“Truth? You can't handle the truth!”

[The Legendary Shark]

Okay, Jim, let's get into it.

First, though, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I don't hold my views simply because they are contrarian. In fact, I change my views as soon as new evidence comes to light. Here are three examples:

1) 9/11. It was my previously held belief that passenger airliners could not travel at top speed in the denser lower atmosphere because they'd rip themselves apart. This turns out to be untrue. Planes can travel at top speed in the lower atmosphere although such a manoeuvre can cause structural damage, engine flame-outs and turbine failure. The truth is that it's against aviation legislation, and technical recommendations, to fly at top speed in the lower atmosphere, not impossible.

2) Hollie Greig. It has come to light that many of the persons who supposedly abused Hollie do not exist.

3) Winston Churchill knew Coventry was to be bombed and did nothing about it to protect the secret of the cracked Enigma code. The truth is that Churchill was told there was to be a raid that night but the target was unknown. In fact, Churchill believed the raid was to be on London.

(I know you are also capable of altering your view as new information comes to light, as with the false hysteria over Russia supposedly banning gays from driving.)

I therefore cannot accept your assertion that there is "...no standard of evidence presented against the flimsy arguments you advance on the hot-button-topic-du-jour which you will accept."

On a personal note, I want to say that I do not put forth my opinions in order to upset or annoy people, neither am I trying to convince anyone of anything. I find it upsetting that the modern attitude seems to be that if I disagree with someone I think they're stupid or that I must hate them. This is absolutely not the case. Sometimes, though, I do rise to comments like

...you look entirely clueless...

as if they were ad hominem attacks, because that's what they feel like. There is no excuse for me doing this as it just makes both of us look childish and, as W.R. Logan points out, is a turn-off to other board members. Arguments like that just make us look like Newman and Baddiel's "that's you, that is" sketches. I don't know everything, I'm not perfect and I do occasionally drop clangers (like the "dead dinosaur juice" howler) but my imperfections are no basis on which to consider everything I say as false. As you yourself said:

...I don't claim expert knowledge on fossil fuels, climate change or geology, but I have taken enough of an interest as a layman to have some broad, imperfect surface knowledge which I try to maintain through broad reading and, where possible, some attempts to grapple with raw data.

Which is exactly where I stand as well.

So please, attack my arguments all you want but, please, do not attack me. And if you find me firing off ad hominem attacks, as I sometimes (to my shame) do, then I expect you to pull me up on that sharpish.

Now, back to the topic in hand. You said:

Again: we are taking CO₂ stripped out of the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years and putting it back at a rate measured in tens of years. This is undeniable, unless you're now also disputing basic geology.

The way you put that makes it sound like oil and gas fields have been constantly stripping CO₂ out of the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. I don't think you meant it that way. If the current mainstream thinking about the formation of fossil fuels is correct, then it cannot be true. Some biomass, whether ancient forests, peat bogs, dead dinosaur juice or seabed, gets covered somehow by new layers of sediment which eventually turn into rock. Whilst the covering process is going on, the biomass continues as a carbon sink/exchanger but, at some point, will be cut off from the atmosphere or ocean. At this point, the biomass becomes a carbon reservoir and ceases exchanging CO₂  with the wider world. I don't know how long this process of cutting off takes, so I'll guess at between one and ten million years - though I am open to a more accurate estimate. I do then concede that fossil fuel reservoirs contain hundreds of millions of years worth of cumulative CO₂ which is being released over a matter of decades. I'm not disputing that.

If the above scenario is true, then the problem of CO₂ may not be quite so bad as the alarmists would have us believe. The oil, we are told, is close to running out, or at least getting more difficult to access, and so there is only a finite amount of CO₂ yet to be released. As I said earlier, we have the technology, both natural and artificial, to make use of this carbon dioxide in safe and even beneficial ways. This is not to say that we should burn every drop until it's all gone and then wait for the Earth to fix it for us. What I'm saying is that, if current mainstream thinking is correct, the CO₂ problem is not as insurmountable as it might at first seem.

If, on the other hand, "fossil fuels" can be formed by ongoing abiotic or geobiological processes (which I think is a distinct possibility) then there might be a big problem in that we can keep sucking it out of the ground and burning it up virtually forever. Whilst I don't currently believe that CO₂ in the atmosphere is as big a problem as the alarmists claim, a virtually inexhaustible supply of oil and gas could cause extreme problems in the long run if we do not balance our output - especially with the acidification of the oceans.

Climate change is real.

I thought I'd put that on a line of its own just to show that I'm not a "climate denier" (whatever that means) but I don't think that CO₂ is a significant driver behind it. It is a very small part of a very large and complex system but still needs to be tackled. I think, and I believe you do to, that climate change is a very serious problem which needs to be understood and addressed. My fear is that, by putting all our eggs in the CO₂ basket, we are looking for and implementing solutions (like the execrable carbon tax) which will be ineffective at best and disastrous at worst. We can't spend the next fifty years concentrating on reducing carbon emissions only to find that climate change is an ongoing, natural phenomena that cannot be halted.

So yes, we do need to reduce our carbon emissions but that's only a very small part of what needs to be done.

[TordelBack]

We can't spend the next fifty years concentrating on reducing carbon emissions only to find that climate change is an ongoing, natural phenomena that cannot be halted.

So yes, we do need to reduce our carbon emissions but that's only a very small part of what needs to be done.

I have to ask: what's the plan, so?

When we know, by all current metrics and by all historical and palaeoclimatic proxy data, that increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to a higher global mean temperature, and that we as a species chuff out CO2 at an unprecedented rate, why shouldn't reducing these emissions be the major thrust of our response?

If it does turn out that increasing temperatures are 99% due to solar fluctuations or are caused by Thetans angry at South Park or whatever, won't we still have done our best with the 1% we have control over?

I just don't see why we shouldn't act on current understanding, even as we continue to gather and interrogate new data, and I don't see why it is so important to so many people (who aren't themselves super-rich wankers with vested interests) to impede these efforts by seizing on every half-baked utterance from a very small group of largely discredited scientists as if is was the pillar of fire sent to guide us by day. How can you simultaneously be sceptical of 98% of climate scientists, and blindly trusting of 2%?

[JayzusB.Christ]

How can you simultaneously be sceptical of 98% of climate scientists, and blindly trusting of 2%?

This is what baffles me too. 

[The Legendary Shark]

It's not about disregarding climate scientists' results, but about the political interpretation of what "agree with ACC" actually means. For example, a paper describing the rising temperatures within cityscape microclimates is not the same as agreeing with overall ACC. Some links:

Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims

97 per cent of climate activists in the pay of Big Oil shock!

The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up

The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'

[JPMaybe]

Keep Googling shitty blog posts genius, maybe if you do it enough the laws of physics will match those in your febrile imagination

[TordelBack]

James Delingpole? At the risk of invoking the curse of Ad Hominem yet again, if he's for it, I'm agin it. You two make for very strange bedfellows, Sharky.

I'll push on with the ad homs, in for a penny and all that: your other cited sources are the bloody Heartland Institute again, and the economist Richard Tol, quoted as saying "The first rule of climate policy should be: do no harm to economic growth", and not bothered about the man-made climate change that he accepts is happening because it will only negatively impact those south of a line from Paris to Munich, and the poor and dispirited victims are unlikely to be much of a military threat. That's okay, then.

Here is a far more detailed rebuttal of all those pieces than I could manage, and also doesn't appear to be authored by the kind of people who would step on your head to prevent their handmade slip-ons getting muddy.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

I do love it when people who are barely comment on the forum anymore pop on to tell us how unappealing a place this is to hang out.

If you don't give a shit you're doing a very bad job of it!

In terms of all this: 

[The Legendary Shark]

John Cook, co-author of Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, the study under criticism here, is "...not a climatologist or a scientist but a self employed cartoonist and web programmer..." He is also the founder of skepticalscience.com, the very website Tordels links to as rebuttal of the site's founder's paper.

[TordelBack]

He is also the founder of skepticalscience.com, the very website Tordels links to as rebuttal of the site's founder's paper.

Ha, missed that completely! Nice one.

[The Legendary Shark]

Took me a while to uncover that
.
I'm working at the moment so haven't got the links to hand, will post them later if you like, but skepticalscience.com does have its critics. I haven't followed up fully yet, but it seems the site may have a history of deleting comments arguing against its position off the forums. Again, I haven't followed this through yet so it might not be true. If you fancy a little project, maybe you'd like to look into that. No probs if not, of course.

[W. R. Logan]

It's at times like this that you can see why there was an exodus of people away from here.

Weren't you leaving forever? Or was that me? ;-)

Cheers!

Jim

LOL, probably me, but I dip my toe in to see if things have changed.
Then I see that you're bashing your head against the same brick walls and realise that as good as this place can and draws in some great boarders it's also the 2000AD home for Futsies.

[The Legendary Shark]

TV illusionist Derren Brown 'persuades' two ordinary women to push a stranger off a roof... but could you be talked into MURDER?
.
I don't possess a telly, so I don't know how accurate this is. Still, it
makes me wonder if certain individuals could be 'persuaded' to shoot a president, eliminate a dissident or simply carry a 'harmless' rucksack into a public place...

[Tiplodocus]

James Delingpole? At the risk of invoking the curse of Ad Hominem yet again, if he's for it, I'm agin it. You two make for very strange bedfellows, Sharky.

I'll push on with the ad homs, in for a penny and all that: your other cited sources are the bloody Heartland Institute again, and the economist Richard Tol, quoted as saying "The first rule of climate policy should be: do no harm to economic growth", and not bothered about the man-made climate change that he accepts is happening because it will only negatively impact those south of a line from Paris to Munich, and the poor and dispirited victims are unlikely to be much of a military threat. That's okay, then.

Here is a far more detailed rebuttal of all those pieces than I could manage, and also doesn't appear to be authored by the kind of people who would step on your head to prevent their handmade slip-ons getting muddy.

Anyway, isn't it all the fault of the farting cows?

[The Legendary Shark]

How Big Oil Conquered The World.
.
"From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the oil industry. The story of oil is the story of the modern world. And this is the story of those who helped shape that world, and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of monopolizing life itself."
.
Fascinating stuff!

[Proudhuff]

http://theconversation.com/we-just-had-the-hottest-year-on-record-where-does-that-leave-climate-denial-53576?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%2026%202016%20-%204176&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%2026%202016%20-%204176+CID_dc454c1839076f87450c7e2df81d9af3&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=We%20just%20had%20the%20hottest%20year%20on%20record%20%20where%20does%20that%20leave%20climate%20denial


ooops sorry forgot how to give that a title and CBA looking