Is it just me, or does SPQR sound an awful lot like ALGOREisRICH?
Posted by Aleister Crowley, Monday, 24 January 2011 11:09:54 PM

Dear Aleister,

The same question was asked of SPQR a few days ago on another thread but we are still waiting for a straight answer.

It appears (though unconfirmed) AGIR was suspended for a month. SPQR surfaced a week into the penalty and unlike a normal newbie was right into it. I had hoped SPQR might have been retired once AL's suspension was over but instead we see the personas even complimenting each other as in this thread.

I owe belly an apology if they are in fact separate people but at the moment I think I might be safe.

SPQR AGIR?

Not religious enough. SPQR sounds, writes and looks more like spindoc.

But, who really cares? You don't really get a straight answer from any of them.

Squeers,
It’s amazing, you know me even less than CSteele and yet you’re telling me what I believe:
“but they're not dogmatically denying mountains of evidence either--like you do, for instance.”

My only point of contention over AGW, on this forum, has been on the issue of whether or not the below statement was fair and reasonable:

/// To quote the head of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research's Climate Analysis Section “Certain events would have been extremely unlikely to have occurred without global warming, and that includes the Russian heat wave and wild fires, and the Pakistan, Chinese, and Indian floods”. He could probably add the long drought and the recent Qld floods that broke it as well ///

And it’s becoming pretty apparent that it’s NOT, since when asked to defend it, people
skirt around what is right before their eyes and start to re-write it –so it sounds like this:

“It's quite reasonable to conjecture that there's a connection”

Or this:
“we've always had extreme weather events and so 'tis difficult to say whether the latest spate is due to global warming”

I’m sorry Squeers, but that is exactly what the quotation is asserting !

It’s saying without AGW it is EXTREMELY UNLIKEY that any of these events would have occurred .

A proposition amplified by :
Sophie Trevitt : http://tinyurl.com/4nhv79l
“ the potential losses precipitated by climate change (like the lives and livelihoods that are currently being devastated by the natural disaster in Queensland)”
And by Bob Brown http://tinyurl.com/4ahlwm6
“It's the single biggest cause - burning coal - for climate change and it must take its major share of responsibility for the weather events we are seeing unfolding now"

If as you say : “ Reasonable people are… not dogmatically ascribing all extreme weather events to global warming”

But our straw poll or modelling has produced three examples in a row, couldn’t we quite reasonably draw a IPCC-like conclusion that there are few reasonable people on your side of the debate (?)

SPQR:
<But our straw poll or modelling has produced three examples in a row, couldn’t we quite reasonably draw a IPCC-like conclusion that there are few reasonable people on your side of the debate (?)>

NO.
There are certainly loonies on both sides of the debate, but minimifidianism, which monolithically refuses to acknowledge evidence, let alone assess it objectively, is NOT REASONABLE.

Global warming is certainly a compelling explanation for the upward trend in extreme weather events, but I agree that no one is in a position to assert this without qualification. I'd like to see a graph pegging this trend to the warming trend, but there's unlikely to be enough data to make such a graph for many years, indeed we're unlikely to ever have a complete climate model, or be able to accurately pinpoint its volatility.
AGW though, like most science, is based on inference from the available data. At what point do you decide to quit a dangerous situation? Do you need a blade between the ribs before you're convinced?
On what do you base your scepticism on AGW?
Unless you can show me intellectual/evidential objections, I will continue to see denialism as based either in vested interest, on political paranoia, or prejudice of many hues.
What it comes down to for popular or layman-denialism, is we're a rich country and the contented centre doesn't want its ideological slice of heaven tampered with (a delusion anyway).
Well, sorry for the inconvenience, but sh!t happens!
Burying your head in the sand won't make it go away.

Squeers,

/// On what do you base your scepticism on AGW? ///

Aw! I don’t know I’m in either camp.I consider myself more of interested observer , who, disguised as SPQR , mild-mannered poster in cyber space fights a never ending battle for truth, justice, and the scientific way.

Cheers!
Catch you next time

Explanation of SPQR:

The abbreviation SPQR means, in English, the Senate and the Roman people, but what exactly those four letters stand for -- in Latin -- is a little less clear. My take, which I've recently changed, is that SPQR stands for the first letters of the following words with "-que" added as the third:
Senatus Populusque Romanus.
That -que is added to another wo

Translated: Short Fat Agnostic.