The Great Global Warming Swindle

[Lonan3]

I form part of an elite squad of mainland minds that come here, when summoned, to deal with localised outbreaks of idiocy.

Smart enough to alienate the majority on this forum with a pathetically patronising statement such as that?

[Chinahand]

I form part of an elite squad of mainland minds that come here, when summoned, to deal with localised outbreaks of idiocy.

Smart enough to alienate the majority on this forum with a pathetically patronising statement such as that?

I'm also amazed by that statement - what do you mean? - direct question.

[Lurkah]

I'm also amazed by that statement - what do you mean? - direct question.

 

If I'm going up against those without the capability to engage, then I occasionally lapse into juvenile behavior to extract what entertainment I can. No offence is meant to you. I simply did not take kindly to being acused of being a forum troll alias. The reality, if you prefer, is far more sinister.

[Cambon]

I form part of an elite squad of mainland minds that come here, when summoned, to deal with localised outbreaks of idiocy

 

That is brilliant. "An elite squad of Mainland minds"

 

I have no comeback. There really is nothing to say!!

[Lonan3]

"Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used."

Dr. Carl Sagan

 

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice."

Albert Einstein

 

"The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control their emotions by the application of reason."

Marya Manne

 

"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence he is just using his memory."

Leonardo Da Vinci

[Lost Login]

I think this summarises my feeling well. It was written by George Monbiot & published in the Guardian

 

"I company called WAG TV is currently completing a 90-minute documentary for Channel 4 called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. Manmade climate change, the channel tells us, is “a lie … the biggest scam of modern times. The truth is that Global Warming is a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media. ... The fact is that CO2 has no proven link to global temperatures … solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit.”(10)

 

So it’s the same old conspiracy theory that we’ve been hearing from the denial industry for the past ten years, and it carries as much scientific weight as the contention that the Twin Towers were brought down by missiles. The programme’s thesis revolves around the deniers’ favourite canard: that the “hockey-stick graph” showing rising global temperatures is based on a statistical mistake made in a paper by the scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes(11). What it will not be showing is that their results have now been repeated several times by other scientists using different statistical methods(12); that the paper claiming to have exposed the mistake has been comprehensively debunked(13) and that the lines of evidence used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes are just a few among hundreds demonstrating that 20th century temperatures were anomalous.

 

The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover who is making it. In 1997, the director, Martin Durkin, produced a very similar series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamt up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and to edit their answers to change their meaning. Following complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that “the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing” and that they had been “misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”(14) Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has ever made. Are institutional memories really so short?

 

So now the whole weary business of pointing out that the evidence against manmade climate change is sparse and unable to withstand critical scrutiny while the evidence in favour is overwhelming and repeatedly confirmed must begin all over again. How often do scientists have to remind the media that a handful of cherry-picked studies does not amount to the refutation of an entire discipline?"

 

For those who want references they can be got from the link

 

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/01/30...cies-of-denial/

[Slim]

"Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used."

Dr. Carl Sagan

 

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice."

Albert Einstein

 

"The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control their emotions by the application of reason."

Marya Manne

 

"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence he is just using his memory."

Leonardo Da Vinci

 

Er, behave. He's gone to quite considerable lengths to illustrate his points. To write all that off from one flippant remark in response to something that, well, deserved it is bang out of order. He was clearly taking the piss, why get so prissy about it?

 

Ruins what was shaping up to be an interesting discussion.

[Lonan3]

Er, behave. He's gone to quite considerable lengths to illustrate his points. To write all that off from one flippant remark in response to something that, well, deserved it is bang out of order. He was clearly taking the piss, why get so prissy about it?

 

Ruins what was shaping up to be an interesting discussion.

 

Will you stop being right!

 

Okay, my stance is that many scientists are convinced about humankind's contribution to global warming - but some are not.

In the majority of cases in the past, the majority of scientists have been proved right - although there have been exceptions.

Governments have (sometimes reluctantly) embraced the concept - although I reserve the right to doubt that they are all acting from purely altruistic reasons.

Both the scientists and the politicians have done a lousy job of convincing the average person (perhaps they've used phrases like 'sincerely believe' and 'it is our duty to' too often?)

When the eco-warriors joined (or maybe started) the bandwagon, it turned a lot of people off.

I am not capable of wading through reams of scientific papers - that is not my discipline (thank God!) and I'd probably end up more confused than ever.

So all that I am saying - ultimately - is that I remain unconvinced by either argument up to now.

My middle name is Thomas - I'm a natural sceptic.

[ourtess]

As a physicist I could never understand why people said creating CO2 would warm up the planet. Now Thatcher's involvement is explained it becomes clear.

 

Anything that stops others using up 'our' oil goes. No wonder all the western governments are behind the CO2 baloney.

[Dr_Dave]

So all that I am saying - ultimately - is that I remain unconvinced by either argument up to now.

 

What would science have to do to convince you?

[Lonan3]

So all that I am saying - ultimately - is that I remain unconvinced by either argument up to now.

 

What would science have to do to convince you?

I would love to be able to answer that - but I honestly don't know.

Possibly (although I must emphasise 'possibly') a presentation of all the arguments - both for and against; clearly, concisely and simply presented in a way that someone of average intelligence (whose interest in science ended with boring physics and chemistry lessons some forty-odd years ago!) can understand.

Follow that with a controlled and reasoned debate by people on each and every side of the argument and I might be able to reach a decision.

[Dr_Dave]

I would love to be able to answer that - but I honestly don't know.

Possibly (although I must emphasise 'possibly') a presentation of all the arguments - both for and against; clearly, concisely and simply presented in a way that someone of average intelligence (whose interest in science ended with boring physics and chemistry lessons some forty-odd years ago!) can understand.

Follow that with a controlled and reasoned debate by people on each and every side of the argument and I might be able to reach a decision.

 

It's a tricky one, sure enough, and one that science has to face more and more often these days. Disciplines are getting more complex, issues are affecting people in their everyday lives, and those people have the ability to determine policy by virtue of being able to vote more and more. It also doesn't help that the best scientists are often not the greatest communicators - with some notable exceptions: Sagan, Dawkins, Hawking, etc.

 

And even when you have your best men on the job, when the subject is ground down to its basics and fed to school kids in the simplest form possible, you still end up with significant numbers of people just plain not accepting it - evolution, for example. Plus, even hugely "dumbed down" (no implication intended) a subject as complex as global warming would still require an effort on the part of the person it is aimed at. Namely, to understand underlying concepts to a certain extent and to go off and find information where the source is lacking. And to top it all off, the consensus is not as strong as something like evolution or plate tectonics, so you'll never be able to present information in a way that both sides will agree as being non-biased.

 

Ultimately though, do you think that even when presented with simplified models explaining, for example, the CO2/temperature lag you'd be capable of evaluating the most likely with any degree of certainty? I would say that I wouldn't and I went far beyond "boring physics" in my scientific training. Ultimately, like choosing a treatment for cancer, the only honest way of doing it would be to look at the numbers of experts on each side of the room and going with the side that has the most support.

[Lost Login]

It would be great to have that but unfortunately you will never get that.

 

There is a presently a majority view, a respectable minority view and an extreme minority view. The respectable minority view I am referring to are the very small number of independent and impartial scientists such as David Bellamy who still question the matter. The extreme minority view I refer to are the are the paid for lobbyists and non scientists of that ilk i.e those with a political agenda.

 

If you could get the majority to agree with the reasonable minority there would not be a minority. It would though be an interesting programme but not one probably leaving you or I much the wiser

 

The extreme minority though are never going to take part or if they do after the programme they will shout it was a "fix up" as it was edited to make them look back, not all the questions or issues were raised, there was not time scale in the period to discuss.

 

I wish it was otherwise but...............

 

I would love to be able to answer that - but I honestly don't know.

Possibly (although I must emphasise 'possibly') a presentation of all the arguments - both for and against; clearly, concisely and simply presented in a way that someone of average intelligence (whose interest in science ended with boring physics and chemistry lessons some forty-odd years ago!) can understand.

Follow that with a controlled and reasoned debate by people on each and every side of the argument and I might be able to reach a decision.

[VinnieK]

As a physicist I could never understand why people said creating CO2 would warm up the planet.

 

If you were a, say, a chemist or climatologist perhaps you would understand why they say that

[stevie]

Back in the 70s (before the World Wide Web) we were all being sold on the fears of a new ice age. No, I am not kidding. The same mainstream media that screams "GLOBAL WARMING" at us today was predicting that the coming of the next ice age would happen within our lifetimes. And back in the 30s, the "fashionable science" was Eugenics, or the undesirability of allowing less than perfect humans to contaminate the gene pool by breeding. All that Hitler did in the name of "Racial Hygiene" was drawn from the American scientists he chose as his inspiration.

 

The fact is that much of what people think is science is just pop culture, what is trendy to believe in and support, or even religion dressed up as science to make it sell better, such as the "Big Bang." again back in the 70s the cocktail party elite were obligated to be able to discuss the origin of consciousness in the triune brain, even though real psychologists had abandoned the theory years ago. People who are not actually scientists will cling to their pet theories the way they cling to religions. They don't really understand what they are talking about; they just know that is they speak the correct words, their peers will approve of them.

 

A good example of this mindset is illustrated by two recent news stories, one of which confirms that the level of solar radiation has in fact been increasing and is at a 60 year peak right now, and the announcement that Mars is showing signs of warming right alongside that of Earth. Now, a real scientist will look at those facts and say, "Okay, we need a new theory here." But the "Pop-scientists", the ones who wear science as a fashion accessory, they refuse to look at the facts.I get a lot of people insisting that the warming on Mars has nothing to do with the warming on Earth because, well, just BECAUSE! no contrary facts are ever presented, just a resorting to various "authorities" on global warming whose continued funding depends on the continued "existence" of global warming, much as the "authorities" on the coming ice age in the 70s needed a continuing threat of that ice age to exist in the public mind to secure their added funding. Remember the witch hunts of Europe? When people were paid to find witches, they found witches. When people are paid to find global warming, they find global warming. That is the danger of agenda-driven science. One does not get scientific results, one gets political results.

 

The fact is that the Earth is getting warmer. We just came out of an ice age. Of COURSE it is getting warmer. Earth is currently warmer than the ice ages and cooler than the Cretaceous. It is only human arrogance that dares declare one particular temperature as "correct" or "normal", or dares suggest that the always-changing Earth can or should be locked into one particular temperature, based on that rather arbitrary decision of what is "normal."

 

Now, I am fully in favor of conservation and wise use of resources. I am also in favor of developing energy alternatives that are as environmentally friendly as possible. I am convinced that had we taken the money wasted on Iraq and put it into research we would not need the oil any more.

 

But the clamor about global warming is not leading to solutions but merely scares people into buying ill considered policies and products without the careful thought that should go into such decisions. People will buy anything if they are told it is good for the environment. Yet the reality is that everything man does affects the environment, no matter how eco-friendly it is claimed to be. Windmills were hailed as the ultimate in safe energy systems, until it was discovered that the disrupted wind flow changed the micro-climates in the lee of the wind farms, and that wind farms built across migratory paths wound up chopping thousands of birds (including endangered species) into bits.

 

Pop-scientists and cocktail party cognoscenti like to have a single easy theory that explains everything. "The world is getting warmer and if you stop driving your SUV/vote for my politician/buy my product all will be well!" The real world, and real science, are seldom that simple and clean cut. Yes, man undoubtedly has an influence on the Earth's environment. But the reality is that man's ability to change the Earth remains minuscule compared to other naturally occurring forces.

 

The real purpose of the global warming scare (besides selling candidates and products) is to give people something safe to fret about. Most of the global warming crowd welcome the global warming "cause" because it is safe. They are not in danger of having the government come after them the way pro-peace activists do, or those who expose government cover-ups. The global warmers can walk around with an air of superiority, feeling like they are making a better world without actually having to confront the far more deadly reality of a government that is lying us into war after war after war. That's why the global warmers cling to their religion so tightly. Without it, they would have to deal with some pretty harsh realities.