I did not write that science is a religion. I wrote that many environmentalists treat science as if it were a religion.

Back this up with some original thoughts of your own, please, or admit that it’s just a lazy phrase that you’ve picked up off the folks that you clearly like to mix with.

As a corollary, Lindzen is causing emotional distress. As a world-leading meteorologist, he should be one of your high priests — but he is not.

Causing distress to you in having to defend him (as a co-denialist), maybe, but not to anyone else.

Monckton is a real lord

Funny that (and who couldn’t tell that this was coming?):

“Although he has asserted that as an hereditary peer he is “a member of the House of Lords, though without the right to sit or vote”, the House of Lords has stated that “Christopher Monckton is not and has never been a Member of the House of Lords. There is no such thing as a ‘non-voting’ or ‘honorary’ member.”"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley

The above, I believe, arises from Monckton having been claiming on his tours of the US to be a member of the British House of Lords (not the worst of the fibs he tells, admittedly).

I distinguish between “environmentalists” and “climate scientists”, though there may be overlap. I judge scientists by the science they produce, and I have seen little religious fervour among climate scientists, though a lot of enthusiasm and a tendency to be rambunctious, not surprising in what is a new field of science. However, I do not think there are any who would not be relieved if AGW was falsified. In the past, I have avoided environmentalists like the plague, and I have never made their religious views my concern. Maybe that will change!

I’ll justr refer to the excellent set of videos by Peter Sinclair “Climate Crock of the Week”, which are amusing even if you do not agree with them.

http://newenergynews.blogspot.com/2010/04/climate-crock-of-week-lord-monckton.html

http://newenergynews.blogspot.com/2010/04/climate-crock-continued-lord-monckton.html

I have frequently commented on your own ambiguous stance on climate change, where you state you believe AGW is happening, yet do your best to belittle or disparage the science behind it (”religious believers” etc.), without actually highlighting any data or factual evidence.

“Willing to wound/ yet afraid to strike/ just hint a fault/ and hesitate dislike” (Alexander Pope). I have long since abandoned any hope you will come clean on the issue.

While you hide behind anonymity, I do not. So, you can have a look at my CV to check your claim about me being “left out”. It is certainly news to me.

I stand over my remarks about Lindzen as not being ageist. But you are far too kind to the man. If he was “trying to help” climate science, he had plenty of scope to make his criticisms from within the paradigm. Instead, he made common cause with shills and fakes like Steve Milloy and “Lord” Monckton.

It is also not unusual for scientific disputes to become bitter and personal. The two founders of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg and Schrodinger, despised each other. Newton vs. Leibniz reached high levels of fury. James Watson’s “The Double Helix” revealed just how human scientists are in their personal dealings. So Lindzen the Martyr does not wash. If he became an outsider, it was firstly by choice, and secondly, by his choice of allies.

I see you have your own case of cognitive dissonance in the description of climate science as a “religion”. You have been challenged about this before and failed to produce a scintilla of a tither of evidence.

As far as I can see, a new science has been born in the last 30 years - scientists who were geophysicists, geologists, or oceanographers are now united in a science of “climatology”. I think history will see it as exciting and interesting a period as the start of atomic physics, roughly 1900-1930.
Is this a science can can be refuted? Of course it is. Unlike denialism, which keeps recycling the same tried objections no matter how often they get shot down - and Lindzen is as guilty of that as anyone.

Obviously, finding yourself somehow “left out” of this exciting new discipline has left you with your own cognitive distress.

You, however, called Lindzen a crank.

We’ve had this discussion before, so you know that I subscribe to the theory that environmentalists treat science as a religion and scientists as priests. As a corollary, Lindzen is causing emotional distress. As a world-leading meteorologist, he should be one of your high priests — but he is not. Instead, he is doing what a scientist should do: try and shoot holes in the prevailing paradigm. While I think that he fails to do so, that does not lower my respect for the man and his work.

Better attribution, please. I have said nothing about Lindzen’s age (a common characteristic though it may be of he and his cohorts).

“Distinguished” meteorologist, says you? I think that that notion died a death when he brought out his “Iris” theory. And his rather pathetic misleading remarks on the scientific basis of AGW in recent years has undone any remaining reputation he may have had. Great company that you keep in your GWPF.

Ireland has one of the strictest emission reduction targets in the world; if we were to try and meet those targets, the economic repercussions would be serious. That’s why climate is discussed here.

I hope that you’ll clarify that remark. It seems to imply that you think that if you throw enough mud at the (genuine) scientists who agree with AGW, then you can avoid the “economic repercussions” as you phrase them. Economists, eh?

I do think R. Lindzen is wrong - rightness is not a quality which attachs itself naturally to young or old, nor am I any spring chicken myself. If you re-read what I said, I went out of my way to be respectful by comparing him another old fart & old genius Max Planck. Planck had his key insights at age 40, old for a physicist.

Accomplished does not mean wrong, either; neither does old.

Richard Lindzen may be accomplished, but at 70 years old, one can hardly count him as being at the spearhead of a vital new science. It strikes me he is a fit subject for the Max Planck quotation:

“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Nor does “accomplished” = “right”. There was hardly a physicist more accomplished than Einstein, but he was wrong about a few things - quantum mechanics and the cosmological constant being just two.

At least you did not try to count Steven McIntyre as a scientist. Small mercies.

@Nicholas Mycroft
Ireland has one of the strictest emission reduction targets in the world; if we were to try and meet those targets, the economic repercussions would be serious. That’s why climate is discussed here.

@Veronica
As you can see from the “discussion” above, the debate has yet to move on.

I’m afraid that weathergirls and economists aren’t generally recognised as “scientists”, mate, at least not as you’re attempting to pass them off here.

Are you just going to discount the views of Richard Lindzen, Bob Carter etc etc as cranks and deniers?

Well, yes. Because they, um, are, y’know.

They are as interested in the truth as I am

Never a truer word was said!

the tireless voluntary work of Steve McIntyre

This would be the same “tireless” Steve McIntyre who was pulling the very same tricks in the service of the tobacco industry in decades past, before hopping on the anti-AGW bandwagon.

The rate at which what is happening? Temperatures have not risen in Ireland, sea-levels haven’t risen. The glaciers, as we have seen, aren’t melting either. None of the predictions of catastrophic climate change have happened. Any changes we have seen in average temperature globally (another poorly defined variable) fall well within normal rates of change.

As for the bad scientific attitude - if the scientists who wrote the IPCC report were involved in fraud / adjusting of data / sexing up data, then I would say that is a pretty damning indictment of the state of that field.

I don’t deny that CO2 absorbs infra-red radiation - so do lots of gases, including water vapour. But that is only a tiny part of the picture. You have this unbelievably complex highly nonlinear system that transports heat around the earth. There are all sorts of poorly understood feedbacks within that system, and yet somehow it has all remained fairly stable for 4 billion years. We know that CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, and much lower. And then Al Gore / James Hansen / Michael Mann come along and say if CO2 exceeds 350ppm, we are all phuqqed? But if you buy these indulgences, I mean carbon credits, then everything will be ok? I’m sorry Sarah, but I just think it’s all bollocks! Thanks for taking the trouble to debate the issues though

So your argument is based on a rejection of the basic mechanism of the greenhouse effect? Not sure what to say to that one really, it’s been part of the mainstream scientific consensus for more than a few decades at this stage. And it’s all perfectly within the theoretical realms of possibility.

As for the “wider scientific community” - I’m not really that bothered about the opinion of someone with a PhD psychology thanks very much. It’s ironic that you accuse me of discounting the views of Lindzen because even he accepts that humans are having an impact through increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions!

The rest of what you talk of is bad scientific attitude but it does nothing to negate the science of AGW. NASA’s GISS temperatures for example are transparent and available for all to access.

Sorry? I missed the part where I said that climate change didn’t happen before humans. What’s different about today is the RATE at which it’s happening and the lack of alternative explanations. As Sherlock himself said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”. So yes you can separate out climate change as caused by solar activity etc from that caused by humans.

Another thing Sarah - you say that scientists are 90% certain that climate change is being caused by human activities. Does this mean that there was no climate change before humans? No it doesn’t. How can you separate natural climate change out from supposed human induced CC? You can’t.

1) 100% is never achieved in science
2) If a plane had a 90% chance of crashing, would you get on it?

Hmmm.

Science is : “a technique of not kidding yourself”.

Climate change issues are risk-management issues.

Some people refuse to accept that there will be serious consequences in any timescale they care about, or think anybody should care about, which might be a century or less.

Others worry there might eventually be very serious consequences.

You are absolutely right - I just don’t get it
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

Funny how those who demonstrably misunderstand the scientific method are the quickest to chuck the accusation of ‘religion’ at anything approaching a scientific consensus.

You *want* to believe it’s a ‘big lie’. That want is why denialists think their research by Google is somehow valid. That want is why denialists pick their cherries. That want is why you just don’t get science.

Extrapolating from the weather conditions of one winter in only a part of the Earth has fallacies which should be obvious.

As to your question as to whether we will see more ‘contributions’ by sideshow authors along the lines of Tol/Lomborg (Tolborg?), I’m sure the funding is out there.

I see the right-wing thinktanks in the US already pursuing the line, for example, that higher efficiency standards in cars will kill people (by questionable extrapolations from the likely decrease in car size and weight). This is the kind of FUD that these characters specialise in as a lucrative career choice.

Given that the first US President to mention climate change in a message to Congress was Lyndon Johnson, and the first confirmatory paper was written in 1988 by James Hansen, some of us might conclude that the “judgement” of political organizations has been positively glacial!
Jimmy Cater tried to wean the US away from Middle Eastern oil 30 years ago - how different might the world be if Reagan had adopted the same policy?

BTW, Koch Industries have their own PR. I don’t think they need you as well. Koch’s focus on right-wing causes is too well known.

Look to the Sun, Aten, Apollo and see what is truly powerful. There is fusion, but on the surface and more in the corona, as the power of the galaxy flows through every star. Science can propogate lies very effectively for almost as long as false economic theories, but in the end history decides. If we learn we earn.

Economists associated with a scam? Shurely not, hic!

The early assessments of the cost of AGW were higher than today because the benefits of warming had not been properly accounted for. I don’t know, but I wonder have the freezing conditions of last winter led to some reviews of the costs of the cold - globally obviously.

In Ireland’s case the lack of salt will likely not be repeated but what about our approach to building, to roads, agriculture, heating and our general health to reduce the cost of future cold spells?

Aside from the third world, warming to 2050 will result in fewer temperature related deaths and lost life years and is likely to hold to 2200 (This was Lomborg quoting a 2006 study by Tol that was THE FIRST complete global survey of the issue). And deaths from warming is not the biggest problem facing developing countries. This was 2006. Will more studies emerge showing - unaccounted for - benefits of warming?

I did feel your views on science were a bit simplistic, and I may have come across too sharply. There are four major indicators of AGW:

CO2 levels
Global Average Temperature
Arctic Sea Ice
Sea Level Rise

Each indicator is inexorably offering confirmatory evidence for anthropogenic global warming year after year. None are laboratory-based indicators. Even if global cooling suddenly kicked in about 2015 and every indicator went into reverse, we would be foolish not to start making preparations now for the likelihood that global warming is happening and will increase.

I work for a telecommunications company researching smart-grids and energy reduction in telecommunications networks. My own work is more development than research, and not in those areas. And, no, I am not heavily invested in green technology. :))