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OT: Skeptics vs Alarmist Cage Match unSpectacular! |
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17-Jun-2009 4:39:09 PM
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On 17/06/2009 R James wrote:
>You suggest that AGW does not happen, but,
>>as others have asked, What if you’re wrong!
>
>And I responded on 12/6/09. Have a look back.
>
>I'm suggesting that realistically there's little we can do about climate,
>whether AGW is real or not, while we have an exponentially growing population.
>Most of Australia's growth comes from immigration. We choose not to overpopulate,
>so the government offsets this by encouraging immigration from other countries.
>Sensible when capital cities struggle to supply enough drinking water.
>
>I'm not suggesting a one child policy - we need 2 - 3 children on average
>for stability. However, if Australia is serious about reducing emissions,
>for a start reduce immigration.
>
>We need to globally acknowledge, at government level, that population
>increase is not in our best interests. It will require education and culture
>changes - this is a huge topic and outside the scope of this thread, so
>I won't dwell on it.
>
>Let's just consider that world population is expected to increase by 35%
>by 2050 to 9.2 billion people. Does anyone really believe we'll reduce
>total emissions and use of resources at the same time? Politicians are
>pulling vote winning unachievable figures out of a hat (eg reduce emissions
>by 25% by 2050).
>
>Reducing population won't win an election. However, people feel so good
>about reducing emissions, that not only will it win an election, the silly
>sheeple will pay more taxes to support it. Meanwhile, Blind Freddie can
>see that the emission goals are unachievable while the bigger problem of
>population growth is ignored.
It is not just global population increase that makes CO2 reductions more difficult it is the rise of the middle class in China and India. Just think if a rural kid living in India/China gets an education, gets a good job, moves to the city, gets married, has kids, buys a car, TV, microwave, fridge, use airplanes for holidays etc, etc there impact is probably 10-20 times that of if he/she didn't rise up into middle class/consumer ranks. They of course have every right to do so. So say 100,000,000 people over the next 10-20 years increase their CO2 emmisions by times 5, 10, 20 then you have an effective population increase in terms of CO2 of 500, 1000, or 2000 million people. Thats scary. I don't have the exact numbers/forecasts but you get the idea.
With that said, population projections, changes in CO2 per person emmisions are factored into emmisions reductions scenarios. In fact, Dept. Climate Change loves to produce figures based on CO2 reductions per capita (ie. something like 25-35% decrease in C02 emmisions per capita compared to overall decrease of 5-10-25%). It makes us sound like we are doing more than everyone else.
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17-Jun-2009 5:04:42 PM
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I've read most of the Synthesis report over the past couple of years, and agree that it's quite convincing. However, it does use selected research, and still doesn't answer my few basic questions. I've also spent some time with Prof Carter, both seminars and correspondence. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI. - parts 1 - 4.
I guess I've spelled out what would convince me earlier - some evidence of unusual climate based on long term, climate models that match real data, some evidence that positive feedback dominates negative feedback etc. So far, most of what I've found is hypothesis. Sure a lot of it is peer reviewed (so was Mann's hockey stick - doesn't give much confidence.) Peer review often means the author's mates said nice things about it.
With scientists previously associated with IPCC now openly speaking against it, it's hard to take it seriously. http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1
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17-Jun-2009 7:14:05 PM
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On 17/06/2009 R James wrote:
>With scientists previously associated with IPCC now openly speaking against
>it, it's hard to take it seriously. http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_conte
>t&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1
That's jilted lover syndrome.
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17-Jun-2009 7:48:15 PM
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The link you provided for Prof Carter doesn't seem to work for me, R James, although it's right.
If you haven't watched it evanbb, you should. Just search "bob carter co2" in youtube. A lot of stuff on IPCC over the 4 parts. There is some other interesting stuff featuring Prof Carter explaining the effects of CO2, on youtube too.
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17-Jun-2009 7:54:15 PM
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On 17/06/2009 SwineOfTheTimes wrote:
>The link you provided for Prof Carter doesn't seem to work for me, R James, although it's right.
Chockstone's autolinky thing included the full stop in the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI
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17-Jun-2009 8:15:27 PM
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You're right - thanks for the correction, and providing the correct link. We should all watch out for this in future.
here it is again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI
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18-Jun-2009 8:43:43 AM
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On 17/06/2009 R James wrote:
>I guess I've spelled out what would convince me earlier - some evidence
>of unusual climate based on long term, climate models that match real data,
>some evidence that positive feedback dominates negative feedback etc. So
>far, most of what I've found is hypothesis.
Well, at least you've given me something to have a swing at, but I suspect you've priced yourself out of the market with this wish list. I'll have a crack later though.
The haven't had a chance to look at the videos yet, but what ever their content, it would be very difficult to say for certain that Carter hadn't been bought out. As it is on either side of the argument. But the oil companies have some very high profile, and fairly public hired guns. Check out Chris Mitchell, editor of the Oz. Recently presented some award for journalistic integrity and coverage of 'Climate Science', sponsored by, guess who, the Australian Petroleum body. He was modest enough to put this on the front page of his paper too.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25579486-7582,00.html
http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/06/05/and-the-wankley-goes-to-mitchells-climate-change-award/
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18-Jun-2009 9:28:19 AM
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On 17/06/2009 anthonyk wrote:
>but its overdue to increase so there'll be an increase in solar energy over the next 5 (3?) years of the 11 year cycle.
I thought this NASA article might interest some people here: Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, Solved?
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18-Jun-2009 9:33:13 AM
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>The haven't had a chance to look at the videos yet, but what ever their
>content, it would be very difficult to say for certain that Carter hadn't
>been bought out. As it is on either side of the argument. Check out Chris
>Mitchell, editor of the Oz. Recently presented some award for journalistic
>integrity and coverage of 'Climate Science', sponsored by, guess who, the
>Australian Petroleum body.
I agree it may have been prudent for Chris Mitchel to reject the award. However, provided the science and logic is correct, does it matter? All I see is that there is an award funded my the petroleum industry. In this case it just happened to be given to someone for reporting on climate.
Bob Carter usually charges for traveling and giving seminars, but to the best of my knowledge, has no interest other than presenting good science. I can't fault his data or logic. I admit I'm not a climate scientist, but can certainly evaluate data and its statistical significance. I would be interested in your (and anyone else) comments after seeing all four videos, and any problems you have with the data sources and logic applied.
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18-Jun-2009 9:57:55 AM
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during the early 70's there was great debate about the safety of asbestos and victoria was a heavy user in the new power stations and basically came up with scientific proof that blue asbestos was a real baddy but white asbestos was ok . They had a good number of scientists swearing that only blue had proved to be bad and white was ok . Governments had been sitting on reports about asbestos since the early 20th century. I know that 75 or 76 suddenly nobody could flue gas heaters as asbestos piping was stopped being made . Todays version on asbestos make Hardies to be the only bad guys whereas governments allowed them to operate and collect tax from them etc . Nearly every asbestos company in the world simply liquidated or closed and hardies are suddenly responsible for all compensation . scientists were right in their views? well some were some werent and we as a commmunity will pay the price for many years to come . Climate change could well be a repeat with many magnitudes greater effect and to all people not just those exposed to the danger
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19-Jun-2009 9:50:52 AM
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On 17/06/2009 R James wrote:
>Sure a lot of it is peer reviewed
>(so was Mann's hockey stick - doesn't give much confidence.) Peer review
>often means the author's mates said nice things about it.
I'd never really looked into the Mann graph with any seriousness, and started reading up on it today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
There's the wiki summary.
It's not the refuted nightmare that a lot of people claim. Apparently a mining executive and an economist the methodology. Some US senators got hold of it and called a senate inquiry.
The inquiry found that:
"The report agreed that there were statistical shortcomings in the MBH analysis, but concluded that they were small in effect."
This report was then refuted by some other statisticians not involved in the Congress (I should have said Congress not senate before) report, who declared it nonsense in a number of ways.
The whole wiki article is worth a read. It's quite well written and includes heaps of references.
The point is, that there have been contradictory views of the Hockey Stick; it has not been proved false outright as a lot of people suggest.
There's been a lot of tooing and froing over the result, which most recently, at a Statisticians Conference (which sounds Awesome!), was found to be 'most likely correct'.
"Similarly to the original study, this work found that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years, and that this result is robust to the inclusion or exclusion of the tree-ring dataset."
Sure you can interpret it anyway you like, but it seems A LOT of people support Mann's findings. One or 2, oppose it, but they're making a hell of a lot of noise about it.
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19-Jun-2009 10:32:52 AM
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I only watched the first video, which was enough to conclude that Bob is quite the showman, that I hate getting information from videos of presentations where it's tedious to go back and look up some point, I can't see the powerpoints properly and definately can't see any references to where they come from. Aside from that, he didn't seem to be saying anything new and exciting, plenty of standard objections that have been rebutted elsewhere but I can't find a rebuttal of the rebuttals anywhere, so feel free to direct me to one. On some other research into Bob, he has some interesting ideas about a 60 year climate cycle, based on some studies of the last ... um ... 120 years ...
On top of that, here's a few people objecting to his views and his impartiality:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/09/12/spot-the-recycled-denial-v-%E2%80%93-prof-bob-carter/
http://newmatilda.com/node/1585?ArticleID=1585&HomepageID=142
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/the_australians_war_on_science_34.php
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/04/bob_carter_claims_its_not_warm.php
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/04/crackpot_index.php
http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/04/silent-bob.html
http://www.desmogblog.com/rm-bob-carter
This one is actually about vocal climate skeptics in general and has a look at Don Aitken, Fred Singer, the Heartland Institute and our new found friend here, Bob:
http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/death_rattles_of_the_climate_change_skeptics.pdf
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19-Jun-2009 10:35:17 AM
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wtf haven't you all got bored yet....!
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19-Jun-2009 10:37:38 AM
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On 19/06/2009 Sabu wrote:
>wtf haven't you all got bored yet....!
Nope.
*wanders off to microwave some more pop corn*
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19-Jun-2009 10:50:25 AM
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On 19/06/2009 Sabu wrote:
>wtf haven't you all got bored yet....!
well, seeing i still can't go climbing ... and the weather's actually nice again ... moan ...
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19-Jun-2009 11:02:28 AM
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On 19/06/2009 Sabu wrote:
>wtf haven't you all got bored yet....!
Oh yeah, I was bored pages ago. I'm just trying to prop it up now to go for the records.
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19-Jun-2009 11:21:35 AM
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what is the record for number of posts? 100
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19-Jun-2009 11:21:47 AM
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300
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19-Jun-2009 11:21:56 AM
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1000???
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19-Jun-2009 11:25:25 AM
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have a look at the stoked thread. Or dig haveachatwithhex out of the archives. This can't be doing badly for something that has a pseudo consistant topic anyway. Ask M9!
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