So that's a "dunno" then ?

Loudmouth,

You are the most disingenuous of inquirers.

You're not interested at all in the veracity of climate science - and certainly only ask questions so you can give vent to your "oh-so-clever" line of sarcasm.

Here's a quote from a little exchange we had way back when - Poirot:

"Firstly, Loudmouth, while appearing reasonably intelligent, has an extremely limited repertoire when jumping on board to question climate scientists and their conclusions.

He maintains a stock standard collection of a few simplistic strawman questions which he regularly rolls out - supposedly to confound the experts. He then demands a "yes or no" answer to them.

Sometimes scientists are stupid enough to take his questions as genuine, and will attempt to answer them. bonmot did so once, taking the time to give him a lengthy post in reply - and this was what Loudmouth said to me in response:

"I certainly don't dismiss what someone writes - witness my responses to your constipated friend Bonmot above."

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13951&page=0#241476

And he finishes of that particular post to me in fine form:

".....See, I'm assuming you're not one of those latte-sipping wa.nkers, that you have ideas :)"

You had asked some questions of bonmot who is a climate scientist - and he replied with a respectful and lengthy explanation of things you don't understand (scroll up on that link to read his reply) - and that was how you replied to him.

You don't wish to know anything...you are assured that you already "know" it's a scam.

Why would anyone - scientist or non-scientist - bother with your game?

Have to chime in there, Poirot.
"Joe's' closed, ideology-driven mind even denies ethnico-political realities close to home, like the stolen generation. His AGW denialism is of a piece

No, I'm interested to know if it is true that there has been no world-wide temperature rise for eighteen years.

I'm also curious whether or not some weather stations have been discontinued, and if others have been kept going even though their immediate environments (i.e. in terms of heat generation) have changed. Or if data have been 'homogenised' at all and why.

As for a sea-level rise of 20 cm, or 8 inches, in the past century, I'm sceptical enough to think that this would mean the severe erosion of beaches near my place - I live half a mile from the sea (a lot of us do in Adelaide), so of course I'm concerned whether that's true or not. An 8-inch sea-level rise would mean that the tide comes up the beach by about, well, it swallows the beach, there would be no more beach. But it was still there last week, and it looked pretty much the same as it did fifty years ago.

So no, I'm not a denier, I'm a sceptic. There may be forces that counter sea-level rise - around Sydney or Melbourne, I would expect that the very long-term rebound from the last Ice Age means that the land is very slowly rising. I don't know. It would be too much of a coincidence if it was 're-bounding' at 8 inches a century.

Put it this way, Poirot, I don't know enough to be a believer, but I'd like to know more :)

I apologise for an insult-free post, nothing to get your teeth into. Do geese have teeth ? There you go, two mild insults in one post.

Joe

No Joe, you are not a sceptic.

A real sceptic studies and works with the stuff from all sides.

By your own admission you clearly don't.

I am a sceptic, I have to be.

Bernie

I agree with your post and with Peter Lang’s where there is any inconsistency.

“Here, my answer is yes, provided the actions we take make social, environmental and economic sense.”

The original question to be answered was whether policy action makes rational sense in the first place. So it is no rational answer to say “it does if it does”, obviously.

Now the end result of everything you have just said is that even if all the issues of climatology are conceded, no-one can demonstrate the minimal level of rationality necessary for the warmist argument to be even logically valid, let alone to be preferable as policy, or justify coercive confiscations and restrictions of people’ s liberty.

Therefore we have just demonstrated that there is no rational justification for climate policy. But notice that this is the reverse of how you entered the discussion which was, ASSUMING that it is justified, then wouldn’t it be better done this way rather than that?

The problem is, that ALL warmist argument takes the same form: entering the discussion assuming that someone somewhere somehow sometime must have established the validity of it, but then immediately unable to cope with even the most basic tests of rationality on being challenged; and fleeing into circularity, appeal to authority, and ad hom.

For example, Poirot's defence crumbles and fails into nothingness here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16680&page=0

So she runs away, and promptly re-loses the same argument for the same reasons in a different thread, with Luciferase, here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16757&page=0,
and then the same again here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16757&page=0

And how, having been unable to answer a rational critique with reason, they slink off and pop up *again* here, re-running all the same nonsense, fortified with one more slather of ad hominem.

So please don’t encourage them! We’ve just established that it’s an irrational belief system. It's an episode of popular hysteria and madness of crowds, and that's all it is. There is no more justification for climate policy than there is for throwing-virgins-into-the-volcano policy. It’s only religious groupthink that JUST HAPPENS to serve the ends of corrupt political privilege, that’s all.