Dear Chris, another interesting article.

As an exponent of Daniel Goleman’s EQ it would be interesting to hear from you in relation to those in our society who develop such passionate belief in alarmism.

Armstrong and Green have identified 60 public alarm phenomena since 1780, 26 of which correlate precisely with the AGW alarm phenomena. So what is the emotional “difference” between those who are described as deniers, flat earthers, unintelligent and criminals for “not” believing the current alarm orthodoxy and those who have so passionately embraced this phenomena?

We have had previous threads along these lines on OLO however, since then we have seen the development of an “entity relationship analysis” that describes the advocacy block, its components and the interrelationships.

The advocacy block is represented by; Political Advocates, Media Advocacy, Academic Advocacy, Scientific Advocacy, Celebrity Advocates, Public Advocates, Commercial Opportunist Advocacy and NGO advocacy.

This is a powerful block and in terms of traditional IQ there would have to be the assumption that, apart from the usual suspects, they were all well educated.

So is there anything that can be drawn from EQ that might explain this paradox?

It’s also worth noting that as many advocates sense impending collapse of the AGW phenomena, the new “alarms” are already starting to emerge, namely “overpopulation” and “food production” alarms.

If society doesn’t get its collective head round this “alarmism” challenge soon, we might just end up shredding ourselves

From the article:

"This is what climate change needs; an hypothesis that is proved or disproved by experimental observation. The best attempt at this I have been able to find is in a 2006 report, Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere by the US government's Climate Change Science Program (CCSP)."

You didn't look hard enough Greg. Read up on James Hansen's climate models he developed in the 1980's. Here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Climate_model_development_and_projections

He developed some models around what was some far out theory on the effect of increasing CO2 concentrations, and on the basis of those models made what were at the time some controversial predictions on what would happen in the next 20 years. It turned out he was right.

It was classic science: develop a model explaining the data, make some predictions, and then have predictions confirmed. Because it was classic science it convinced a lot of people. One of the people who sat in Hansen's classes, listening to his wild theories was a politician named Al Gore.

I gather he wasn't completely convinced at the time, but when they came true ... well, the rest, as they say, is history.

Whether Hansen is right is another question. 20 years is not a long time in climate science. If you look at the land temperature record:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_%28NASA%29.svg

You will see the graph is clearly going up. Yet if we cherry picked 1940 as our starting point the world didn't get that warm again for 40 years. If 1998 marks a similar point climate science is in for a real battle.

The point being 20 years isn't really long enough to be sure if you are just going by global temperature, and besides a single match isn't that convincing.

Fortunately we won't have to. The limitation in the models has been the amount of computer power we can devote to the task, and I gather we are now entering a new era where they can make predictions for various parts of the world. 100's of accurate predictions about local climate around the world would be a slam dunk.

I am no expert on emotional intelligence unlike the author, but believe it encompasses:
- interpersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people); and
- intrapersonal intelligence (the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivations)

I have to wonder at the author's understanding of his own motivations in writing and promoting such an article.

I reject the idea that the medium and long term interests of people are best served by cherry picking items from the climate change literature (as pointed out in a previous post by GlenC) and ignoring the mass of evidence and scientific opinion that points in the other direction.

I also sense double standards in the article. The author doesn't believe in models but is happy to unequivocally state that the economic costs of the policies being proposed are going to be "catastrophic" for Australia without offering any evidence and without contemplating the size of the risk we are trying to minimise.

Other problems in the article seem to me to stem more from a layman trying to understand science (eg: hotspot), rather than the science being flawed.

We are putting up 90 million tonnes of CO2 (a known greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere every day through burning fossil fuels. Temperatures are on a clear upward trend as is the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. I would like to see articles such as this go the extra mile and post a hypothesis - that hasn't already been disproved - as to why that wouldn't be a problem. It would be the equivalent theory to the "bacterium" theory that the author mentioned in his article and by implication believes is out there.

rstuart, as was said in the UK when the Met claimed their predictions would be so much better if they had bigger, faster, much more expensive computers to run their models ...

"They would merely get the wrong answer, faster."

The very basis of modelling is the primary concern of skeptics of AGW, there are so many variables, so many millions of inputs, that since we are not nearly advanced enough to consider or understand them all, we ignore most as irrelevant and many we just use a "constant" for, e.g clouds and everything about them (is poorly understood).

Hanson's models predict all manner of things, some appear correct, the majority are not .. this is shotgunning science, not precision research. Ask yourself why people doubt Hanson?

In 50 or 100 years time, the science may be better understood, but to claim right now it is a mature science, is nonsense, not withstanding the enormous egos involved, as you get with enormous amounts of money.

Climate Science cannot be compared to other better understood science fields, and no other field makes as strong use of models, and that is because, it is not as advanced.

So I am not denigrating scientists, or the science, I merely point out it is in it's infancy, and should be treated as such, with a bloody huge grain of salt.

To those who say, well most climate scientists say this so we should not take the risk .. science is not gambling, and that is exactly what the current government's philosophy is as was Pascal's Wager.

not having sufficient data is not justification for tossing a coin.

It is not good enough to say there is a consensus of scientists in an immature field, so we should gamble everything on it .. the same scientists who collude to deny debate and to allow data to be free and no other scientific field does this ask us to trust them when it suits them.

I remain, skeptical.

It is wrong to claim, as the author does, that a tropospheric “hot spot” is evidence of AGW. It could equally be evidence of an increase in solar irradiance. It is only possible to distinguish between the two by looking at what is happening in the stratosphere where solar radiation should be causing warming and greenhouse gases be causing cooling. Satellite and radiosonde data clearly show cooling.

@Amicus: Hanson's models predict all manner of things, some appear correct, the majority are not .. this is shotgunning science, not precision research. Ask yourself why people doubt Hanson?

I can't know why people doubt Hansen (note the correct spelling of the man's name).

But I do know why I doubt you, Amicus. You don't give a single reference or link to back up your assertions. In the era of instant fact checking, that can mean only one of two things: you are lazy, or you are just making it up as you go along.

For what it's work, I think it's the latter, because I have never seen any credible evidence that most of Hansen's models were wrong.