runner,

"Fossils are certainly real but they certainly make a mockery of the evolution tale."

How so?

I'm glad this article is on OLO, I read it last week in the original, but was interested to see how it would take the usual OLO hysterics. would take it.

No surprises there, closed minds are closed minds, at least skeptics are open to read and listen to anything, not agree with it, but am happy to continue to learn.

There will be no debate in the AGW or not argument, the AGW scientists horde (most of them) who are well attached to grants and their positions have made it quite clear it is not worth the risk and they claim, the science is too complex to argue in a few hours.

Probably right, but my thought on why they don't want to debate is they really don't understand enough about climate to debate it, the science is too vast and is well beyond us at this stage of our development.

Maybe in another 100 years or so we'll have a better understanding, but we clearly don't now, why we don't even know how or why clouds form .. that's kind of basic to climate and weather is it not?

It's great to see more and more rational papers and articles as the fear of the establishment breaks down, and people feel up to challanging it.

If you go over to the ABC and to a degree here, you can see the government's useful idiots in action .. the benefits are clear to them, money in their pockets. The Gillard government is offering a cash incentive to support her Big New Tax .. why, you'll be better off and the believers line up to chant her glory.

It make same smile when the same people waiting for their ALPGreen cheques, claim, with no substance, that skeptics are in the pay of someone .. anyone.

Poor Runner,

Imposing restrictions of proof upon others but bases his own reality on something entirely based on myths and faith and for which no proof is possible.

How convenient.

Blaming something that's been researched for at least 50 years on Al Gore is like claiming that Sir Richard Attenborough actually discovered all those animals he presents on his documentaries

Excellent description of science vs pseudo-science. Science is indeed the art of the skeptical, evidence based mind. Of course like most successful movements there are hangers-on and those who are initially taken as cranks, yet eventually found to be "ahead of their time".
Physics, chemistry, biology are all based on repeatable experiments and hard maths. Climate science however cannot claim the same rigor...they are doing the best they can based on available evidence...and yes, computer models.
Keep in mind that these are essentially the same models that compute the weather forecasts that folks rely on. These are based on known physical laws (unlike economic or social models) and can be tested and refined *within the limits of a chaotic system*. The "butterfly effect" effectively makes precise "prediction" impossible. The probabilities are "dumbed down" for mass consumption, hence the 30% change of rain within a "pixel" of the model may or may not occur.
With Global Climate Models the entire Earth energy budget must be modeled. Digging up and burning several million years worth of carbon within a couple of hundred years certainly *should* have an impact...theory says so, and the data is increasingly heading that way.
I too am not a Climate Scientist...but I work with a bunch of them and whilst still not convinced there is not some "group think" going on, I can assure you they are not doing it for the money! (given salaries and working conditions this is laughable). I'm hoping the "global conspiracy of scientists" notion isn't taken too seriously either! That said, the data on sea surface temps, air temps, upper air temps and the understanding of water vapour, SO2, soot, etc is still pointing to "trouble ahead" and confirming the theory.
But...taking a longer view, the Earth suffers periodic episodes of vulcanism, asteroid/meteorite impacts, and mini-ice ages. Perhaps this slow motion disaster with added guilt (by some) will give us time to get out of our cradle and to focus on sustainable living, instead of just using technology to breed better and suck resources from nature at an accelerating rate.

There are no unqualified "scientific truths" and few that aren't eventually debunked.

More importantly, Ridley is himself a shameless and flagrant exponent of confirmation bias. He admits to this to a certain falsely modest extent, but that's just the tip of the ice-berg, he's oblivious of the bulk of it. Ridley's rational optimism is a monumental confirmation bias that ties him to neo-liberalism and market-based solutions to AGW, for instance, (though he's also an irrational denier whatever he says) when it is plain that the requisite and perpertual economic growth, in a closed system, is not only impossible, but is exponentially productive of the very carbon emissions this economic method purports to reduce--not to mention population growth, resource depletion, species extinction, biospheric degradation etc. All of this for Ridley is just so much negative thinking--he's just as much in denial as a fundamentalist Christian who denies the evidence of the fossil record--though at least Christians, however deluded, are meant to have ethics.
I assert that Matt Ridley is defending either an ingenuous or a disingenuous, but either way monumental, confirmation bias. I'll give him credit for being smart enough to be disingenuous--he figured out crop circles so he must fathom his own duplicity. His "optimism" about the future, despite the horrendous impacts the growing human presence is having locally and globally; his faux-scepticism about the dangerously accumulating effects of human activity on climate; and his willingness to relegate the vast majority of the scientific community to a collective confirmation bias (while ignoring his own), speaks volumes about his economic myopia and his spoiled, aristocratic perspective.
I wonder if Viscount Ridley and Lord Monckton have neighbouring castles and similar investments and vested interests? They seem to have identical confirmation bias!

Squeers,

Dr. Matt Ridley is NOT a viscount, nor indeed any other variety of peer, until such time as his old man buys the farm. And Lord Monckton is actually a viscount, not a lord. And both these facts are irrelevant, and by raising them you have committed an ad hominem fallacy: arguments stand or fall on their own merits, not the titles of those advancing said arguments.