Loudmouth,

90 percent of your post is strawman (as usual).

If you insist on employing this strategy, then I'm happy to continue to ignore it: )

"But keep barking if it makes you feel better."

I can see your hypocritical stance on posting etiquette is still going strong...and if someone happens to point out your double standards, suddenly they're appealing to petty sensitivities.

SPQR,

So Klein worked out the reason for denialists vehemence - they see a threat to the status quo. Wow - what a surprise!

Excellent post, Squeers : )

cohenite,

The concept of Gaia, as Lovelock conceived it, seems perfectly reasonable to me, not as an article of faith, but as a way of viewing the world and for all practical purposes.

sorry I can't comment at length on your sources, but whatever their short-comings, or the excoriations proposed, our system, based on its rapacious use of limited resources, destructiveness and endless expansion in a closed system, is definitively insane.
You might celebrate the current state of affairs, but even supposing it was "democratic" in any meaningful sense (though it's not), it's patently unsustainable.

However, adieu.

SPQR writes:

>>Listen, Steven, you come across as a reasonable guy. And I can see from your comments above about the US election, you're not easy fooled by hype.
You don’t belong on the same side of the house ….>>

You've asked a reasonable question and I shall try and give a reasonable answer.

First, I cannot begin to describe how much it pains me to be on the same side as the slimy self-righteous Greens on any issue.

They're loathsome!

The Greens leadership consists largely of recycled Stalinists and their acolytes.

And don't get me started on Naomi Klein or that ABC popinjay Garnaut!

It may surprise you to know that most of the actual climatologists I know perceive the Greens as part of the problem.

But what you are suggesting is that I change my mind on a SCIENTIFIC issue because of the PERSONALITIES of some of the people who purport to believe in AGW. That's like asking me to reject photo-electric theory - and the whole of quantum mechanics - because Philipp Lenard, the Nobel-prize-winning experimental physicist whose brilliant experiments established the facts about photo-electricity, was an early supporter of Hitler.

By all accounts Isaac Newton was a mean spirited, nasty, backstabbing intellectual thug. Is that a reason to reject Newtonian dynamics?

Galileo was apparently bombastic and arrogant. Even when he was demonstrably wrong – e.g. his theory of tides – his response was to attack his critics rather than rebut their arguments. He sounds like an early James Hansen. Do we go back to believing in a stationary Earth because of Galileo's personal shortcomings?

Here's the reality. If it turned out that James Hansen moonlighted as a serial killer it would make no difference to the validity or otherwise of his scientific work.

Scientists rarely get all the detail of a complex issue right the first time. Copernicus' astronomy did not match observation because he got an important detail wrong; planets do not follow circular orbits. Do we go back to a geocentric theory because the first effort got some details wrong?

Cont'd below

A few points:

--I deplore the fact that so many really awful people have hijacked a scientific ISSUE, AGW, and turned it into a CAUSE which they use to advance their totalitarian agenda. But it does not affect the underlying science.

--The science underpinning AGW and the policy responses are separate issues. The reality of AGW does not mean embracing Australia's carbon tax or joining the Gillard groupies.

--The thousands of climatologists working on AGW are mostly not fools, are mostly honest and are not engaged in a conspiracy or scam. Nor are the leaders of the world's premier scientific bodies, all of which have warned about the dangers posed by AGW, fools. If you truly believe all these scientists are engaged in a "scam" you are in the same class as the "birthers" who purport to believe Obama was not born a US citizen.

With that out of the way here are the facts.

--Given some basic physics plus what we know about the dynamics of the world's climate system it would be rather astonishing if adding CO2 to the atmosphere did not result in global warming. In fact if we did not observe a warming trend we'd have a lot of explaining to do.

--Broadly speaking, and with many exceptions, the planet is responding in a way that is consistent with AGW.

--Can we be certain what we observe is due to AGW and not some natural climatic variation? No we can't but the preponderance of evidence points in that direction.

We are roughly where heliocentric astronomy was in 1543 when Copernicus published his magnum opus. The framework looks right but there's still a lot of detail to fill in.

Personal attacks on scientists, allegations of a vast conspiracy, the parasites (ie the Greenies) who have attached themselves to this issue, cherry picking bits of data here and there, quotes from some distinguished scientists who dissent, the self-righteousness of Julia Gillard, none of these alter the science.

Nor do our personal preferences have any impact on the laws of physics.

Great post Steven, thank you. However I have to try to tear it apart.

I'm afraid the whole thing can be called a referral to authority. The only reasons you give me are;

1/ That thousands of climatologists are all good blokes.

2/ That the theory of CO2 behaviour, as they & you see it, leaves no other thing to believe.

Not really anything to prove anything mate. It really is like saying stomach ulcers "MUST" be due to worry, because we can't find anything else to explain them. Group think is a worrying thing, it would probably give me ulcers, if I were the worrying type.

All that stuff about the people involved is a bit irrelevant, if you are looking at what is said, & not by whom it is said. Hell I'm so dyslexic I can't remember who wrote a paper, even I'm just half way through it. I can however, remember what was said even years later, which is the important thing really. It means I consider the subject, not the author.

I have seen two papers now, [no I don't keep references, the computer crashes too often], that suggest adding CO2 to the atmosphere displaces water vapor. If this is the case, CO2 would be a cooling influence. The evidence for this, obtained by experiment, is actually stronger than anything obtained to support CO2's warming, except that it "just must".

There is also plenty of genuine evidence to show that convection has much more effect than radiation in cooling, & add in evaporation, & radiation becomes the country cousin in the cooling of the earth.

So sorry mate, I'm with SPQR when he says he's surprised you can't see the scam.

Steven,

Yes, good post.

I take your point on"In-your-face" AGW supporters like Klein, et al - but really, what do you do if corporate and media elites hold sway on the dissemination of science and opinion? In the end, movements form presenting both sides of the argument. That's how humans do it.

And then we have the "skeptics" like Loudmouth constantly spouting the same line about sea rise and temperature rise as if these are static entities and not part of an interconnected web of cause and effect, of which he knows very little - and ignores time after time the links that are provided explaining the intricacies far better than I could. He appears convinced that it's either a socialist or fascist plot - and apparently there's no threat when all he can see is his "0.7 degrees in 100 years/2-6 inches in 100 years"....which he trots out time and again as if it's a game changer.

Steven - in the end if someone like you has faith in the scientists to "honestly" do their best, what happens when denialists call it scam, when certain sections of the media run with that line, when it's extremely difficult for fortunate humans to back off from their rampant consumerism in favour of a lighter footprint, when they're encouraged to doubt the scientists and to blow a raspberry at their sense and conscience because "it's easier" to believe it's all a fraud.

What do you do?...People like Naomi Klein at least have the eloquence to get the message across to ears that would be happier not to hear it.