http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/2010-Peter-Taylor-Climate-Reviews.htm

We don’t need books written by homeopathic tree huggers that believe that the masons are after them. He makes crazy Lord Monckton seem like a sane person.

Secondly, even if you do think something productive can be done, how does this blog posting on transitionculture.org reflect the mantra of Transition easing the public into doing the right thing rather than rocking the boat?

To satirize, scold, or otherwise berate denialism is to attack or at least condescend to denialists in our communities.

If denialists have declared war on AGW believers, then how can transition activists counter that without lowering themselves to the same level of tit-for-tat rhetorical warfare? People will react to that as they always do, by getting defensive, digging in their heels, and lobbing insults at eachother instead of engaging in intelligent debate.

I would argue that the denial machine has been more effective than Transition because they go right to the reptilian part of the human brain, the part that has already become so swolen by BAU.

How hard is it to understand that people believe the truths that reinforce their preexisting vision of the world? People living in the BAU bubble are more likely to believe that threats to BAU are imaginary because it _comforts_ them to do so.

Thank you. I smiled.

Please excuse my Eeyore-like disposition.

I agree. All you get when you try to correct the sceptics’ wild claims are a further set of wild claims.

I’ve wondered what it will take for the more general public to wake up to the fact that the sceptics have been wrong all these years. I think that the total summer melt of the arctic ice cap might do it, particularly if some drowned polar bears start getting washed up on a beach somewhere. But even then, I wonder if it will only happen when it starts to affect people directly. Food shortages will do it, but that’s probably a long way off yet.

On a lighter note, I came across this summary of the sceptics’ argument in “The Rough Guide to Climate Change” by Robert Henson of NCAR. I think he was only half joking.

“The atmosphere isn’t warming; and if it is, then it’s due to natural variation; and even if it’s not due to natural variation, then the warming is insignificant; and if it becomes significant, then the benefits will outweigh the problems; and even if they don’t, technology will come to the rescue; and even if it doesn’t, we shouldn’t wreck the economy to fix the problem when many parts of the science are uncertain.”

They may think they are winning when it comes to public opinion, but that is utterly irrelevant when it is contradicted by the evidence, already present and becoming more and more obvious as the signal starts to emerge more progressively from the noise. There will come a point when the signal is obvious to all but the weapons-grade delusional. Unfortunately we will be down to adaptation and triage by that point. But I sometimes wonder if there will be a backlash, and what form it might take?

Cheers – John

I’ve tried arguing on a point-by-point basis with these folks in the past and all you get is more references to dodgy web-sites.

Like I said before, what does it really matter – they have won.

So what? The tectonic arrangement of continents (most were close to the South Pole), ocean currents, solar output etc etc etc were vastly different from anything in the past 65 million years.

2) During the last and previous glaciations, atmospheric CO2 increase often lagged temperature increase by hundreds of years

Glacials/interglacials are triggered by orbital variations known as Milankovitch cycles. Warming cycles that cause deglaciation release lots of CO2 as a positive feedback process. The CO2 then contributes to the warming.

3) Proxy data from ice cores show temperature trend direction changes. Temperature trend direction changes are not possible if NET feedback from average global temperature is positive.

Nonsense. There are plenty of other cycles capable of bringing about trend changes on all sorts of timescales. 1998-2002 has a negative trend because 1998 was one of the strongest El Nino years in decades.

4)Average global temperatures for over a century have trended down then up then down then up then down while average annual atmospheric CO2 levels have always risen since 1800. Lack of correlation proves lack of causation.

More nonsense – see above. Whoever predicted a linear year-on-year increased temperature trend? Nobody I know.

5) A simple model accurately predicts average global temperatures since 1895 (i.e. over 114 years…and counting) without any need to consider the effects of change to CO2 level or any other ghg. The model, with an eye-opening graph, is presented in the October 16 pdf at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true. (Replace all references to PDO with ESST which is short for Effective Sea Surface Temperature).

Cracking graph – love the way it wobbles about up to 2010 then goes down, down, down in a dead-straight line! Such confidence….

6) It is woefully naive to think that all that needs to be done to get global weather models (calling them climate models does not make them climate models) to predict climate is to run them longer.

The GFS goes out to T+384 and is a weather model, trying to interpret a chaotic system. Beyond T+180 is known to all weather enthusiasts as “Fantasy Island” and beyond T+120 must be viewed with caution. That is weather, driven by often very short-term interactions of influences.

Climate is driven by completely different longterm factors: tectonic distribution of landmasses, amounts of aerosols, greenhouse gases, solar output, orbital variations, ocean currents etc etc etc. Weather and climate (and the models designed to reproduce/forecast them) are COMPLETELY different things.

Hope that helps

Cheers – John

Small errors ?!

Good grief what planet is the writer living on.
Certainly not planet truth. Or planet unbiased.

There is a catalogue of lies being reported now.
When are you alarmists going to get over it and accept the truth.
You’ve been lied to, or are liars yourselves.

The IPCC report has as much credibility as the recent bodice ripper.

quote:
Just when you think things can’t get any more bizarre with the IPCC, having just learned that the IPPC 2007 report used magazine articles for references, head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, provides comedy gold. According to the UK Telegraph, he’s just released what they describe as a “smutty” romance novel, Return to Almora laced with steamy sex, lots of sex. Oh, and Shirley MacLaine.

(…)

As the UN’s climate change chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri has spent his career writing only the driest of academic articles. But the latest offering from the chairman of the UN’s climate change panel is an altogether racier tome.

Some might even suggest Dr Pachauri’s first novel is frankly smutty.
unquote

ROFL

Good luck coming to terms with your grief.

What a joke that is.

And since when was being sceptical a bad thing.
Sheesh. Talk about getting things backwards.

During the late Ordovician the planet plunged into the Andean/Saharan ice age when the CO2 level was several times the present.

During the last and previous glaciations, atmospheric CO2 increase often lagged temperature increase by hundreds of years

Proxy data from ice cores show temperature trend direction changes. Temperature trend direction changes are not possible if NET feedback from average global temperature is positive.

Average global temperatures for over a century have trended down then up then down then up then down while average annual atmospheric CO2 levels have always risen since 1800. Lack of correlation proves lack of causation.

A simple model accurately predicts average global temperatures since 1895 (i.e. over 114 years…and counting) without any need to consider the effects of change to CO2 level or any other ghg. The model, with an eye-opening graph, is presented in the October 16 pdf at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true. (Replace all references to PDO with ESST which is short for Effective Sea Surface Temperature).

It is woefully naive to think that all that needs to be done to get global weather models (calling them climate models does not make them climate models) to predict climate is to run them longer.