Jedimaster, I speculated earlier that you were “one of the few warmers that remain belligerent but are not looking for an exit strategy”.

I was wrong, you followed with;

<<Again, as a skeptic, I must await proof>> and in the same post you said;

<<There seem to be a lot of cynics around all too ready to administer the hemlock to skeptics who insist on seeing data connected by logic and reason>>

I missed the fact that you are defending the warming faith whilst at the same time insisting that you are a skeptic? This is both your exit strategy and your schizophrenia.

I note that you have greater computing skills than the entire PW Group by still insisting that the CRU files were “hacked”. <<The CRU hacker, in my view, broke that ethos. >> (Posted by Jedimaster, Monday, 26 July 2010 11:17:53 PM), which nicely avoids the many questions that real skeptics are asking.

You are in good company Jedimaster, there are many warmers showing the embryonic stages of exit strategies, the profound confusion, the “bob each way”, the bubbling frustration, the tearing schizophrenia and the elevated fundamentalism as reality starts to bite.

Gullibility has a harsh price.

Keep on digging.

Amicus

To misquote Maggie Thatcher- this man is not for squirming.

Your response exemplifies the difference between your approach and mine to this issue- which in turn seems to be a microcosm of the discourse at large: I present data, and draw inferences from it (which, in the spirit of Popper) are open to refutation by other data, logic and reason. You, in turn, ignore my data, as such, give an unsupported interpretation and then follow up with a personal jibe, insult or insinuation. I grew up with that kind of behaviour in the woolsheds and bars of WA in the '50s. "Wake in Fright" is a good depiction of that behaviour.

Does this point to a widespread failure of our education system, or is my sample skewed by a preponderance of anti-empiricists participating in OLO?

Now back to your claim of behaviour vs science: First, I thought that you and rpg were claiming that the CRU scientists were behaving badly, as well as cooking the books. The two findings I exerpted above deal with both. Secondly, if you read the findings of Muir Russell (http://www.scribd.com/doc/34003747/Muir-Russell-Final), you will see that they go on at length about many aspects of the science -several dozen in fact- all of which support CRU and the science.

Muir Russell, did, indeed, comment adversely on some of CRU's behaviour. Although it is quite possible that some of this behaviour is due to unacceptable professional rivalries, it was found by Muir Russell to be of no scientific consequence. Some of the behaviour was possibly due to CRU essentially being a typical bunch of scientists- introvert, nerdy, focussed on ideas not people etc- who were pushed out of their comfort zone by the waves of public requests for info-many of which were demonstrated to be vexatious- although not all.

The climatologists have taken note of this issue of dealing with the wider public- have a look at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-muir-russell-report/. Not only are they self-critical, but invariably courteous.

That's my model for discourse, not "Wake in Fright" or a '50s woolshed.

The issue is not whether the climate is changing, it is whether policy action on global warming is justified.

Putting aside any issue of climate science, and any issue of corruption and fraud resulting from policy action, it seems to me the warmists’ irrationality is in three categories.

Fallacy of normative conclusions from positive science
Science does not supply value judgments, whereas policy requires them. Therefore measurements of temperature do not, of themselves, provide any justification of any policy.

Yet we see this fallacious assumption constantly repeated throughout the arguments of the warmists above and in public debate, as if “science” self-evidently or overwhelmingly justifies policy action; and as if the qualification to judge is expertise in climatology.

Justification of policy action requires two further steps. Policy action must be technically capable of achieving a better outcome than the status quo, and it must be ethical in the first place.


Economics
If policy action is to maintain the same population at the same standard, the warmists inherently assume that governmental control or direction of production is capable of being *more* productive than the status quo, in that it will provide the same benefits with fewer costs (to the environment). It will be more efficient at economising specifically those resources that are not subject to private property, and therefore outside economic calculation.

Ethics
There are already food shortages in the world now, and the policies urged on the most productive nations by the warmists, massively reduce and divert production from more productive uses, to less productive uses. And that is to say nothing of the ruination of livelihoods, and the political enrichment of some at the expense of others. And is everyone to have an equal claim? If so, how is that to be reconciled with private property?

If policy action is not to maintain the same population at the same standard, who is this fictional “we” who is to decide who shall live and who shall die? No warmist ever answers this question; nor even acknowledges the ethical issues

To argue that we cannot be 100% certain before action, is
a) to assume that the warmists have made their case before they have, and
b) to inappropriately export an empirical assumption about knowledge from the physical sciences, where it is appropriate, into the ethics and economics.

It is not valid in the ethics because ethics is not a positive science. For example, we don’t deliberately or recklessly kill someone and then try to measure or statistically quantify the resulting grief to determine whether it was morally wrong.

And as for the economics, we already know central planning is incapable of being as productive as the status quo, not only as a matter of empirical science, but because the belief in the superior productivity of central planning does not even meet the prior threshold test of a logically sound belief system (because public ownership abolishes the possibility of economic calculation except as depends on the remaining private ownership).

The economic illiteracy and ethical confusion of the warmists either does not comprehend or care that their approach *necessarily* involves either fallacies on the one hand, or crimes against human rights on the other. They assume or assert all the arguments for central planning that failed so spectacularly last century, at such enormous cost in lives and misery; only this time the claim is made on behalf of the long-suffering climate rather than the long-suffering proletariat. All the other assumptions are unchanged.

Underlying all the positive science of the warmists is an irrational belief in government, a superior mystic entity over and above society that is all-knowing, all-good, and all-capable, and which can abolish natural scarcity by legislative fiat; a complete fantasy that has no basis in reason or evidence.

But if it does, please answer these two questions:
a) How is government to know whether all the costs of a given policy action exceed the benefits
b) How is government to weigh up and reconcile the inconsistent claims of all people involved?

Peter Hume precises the limited cognitive skills of the warmist lobby

The application of collectivism, when collectivism has failed repeatedly is, through the aggitation of entryists, the real reason for warmist and enviromentalist hysteria

As Lenin said, “Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.”

and I have seen it written in even more succinct terms -

Socialism By Stealth

Jedimaster

I appreciate your continuing the argument. Unfortunately, OLO is an unreconstructed pro-denialist site. In answer to your question, denialists are not very prevalent anywhere else. Even the CEO of BP is quoted as saying the science is clear and we need to take prudent action.

Certainly, none of the denialists who have posted on this thread can claim to have posited a logical argument and have done nothing but prove the original contention of the article by "dancing on reason's grave".

I am still waiting for the peer reviewed work which counters that global warming hypothesis. I have asked for this many times and the closest I have gotten to an answer was from Cumudgeon who told me to buy his book which of course is no answer at all.