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Riverwind

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Posts posted by Riverwind

  1. Why? I know what I said which is; if the rate of change is too fast for things like animals and plants to cope with, THAT is a big consequence, and a bad one.
    How do you know it is too fast? Where is your evidence supporting this 'too fast' meme? When look at the temperature record I see many times when temperatures changed much faster than 0.7 degC/century in the past 10000 years. The suggests to me that the ecosystems are far more adaptable than you seem to thing.
    Established? What does that mean? You won't accept anything less than 110% certainty when it comes to AGW science.
    I don't expect 100% but I do expect a lot more than the wild a** guesses from someone with a PhD. Unfortnately, wild a** guesses is all climate science is and the guys with the PhDs making these guess are starting to make lawyers look like paragons of virtue.
    extreme weather just about everywhere you look as a result of an increasingly warming climate.
    Where your evidence there this is more 'extreme' weather? Once you establish that we are actually experiencing more extremes you will have to demonstrate that there is a link to the warming. I am really getting tied of environmentalist propoganda being waved around as scientific 'truth'.
    Of course I'm accepting the views of some economists, especially those who accept that you cannot talk about a human economy without accounting for the natural capital and ecosystems that underwrite it.
    Lovely talk but ultimately meaningless since we can't put a price on any of these things. The economists who have tried to put price on it have a nasty habit of deciding what policies they want to start with and then making whatever up numbers are required to make those policies sound rational.
  2. This is false. Why do you keep repeating it, when you have much better arguments to submit ?
    I suggest you re-read the context. I think you will find my meaning was different that you assumed.

    eyeball said:

    Weren't we all supposed to be doomed to poverty if CFC's were phased out?

    I responded:

    If you believe that then you must believe the scientific consensus in the 70s said that the planet was heading into an ice age.
  3. you cherry-pick your coveted 2001 starting year
    That is when the latest IPCC models started predicting the future. It is the ONLY suitable starting point since it is easy to get a model to "predict" temperatures when you already know what they are.
    working with a period that over-emphasizes the existing natural influences during that period (predominate La Nina & solar cycle positioning).
    The sun's effect was known to the modellers. If they believed it had such a strong role we would see the effect in the model outputs. The fact is the modellers ignore the sun because they believe it has no effect. It is rediculous to say now that they 'forgot' to take the sun into account. If they did forget they are incompetent if they left it out because they believed it had no effect then they are wrong. Take your pick.
  4. with 2008 being the bottom of the solar cycle and the sun headed into the peak of the solar cycle we may see some new records in 2010 or 2011.
    The amount of cooling experienced is much larger than what can explained with the solar cycle given current understanding. If warming does resume when the solar cycle starts that will be extremely strong evidence that the climate models underestimate the effect of the sun and, consequently, overestimate the effect of CO2.
  5. The fact you actually know the implications of short-term trending only acts to amplify your most personal hypocrisy, your own deviousness and, again, your desperation in continuing to foster this falsehood over global cooling.
    The cooling is a fact and you know it. The only person being deceptive is you. If you were actually interested in discussing science you would accept the *fact* of cooling but try to explain why you think that the cooling is not significant. However, you are only interested in peddling alarmist propoganda which means you are unable to acknowledge facts and prefer to hurl various insults at people who are not interested in enabling your fantasies.

    As for the significance of the cooling: the are mathematical techniques which can be used to determine whether it is signicant and when applied properly those techniques show that the cooling is significant when compare to the claims made by the IPCC.

  6. Not really, its the consequences of the rate of change being to fast to cope with that we care about.
    I suggest you read what you wrote. You agree that it is the consequences which are a concern - not the rate of change in itself. It has not been established that the current 'rate of change' is outside normal variability for climate. In fact, there is evidence from the ice cores that the kind of change we are seeing now is perfectly normal.
    You don't seem to believe the same thing when dealing with economists.
    I, for the most part, have ignored your endless attempts to divert discussion away from climate policy. However, it is worth noting that the argument that AGW is something to worry about is fundementally an economic argument and if you accept that premise then you are accepting the views of some economists. So the question becomes: why do you blindly accept the pronouncements of some economists but not others?
  7. I think its the rate at which things are warming up that's worrisome to the alarmists.
    The rate of warming is irrelevant too. It is the consequences of warming which we care about.
    Weren't we all supposed to be doomed to poverty if CFC's were phased out?
    If you believe that then you must believe the scientific consensus in the 70s said that the planet was heading into an ice age. In any case, there is a huge difference between a report that governments use to justify policy and the claims of random individuals.
    People lie all the time to make a case, even the most trusted people in society are shameless liars.
    Yep. Which is why skepticism is always required - even when dealing with scientists.
  8. Winters just aren't what they used to be.
    So what? The climate has gotten warmer over the last 100 years and that is probably a good thing. The problem with AGW alarmists is their obsession with the idea that warming must be bad. In the last week, two of the main arguments (glaciers melting/more hurricaines) used by alarmists to claim that warming is bad have been exposed as not only false - but as deliberate lies by people who are supposed to be giving us unbiased scientific information.
  9. How does whether they are a man or a young, attractive woman make a "moral" difference? What does that have to do with one's "moral dilemma?"
    Moral dilemmas need to resolved and the process of resolving such a dilemma is not clearly defined and changing a small detail of the scenario could result in a different decision. For example, lets say in one scenario the person in question refused to help because helping would put him/her in danger. Lets say in another scenario the person in question refused to help because they we just selfish. I would say that the majority of people would be more likely to choose killing in the latter case.

    In same way the fact that the person is attractive young woman would tip the balance away from killing in many cases - especially with men. That does not mean that men would never choose killing as an option. It just means that it is a factor that will be taken into account when people attempt to resolve the dilemma.

  10. Interesting week for the AGW true-believers

    It gets worse.
    THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

    It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

    It worth remembering that people who have been complaining about these issues for years have be repeatedly dismissed as 'anti-science deniers'.
  11. How does whether they are a man or a young, attractive woman make a "moral" difference? What does that have to do with one's "moral dilemma?"
    The point was to make people think about their deeply held prejudices - i.e. most people (especially men), given the same situation, would be less likely to kill a young attractive women than a ugly old man. It would not surprise me to find that such prejudice is in our DNA.
  12. is it your position that funding skews the actual science study/research result?
    I have said this before but you seem to have problems understanding it: in climate science there is no reliable data or experimental results that can be used to prove/disprove theories and all scientific claims are built on a huge number of unverifiable assumptions. What this means that the 'consensus' is really nothing more than a popularity contest among scientists. The scientists which produce the most convenient analyses are presumed to be correct and if data disagrees then the data is presumed to be wrong and adjusted accordingly. In a different universe a different group of scientists with a different theory could easily take the same data, adjust it according to their biases over many years and build up 'many lines of evidence' that support that theory.

    IOW - climate science is the perfect environment for group think to take hold. When you combine that with a huge pressure on scientists to support certain political agendas you have a toxic environment which makes it impossible to trust any of the science that comes out of it. It could be fixed but people have to start by acknowledging there is a problem.

  13. HadCRUT cooling since 2001

    UAH and RSS are similar but I don't have a recent plot handy. GISS is flat.

    "the decadel trends are consistent with the 25 year trend and IPCC predictions".
    Claiming that the temperatures are 'consistent with' the models is meaningless claim since virtually every plausible temperature outcome is 'consistent with' the models.

    Here is good debunking of the 'consistent with' nonsense.

    Man-made global warming is just one of many possible theories of climate. Another is the Business-as-Usual Theory (BUT), which states that whatever happened last year will more or less happen this year, and so on into the future.

    The winter were seeing is consistent with the BUT, which like the man-made global warming theory, never says any temperature is impossible. Further, BUT is corroborated more strongly by this winter than is the man-made warming theory. BUTs predictions are closer to what we actually see.

    Stop right there, Briggs! Youre making the classical mistake of confusing weather with climate. The global warming models make predictions of climate and not weather. This winter doesnt mean anything!

    I am not making that mistake, and it is you who are confused. Weather is climate. More specifically, aggregations of weather are climate. Means, averages, and distributions of daily weather comprise climate. That is, climate is a statistical phenomenon and depends for its existence on defining a reference time frame

  14. "The Biggest Control Knob - C02 in Earth's Climate History".
    Yep. For the 20 years any explanation for past climate that did not involve CO2 was systematically expunged from the record. Data that did not support the conclusions was dismissed or adjusted. Data that supported the CO2 hypothesis had its significance exaggerated.

    Scientists are herd animals. They go where the grants are. Scientists that try to disrupt the gravy train are vilified and attacked. Scientists that cook up bogus analyses which provide 'another line of evidence' are lauded as heroes and have grants showered on them. All it takes is a little 'cognitive dissonance' to turn the grant hungry scientist into a true believer. As Jerry Seinfeld said: its not a lie if you believe it.

  15. If there are flaws to be fixed, it's in the party system in our country, which has far too great a hold over individual MPs.
    It is worth noting that system where MPs can act as free agents leads to its own set of problems - just look at the US and all of the absurd provisions that get tacked onto billing in order to appease various local interests. Perhaps the most odious example was the health-care bill were the Senator from Oklahoma negotiated a clause that exempted Oklahoman seniors from the Medicare cuts which are inevitably coming.
  16. S. Korea, is investing in Ontario Green Tech. and this is suppose to add thousand of jobs to the maufacture sector, do you think it really will?
    Surely you jest.

    Here is a report on Germany's experience

    Second, numerous empirical studies have consistently shown the net employment

    balance to be zero or even negative in the long run, a consequence of the high

    opportunity cost of supporting renewable energy technologies. Indeed, it is most

    likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish

    as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germanys export sector

    to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries

    such as the US. Third, rather than promoting energy security, the need for backup

    power from fossil fuels means that renewables increase Germanys dependence on

    gas imports, most of which come from Russia. And finally, the system of feed-in

    tariffs stifles competition among renewable energy producers and creates perverse

    incentives to lock into existing technologies.

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