How To Be A Global Warming Sceptic

[CapelDodger]

And your yummy, delicious brand of totalitarianism is ???

More advice to the aspiring GWSceptic : adopt a Manichaean world-view.

 

[TrueSceptic]

Clean water combined with sanitation. Most cities were transformed when sewage systems were installed. Joseph Bazalgette was responsible for building the London system. His ancestor, Peter, is responsible for giving us 'Big Brother' and I like Stephen Fry's quip that he was undoing his great-grandfather's works by "pumping **** back into our homes."

Descendant. Doh!

 

[mhaze]

Originally Posted by mhaze
And your yummy, delicious brand of totalitarianism is ???

More advice to the aspiring GWSceptic : adopt a Manichaean world-view.

A delightful non-answer, wrapped in the Wisdom of the Ages, tumbling from the penny chewing gum machine!

Thanks, CD.

The thing that I find ironic is that AGW will mean all the 'free-market' defenders will find their brand indelibly tarnished, since they were the ones who resisted most of all any attempts to mitigate the effects. Come next century, "Free Market" will carry the same stain as Communism.

AGW prophesy - free markets doomed!

Believe our dogma now! Wise central governments will make decisions on important matters!

 

[CapelDodger]

A delightful non-answer, wrapped in the Wisdom of the Ages, tumbling from the penny chewing gum machine!

Thanks, CD.

My post was not directed towards you. You are not an aspirant; far from it, you are an exemplar. Be proud.

 

[CapelDodger]

Descendant. Doh!

I prefer Stephen Fry's take - Peter Bazalgette is a throwback .

The health benefits of hygiene (or the dis-benefits of poor hygiene) were known long before Bazalgette's great work, but it was only when the Great Stink made Parliament unbearable that money was voted to get something done. Prior to that, rich Londoners just kept migrating westwards (and thus up-river).

 

[CapelDodger]

The thing that I find ironic is that AGW will mean all the 'free-market' defenders will find their brand indelibly tarnished, since they were the ones who resisted most of all any attempts to mitigate the effects. Come next century, "Free Market" will carry the same stain as Communism.

I think it's neo-liberalism that will carry the stain, not free markets per se. Much the same happened after 1929 and the Great Depression. Unregulated markets always come a cropper because they're simply not viable, given human nature. This recent recurrence (which I think of as post-Thatcherite, for provincial reasons, but Friedmanite is more universal) has about had its day. AGW will just be the final nail in the box (but probably not the stake through its heart).

As the great Mark Twain put it, History doesn't repeat but it sometimes rhymes. Will Obama be the new FDR, I wonder?

 

[TrueSceptic]

"Worst argument against global warming, ever."

Lucifuge has reposted that Scientists' Letter to the UN.
One of those names I didn't know before today.

Louis Hissink MSc, M.A.I.G., editor, AIG News, and consulting geologist, Perth, Western Australia

You might not want to be drinking anything while reading what follows. From
here

SMERSH 1 December Date 29/11/2004

A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth's recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming.
By Louis Hissink

So let's get a little more scientific about this issue.

As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth's mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth's mass cooler than 100 degrees celsius - statistics here.

The temperature of space is about 2.7 degrees Kelvin, or expressed in the Celsius scale, approximately -269 degrees Celsius.

Therefore the net heat loss from the earth to space is enormous, from which space could be thought as an almost infinite heat sink. And fluctuations of this heat source will overwhelm anything that humanity thinks it could contribute.

And why are we not being cooked to a frazzle on the earth's surface by this enormous mass of matter at a temperature greater than 1000 Degrees Celsius underneath us?

Since the temperature gradient between the earth and space is somewhat steep, one wonders about the scientific basis of climate science and the hypothetical construct of anthropogenic CO2 induced global warming, given the overwhelming contribution that the earth's interior makes to the surface temperature of the earth and to space's ability to absorb all this thermal energy.

Given the mass of the solid earth is somewhat greater than that of the atmosphere, of which 0.033 percent is CO2, a simple physics 101 calculation of the heat balance might suggest that the contribution by CO2 to the earth's surface temperature is, for practical purposes, irrelevant.

Are these scientific facts incorporated into the climate models? No, for which self respecting climatologist would study geology - the necessary background for miners of coal, oil, metals and industrial minerals.

C02 contributes nothing to the "Greenhouse effect" in practical terms, see here .

Climate scientists and the Greens are not repositioning the deck chairs on the Titanic, they are actually screaming about the position of specks of dust on the armrests of those deck chairs.

Paraphrasing Henry Louis Mencken, they are scientific morons.

Lambert called that the "Worst argument against global warming, ever."
But wait, there's more

SMERSH Science comment 12 Dec Date 12/12/2004

More climate scare stories, and a Quadrant reader raises the interesting possibility of an alternative reason for apparent climate change, plus one needs to be careful with laptop computers, they do a bit more that contribute to global warming.
By Louis HIssink

The man-made global warming priests went to a conference, COP 10, in Buenos Aires recently, explaining the sudden deluge of pro-global warming scare stories in the media. All rather contrived for those of us of a conspiratorial bent. But as we are continually reminded by the global warmers, there is no conspiracy, but there is consensus.

It is therefore possible to assume that as a camel is a horse designed by consensus, then climate science suffers from similar design aberrations. But as the author Michael Crichton has emphasised, science is not consensus.

This raises the now infamous statement of the IPCC - that the climate system is a coupled, non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the prediction of future climate states is impossible.

The IPCC then states :"Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential".

Model solutions of what? Models of something which cannot be modelled in the first place? We cannot model chaotic systems by definition. We cannot even model small scale turbulence, so what is the basis for the arrogance behind the IPCC statement that it's scientists can? They can't, except that the bureaucrats running the IPCC agenda don't want to confuse you with these awkward facts. Instead we will blind you with statistics.

So they propose an ensemble of model solutions. Now these model solutions are essentially linear models, since we have a problem in defining non-linear ones, and by coming up with a great number of different linear models, we can then statistically estimate future climate states. This is done by some magical statistical gobbledygook clothed in arcane scientific jargon, where linear models are converted to non linear ones, and the IPCC hopes to convince by authority alone, that its climate modelling is scientifically valid. It isn't. Linear models cannot give rise to non-linear results. Talk about creating a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Our meteorology departments cannot, with the massive computing power and scientific knowledge, forecast the weather in one week's time. They certainly cannot in 50 years time. Let's get the short term predictions right first before wasting money on predicting the weather 50 years hence because there is a good chance that our understanding of the past climate is seriously incorrect. If our understanding of past climates states is flawed, then any prediction of future climate states from those flawed assumptions, will be equally flawed.

Which really means we cannot predict future climate states but we can predict statistically the future climate states by creating many smaller models of climate systems we cannot model, and from reading chicken entrails we can predict future climate states by blinding you with statistics. Believe in us, we are the UN, the most despotic and corrupt, taxpayer funded junket on the planet.

In the past we have had to be put up with prophesies of doom and gloom of the second coming. This has metamorphosed into the doom and gloom of the coming climatic disaster. Both prophesies are based on fallacies, but as the Nazi Propoganda chief Joseph Goebbels well knew, repeat a lie often enough, it will eventually be accepted as fact.

A letter writer Richard S. Woodgate wrote in the Quadrant Magazine, edited by Henry's contributor Padriac McGuinness, about abnormal weather, past and future and in particular referred to Gavin Menzie's book, 1421: The year China Discovered the World, published in 2003, with a second edition in 2004. Mention was made of a shift in the earth's axis which which appeared to have been associated with a change in the weather.

This is not the first time that shifts of the earth's axis were noted in the historical past, the most infamous being the biblical Joshua Ben Nunn event who commanded the sun stand still by pounding his staff on the ground. Of course no man can do that, (but advocates of anthropogenic global warming assert that while man cannot stop the sun, he surely can change the weather, though it then strikes me that as the devout believe Joshua did stop the sun, then changing the climate would seem a trivial exercise for the devout, whether divine or secular - ask Sir David King - thereby confirming Michael Crichton's observation that anthropogenic global warming is a religious belief rather than scientific fact).

Then there are other more ancient accounts in Egyptian history where the rising and setting suns exchanged places. Where once the sun used to rise, it now sets, and that this happened more than once. So they said. Modern science, limiting its understanding to Newtonian mechanics, finds these ancient accounts extremely problematical, if nigh well impossible but as we all know too well, science also has a habit of changing when new facts are discovered. So while the past might remain inexplicable using existing theories, it is quite likely that new facts will enable us to explain the past in a more sensible manner than by simply dismissing it as impossible today. That is science, of course, which always changes when new facts are discovered. Religion never changes, even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory fact.

But I am not going to dwell on this because it occurred to me that if the earth did change its axis of spin, or careened, slightly, or significantly in the past, then that would have had the interesting effect of moving regions which were once in the tropics, perhaps into more temperate zones, and those in the temperate, perhaps into the arctic zones. We can change the climate of a place simply by moving it about in space?

This would result in the illusion that a particular region suffered a severe climate change, which in one sense is true, but this was only because that region was moved to a different latitude by a change in the earth's attitude around its axis of spin. The earth's overall thermal balance would not have changed, but only appeared to have changed from a misinterpretation of the evidence.

This then suggests that during the Medieval warming period Greenland was closer to the equator, and afterwards was moved further north to colder latitudes as the result of some cosmic interaction. That also means that Europe moved to colder climates. Is there any evidence for that? Seems so, if the Korean Choson Annals are anything to go by, as well as the necessity to change the Gregorian calendar, at the time. Of course much research needs to be done in this area, but if no one accepts this, then funding of course will not be allocated. Same old story of facts being quietly ignored by denying funding.

So past climate changes may not have been due to the earth cooling down to an ice age, but that overall thermal balance of the earth remained the same, and the illusion of climate change produced by infrequent careening around its axis, removing areas from the tropics to the arctic or polar regions, as hinted at by many ancients myths and legends of many older civilisations. True? Perhaps, and obviously a lot of research needs to be done to clarify our understanding of the past.

Climate science is far more complex than most of use realise, especially if we are using politically correct histories. The debate has only started.

A careening earth caused by close encounters of the cosmic kind, in an electrically dynamic plasma universe would offer some solutions to the interesting questions made in Richard Woodgate's letter in Quadrant Magazine.

Could Hissink be the champion skeptard? Is there anyone out there more idiotic, delusional, or arrogant, moronic to the point of hilarity?

I think I knew more science than this f***wit when I was oh, 12 years old.

 

[Lucifuge Rofocale]

LOL ...as predicted, the classic "I found something about a supporter of a 100+ scientifics letter to the UN" used to try invalidate stuff.
Really nice for a warm-ass.

 

[TrueSceptic]

LOL ...as predicted, the classic "I found something about a supporter of a 100+ scientifics letter to the UN" used to try invalidate stuff.
Really nice for a warm-ass.

What is your point? Of course any and all of the people on that list are fair game. Should we look at some more?

Did you read it? Would you want a f***wit like that signing anything you agree with?

 

[Lucifuge Rofocale]

There are notorious idiots signing Stop AGW petitions.....but that you won't accept. You are a waste of time

 

[TrueSceptic]

There are notorious idiots signing Stop AGW petitions.....but that you won't accept. You are a waste of time

Is that so? Have you posted such a list, and what was my reaction?

This is a test of your honesty. You should know that.

 

[mhaze]

Originally Posted by Lucifuge Rofocale
There are notorious idiots signing Stop AGW petitions.....but that you won't accept. You are a waste of time
​

Is that so? Have you posted such a list, and what was my reaction?
This is a test of your honesty. You should know that.

Only TS could dream up the utter seriousness of establishing the Test of Honesty.

On the production of a list of idiots!

Wow!

BWAHAHA!!!

Wait...isn't that pretty idiotic?

 

[TrueSceptic]

Only TS could dream up the utter seriousness of establishing the Test of Honesty.

On the production of a list of idiots!

Wow!

BWAHAHA!!!

Wait...isn't that pretty idiotic?

Trust our pet idiot to miss the point entirely. Again.

 

[CapelDodger]

Trust our pet idiot to miss the point entirely. Again.

Pretty much what we'd expect from a failing attempt at the Turing Test. That doesn't constitute proof, of course, but it leaves the possibility open.

 

[TrueSceptic]

Pretty much what we'd expect from a failing attempt at the Turing Test. That doesn't constitute proof, of course, but it leaves the possibility open.

I do wonder, sometimes...

What did you think of the Hissink quotes BTW? Wackiest I've seen for a while.

 

[CapelDodger]

What did you think of the Hissink quotes BTW? Wackiest I've seen for a while.

Well, I'd already had a drink when I looked in last night (it was cards night and my housemate's birthday, there was brandy, you get the picture) but it certainly seemed krankie from an overview. The temperature of the Earth's core? Very odd.

A more detailed look reveals clear insanity - unless it's parody, of course. One should always keep the possibility of parody in mind. It might even explain mhaze.

 

[a_unique_person]

Originally Posted by mhaze http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/helloworld2/buttons/viewpost.gif
And your yummy, delicious brand of totalitarianism is ???




A delightful non-answer, wrapped in the Wisdom of the Ages, tumbling from the penny chewing gum machine!

Thanks, CD.



AGW prophesy - free markets doomed!

Believe our dogma now! Wise central governments will make decisions on important matters!

The most sustainable model to date appears to be the MOR option, markets are left to be as free as necessary, with as much government control as necessary. Both extremes are inherently unstable.

 

[CapelDodger]

The most sustainable model to date appears to be the MOR option, markets are left to be as free as necessary, with as much government control as necessary. Both extremes are inherently unstable.

Absolutely. What's important is flexibility, and ideologies are inherently inflexible. They hold out against reality until they break, after which comes a period of chaos. The Soviet system is a prime example of that.

 

[TrueSceptic]

Blessed are the sceptics

In keeping with the OP, I have to report a superb example of the Galileo/Darwin argument in 'The Australian'.

They didn't make the common mistake of saying that it was all about the Flat Earth belief, but every other misrepresentation of the situation is present. Enjoy...

 

[mhaze]

In keeping with the OP, I have to report a superb example of the Galileo/Darwin argument in 'The Australian'.

They didn't make the common mistake of saying that it was all about the Flat Earth belief, but every other misrepresentation of the situation is present. Enjoy...

Something is unsatisfactory on this?

...what is this partnership between the Institute of Public Affairs and the University of Queensland to support environmental research about? What are we doing it for?


There are two main reasons.


First, to provide a haven for our scholars without ideological or commercial interference and with no prescription as to the end point of their inquiries. If they challenge orthodoxies and assumptions, particularly mine, then that's good. If they find that conventional wisdom is correct, then that's good, too.


The only criterion is to seek empirical evidence.


Second, it is important that any research that our scholars undertake is made available to aid the development of better, more rational public policy.
​