

I commented at the time that if it was not available for commercial
reasons, then it should be purchased, compulsory if necessary, as just
too much money is to be spent on its say so to allow such uncertainty.

I believe it is absolutely impossible for a computer program to
forcast climate as far out ahead of the input data as is claimed.
It is a total nonsense.

Well the Sheraton on the Park event by C Monckton was not well organised.I rang the Sheration and they said the doors would be open at 5.15 pm.We got there at 4:50 pm and were turned away because they already had 1000 inside with a capacity for 800. A week before I contacted many people trying to buy tickets but no one knew if it was turn up and pay or pre-purchase.

It was very poorly organised.They could have charged $50.00 per ticket instead of $20 and if not sold, announce a turn up at a cheaper price.About 200-300 people were turned away.

Don't worry Arjay

I saw him at lunchtime. Reminded me of another Scotsman- Shakespeare's Macbeth:

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death... a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." - (Act V, Scene V).

GrahamY: "I'd be interested to see the computer model that accurately reproduces climate for the last one million years."

So would I. David Archer in his "Global Warming: Understanding the forecast" lecture series they exist. I can't find which lecture it was now, but he said the models did a reasonable job of showing how the climate behaved over the last few ice ages when the trigger for changes was the earths orbit. This included CO2 levels trailing temperature rises. The 1M was my invention. He implied the models went over a few ice ages which I thought would span approx 1M years, but looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png it is probably closer to 0.5M.

Archer said the data from those models was freely downloadable from the IPCC web site. Despite spending some hours looking, I could not find it. They are certainly references to Paleoclimatology and Paleoclimate models there, and there are words in the IPCC reports implying they did a reasonable job, but I for the life of me could not find any model that had CO2 in it. However, in the lecture series Archer made a point of only saying things that could reasonably be derived from the facts available, so I'll take his word for it.

That I have to just take his word for it pisses me off no end. What is it with these people? Can't they see that if the basis to their claims is "we can model the climate", then surely it is patently obvious they must show us the models, explain their basis even if only in simple terms, give us their output, so everyone can see they do what they say? If they can indeed successfully model the climate over 100's of thousands of years, surely it is a lay down misère.

There is no way to defend this state of affairs. It is not just climate science, either. It looks to me like science in general hasn't managed the transition from pencil and paper calculations to computer ones (ie "models") at all well. I'd lay odds that given the published information even a climate scientist could not reproduce the "experiments" - ie create a model that spat out the same data. This is because unlike the pencil and paper calculations they don't publish the source code. All the source code, and all the raw data fed to it necessary to produce the results should be mandatory attachments to every published paper.

I hope the scientists take a step back, look at the controversies that swirl around AGW and realise their own poor practices are a root cause of it. And I don't mean their practices in engaging the press, or working the politics. I mean because they have not done the science properly. They've skimmed on the boring bit - the paper work. Clean up the source code, clean up the data, put it online so other people could in principle do what they did if they had the computing power. Among those others are the people who do engage the press and politicians well.

Jedimaster: Being sarcastic is the poorest form of humor. He must have impressed you some how. Sorry arjay you couldn't get in. But did anyone
on the blog go, and can give a reasonable report whatever you are
for AGW or questioners of the science? Was Mr Rudd there, for example.

By the way, depending on where you live there are storm warnings for
some parts of NSW. No not climate change, just the norm. Been rather
warmer than normal so what do you expect? LOL

Here, here rstuart !

However I think the whole AGW thing is going to die a quiet death after the Mexico meeting.

The latest info I have read on peak coal and the depletion rate of
existing oil fields together with the high cost of oil from the new
finds in Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico sets a new regime.
It means that the price in ten years time when they come on line will
be so high that demand will be suppressed and the CO2 released will
be less than the proposed ETS levels anyway.
Until then we will have high prices set by tight supplies and some
shortages if not actual rationing.

The widespread acceptance of these simple facts will undermine any
concern about GW or AGW and will get us back to worrying about the
real problem we face.

Coal's peak date however is about 2025 so while it will get more
expensive it should be in good supply till then.
China and India might throw a spanner in the works because they both
have power shortages and need to build many more power stations.
Coal has already started getting much more expensive because the
quality is falling so that more is needed for the same BTUs output.
I heard today that China is buying Victorian brown coal.
Interesting does that mean less CO2 when China burns it ?
Remember what the Chinese PM said ?
"We will burn all our coal and then burn yours !"

rstuart, one of the things that came out of the Climate Gate emails was that the temperature data had been so poorly kept that after three years the programmer tasked with the job of replicating the plots gave up in despair.

It's worth noting that while there was software involved, it is a fairly simple task, nothing like as complex as modelling the climate.

There's not a lot of demand from people to check my polling data, but I know if anyone ever asked there is a good clean set of data for every poll.

I agree that the science in some of these areas is beyond shoddy. I bet some of them keep their tax records better than their climate records.

Hi,

You mean to say Graham that the program used was inadequate? They were paid to provide evidence for Global warming... they failed...

Regarding the comment on China, they are hopping mad, but are planning
to link into the Russian Grid to supplement their electricity supply.

How much monies have been poorly spent to prove their science is flawed. If no one checked them out, where would we be now. Climate change is not happening, other than what we normally expect. CO2 emissions reductions other than local pollution, will not
help. It's a big big con, and Al Gore should be sued and the IPCC
for fudging data. This Himalayan glacier farce is criminal. I see
the Indian Government are taking action against the Chairman of the IPCC.

As far as the science is concerned and temperature graphs, they are part of any climate orientated Uni course or related studies, such as
environmental studies, archaeology and palaeoanthropology and geology.

Arjay,
I found the organisation for Monkton's talk OK.
The site where I saw the info said $20 paid at the door.
I did get there early as I was in the city anyway and got done
the other things I had to do quicker than expected.
I did not see anything about door time, just that it started at 5-30.
I think they kept it low in price because they may have thought not
too many would turn up. I did hear that the queue went around two
floors of stairs, out through the lobby and into the street.

I found what he had to say very interesting and he has challenged to
debate some of those on the other side, but no one will accept it.
Mind you I wouldn't either, he is a very impressive speaker.
He was of course preaching to the converted.

One little point that did impress me was that the earth has been
warming for the last 300 years since the peak of the Maunder minimum.
Obvious of course but I had not thought of it.
Another point was that Al Gore has bought a waterfront property on
San Francisco Bay ! Hmmmm.

Even very pro ADW people would have found it interesting.
It appears that there are some very serious fraud investigations
going on at the IPCC.
Well that is a bit of a summary.

As far as I know there was only one politician and one journalist in
attendance. There was a cameraman running around but he might have
been making a video to be distributed. It did not look like a news
TV crew. They apparently thought it was not newsworthy.

Thanks Bazz.The poor organisation is not a reflection upon C Monckton.I think they should know since there were many irate people left in their wake and that is not good PR if you are trying to build supporting numbers.

I notice that the pop media have given Monckton the cold shoulder.They are too scared of the truth and will not enter into debate.We should all remember this event and be resolved not to buy their woeful excuse for unbiased reporting.

Yes Arjay, I don't think they were expecting such a massive rollup.
Certainly the hotel security seemed very agitated and just not knowing
where to get people to stand in the queue.
It looks like the Town Hall or the Opera House would have been a better bet.

Well the disinterest of the media and government in the anti AGW
discussion has the same aura about it as the attitude of the
government and media have to peak oil.
I have only ever heard one government minister utter the words peak
oil and that was Martin Ferguson, but that was a couple of years ago
and he seems to have now got the message.
It is interesting that world wide politicians and media all maintain
the same stance. Ignore peak oil and anti AGW.
It is only recently that antiAGW has got off the ground.
I am not a conspiracy nut, but well you have to wonder.

The media is showing a slow response, but Google Miranda Devine of the SMH she had a very good article in the SMH last week. I believe fromthe JoNova blog, that at one of the meetings, someone was filming the debate in Brisbane I believe. The Climate change speaker was outclassed
I believe. And it was videoed by a freelance photographer who reckoned
it was aimed for the ABC? Hope they buy it. Doesn't stop PM Rudd
from pushing on with the ETS bill with amendments. However, Tony Abbott said, his amended ETS bill will contain no taxes? Why don't they all start to consider, climate change or not, and not is the obvious, is fraught with flaws. Why not concentrate on sustainability. Simple as that. I installed a 5000 litre rain water tank, linked to one toilet and washing machine. The cost was just under 2000 dollars. I got $1400 back from the State government and $500 from the Feds. But the projection of 35 million population by 2050 is rather frightening don't you believe, all concentrated on the Eastern coastal regions. Flannery for once had something sensible to say, 'proceed with caution' we haven't the water supply to accommodate
the number we have now, if we continue with our present life style.

Bush Bunny, I don't think it is correct to say, re Climategate, that 'They were paid to provide evidence for Global warming... they failed...'. I think what they were meant to be doing was collect and model climate data and report their findings, whatever they were. It seems they were very bad at it, and that some of them were trying to find or create evidence of global warming, and that they have been sprung. This doesn't mean that their behaviour provides evidence for either the AGW or sceptic case, or is typical of all climate scientists.

Well done Bush Bunny for putting in a rain water tank and collecting money from Governments Federal and State BUT! They do not tell you that the limit for water you pay over their arbitrary limit is reduced by the size of your tank. You might fill the tank many times a year but you will pay a lot more for your water from now on. Tell me you did not think the Government were "Giving" you something? Do not feel bad, a friendly plumber told me this and it seems all the scientific geniuses and politicians forget that little bit of news.
after finding this out I got a tank but happily paid for it myself.

Bazz,

I still think the climate models most likely do predict the climate.

What you see is my frustration at not understanding how they work. Because water is the dominate "short term" (ie the few couple of centuries), I don't have a clue how they model it, thus I clue about global warming. This is despite Q&A's gallant effort on trying explain it to me here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3312#78892

Given I don't understand the models criticisms that you, GrahamY throw at them are meaningless to me. I can't evaluate them any more than I can evaluate the models.

The availably carbon is something I can get my head around. The climate guys have just taken the estimates from the US Geological Survey, the IEA and so on, and plugged them into their models. Fair enough - anything else isn't really defensible. You are right in saying if Rutledge's calculations hold all the worrying about AGW is a complete waste of time. But not even Rutledge knows why his model works. If they broke tomorrow no one would no why, and no one would be surprised. His models are built on far weaker sand than the climate models you distrust so much.

GrahamY: "what studies are you relying on to say that the "do nothing" scenario is more expensive than the "do something" scenario? ... The only reputable independent studies I am aware of say the opposite."

This surprises me. I admit to not looking closely, but my understanding the Stern Review and the Garnaut report were reasonable attempts at this. They took the climate scientists models as a starting point of course - but that was their brief. Are you are saying given the climate models are correct, their conclusions are wrong?

GrahamY: "there is no claim in it from Carter that global warming stopped in 1998"

True. But what a twisted thread. Leo Lane is claiming warming stopped in 1998 and quoting Carter as his authority. Q&A is condemning Carter for making that claim. And you are saying it is all a fiction.

rstuart, you're asking me about a couple of things here. I'm not sure how you can be sure that the models predict anything when you don't have access to any model results that can reproduce the past - just an assertion that they exist from a video lecture. And then you'd need someone to reproduce the results because until you do you only have the researchers' word that they have been successful.

When it comes to economic modelling, Stern is regarded as a joke by good economists. The report was commissioned by a government that wanted to prove something. The major fiddle was selecting an unrealisticly low discount rate which meant that he slanted the analysis towards immediate action. A more realistic discount rate would not have come to the same conclusion. See Nordhaus.

However, on top of that Stern relied on the IPCC estimates of the increase in damage from storms due to global warming. I think they are calling that "hurricanegate" now. The paper that the IPCC rely on was not even published, and the author has now retracted the claim that damage will increase. We already knew that the claim that storm activity would increase was dodgy, as there had been a previous controversy where Chris Landsea resigned over the misrepresentation in the summary of the actual research.

And re: Carter - I take no responsibility for other people's failure to read accurately. Go to the source. Neither Lane nor Q&A can provide a quote (Q&A I thought had admitted that).

GrahamY: "I'm not sure how you can be sure that the models predict anything"

I can't be sure. Thus my frustration.

Of the people commenting here, only Q&A seems to have a understanding of how water is modeled. I don't see how it is possible for anyone who doesn't have that understanding to criticise the technical details of models. The rest of us end up deciding on some political basis. For me, that is an easy decision while a large majority of climate scientists are in agreement. But as I said, having to decide on that basis sucks.

GrahamY: "Q&A I thought had admitted that"

Indeed. I did say you were right about Carter. It just struck me as odd that everybody else in the thread on both sides of the debate were basing their arguments on a falsehood.

GrahamY: "programmer tasked with the job of replicating the plots gave up in despair."

Yeah I read his comments. He was whinging about the Australian data which was a bit of an embarrassment. I can imagine he got dump consisting of a mishmash of formats, encodings, and poorly identified data that took a zillion phone calls to a different time zone to sort out. Poor bastard.

As for climate gate - wasn't one. Instead we have a bunch of people trying to guard their high position in the climate science hierarchy. They did that by exploiting their position as keepers of the data. By making access difficult, by not publishing the code required to normalise that data, they made it very difficult for others to build upon their work and provide a better "service" than they did. It was all about job security. Perfectly understandable, and acceptable in most professions. Just not in science.

A climate gate would require them to lie in their published papers. Somewhere in a paper, in their explanation of how they got from raw data to conclusions, they would have to deliberately hide, distort or deceive. I haven't seen any evidence they did.

Rstuart said;
You are right in saying if Rutledge's calculations hold all the
worrying about AGW is a complete waste of time.

Was that directed at me ? I never mentioned Rutledge.
Re the climate models, I know virtually nothing about them, but I do
have a gut feeling from understanding that something running so many
arithmetic calculations on something like weather would run into
chaos and fractal complications. So much so that I cannot see how you
could keep it sensible after a few iterations.
Sure they are not trying to calculate whether it will rain next week
which could be harder, but to try and go out to 50 years or more seems
just far fetched, There could be many very small non linear changes
in the real world, of which they are unaware.
Their effect would get larger and larger or smaller and smaller.

Any way I guess we will have to wait to see what Scotland Yard comes
up with as they have now got in the act.
It appears they had a contract with the government to do the work that
required them to maintain the data and make it available for which
they were paid. Aside from the FOI, it has been alleged they are in
breach of their contract and have acted fraudulently.
I would imagine that would be pretty serious stuff.

In view of the Chinese attitude at Copenhagen and there being no
agreement it would be totally useless for the government to proceed
as anything done here would have no measurable effect.
The opposition should not bother with their proposal either.
The whole thing is stalled and has become meaningless.
There is no way we can crank up enough alternative electrical energy
to enable the shutting down of coal fired stations, it just won't
happen. We will however have to get cracking on something else as
peak coal is expected round 2025.

rstuart you said "A climate gate would require them to lie in their published papers. Somewhere in a paper, in their explanation of how they got from raw data to conclusions, they would have to deliberately hide, distort or deceive. I haven't seen any evidence they did."

Don't you think Michael Mann's substition of instrumental data for proxy data post 1960 or so because the proxies show a decline in temperature, without revealing that fact is to "deliberately hide, distort or deceive"? (I'm not saying that the actual temperature went down, but it makes the proxies inappapropriate as proxies if they don't correspond to the actual temperature, which throws the Hockey Stick out the window completely!)

The data and code the computer programmer was frustrated with was from all over the planet, Australia just got a special guernsey. Anthony Watts has a handy compilation of the programmers comments at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/. You will be horrified at some of the programmers' comments. This is not minor but major stuff.

Q&A just diverted you from the real problem with the models. He had an explanation for something unrelated to the issue, but which involved water. To nullify a model output you don't need to understand how it works. (I suspect even the modellers themselves only have a vague idea of that given the complexities.) What you need is to test a prediction. The one that is normally cited is the troposphere hot spot which the models predict, but which doesn't exist.

Or you can look at the comments of modellers who actually know (versus anonymous posters who claim to know). The quotes from Ann Henderson Sellers in this blog post by me give you proof of this kind http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/003405.html.

You're pretty casual about Climate Gate given that it involves deliberate destruction of data so as to avoid their legal obligations. I don't know what industry you're in, but I hope you don't indulge in that sort of behaviour because it is probably criminal.

It is interesting to see how this particular forum is evolving. Monckton has catalysed a particularly useful debate, which seems to mirror the diversity of views I find in the community- ranging from incoherent angry raves to cogent discourse on details.

At its heart, there is a genuine concern that society might be being ripped off again. These rip-offs have a long history which includes stock market bubbles over many centuries, Y2K, WMD in Iraq, the GFC and so on. By the very nature of society, technical people have been involved at all levels- some struggling to do their best with the task at hand with limited resources, others seizing the day to make career moves, others innocently reacting to received data and others manipulating people and organisations for personal and/or political motives. The media seize any opportunity for a story (Recent absurd example: "Terrier terror: list reveals Jack Russell attacks" ABC http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/25/2800176.htm). That's a vigorous democracy up close!

But, as Galileo said:“Eppur si muove” -"and yet it turns". The state of the planet is inexorably deteriorating,due to human activity, even if the climate is only changing within "normal" statistical variability. Scientists, accustomed to making reliable nano-scale and peta-scale measurements, have applied their methodologies to the global malaise. Their job is to turn data into knowledge via testing conjectures and hypothesese.

Then the public bandwagon and free-for-all begins,complete with showmen and snake-oil-salesmen.

Monckton may have done us a service of a kind, but, to use a zen quote: "When a wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger."
...and yet it turns, Christopher, and yet it turns.

Hi candide, I'm not sure if I agree with you. Check out Google Prof Jones who seems to be in hot water, fudging the data, to favor global warming evidence. And deliberately hiding the fact that FOI should be denied as FOI laws in GB are not generally known. Well they are present. There is something in the Telegraph UK about it. By deliberately and willfully siding with the AGW argument is prejudiced.

In my opinion,there is strong political/economic/social manipulation involved in this climate change swindle. Corrupting so called scientific data to prove a point is scandalous. And retribution against those swindler's should be followed up. Including the IPCC and Al Gore et al, and the UEA people.

It's not as though they did a terrible job of the research as you suggest, it was willfully manipulated to substantiate the UN draft treaty advocating taxing under a globally run government, (not an elected one) developed countries to pay compensation to undeveloped countries for the damage we developed countries are doing to them. That goes beyond just a stupid mistake but absolute fraud!

I recommend people get onto U Tube and see "The Great Global Warming Swindle" produced back in 2007. Even the founder of Greenpeace resigned for reasons you will understand.

Hi all, maybe GrahamY might like to make a comment he seems to be cluey on the scientific facts. It was mentioned there maybe another element missing from what controls climate and water vapor and if I understand it water vapor is the key element of Greenhouse gases, that keep the planet warm and cool depending on seasons and also cloud cover.

In that UTube DVD 'The Great Climate Change Swindle' check out the
Canadian report. Initially instigated by the fisheries department on why there was sometimes a decline in herring and anchovies hauls. They suggested that cosmic rays influence cloud cover, and solar activity deflects Cosmic rays. They did a very good report not I believe beyond most people's intelligence to suggest global warming has anything to do with CO2 emissions or climate change. It's those dreaded cosmic rays and those sunspots that control the weather and climate ... now Mr Rudd and Obama can you suggest how we control them?

This is my second post in twenty four hours, so I will say goodnight
now but look forward to reading from ALL posters. Au revoir mon amies.

Bazz: "something running so many arithmetic calculations on something like weather would run into chaos and fractal complications. ... go out to 50 years or more seems just far fetched"

They do the equivalent of modelling the effects of the river bank, while ignoring the rapids. Thus if you pour a glass of water into the rapids they can't tell you where it will be in 5 seconds time, yet they can still tell you pretty accurately where it will be in 1 week.

GrahamY: "without revealing that fact"

My understanding is he did explain all steps he took in the resulting paper.

GrahamY: "Q&A just diverted"

I knew I didn't have a clue how they model water before Q&A gave me his explanation. After his explanation I knew they modelled the water flow in Hadley cells using fluid dynamics. But as Q&A later explained, that was only one part of the picture. And I didn't even know how how big a part it was. So I as far as I could tell, I still didn't have a clue. I don't see how that could be called a diversion. The only thing that changed was my frustration level.

GrahamY: "You will be horrified at some of the programmers' comments."

You want to see programmers when they are really pissed off? Read this:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454

After a decade of watching flame wars like that between open source programmers, it would take a fair bit to horrify me. The above flame war has another lesson. What you see in there is the infighting triggered by a horrendous mistake compromising the security not only of that program, but of the entire Debian archive, and every distribution derived from it (eg Ubuntu). But you know what? After it all died down the original problem had been fixed, the holes it created plugged before serious damage was done and life went on. I'd say the same thing happened with the temperature data.

GrahamY: "deliberate destruction of data so as to avoid their legal obligations"

I don't know what you are referring to.

GrahamY,30Jan 9:15 PM:
Addressing the allegedly large cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Graham said
"When it comes to economic modelling, Stern is regarded as a joke by good economists."

Stern's discount rate is equivalent to valuing a human life in 2050 as equal to one now, as he clearly explained. The discount rate used by "good" economists values a human life in 2050 as worth almost nothing, and therefore our grandchildren as disposable. Their lives can be traded for more growth now. Typical of the destructive abstractions of economists.

You don't even have to argue this using economic theory. There are many practical demonstrations of how to cut emissions for a modest cost, when properly done. The mainstream of "good" economists like Nordhaus is oblivious to this on-the-ground evidence that clearly contradict their models. (You want to criticise models, have a look at economic models.) See my post
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/cut-emissions-and-boost-economy/

But then the entire neoclassical economics profession is oblivious to blatantly obvious evidence that their theory bears no resemblance to real modern economies:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8644
Pseudo-science.

I think GrahamY is immune to such arguments, but others may be interested.

And Graham you fudged your response to why you rely on the Hadley data (peak 1998) rather than the NASA data (peak 2005) by saying you don't trust any data. So how do you know the globe has been cooling since 1998, or at all? In any case, neither is inconsistent with global warming, as I have explained many times here.
http://betternature.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/global-cooling-since-1998/

rstuart, my hears are burning.

In Graham’s comment yesterday http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9906#160953 he linked to his Ambit-Gambit blog post

http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/003405.html

In it he appears to ‘quote mine’ Professor Ann Henderson-Sellers from a Roger Pielke Snr blog site. Unfortunately, there seems to be a problem accessing the link in Graham’s (ambit gambit) post so it is impossible to validate, one way or another.

Nevertheless, in my reply to Graham, I linked to what Henderson-Sellers really thinks about global warming:

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2399646.htm

in contrast to “quotes” lifted from the inimitable Roger Pielke Snr.

You tell me ... does Graham’s ambit gambit piece come across as misrepresenting what Professor Henderson-Sellers thinks?

Of course, all this brouhaha was based on the snippet of information provided by the “courtesy” of Jennifer Marohasy, and Graham’s questioning the veracity of climate models ...

“the only way General Circulation Models can produce catastrophic CO2-induced warming is to introduce positive forcings from other agents, such as water vapour. Without these forcings temperature increases are relatively benign. What most don't understand is that the values attributed to these forcings are largely imaginary.”

There's that water vapour again ... it really does look like Graham has never really had a good handle on it (I can imagine the difficulties he’s going to have with water vapour in the stratosphere).

And don't you wish "catastrophic CO2-induced warming" could be given a rest - it is a tad alarming after all.

Anyway, yet again Graham goes for the jugular – “diversion” this time.

And I apologise if this is frustrating, it is for me too :)

GrahamY: "deliberate destruction of data so as to avoid their legal obligations"
rstuart: "I don't know what you are referring to."

You didn't reply, but things have moved on. Two formal investigations have now handed in their findings.

If "destruction of data" referred to information they were asked to provide under FOI, then you might have a point. From http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/no-formal-charges-from-first-climate-e-mail-investigations.ars :

"The ICO has decided that ... not dealt with as they should have been"

So they have been naughty boys. But FOI requests aren't where the real game is being played, which is the science. The universities own formal investigation into how science was done came up with this conclusion (from the same source):

"After having examined the relevant e-mails, other e-mail provided by Mann, and interviewing Mann himself, the committee determined that there was no evidence that Mann destroyed, suppressed, or falsified data, or misused any confidential or privileged information obtained during peer review or from embargoed papers."

So the American side of the pond came through with flying colours. Now we have to wait and see what the Brits have to say.

Michael Mann has not been left off the hook, Google and see yourself.
Greenpeace UK have distanced themselves from the ICPP report
WWF have removed the melting glaciers from their website

Even India is distancing themselves from the UN IPCC report, and why?
Google, seems the chairman has other interests promoting a sexy novel.

The Greens Australia have a global governance E5 on their site. Google and also see the methane emissions from cattle and sheep? Lord Monckton wasn't incorrect this was an agenda on the original IPCC
draft climate treaty. To undermine developed industrialized countries
and that ain't to way to go, friends!

The UEA are under investigation too.

I have the feeling the rats are leaving the sinking ship BS Climate Change.

President Obama side stepped it during his Address to the Union at the Congress... even though laughter and smiles were seen by him and his VP and the chairwoman of the Congress when he stated .."I know there are people who do not believe in the Climate Change Science [laughter} whether it is right or wrong we must commit ourselves to
clean energy... to keep ahead of China and Europe ...nuclear, and off shore gas and oil exploration and employ people in the manufacture of
solar panels, to be leaders in clean energy.." Part of this is viewable via U Tube.

Pres.Obama and family are visiting Australia soon, maybe he will give
PM Rudd and Sen.Wong how to back out gracefully as he has, and this
global governance myth as promoted by Lord Monckton is no myth.

The media are beginning to swing their attention to the AGW myth.
About time!

Only in your tiny little minds, Bush Bunny and brethren.

Q&A up to his usual sloppy tendentious worst again I see. I've been too busy earning a living to spend time on this forum. He can smear by innuendo all he likes. Apparently if you get good information from Jennifer Marohasy or Roger Pielke Jnr it is somehow tainted. I seem to remember Q&A just a few weeks ago accusing me of ad hominem attacks! Should I respond with a charge of hypocrisy?

If he seriously wanted to know what Ann Henderson-Sellers said he could have googled it instead of just complaining that the link on my site is broken (it isn't, the site it links to appears to be down). But a quick google search using "anne henderson sellars what the lead authors really think" would have turned Anne's own piece up on "Environmental Research Letters". http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/opinion/35820. (It's second on the first page).

Does this now make it good information because the link isn't to Roger Pielke Jnr who apparently doubles as Mephistopheles in his spare time?

Q&A objects to me talking about "catastrophic" global warming. Well when people he cites with approval say "We should be exercising triage. We should be looking at the parts of the world that are already dead, they're just still walking around. And we just need to leave them alone, and maybe the Murray Darling Basin is one of those." I think that is just what we are talking about.

And if Q&A doesn't get that it is cloud formation that is at the heart of the debate about forcings then he doesn't understand the science, no matter how many times he claims to be a scientist.

rstuart I wouldn't put any faith in a university inquiry. A lot of the academic fraud that has flourished does so because Unis would rather just sweep it under the carpet. They're hardly a disinterested body given that their economic interests align almost exactly with the miscreants'.

I was wrong when I said Jones had destroyed data - it was emails he was destroying.

Graham you must be one-of-a-kind… being a working-sceptic.
Prof Andy Pitman made the finding that , if you’re a sceptic, you’re likely to have no day job and be on some cash-for-comment retainer

He actually announced his discover , twice, first on RadioNational news :
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/25/2800992.htm
“They have nothing else to do. They don't have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science”
And then he gave us a near --carbon-- copy "on the ABC Science Show [30 January 2010] :
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2805143.htm#transcript
“ the sceptics are so well funded, so well organised, have nothing else to do. They kind of don't have day jobs.”
Apparently it’s Ok to propose conspiracy theories ---as long as you only implicate sceptics.

And it’s just a hypothesis mind you, not proven like the theory of AGW, but I’d wager that had Pitman been from the opposite side , had his name been Plimer, and had he made such a claim about his opponents, he’d would not have been permitted to go unchallenged, on the ABC , once –let alone, twice.

Nor is it out of line for Q& A to denigrate sources of contrary opinion , no, it’s perfectly in line ( rote line). Only those who talk on the side of AGW could possibly be representatives of real science .And, anyone at odds must be insincere & must have ulterior motives.

Which must make the following little confession coming as it does from one of those “atmosphere scientist's ” --one of that elite, gifted group, qualified talk on climate matters --a bit of shock:
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can
speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical...The main basis of the claim that
man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely
upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface
system.” Dr. Joanne Simpson.

But not enough of a shock, I’ll wager, to dent a true believers zeal

“Q&A up to his usual sloppy tendentious worst again I see ...”

Attack me all you want Graham, it doesn’t change the fact that the climate is changing before our very eyes and that humanity is complicit.

As Professor Henderson-Sellers clearly states (thanks for your latest link):

“It is clear that climate change will remain a risk management problem for the foreseeable future ... The cleverer we are in the design of relevant and deliverable climate change results, the sooner we constrain the potential for some really "dangerous" outcomes that cannot currently be ruled out at less than a 10% chance.”

Obviously, some are prepared to take that risk.

Btw, I am quite familiar with the role of clouds (amongst other things, Graham) in the “debate” – and I really hope Roy Spencer is on to something, but alas ...

______

Horus

May I suggest, don’t quote Dr Joanne Simpson out of context. This is what she said:

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain sceptical.”

I too am a scientist, and I too am a sceptic – but the weight of evidence (for AGW) is very robust. Besides, paraphrasing Professor Henderson-Sellers; there is a 90% chance for some really dangerous outcomes if we don’t adopt risk management measures.

It would be great if everybody puts their ideological differences aside to work together in living in a more sustainable way. It ain't going to happen - there is too much vested interest in maintaining power and control over the masses.

qanda, you and Q&A are the same person I assume? You might like to give me an explanation as to why the dual personalities or I am going to delete one of you. I'll also continue to call you on your bullying and villification, and that does not constitute "attack". If you are going to do those things you should get used to it being pointed out.

And you might also acknowledge that in the quote from Henderson she lists a great number of problems with the models, including ones to do with the hydrological cycle, in which you claim to be an expert. That was what the argument was about.

I know she is one of the hysterics. I don't take everything that she says seriously. But she does provide a valuable inside view of the reliability of the models.

If you are familiar with the role of clouds then why do you distract from that with your explanations on water vapour forcings?

All this talk about risks occurs in a vacuum. At current levels there is nothing to suggest any risk from the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We've been well above this level many times in the past. But even if there were a risk, what about the risk of an ice age? I'd put that at an 100% certainty at current levels of CO2 sometime in the future.

In which case even if I thought there was a greater than zero risk from CO2, I'd be happy to weigh that against a 100% risk from global cooling and go with the warming. As there is zero risk from the warming, I'm even happier to go with that. It's a win-win situation.

Risk means very little unless it is in a matrix of risks. There is generally no absolutely safe course, but there are always relatively safer courses.

>In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC

You must be kidding !

I deleted the Q&A account myself, Graham ... before I registered under 'qanda'. Unlike Mark, curmudgeon (at home or otherwise), I am quite happy to post under one account.

Yes, Professor Henderson-Sellers does list some issues identified by contributors to the IPCC process. I for one would expect that after any comprehensive report or method of inquiry, a review is held to see how it can be improved.

Graham, the process is not perfect, neither are the (numerous) models or indeed the science. However, it/they are pretty damn good - and it's getting better all the time. Yes, mistakes and errors will be found, but that is how science progresses - some ideas are tweaked, others are cast aside, but you don't throw the baby out with the bath water (the reason why Spencer should keep trying with his baby).

<< At current levels there is nothing to suggest any risk from the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We've been well above this level many times in the past. But even if there were a risk, what about the risk of an ice age? I'd put that at an 100% certainty at current levels of CO2 sometime in the future. >>

There is much work being done on climate sensitivity, and there is robust work suggesting exposure to high risk. While the planet has had higher [CO2] in the geologic past, humanity has not. We are conducting an experiment that we have not done before ... and we have no other test tube to use as a control. In geologic time, we are most definitely 100% heading towards another ice age, regardless of our current [CO2].

This is crucial, Graham - people like Ian Plimer recognise high sensitivity to [CO2] because it has been very much so in the past. Monckton n the other hand wants to assure us that climate sensitivity to [CO2] is low. This contradiction is not seen, let alone acknowledged, by the followers of the current road show.

_____

Bazz, I was surprised myself, but that is what she said.

qanda
I am not one that thinks all these doubts around the IPCC are a
conspiracy, but the biggest complaint I have is the problems associated
with exaggeration of the effects.
Generally they were not *mistakes*, they were deliberate
exaggerations designed to influence politicians.

I am on a committee that has mostly AGW conviction people and they are
frankly terrified at what may happen. They still believe that the
Himalayan Glaciers will melt by 2035. They think that the story that
they will not if ever melt is put up by deniers.
They have total faith in Al Gore and the IPCC.
This was the first time I had been in any personal contact with AGW
activists and frankly they frighten me.

It seems that the temperatures are noticeably below the model
predictions and with the current short term pause it will be prudent
to watch what happens over the next few years.
In any case there is not much point in Australia trying to do anything
unless China scraps burning our coal.
I was not aware that the CO2 from the burning of our coal exports is
counted against our CO2 score.
If this is so, it is absolutely pointless for us to do anything at all.
We could shut down the whole of Australia and you couldn't measure
the difference.

The whole thing has become a farce !

Bazz
Every major public issue attracts "activists" or "conviction people"- on all sides of the issue. Way back in the Vietnam War days there were people protesting who embarrassed me- I put my effort into rational debate and providing moral support for draft dodgers. My Dad told me about protests related to WWII. The original Luddites were probably a motley bunch as well. My point is that you can't gauge the veracity of the core issue from the actions of the "fellow travellers"- they have their own agendas, ranging from cogent to idiotic, and often they are coat-tailing on the latest issue. And the conservatives/reactionaries have a similar spectrum.

Thinking of the crowd in behaviour-spectrum terms helps- there is no point trying to reason with someone to is ignorant of, or chooses to ignore, the facts and is a passionate believer (hey! isn't that where we came in with the recently-departed peer?). But there are people who are somewhat passionate and are wanting to learn. We need to try to accept their passionate disposition and hold firm with the data as we know it. We need to encourage them to not panic when they hear words "uncertainty", "mistake", "likely" etc. Fundamentalists of all kinds want absolute certainty. Don't let them have it.

...and refer them to websites where people try to behave, and also have a sense of humour, like http://www.realclimate.org.

Qanda,
It is YOU who misrepresents.

The salient points being made by Simpson are:
1) She felt compelled whilst funded by, and or affiliated with, an organisation to tow its pro-AGW party line –something, you and others tell us never happens!
2) She has little faith in climatic modelling –quite at odds with your unshakable faith in such!

You’ve docked onto her statement YOUR little serial puff piece about “the weight of evidence (for AGW) [ being] robust.” & ”dangerous outcomes” .Totally against the spirit of what she was saying.

The only place Simpson comes close to your take, is her decision to err on the side of caution.
And such would normally be eminently sensible. Except that, equating caution with the program proposed by Gore/IPCC is an error.

Commitment to the Gore /IPCC program doesn’t just mean: “ lets clean -up our act, reduce pollution & waste & develop alternate energy sources”
( I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t think such is wise!)

It means, we sign off on contracts to bankroll the rest of the world for what ever amount, and for however long, the IPCC & its organs dictate.

And far from taking precautions to mitigate any threat , in accepting the program we accept liability for a 1001 problems in the rest of the world.
Most of which are not derived from climate change . Whilst all the time allowing the major causes of such problems: over population, poor farming ,over fishing practises , to name but a few, to go largely unaddressed .

Such is not a prudent stand – it is a foolhardy stand!

Want to see the IPCC future world ?
Witness your poster boy Bishop Tutu singing & doing his geriatric jig at Copenhagen: “We’ll all sink or swim together”
The only team sport he and his followers have in mind is to line up for their free handouts.

As for your comment: “I too am a sceptic” --sorry, I don’t buy it!

Jedimaster, your words, “not panic" really give you away, because you are not warning against the panic promoted on the basis of a “very likely” with no proof.

Why is this line pushed with no proof, instead of proceeding with investigation, until the science is clear?

It has been obvious to anyone following the debate for a few years, that dishonesty is endemic in the IPCC and its accomplices.

The UN wants legislation in place to force the purchase of “carbon credits”, a spurious method of creating a huge market to be constantly traded to the profit of the UN.

Huge funds would be put in the control of a proven master of corruption, as witness its self extrication from the Iraq Oil for Food swindle.

Observation of the Bali farce made it clear that the UN would say anything to back the fraud of global warming.

The Hadley scientists with their scurrilous tampering with data put this all beyond doubt.

Nothing could be more obvious than that Gore, the IPCC and the UN are barefaced liars, intent on profiting from a fraudulent scheme.

Long before the present examples, there were the lies about a consensus which never was, the “thousands of scientists” who were said to back the non science of the Summaries, despite scientists, who were the authors of the science, speaking up to say that the Summaries did not reflect the science.

The peer review farce, where co miscreants of the Hadley scientists reviewed each other.

Truthful articles are immediately removed from Wikipedia, and lies about consensus are still retained and protected. Sites like realclimate, run by Michael Mann of Hockey stick infamy, are constantly promoted by warmists or their gulls.

The lie incessantly pushed is that models are capable of predicting climate. There is no attempt even to appear honest.

Without the internet, the compliant, corrupt media would have facilitated this crime, but honest realists now have a real chance of succeeding, despite the odds at the beginning.

Personally I think the AGWers and the political agendas that support their ideology have been found MORE than wanting. With my experience
and studies over 10 years I have never found their argument stable.

First it was CO2 and Greenhouse gases, then AGW CO2 was causing ALL
global warming, then it went further to contributing to global climate
change. It was all a load of crap. With No scientific basis, even though Al Gore reckoned he had provided the punch line.

Now we learn and it isn't new by any chance going back to 2007 even early warnings for investors in Carbon Credit trading shares etc.

This is what is driving Climate change now. Those who see the debunking of the whole ideology connected to global warming, climate change and CO2 emissions from developed countries is falsified.

As 'Bar Humbug' suggested on Joanne Nova's blog (I've enhanced it a bit) The Climate Change money train was hurtling at 100 miles a hour
until it met a bump, and now is being derailed carriage by carriage!!"

We are conned, those that believed in AGW have been more conned, and all to support people who want ETS taxes to be endorsed so they can
get better dividends. The biggest scam ever...I feel sorry though
for those who genuinely believe measures suggested during the Copenhagen Summit although basically driven by political agendas
have also been conned. They should be FURIOUS. Sustainability is one
thing though that I support.

qanda, how can you say that the models are pretty good and getting better all the time? What is your test of that? We've had ten years of static temperature which none of the models predicted, or can account for. There's an interesting website where they test model hypotheses http://rankexploits.com/musings/. Last time I looked the models weren't doing too well. Don't tell me that because the models are more likely to agree now than they were that they are more robust. That is a function of group think, not robustness.

Where does Plimer claim high sensitivity to CO2? You don't have to show me where Monckton said it - it's in his peer-reviewed contribution to climate science.

It's a furphy to say that because humanity wasn't around when CO2 was higher that it is somehow different now. Are you seriously saying mankind couldn't have lived in those higher CO2 days?

Good to see you agree about the ice age. So, what are you doing about it? If one turned-up in the next 100 years we really would have a catastrophe. It ought to be consuming our every waking thoughts. As well as working out what to do about the next NEO that crashes into us. Better odds of that than catastrophic global warming.

Malcolm Turnbull who was the leader of the opposition in Australia and
was replaced by Tony Abbott. Stood up in the House of Reps and said
he believed in all the Al Gore nonsense, and would cross the floor
to support the ALP and chairman Rudd and Senator Wrong's case for
installing ETS taxes?

Well - I have heard from credible sources, that Mr Turnbull has heavily invested into Carbon Credit trading. No wonder he supports the ETS bills offered by the ALP. He risks losing dividends doesn't he if no ETS taxes are passed.

Let's get real. Does Malcolm Turnbull represent the majority of his
Wentworth constituents ideology? I doubt it unless they have also invested heavily in Carbon Credits trading?

I think Malcolm should cross the floor and keep walking out of Parliament House because he is not acting in the best interests of his
constituents and also by supporting the Fed Gov ETS taxes is concerned with his own financial interests and others, and not Australia or citizen's welfare should these ETS taxes be implemented.

Keep walking Malcolm out of Parliament House and take Mr Rudd, and
Senator Wong with you, they have spent millions of dollars of tax payers monies on this AGW debate and supported Climate Change organisations who are paid to support the IPCC report, and Greens.
All proven now with the help of Lord Monckton, Prof Plimer and many other honest scientists, that human activity or AGW does not influence
climate change and have the scientific data (not corrupted by the UN IPCC, UAE et al) to prove it.

God bless the skeptics. We would not have been skeptics unless we were faced with incorrect and fraudulently based scientific data that was underlined by political agendas and to fraudulent money gathering
organisations. That could eventually harm humanity not help it!

Bush Bunny;
You exaggerate.
>All proven now with the help of Lord Monckton, Prof Plimer and many
>other honest scientists, that human activity or AGW does not influence
>climate change and have the scientific data (not corrupted by the UN
>IPCC, UAE et al) to prove it.

That is not what Monkton said.
What he said was that temperature is rising and has been rising for 300 years.
He did say that man generated CO2 was causing an increase above the
long term rise, but that this rise was only about 1/5th of the IPCCs
rise and he presented the figures and reasoning behind his statement.
Actually he might have said 1/7th not 1/5th.
He said that this smaller figure meant that the effect of reducing CO2
emissions would have negligible effect on temperature.
Monkton claims that the real temperature is significantly below the
model projected temperatures.

I think Bush Bunny that is a fairer picture of what Monkton said.

Bazz

And if the temperatures continue to trend up?
Of course, you are right - a global problem requires a global response.
And yep, a farce.

_____

Horus

The kerfuffle is about what to do, how, when and by whom - not why.
And yes, I am a sceptic (in the scientific sense). I would classify the majority of so called 'sceptics' ... cynics.

_____

Graham

The models today are much better than the models of yesterday. We have much better temporal and spatial resolution. This will aid everyone from governments to farmers and all those in between, particularly at a regional level.

Yes, I pop in to Lucia's blog now and then, even Tamino's "Open Mind".
However, I mostly go to places like this:

http://pcmdi-cmip.llnl.gov/cmip5/index.html

http://www.ecmwf.int/research/

You should check out the anual reports.

Re: Plimer - his lectures.

No, I am not saying "mankind couldn't have lived in those higher CO2 days" - I am saying we are conducting an experiment that we have not done before ... and we have no other test tube to use as a control.

Yes, we are heading for another ice age, 100% absolutely. Check the time line for Milankovitch cycles - I'd say in about 30,000 years, +/- a bit.
What am I going to do about it? Nothing, I can't control the tilt or orbit of the planet.

What I have control in is living in a more sustainable way, hopefully others would do the same - but I have my doubts.

Btw, I think Solomon et al is accounting for the stasis pretty well Graham ... stratospheric cooling and you guessed it, that damn water vapour again :(

My last post appears to have stifled discussion so let's get this thing back on topic:

<< The big lie peddled by the UN is the notion that a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause as much as 2-4.5C of 'global warming'. >>

Did anyone watch the debate between the Lord and the Doctor at the Sydney Hilton today?

I think the doctor nailed the Lord on the science, particularly about climate sensitivity. In a nut-shell, the Lord is wrong.

However, the Lord Chris jiggled his followers when talking about politics and economics - that's what the 'debate' is about in the public's mind - not the science.

qanda: "Did anyone watch the debate between the Lord and the Doctor at the Sydney Hilton today?"

Is it online somewhere?

Not sure - I watched the live stream from SMH online.

Here is one appraisal

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/02/12/i-went-to-a-circus-and-a-science-debate-broke-out/

Graham's best friend-not, Dr Tim Lambert, was debating the science of climate sensitivity (the subject the Lord's choosing).

In my opinion, while Monckton tried valiantly to claim credence for his brand of science, Lambert nailed the Lord when he produced an audio clip from Professor Rachel Pinker who categorically refuted Monckton's assertions (Monckton was relying on a paper she wrote to argue his 'case' for low levels of sensitivity to CO2 forcing).

Monckton either doesn't understand the science, or he deliberately misrepresents and distorts what the scientists are saying for his own (or someone/group higher) agenda - despicable imo.

Tim Lambert will be putting Pinker's paper on his website for all to see where, how and why the Lord has got it so wrong.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/

Oh, I thought the funniest bit was that Monckton really thought Rachel Pinker was a bloke - he relied on her paper so much that he didn't even get her gender right!

The other thing that grabbed my attention was that the Lord seemed to rely on Plimer's geologic pre-history of 750 million years ago just too much - rather than concentrating on what was actually happening in real time - like in the recent 200 years. Yep, Plimer has been in Monckton's ear a lot lately - and Plimer still refuses to correct the scientific errors in his Heaven and Earth, simply amazing.

You gotta give it to Monckton though, he really knows how to play to the fears of his followers - rightfully worried about how we are to tackle climate change - ETS, tax, whatever. But the science? They don't have a clue and they dribble at the Lord's every utterance - a shame, really.

Monckton has been accused of a quite a few discreditable things.

However, regarding the Climate Change scam, and it is a scam. Mr
Turnbull spat out the dummy in parliament, and I would advise posters
on this blog to get on to www.cecaust.com.au "Goldman Sachs' Turnbull
dances to British carbon trading tune' - Now why would AGW's say we
who do not agree are in the pay of the big oil companies? After all
they if an Carbon Trading Schemes were introduced, all those who have
invested millions in any Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, could sell them
theirs to compensate. No ETS scheme, devaluation of their shares.
And people like us who have put in solar panels with the hope of
benefiting financially will lose our money invested.

Read the article, very interesting, dated 28th October 2009 before
the Copenhagen comedy hours.

Point 2: Lord M also mentioned that Dr Patchauri and Sir John Houghton as Trustees of TERI Europe, were in trouble and could face
criminal charges (not declaring proper income) The ABC quote Sir John
Houghton as saying "I have never been a Trustee of TERI Europe" Well
Sir John he is obviously a technophobe - Google TERI Europe and their
index and look at Trustees and Sir John is right at the top. I don't
think Lord Monckton is stupid enough to make allegations like this, with out checking out his facts first.

Bazz: In the last 300 years global temps have risen, but we were coming out of a mini ice age and the causation factor was not AGW.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas but a small percentage of it over-all.
CO2 irrespective of it's total content of Greenhouse gases, water vapor e.g.clouds, are responsible for keeping the planet sometimes
warmer (that's why frost doesn't form if their is cloud cover at night) and cooler by day. That's why deserts are boiling hot during
the day and freezing cold at night. Humidity levels add to make it
feel hotter but basically temps are not, other than seasonal variations.

qanda,

I went and looked for a video of the stoush. If it is out there somewhere it is well hidden. Next time you watch something like this do the world a favour and record it. It isn't difficult.

After reading this article from Monckton I decided the guy was likely just a blow hard. That was sharply corrected when I heard him perform on the ABC RN morning show. Having seen Fran Kelly take on Prime Minsters, Professors, Archbishops with ease to hear her torn apart by Monckton was a shock. It was as though the English bulldog had her cowering in the corner. During the moment it was a thoroughly convincing performance, but once his voice ebbed from the airwaves the holes in what he said bubbled up and seemed annoyingly obvious. The next time I heard him on the radio it was different yet again. None of the hysterical claims from this article, no silencing the opposition by the bully, just reasoned argument. The man evidently has a chameleon like ability to tailor debating style to the situation. He is very impressive, and I can see why Plimer wanted him over here.

It would have been nice to have seen him up against Lambert, even if it was just to see an outstanding performer like Monckton weave his magic. If Lambert wasn't 100% up on his topic he would have been torn apart. Evidently he isn't on the economic side. But it sounds that he, at the very least, held his own on the science. In my book just holding your own against Monckton is a resounding win.

I have to say it was disappointing to read larvatusprodeo's summary of the questions asked.

I haven't tried A-PAC

http://www.a-pac.tv/

but it was mentioned on Lambert's thread.

As far as Lord Monckton is concerned, I like him very much. I feel what he has to say is ethical and scientifically correct. I think right now is the AGW believers are in a quandary.

But without Lord Monckton, I knew years ago from my respective 'scientifically' based studies the Al Gores etc., were right off the mark. I have suggested you U Tube "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

And also the political manipulation of those who might have trillions
of dollars invested in Carbon Credits Trading, and without any ETS
legislations being implemented, they are done - lost out financially.

Again, I advise to get on to www.cecaust.com.au and search "Goldman
Sachs' Turnbull dances to British carbon trading tune.

He was with the present government, the principal driver of the belief in AGW. Financial CCT investments now face a plunge possibly complete loss in investments.

Forget the science right now for a moment, and research what will happen if ETS legislations globally are not implemented? Lots will
lose their money, that shouldn't happen just after this other global
financial downfall in stocks and investments.

Blame Al Gore! Blame the UN IPCC and others who contributed to their
reports. You and I are now under the axe if any ETS legislation should be implemented that will push up costs of living, for no reason but to satisfy investors in CCT investment shares that look like plummeting right now. Have plummeted! Sorry... but that's how I feel. I am disgusted Australian politicians are not saying this, other than Senator Barnaby Joyce. The coalition led now by Tony Abbott are sitting on the fence, they know that the climate change
scam will affect people in Australia if they have invested in CCT
and Turnbull is a disgrace as a politician in my opinion.