Chappo

You’re dead right … nothing you say will change sceptics’ minds, because we’re still waiting for the AGW “smoking gun”, and we are not suckers falling for AGW alarmist propaganda. I notice, btw, that you put yourself on the same plane as Al Gore and Tim Flannery – their dire warnings are more way-out than even those of the IPCC’s experts.

Moreover, your use of “filthy” is both offensive and wrong. Flannery constantly used the term in his “Weather Makers” for emotive effect, when referring to “anthracite” (a term he wrongly applied, in his ignorance, to coal in general).

By your reasoning industrial processes should be banned, if they generate some nasty emissions or effluents. The manufacture of iron and steel products is one such. The trick is to limit their release to the surroundings. But industrial accidents are always possible and do occur, even in the best of regulated circumstances. To be sure, your Tennessee incident was on a large scale, but I’ll bet it is the only significant coal-fired power station accident you know about, so why blow it out of proportion?

Atmospheric emissions from power stations consist almost entirely of CO2 and water vapour. Scrubbers remove SO2 and electrostatic precipitators take care of all but a smidgen of fly ash (for burial or similar). Sure, fly ash contains a miniscule amount of uranium and thorium (as does the earth itself) but the radiation dosage from it is only a fraction of the background radiation that each of us endures annually – much less than from one X-ray.

CO2 is the stuff of life and is not “filthy” – in fact market gardeners use around 1000 ppm of CO2 in their glass houses to greatly improve crop yields. No doubt vegetation around the world is currently benefiting from the relatively small increase of 100 ppm (0.01 per cent) from human activity – and don’t forget that that amount (one molecule in each 10,000 molecules of air) has been very slowly rising over the past 250 years.

Btw, I have no connection with fossil fuel industry.

Kulu,

I am surprised that you found it necessary to “read up” on Mann’s hockey stick, in view of the fact that it has been around for years. I am not surprised that you found the view held by the US National Research Council’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate – why should their view be any different from that once held by the IPCC?

However, you surely have realised that the hockey stick graph once held a pre-eminent position in the IPCC’s first three assessment reports, but not in AR4. Why? Because the IPCC has reluctantly concluded that the graph was totally wrong. It was wrong because Mann’s methodology and statistical analysis were extremely questionable. In fact he had been selective in the data he chose for his graph – clearly, he wanted to show that average global temperatures had been relatively flat over the past thousand or so years, thereby eliminating the inconvenient higher temperatures of the Medieval Warm period and the chilliness of the Little Ice Age, and to promote the alleged warming of the planet since the Industrial Revolution. Just what the IPCC wanted.

If you really want to read up on the subject, I suggest the two links below (there are many others). The first is by Ross McKitrick, the Canadian statistician who sorted out Mann’s work, after Steve McIntyre smelt a very rotten rat in Mann’s data.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/APEC-hockey.pdf

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/monckton_what_hockey_stick.pdf

JohnH,

I choose to believe the US National Research Council’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and many others on the Mann's hockey stick graph and I am suspicious of the two Canadians' motives for embarking on their anti Mann campaign. I do understand however that there were some errors in Mann's work. These have not proved fatal to their basic findings or to the science underlying the global warming trends.

I've had enough of this argument, it's going nowhere and anthropogenically induced climate change will continue with very little real effort by governments or business to prevent it.

Kulu

Why, then, do you think that the IPCC dropped Mann’s hockey stick graph from its AR4 after having so enthusiastically adopted it for its first three assessment reports? It wouldn't have been because Mann's work didn't stand up to scientific scrutiny, would it?

Wrt your final paragraph, everything points to a gigantic con by the green fraternity to have their revolutionary ideals adopted so as to “save the world”. If you check out on what the so-called Club of Rome was espousing in the late 1960s, if you read Charles Birch’s 1975 book, “Confronting the Future”, you will find that the greens are promoting the same survival agenda as they were back then. However, they adopted and are now employing GHG-induced global warming as a beautiful driver to achieve their ends.

I’m absolutely certain that you cannot produce one solitary bit of evidence that PROVES that global warming is caused by CO2. I know you can’t because the IPCC’s projections are based purely on hypotheses which the IPCC has never succeeded in converting to hard evidence.

Your warmers' case is rapidly wearing thin. Or perhaps you are unaware that within the past week Dr James Hansen’s recently-retired boss, Dr. John S. Theon, dumped on him. Dr Theon publicly declared himself a sceptic and stated that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.”

Then, a day later, Dr J. Scott Armstrong, prominent forecaster and founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, came forward with a press release saying that not only did his organisation’s audit of IPCC forecasting procedures showed they “violated 72 scientific principles of forecasting”, but that “The models were not intended as forecasting models and they have not been validated for that purpose.”

John, the point I made in my earlier post is that debating AGW on this thread undermines the value of your article, which retains its relevance regardless of whether AGW exists or not. It's therefore disappointing that you continue to use this thread to push your denialist agenda.

You further undermine your own credibility by misquoting me, either deliberately or negligently. Not once did I use the word "filthy" to describe coal. Inflating your opponent's claims so that you can deflate their argument is a cheap highschool debating trick, but unlikely to trick this more sophisticated online audience.

Your last post then goes on to contrive a supposedly generations-old global conspiracy of greens dedicated to the subversion of business as usual. Ah yes, the "coordinated enemy" ruse. Again, I don't think anyone is going to fall for such patently absurd claims, any more than they would fall for the proposition that you are working on behalf of a secret global cartel of transnational fossil fuel producers. Let's forget the Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories and stick with facts rather than politically-motivated myths.

As I said in my first post, I'm not going to debate the existence of climate change. If you don't have anything constructive to add in relation to the article on "clean coal", then I suggest that this thread has probably expired and it's time to move on.

Chappo

My apologies. You twice used “dirty” re coal, not “filthy”. So I was negligent, but there’s little difference in their meanings, is there?. Certainly, “filthy” was Flannery’s word of choice.

Wrt my continuing the warmers’ versus deniers’ debate, I was quite happy to present my essay, which was by invitation btw, to inform interested persons and basically leave it at that, but the rot set in with tonykevin 1’s tirade, followed by Manorina’s, both of which were downright abusive. I simply couldn’t let those sorts of comments pass.

As to your “more sophisticated online audience”, you could have fooled me. In fact, I believe the only really relevant comment offered was that from engineer davey on 17.1.09.

You accuse me of “contriv[ing] a supposedly generations-old global conspiracy”. Get real, I’m not a Dan Brown! If you haven’t acquainted yourself with the contents of the 1970s’ green tracts, such as Birch’s “Confronting the Future” – and I suspect you haven’t – then you are not qualified to pass judgement on what I wrote, are you? And don’t tell me that those pursuing population reduction, renewable energy sources, sustainability etc, as they were in the 1970s, aren’t now utilising AGW alarmism to promote their aims. The 1970s’ alarmists weren’t onto AGW then, because the climate was cooling. Btw, “conspiracy” is your word, not mine, but it does seem apt.

“Confronting the Future” is readily available, second-hand, on the Internet for under $7 and is a good buy, if you need to discover just what the current alarmist thrust is all about. I might add that Professor Birch had a full-page article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29.2.1972, entitled “Science for Survival” – yes, he was pleading for survival of the planet even then.

As to my being a denier, I suppose you have heard of the record-breaking chilliness that has pervaded Northern Hemisphere recently. And I suppose you reckon, as many warmers would have us believe, that this temperature downturn was foreseen in the IPCC’s GW theory – which it wasn’t. But it’s good to have faith, I suppose.