There are contributors to this thread who may not want to read this but here it is all the same -
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/fabricated-quote-used-to-discredit-climate-scientist-1894552.html

Too late? never.

I suspect that you have not even read the article. While interesting and amusing, it is predominantly about the political shenanigans which prevail in the climate change saga. Therefore, it is not necessarily a “scientific debate” as you infer.

However “Andrew’s” and John Bennetts’ contributions on the science is extremely valuable and an easy read for the majority of the public who are not scientifically literate! In no way should that exclude the public from debating the issue. Unfortunately that also includes verbose and ineffective posters whose “contributions:” ( Saturday, 6 February 2010 at 7:53 pm), must surely be the longest and most tedious posts in the entire history of the web!

In the late 1980’s the world’s most powerful corporations launched their “globalization” revolution, incessantly invoking the inevitable beneficence of free trade and, in the process, relegating environmental issues to the trash can.

In 1988, climate scientists and policy-makers established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) to keep abreast of climate change observations and to issue periodic reports.

The following year fifty oil, gas, coal, automobile and chemical manufacturing companies and their trade associations formed the Global Change Coalition (GCC), with the help of public relations giant Burson-Marsteller.

In 2000, the GCC finally went out of business but other like-minded corporate front organizations were created to carry on the negative campaign, which continues.

Current heroines and big oil sycophants are recycled cadavers, Monckton and Plimer, however, nothing lasts for ever. Not the good times, nor the bad times!

Though my use of GREAT BIG WASTEFUL EXPENDITURES (capitalised) was only intended to help the reader with a long post which didn’t have sub-headings or numbered pars. you are, in a sense right about my points being political rather than scientific. In fact I have more than once tried to be very clear and explicit about the view I have held for a long time, certainly before I gave any intense study to what the scientists are up to or have proved, which is that Australian policy should recognise our impotence, not absolute but pretty close to it.

My support for the Coalition passing the CPRS legislation before Christmas was entirely political. I wanted Malcolm Turnbull to survive and to be able to fight Rudd on grounds which included pointing out the deficiencies of the legislation he had helped negotiate. But he wouldn’t have done that and my (short term) political judgment couldn’t have been more wrong.

You and BAAL are astute in your clear understanding of the Phillip Adams position. Despite his intelligence and his fine interviews with many of the world’s very bright people he hasn’t a clue about science but is totally wedded to his great discovery of global warming when he was on the Commission for the Future about 1988. Emotion rules.

Dear red,

The link you supplied just proves that you are a compulsive masturbator !

@Christopher Monckton: As a European citizen, you should be ashamed to describe a scientific debate as Hitler-style genocide. It is an insult to all the millions of victims of a cruel and violent dictator to use this comparison. Such an ignorant and insensitive comment would be enough for me to ignore this man’s statements, but nonetheless I decided to read up on his theory. All of it leads to some sort of conspiracy theory that is more complicated then all of the combined evidence to support global warming.

Here’s a nice summary of his views:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/the-great-greenhouse-plot/story-e6frg7fx-1225828247089

Good luck with this ongoing ‘scientific’ debate.

You just don’t get it do you ?

Ok well I’ll spell it out for you.

Both the climate scientists and the denialists such as yourself Julius have missed the oportunity to
1.) understand climate science and

2.) help others understand it

Unfortunately BOTH sides have missed the boat.
More unfortunately for you Julius is the statement “GREAT BIG WASTEFUL EXPENDITURES”

sounds like Great Big New Tax to me, and that places you as a political beast rather than a scientfic one, even LESS reason to listen to you !

Denialists on this forum, it appears are at liberty to spread more filth than particulate matter. Similarly when one self-reporting, Australian company alone (name not permitted by moderator even though officially documented by NPI) emitted 25,000,000 kilograms of particulate matter (PM 10um) last year (ranked “low to moderate” by the National Pollutant Inventory) without regulatory restraints or enforcement, then we can safely assume that this nation sleeps with the devil and will continue to do so.

And so as the sun rises in the West (as do many of the dead on election day) I bid you adieu or as the maniacal Monckton would say: “Auf Wiedersehen!”

http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=550&ArticleID=5978&l=en

Only had time for a quick glance. I’m all for lots of taxpayer funded spending on science and if it also helped how people round the world how to live less destructively that would be great. Maybe I’m a bit on the pessimistic side of realism but can’t see much result from Australia’s likely or even possible efforts.

As to factual issues like the CO2 “cycle” time, the likely effects of clathrates and methane emissions from the far north, where existing trends (from when?) are heading (and whether they have any manmade or mancontrollable causes), whether anything already done has had any effect, and no doubt other matters, we seem to disagree, and I don’t hold my (very tentative) positions without sources but it would take me more time than I now have to chase down the evidence which would satisfy me that I had an adequately researched and almost certainly correct answer…. so, my apologies for now. I hope to get back to it.

The best place for a nitpicker is on the back of the elephant in the room……

Gosh I’m a funny bastard.

I am interested in following up the C02 cycling time, if you have that reference/link for me.

Fair enough about big wasteful expenditures, but that is part of the issue of what do we do about it, not do we do anything about it.
You do not seem sure we should be doing anything about it at all. Did I get that bit right?

”..the need for action only follows from a credible suggestion that there are current physical happenings which will produce a much higher rate of warming than CO2 alone will produce or that we have experienced over the last century or so.”
I disagree completely - if the RECORDED rate of warming does not increase, merely continues at the same rate, then we have trouble coming. So much in such a short time is almost unprecedented.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

OK if we run with the “CO2 is only a minor greenhouse gas” thingy, would all that methane coming from exposed clathrates and melted permafrost be of concern to you?

Ever notice how your drink stays cool until nearly all the ice in it has melted?

If we lose enough polar ice, I would certainly expect things to be changing even faster - along with the oceans they are massive thermal mass stores that buffer the immediate effects. We seem to be running out of that buffer.
Then there’s the difference between heat energy stored in something and the actual temperature it exhibits - that the temperature has been measured to rise suggests a whole lot of extra energy is being retained that wasn’t before. Solar fluctuations are an order of magnitude out from the required input energy that would lead to our observations - Earth must therefore be retaining more of late, hence the “greenhouse effect”.

I plant plenty of trees etc anyway.

We are already rich enough to adapt, canalside McMansion dwellers be damned, they can have a humpy in the hills along with everyone else. We could easily do it with minor redirection of our amazing levels of discretionary luxury spending.

There is certainly a case for full transparency of work done by and for the IPCC, among the most lucid proponents of this is the site Climate Audit (http://climateaudit.org/ which does fall into the ‘nitpicking’ category for me, but nitpickers do have their place), that rightly points to certain inherant problems with the scientific peer-review process.
This might be somewhere a good cache of nits can be picked up for your digestion.

With such a huge issue as global climate, with so many reactionaries and vested-interests wanting a piece of them in the public thought-space, I am of the opinion they do the world and their own work a great disservice by working like most normal scientists have to.

Unfortunately this would likely DOUBLE the money we spend on science budgets, even more likely we get only half as much science done as half of them will have to be expert-in-the-field auditors (and of all the scientists I have known, none were interested in a career in accounting or beaurocratic arse-covering).

In this case I think it is worth the effort.

Personally I will be hoping for the best and planning for the worst.

It doesn’t have to cost a huge amount - one example is a bloke I met who laughs at everyone spending even one cent on electricity or water, having (cheaply) built his own efficient home (mud and reclaimed timber) with water collection and solar power. He brags about progress on his domestic bio-char reactor for the veggie patch, and has almost repaid the capital investment after less than 10 years on utility savings alone. He’s a bit on the feral side, but pioneers were always a touch odd to the mainstream observer.

Australia CAN make a huge difference if we leverage our technology to make a lifestyle model that is sustainable and offers real benefit in financial terms - others will see and follow, if only through greed or poverty instead of idealism.

Good old Aussie laziness is our worst enemy there. Why build algae-farms in the desert when there is still so much coal lying around? Why make a solar-thermal plant next to an aluminium smelter when diesel is so darn cheap?

The best tipping-point I am hoping for right now is fossil fuels becoming more expensive.
A (further) tax on them would make everyone demand a hybrid SUV (insane how expensive a Landcruiser is to run, if you can afford that you can afford an improved-efficiency version).

Julius, Got any good links to convincing calculations which actually show the actions ALREADY UNDERTAKEN by big rich countries have NOT made an appreciable difference to future (and CURRENT) temperature?

Anyhoos, I have some real work to do now, its been fun, I’ll drop by.

All wrong in a way which disqualifies you from attention.

“So you agree the material you try to use in your spurious argument WAS obtained ILLEGALLY.”
No, and your error is of logic, law and language.

“This makes you also culpable along the lines of accessory after the fact.”
Would be wrong in law and ethics if relevant. (Test question for yourself. Do you have a problem with the discussion that warmists at the Guardian are engaging in on the material?)

“Not to mention knowingly spreading possible false or misleading material.”

As the IPCC’s reports contain “false and misleading material” as we now know for certain (e.g. the Himalayan glaciers and the frequency of extreme weather events just to name two recent admissions) you would be “spreading false [and] misleading material” if you recommended that people read IPCC reports by your criterion. All I have “spread” [unless you care to prove otherwise] is John Costella’s “Climategate Analysis”. If that contains “false or misleading material” you have yet to give any hint of your reasons for suggesting that.

“It seems Julius you also have selective amnesia when it comes to material that doesn’t support your case”.

As I normally try to pay particular attention to material that might contradict any case that I might wish to make [I take it that is what you are referring to rather than material which is non-supportive because irrelevant or barely relevant or of v. little weight] that is most unlikely. You are referring to the sort of stuff that happens in domestic barneys or pub arguments.

You have a bigger problem in view of the fact that some of the more thoughtful bloggers have not been sure what case I was seeking to make, if any, or issues that seemed important enough to inquire about. Now we have the problem that it seems most unlikely that you could specify intelligibly what you could demonstrate was my “case” .

If you are referring to what you take to be an omission [cf. @ FLOWER] of some matters in Roger Jones’s qualifications that, for some reason you think I should have posted, let me put that straight since you can’t work it out for yourself. I did no more than Cut and Paste what was in what appeared to be his own webpage in the site I was taken to by Google for Roger Jones Victoria University. I omitted nothing after I had reached the point where I saw him as having gone from an extraordinarily light CV to working for the IPCC - which was the point I chose to draw attention to. I knew a distinguished Astrophysicist who had spent quite a long time as a school teacher so I wouldn’t deny that some very good science can be done by people in their maturity after a slight beginning.

FWIW even if you had struck some blows against my credibility on facts it would have little relevance to nearly all of what I have written. You don’t have to believe me when I say I have read about 35 per cent of “Climategate Analysis” and regard it as having made a strong case for distrusting, on relevant issues, the people whose emails have been reproduced.

Rhetorical question: are you happy to have shown yourself as someone who condones what has been disclosed by the CRU emails, at least to the point of saying or implying that it would be better if the world didn’t know what was in them? Are you ready to have Phil Jones re-instated in his job before the parliamentary committee has reported? Would you want that parliamentary committee closed down as an accessory after the fact? Rhetorical questions because you are clearly incapable of reasoned and informed response.

It seems Julius you also have selective amnesia when it comes to material that doesn’t support your case.
Why should anyone believe ANYTHING you say, given these undisputed facts ?