1. Show me where in your words I “on one hand refutes all the evidence of thousands of peer reviewed articles and then holds up Ian Plimer as an absolute authority of scientific correctness”

2. Are not Paleoclimatology and Geology part of the climate sciences?
Ian Plimer is a Ph.D.(Monash) in Geology and teaches the subject at Adelaide Uni.

3. I resent you calling me dishonest Twobob.
Sadly all too often that’s what leftists do.
Ad hominem sliming when they are bereft of an argument.

“If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion - I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. “

Thomas Huxley 1860 defening Darwinism from ‘skeptics’

Sceptics like james k who on one hand refutes all the evidence of thousands of peer reviewed articles and then holds up Ian Plimer as an absolute authority of scientific correctness. But james seeks to mislead us all for if he was sceptical surely he would be equally sceptical of every thing.

And fyi james and all Plimer IS NOT A CLIMATE SCIENTIST. to claim that he is is an outright lie. Some thing that inevitably happens when delusionists are forced to justify their arguments.

I think you should have spent more time at your sunday school lessons james because you fail at the honesty and integrity level of this discussion.

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

In this case a conspiracy to keep Justin’s right wing non scientists from ClimateAudit (referred to as CA in the above leaked email, AR$ the 4 th IPCC report and FOI freedom of information request… on scientific data??????) in the dark about another one of Michael Mann’s doctored research papers published in Nature.

I note my earlier response to Justin after deigned to give us a second post has not passed the Moderator.

I haven’t heard that one before. “

Oh good lord. You’re just underscoring my point — either you haven’t read, or don’t understand, what you cite. At least for this nature paper: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n8/abs/ngeo578.html. It, and I, refers to the 3.5 oC temperature rise inferred from proxy records for the PETM event some 55 million years ago. Clearer?

IPCC AR4 — ie, the science — has actual observed temperature rise of 0.76 oC since pre-industrial. No idea what 1 oC you’re talking about. For the record, ‘climate sensitivity’, commonly defined in terms of a doubling of CO2, is currently estimated to be about 3 oC. Many (eg, Hansen, etc) in recent times argue from the paleoclimatic record that this does not properly account for slow feedbacks (vegetation, the cryopshere, cloud effects, etc) and is likely to be too low.

I swore I wasn’t going to reply… and so now I shan’t further.

Just goes to show you don’t need to be a walking library or claim scientific expertise to demonstrate winning logic.

Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit was one of the duo that uncovered Michael Mann’s great lie. I’ve never heard him described as rightwing before. He just opposes Mann’s soothsaying and criticises in substance the scientific prognostications of the IPCC.

Happy for everyone to compare both blogs. I think ClimateAudit stands clear as the more honest and much least spectacular in predictions.

Mind you that tends to be the nature of people who gainsay catastrophists

I haven’t heard that one before.

The IPCC models have 1deg Celsius due to CO2 rise and the majority of their predicted rise due to forcings. as I said earlier.

Is it your contention that the IPCC are grossly underestimating their projections of global warming this century?

Perhaps lung cancer causes a desire to smoke? Perhaps there is a gene that causes both a predilection towards smoking and a tendency towards cancer in all its forms?

Demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt is not the same as proved.

I agree that all the science says that cancer causes smoking. Or, if you prefer, the science, on balance, strongly says that cancer causes smoking.

I’ve told you once…..

You can Ben. You just need to say “Hill & Doll”.

Because they did it for you.

They didn’t predict it beforehand and get past data to fit into a complex computer program and ascribe various weightings to literally hundreds of variables in order that the computer could ‘predict’ the past known data. The hope is it then predicts the future accurately. Only trouble is it doesn’t. No upper atmosphere equatorial ‘hot spot’ and global cooling in the last 8 years again not predicted.

Hill & Doll sought to use well defined populations in oreder to have all other variables constant to study the actions of one variable.

In short normal simple science with observations that could be explained by one theory and one theory only.

Namely that smoking causes lung cancer.

No new data has come forward to refute the theory.

Look it up on Google.

They did longitudinal studies on GP’s actually.

They demonstrated beyond doubt that the incidence of lung cancer was many many fold higher in smokers and there was no otherwise significant differences between the populations.

You may be right about JamesK. And he is right in his claim that I cannot prove that Climate Change is real. I cannot. Nor can I prove that smoking causes cancer. All I can do is look at a smattering of the evidence which goes past, and make a calculated guess, based on accepting what looks sensible (the anti-smoking literature, and the it’s-getting-warmer brigade), and rejecting (declining) what looks less than sensible (the smoking-is-harmless literature and the climate-skeptic brigade).

But if his objective is to raise the (often low) level of debate then he could do better at leading by example.

I am prepared to look at his evidence. Indeed, I have done so - in part, I admit. I have not looked at each of his 450 papers. But those that I have looked at, I have found wanting. In some cases, because I couldn’t understand what they were trying to say. Those I have had to ignore because whether they are either a lot smarter than I, or vice versa, I have failed to understand what they are trying to say. In other cases, I found the arguments unconvincing. I have listed 3 such examples above, and I am still waiting for James to respond. Until he does I will continue to believe that credible scientists overwhelming accept the reality of carbon driven global warming. If I had more time I would investigate his claim that Linden, Spencer and Plimer should be taken seriously. But, at the moment, I don’t. If he wants to persuade me, he will have to do some more legwork himself.

And I will take this opportunity to add one more comment:
>First of all there is no such thing as ‘science’ that tells us unequivocal truths.
This is true.

>There are merely operative theories that apparently explain observations until the said theory is proven incorrect.
This is false. At least, it is as false as the previous theory is true. All theories that require the exercise of science for their validation are only approximations (though some of them are very good approximations indeed). As such, theories are neither true nor false, just better or worse.

Partly this scrutiny of him has been motivated by the effort to interpolate the insults he apparently throws at me which keep getting edited out. I haven’t really been insulted properly since I came to live in Sydney, kind of miss the entertainment of a good free-for-all (like John Cleese looking for an argument — insults are next door) and I find it a bit frustrating they keep getting edited out. Though I appreciate that the moderators are concerned with weightier matters than my personal entertainment.

Anyway, I’m going to hazard a theory here that JamesK is actually on a mission to raise the standard of discourse in these threads, no more and no less. I base this on:

1) His personal position is always in the background, evidence and devils-advocacy in the foreground
2) He challenges us on our rationality and our methods of sophistry, not so much on our underlying politics

So I’ve been re-examining my own style and finding that it leaves a lot to be desired. I also found an interesting book by Deborah Tannen criticising Argument Culture, which I intend to learn about in the hope of rising above the trench warfare of words that characterises so much of public debate in this country, as much in the Crikey threads as anywhere else.

Your respondent Joe Boswell completes the picture. What’s standing in the way is the people behind the politicians. One example is the electric car. India developed a car 15 years ago (the REVA) Its range was only 70 ks, but that’s enough for most Australian commute journeys. It’s been running around Europe for years and when Red Ken introduced the 8 pound bounty on cars using the London CBD in the day, the rich bought REVAs and left their Mercs at home. Bingo - a quieter less polluted London!

Go forward to 2005-6 - the Solar Shop imports a REVA for a trial. The Howard government deems it to be unsafe and imposes a $60,000 + penalty if it’s driven on the road. Alannah McTiernan, the then transport minister in the WA Labor government, transports the car to WA and asks for 50 volunteers to buy the cars for a trial. No permission was given by the Feds. Bye bye REVA.

Studies in Europe showed the car to be safe, so what was the problem? My opinion is that the car industry (sales and maintenance) and the fossil fuel industries used their political weight to nobble it. Why? First of all we don’t want profits going to Indian companies - that’s not de rigueur!

Secondly, many jobs depend on sales (still fairly safe for electric cars) and spare parts etc - where jobs will certainly be lost, because electric cars require almost NO maintenance. And then there are all those American V8s, SUVs and Hummers to get rid of. Finally - they don’t use diesel, petrol or gas.

Oh- I hear you cry -but what about the coal for the electricity? Well the cost to plug in to the grid at the moment is about $4 a week. It is a very efficient way of delivering energy to an automobile. Secondly it’s easier to control emissions from a power station (in the interim period between status quo and alternative) than from the tailpie of 2 milliom cars). Finally - the cars don;t wear out - also a negative for the car industry.

This scenario is being played out in many industries and shows the failure of capitalism to address these problems. What’s good for the market is clearly not what’s good for the planet, in the short term at least. And the short term is what politicians have to deal with, because the electorate is so fickle. On this issue however, the grumblings are everywhere.

Your piece says it all. More power to your arm.

Being somewhat new to Crikey [comments], I then skim-wade through the comments… Ahh the musing of @JamesK. Good god. I think my favourite is throwing up the notorious ClimateAudit against RealClimate; ie, a couple of right-wing hacks versus routinely published, seminal climatologists. I’d point out that not only is M Mann not discredited but that the ‘hockey stick’ has been substantially updated in recent times anyway, and confirmed by multiple independent sources (although with a less flat ‘stick’); or that M Mann doesn’t actually actively contribute to RC anymore in any case; but what would be the point.

Funny stuff though! How crestfallen I am to find that ClimateAudit and WUWT have — apparently! — mightily overthrown the weight of the 10,000+ peer-reviewed scientific papers appearing each year that continue to reaffirm and deepen the unequivocal reality of anthropogenic climate change.

And I just can’t resist. Regarding the Nature paper[1] which was cited in that list of 450 papers disagreeing with AGW (many of which from Energy & Environment no less!): if persons placing it on such a list had read it, or been able to understand it, they might have realised that it was referring to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. It specifically says that at the current mean climate sensitivity estimate of ~3 oC for 2x CO2, the increased atmospheric CO2 could only explain up to 3.5 oC of the observed warming. Other forcings feedbacks would likely have occurred to cause the rest. What this means is that there are other processes which could cause even greater warming, not in the slightest that CO2 didn’t do precisely as expected; at the very least for the PETM event.

This all reminds me why I often try to avoid reading comments…

[1] http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n8/abs/ngeo578.html

You are incorrect and disingenuous.

I didn’t throw you about dozen completely unrelated links as you put it.

All make the point (and by ‘all’ I mean every single one) that it clearly is not “what all the science says” as Ben Aveling had asserted and it was to his post that I responded.

All of that is perfectly clear to anyone with an once of nouse reading the posts. But apparently not to you George. I wonder why not? Hmmm?

Moreover the first link and many others explained in very clear terms why Ben’s assertion (far from universal) was false.

I see that you quote RealClimate run by the thoroughly discredited and dishonest scientist Michael Mann creator of the infamously misleading hockeystick graph and ‘removalist’ of the Mediaeval Warm Period from (at least his) climate historical record.

Mann’s and RealClimate’s ‘techniques’ are what is known universally in the climate science community as “GARP” - Generally Accepted Realclimate Procedure aka ‘lying’, ignoring and manipulating of data to suit alarmists’ agendas.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6440

GeergeD, you act like a religionist.

Svensmark _is_ discredited. His theory has been torn to shreds. Time and time again. There is no evidence for it. Any person with a fragment of dignity or sense would see that, take the the theory, and quietly put it to bed.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/why-the-continued-interest/

It may give me hope.

For the record I’ll be on the believers’ side. I’m going to start weightlifting now to improve my upper body strength. Also I’ll be sharpening my nails.

Even if you don’t believe climate change is happening because of us, surely it’s still a good idea to reduce reliance on coal and petroleum? They’re finite resources - they are going to run out and we’ll HAVE to come up with alternatives some way or another. Also, it is probably cheaper to instigate earth-based water saving strategies than trying to retrieve it from the moon (I’m sure someone’s planning that already).