Here's a little more information on Craig Idso.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Craig_Idso

cohenite,

I see you're still attempting to make the science a 'class' issue...good luck with that.

I tell you what Poirot, you just don't get it do you? Idso does a literature review and instead of looking at the literature he reviewed you try to cast doubt on his abilities. The papers that he has reviewed are all peer-reviewed, so there's not even that nit to pick really.

And what he finds is not surprising because those who've been paying attention to the debate know that plants respond positively to CO2 and need to use less water at elevated levels of the gas.

It is also uncontroversial that the earth is at the lower end of CO2 concentrations in its entire history.

So what is your problem with the fact that on the basis of this we're unlikely to be facing climate Armageddon?

Let's not get too precious, Graham.

All seems to be fair in love and war in this debate.

I don't see you criticising cohenite in his linking to Clive Hamilton's piece on OLO. He did that to provide a bit of "background" to the debate - as I did by linking to the Sourcewatch piece.

If I do it, apparently it's a matter of "...[I] just don't get it..."

Sorry, mate....for stepping on toes. Perhaps in future, I'll keep my nose out. After all, there are enough amateur commentators on this site to keep things rolling along for yonks.

Poirot
As I pointed out earlier, the status quo is the green orthodoxy. That is predominant at the moment, and that is where all the funding is going. The right wing think tanks you decry have made very little impression on that status quo.

Daffy Duck
.. makes the same error in pointing to the IPA and Quadrant with their tiny budgets, while overlooking the hundreds of millions going to the likes of Greenpeace and many billions in grant funds going to scientist world-wide to investigate global warming. No wonder they don't want to say its all a waste of time..

It's the snark that means nothing that annoys me. Just by linking to something from Source Watch you imply that there's something shifty about his research instead of dealing with the research.

There's no similarity between your link and Cohenite's, so I'm not sure what your point is there.

Whether you believe in AGW or not, humanity's development consists in an accelerating movement from situations of scarcity, to technological innovation, to increased resource availability, to increased consumption, to population growth, to resource depletion, to scarcity once again, and so on.

Climatologists, like most scientists, are not normally given to ranting about falling skies; most normally prefer to remain in their laboratories or in the field gathering data and adding their observations and results to an ever growing library of information.

They do not like to, in the main, and are not normally that good at giving interviews to the media or presentations to committees. This is odd, considering the growing number of climate related scientists and specifically climatologists who are speaking out about global warming and its dangers.

I personally would like to see some sort of de-carbonisation carried out. Unfortunately, and necessarily, this experiment would be short-lived, undertaking the experiment would quickly run afoul of the very thing which prevents us from implementing it in the first place; the human instinctual drive to grow without limit.

The great tragedy of the human condition is that we cannot figure out who we are and why we do what we do. In short, humans, for the most part, are completely immersed in their own importance and the need for more and more of whatever ‘floats their boat’. If humans could see themselves from the "outside" as it were, there would be perhaps a very small chance that they could “overcome their instincts with their intelligence”.

Unfortunately humans are “intrinsically incapable of taking the large leap toward self-knowledge”.

Unfortunately most "scientists" will never see any hope of rapid de-carbonisation of the global energy supply as it would ultimately lead to economic dissolution on a vast scale, and no human being, outside the few people who are yelling for the end of industrial civilization, is going to be happy with that outcome.

As such I think this entire argument is moot.