Parihaka

Well of course my quote was about Grey and his contempt for the process of the IPCC, but way to completely dodge that and do some more trolling instead.
But of course he's not any of those things is he quackers? In fact he's
And of course the actual person the previous post was refering to was So it took you two days and you still couldn't come up with any science: at the end your only response is to troll me and make false accusations against those scientists by association.
I'm calling bullshyt, and you're full of it.
Last chance: got any actual interest in the science like patch, or just another net troll?

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Parihaka

Yep. We, productive people helping feed the world, get to have our arses taxed off for, well, feeding the world. As a consequence we're going to be feeding less of the world and charging a damn sight more for what we do provide as well. I wonder what the poor people who can't afford our food are going to do?
But as you so rightly pointed out , it's all ok because the priesthood are having such a lovely time in Bali. Wonder how much carbon they produced getting there...

dalem

Well sure. That's because the only arguable position one can take pro-anthro GW is political. The science is all contra-indicative, so you can't argue it from a scientific point of view and get any traction.

Pluck peoples' heart strings, however, and you can grow your religion.

-dale

captain

An article from the Wall street Journal that is a timely warning to you guys in the US to be very aware of science that is politicised.


The Science of Gore's Nobel
What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?

BY HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet.

The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."

Here's exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads?





It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe.
Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level.

Take John Dingell. He told an environmental publication last year that the "world . . . is great at having consensuses that are in great error." Yet he turned around a few months later and introduced a sweeping carbon tax bill, which would confront Congress more frontally than Congress cares to be confronted with a rational approach to climate change if Congress really believes human activity is responsible.

Mr. Dingell is no fool. Is he merely trying to embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change at the expense of out-of-favor industries such as Mr. Dingell's beloved Detroit?

Take Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist working with Kleiner Perkins, a firm Mr. Gore joined last month to promote alternative energy investments. Mr. Khosla told a recent Senate hearing: "One does not need to believe in climate change to support climate change legislation. . . . Many executives would prefer to deal with known legislation even if unwarranted."

Mr. Khosla is no fool either. His argument is that the cascade itself is a reason that politicians can gain comfort by getting aboard his agenda.





Now let's suppose a most improbable, rhapsodic lobbying success for Mr. Gore, Mr. Khosla and folks on their side of the table--say, a government mandate to replace half the gasoline consumed in the U.S. with a carbon-neutral alternative. This would represent a monumental, $400 billion-a-year business opportunity for the green energy lobby. The impact on global carbon emissions? Four percent--less than China's predicted emissions growth over the next three or four years.
Don't doubt that this is precisely the chasm that keeps Mr. Gore from running for president. He could neither win the office nor govern on the basis of imposing the kinds of costs supposedly necessary to deal with an impending "climate crisis." Yet his credibility would become laughable if he failed to insist on such costs. How much more practical, then, to cash in on the crowd-pleasing role of angry prophet, without having to take responsibility for policies that the public will eventually discover to be fraudulent.

Public opinion cascades are powerful but also fragile--liable to be overturned in an instant when new information comes along. The current age of global warming politics will certainly end with a whimper once a few consecutive years of cooling are recorded. Why should we expect such cooling? Because the forces that caused warming and cooling in the past, before the advent of industrial civilization, are still at work.

No, this wouldn't prove or disprove a human role in warming, only that climate is variable and subject to complicated influences. But it would also eliminate the large incentive for politicians to traffic in doom-laden predictions--because such predictions would no longer command media assent and would cease to function as levers to redistribute resources.

Mr. Gore would have to find a new job.

Mr. Jenkins is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal on Wednesdays.


OpinionJournal - It's Your Money

Cheers.

gunnut

Is there like a comprehensive list of all the countries that signed the Kyoto protocol, their goal, and the actual results they have achieved in 10 years?

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lwarmonger

I think that there is a problem with your reasoning clackers. It assumes that scientists are disinterested in the outcome of their research, and that is a problem that you have failed to address. The funding for "global warming" research is by its very nature political. Private industry has very little interest in such things save to avoid regulation, so funding from the government comes because there is an interest by certain PAC's and internal advocates (like Al Gore). However these advocates have no interest in seeing it demonstrated that there isn't a significant problem! They want a real problem so that people will want to save the environment and back the cause in which they have put so much time and effort, and so they aren't going to help fund a scientist that isn't guaranteed to produce "favorable" results. And scientists, who like funding as much as the next person, are willing to provide such results and support, especially if not doing so would make them a pariah among certain institutions with deep pockets.

Essentially, the flaw in your argument is that you assume that there was a reasoned debate in which both sides were considered equally, and the majority of experts in the field were swayed by a preponderance of evidence towards the belief that global warming was in fact occuring. In reality, this was a highly politicized issue from the start, and large amounts of money and attention only went to one side, and are only going to one side. It has never been subject to the debate or detached scrutiny that good science is subjected to, and has been undully influenced by the "expected" results.

I would also note that you try to discredit Pari's sources as biased using sites and organizations that are also clearly biased (using Greenpeace to try and discredit an organization as right-wing?)... and this is part of the problem. There really isn't an organization out there that doesn't have a vested interest in getting certain results.

Note, I'm not taking any side here. I think that the problem may exist, however I think other environmental problems (like urban sprawl, deforestation in the third world, general industrial pollution in industrialized and industrializing nations) are of far greater magnitude and will have much more significant long term effects. I also think that methods for combating those problems are easier to agree upon, and it is far easier to measure success.

lwarmonger

I believe that most nations signed it, however the Chinese and the US are the two most notable exceptions.

And from what I've read on the BBC, most nations who did sign it aren't even coming close to meeting their targets.

gunnut

Here's a chart from wiki:

Kyoto Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UK is the lone party to be anywhere close to the treaty obligations.

Germany absorbed former East Germany and its shrinking ecomomy to benefit from lowered emission output.

US for all the whining from the global warming cult has increased emissions only by 16%, lower than most other industrialized nations who have ratified the treaty.

Meanwhile, China, which has a free pass, increased emission by 47% and has overtaken the US as the single largest source of man-made CO2 on the planet.

Attached Images

Kyoto result.JPG (48.2 KB, 23 views)

gunnut

Let's see, the US population in 1990 was roughly 248 million.

US Historical Population, by Year

The US population in 2004 was roughly 295 million.

US Population at 295 Million. Going Global: Adventures in Web globalization and all that it entails

That's almost a 19% increase in population from 1990 to 2004. Yet our emissions went up only by 16%. That means our per capita emission actually went DOWN by 3% over the 1990 level.

Meanwhile, China is now the single largest CO2 source on the planet:

Guardian | China passes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter

JAD_333

Para: Excellent article you posted. Aside from the convincing science that put the lie to global warming predictions, this snipet puts the whole furor into context for me. I am a half-cynical, long time observer of how public advocacy operators find ways to turn bogus issues into gainful employment and business opportunities. Captain's post from the WSJ likewise caught the essense of the problem. I can't wait for the next cooling spell to see where the global warming poobahs go to next to keep their paychecks coming. Thanks to you both.

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Parihaka

A pleasure Jad.

captain

No problems mate!

furkensturker

Has everyone heard about the hole in the Ozone layer? It covers a large part of Antarctica and at times migrates north toward Oz and Unzud. Chlorofluorocarbons were found to be the culprit and the world changed the way we use things with Chlorofluorocarbons in it.

So why is Antarctica the only place on earth that has a hole in the Ozone layer?

It has since been discovered that Chlorine gas is escaping out of Mt Eribus, a dormant volcano in Antarctica and it floats up and eats the Ozone layer that's why. So while the green Nazi's were going around blaming you and me for destroying the Ozone layer and yelling "I'm a tea pot", it was Mother nature that should have been ducking for cover.

I wonder if the greenhouse effect is also Mother nature?

One very important fact to keep in mind, when it comes to wilderness, the only true wilderness is between a greenie's ears.

Freddie

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furkensturker

When the expert can agree on global warming, can someone wake me up?

If experts want to be taken seriously, there's one sure way of doing it

Get your sh1t together and stop fighting
If they don't know what's going on, who does?
Freddie

ArmchairGeneral

Um, have a reference for that?

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