Just think that we have this romantic notion regarding cooperation and consensu when evn the most primitive tribes in the Amazon or New Guinea rainforest will defend what they consider is their property.

So not sure what model is best, but willing to look at something.

What other suggestion for organising society which supresses this greed emotion? I suggest that in those societies a very strong patriarctical or matriartical society exists.

Where “do as I say” is the dominant trait.

Perhaps GE modification has a use by replacing the greed gene with a more benevilant one.

Off cource in all people except me. Dont want to be compliant.

which is the whole problem. No one wants to be compliant.

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Not all societies function the way the western capitalist competitive societies function. The ones that don’t have been swallowed up because the western model IS competitive, and if you try not to compete you lose. Sort of like being a pacifist when the other guy really really is going to beat the bejeezus out of you and take everything you own. You either abandon the pacifism or abandon everything you own.

Capitalism of the sort we have competes for energy and resources in a big way. It isn’t the ONLY way humans can organize themselves, it’s just the most effective way to compete that we’ve found.

BJ

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not takepayers.

Hey we ned that neat feature on this blog where you can edit your own comments after posting!!

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Interesting view point said I would say, with rose coloured glasses.

Fortunately I’m a realist and while my view might be construed as “sad and tragic” it is reality.

We build a front of consensus and cooperation yet it is based not on achieving anything but platitudes where the strong dictates to the weak.

The reality is neither party is happy. They may coexist, but happy about the outcome?

You tell your children they cannot eat a snack before dinner. While they might agree with the command not to (even see reason for it) that is not consensus or cooperation. It do as I say.

Consensus would be if you allowed them half the snack they desired.
Cooperation would be if both parties agreed to the compromise of consensus.

Take climate change.

The farmers in Greenland through this warming period are happy because they can now farm organic bovine instead of reindeer.

Now the islanders on an atoll in the South Pacific are unhappy as threatened higher ocean levels due to the warmer climate are going to flood them from their atoll.

Cooperation and consensus would say to move the islander to Greenland.

Would both parties be happy about that?

Passing laws in parliament is cooperative? Only to the point where it feeds the “whats in it for me” syndrome.

All of mankind is greedy. Be it the mega rich capitalist who has more money and power then they know what to do with, to the benificiary who sponges of fellow takepayers.

Greed rules mankind. No other species on this planet has that emotion to the level it has developed in mankind.

And because of this emotion all cooperation and consensus is only to the point of self fulfillment.

Greed based not purely on monatory value but peer recognition, power over others, etc.

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“While the interchange beween BJ and Mouldwarp is interesting, it shows that as a species, humans cannot cooperate for any common good.

I order to cooperate one needs consensus. Something this debate lacks.”

I suppose the whole edifice of civilisation, which I believe is built finely on the balance between cooperation and competition, is actually the result of pure competitive forces? What a sad and tragic world view! I never sought consensus within my family about anything, but we cooperated just fine. I rarely seek consensus at work, yet we cooperate to produce just fine. My family, my work and my nation are all built on cooperation that is not based in consensus. Indeed, our parliamentary system is classed as ‘adversarial’, yet it is only the cooperation between MPs that gets the laws passed – without consensus. Children are cooperative and competitive by nature – for the common good. It is only nurture or lack of resources that breeds the competition that ultimately destroys the common good.

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http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DamonLaut 2004.pdf

The difficult issues with cloud coupled GCR flux are principally that there is no way to determine what correction (if any) is required on account of it. Clouds warm and cool both, depending on where they are and when… and there is no correct cyclical correlation with the planet’s encounters with the spiral arms of the galaxy.. Nor is there strong information relating to the solar flux. There ARE unknowns here, but the known explanation works fine thanks.

The sin, in all of this, is that we are resisting putting a price on the commons. That is all that really matters. In a religious worship of economic growth such as ours this is a very great sin, a mortal sin.

The market cannot do anything but destroy things that are free. It will use the “free” resource preferentially and inefficiently in place of anything that costs money. I do not care if the price is paid to governments, other people or used for toilet paper and shredded. If there is a cost and it is enforced on all equally, the market preserves…

If there isn’t, it destroys.

In the end this debate isn’t really about science at all.

A lot of people became wealthy using the current system. They like it a lot. They don’t want anything changed and a price on the commons WILL change things in ways that make a lot of folks who distrust big business happy.

So be it. I don’t care. Big Business, Big Brother, Big Populations, Big Government, Big Religion… I don’t care WHO makes a profit or a loss as long as there is a fair price on the use of the commons. That single measure puts the market in charge of enforcing sustainability. Its absence demands that the invisible hand must destroy every part of the commons it can reach.

People framing this as left vs right are just wrong.

BJ

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You can’t argue with someone who doesn’t use the hockey stick… can you?

See… the difference between you and me is that I do look at the data and scratch my head once in a while and decide there’s a problem with this set of data and that some other data is more persuasive. The problem with your version of this is of course, that I pointed at and accepted those problems HERE in one of these interminable expressions of futility well over a year ago. I even THANKED you for pointing out the problems with the proxies… but the climate change we are creating doesn’t depend on the hockeystick. So your insults are, to those who have any knowledge of what has been posted here, just a lot of flatulence.

When you are presented with data that doesn’t match your theory what do YOU do? You ignore it. Actually, you’d have to HAVE a theory. You don’t have one though. In our conversations you’ve half-offered a half dozen different ones as each was ripped to shreds.

You don’t seem to realize that if you claim that some tree based proxies for that long handle are statistically invalid you actually haven’t proved what the temperature WAS, just that you don’t know. Which you don’t. You probably know less well than I do, as I have read through the different methods and studies and theories that provide the basis for these conclusions.

The problem is that the IPCC didn’t base its conclusions on the Hockey Stick. The conclusion of the IPCC in 1995 “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climateâ€? comes BEFORE Mann published. The theory rests on 20th century data. It predicts changes in temperature through the atmosphere column that show up in the satellite measurements. There’s still data going back before 150 years that isn’t confounded by the proxy issue .. bigger error bars but there’s still data.

CO2 and the Greenhouse are one reason we humans haven’t already frozen to death. The only question that needs to be answered is what the climate sensitivity is to the CO2 changes we are making. It has to be a damned sight less than the range of 2-4.5 degrees C for a doubling of the gas if you are to have an argument. Problem is that nobody can credibly show that that is likely no matter what starting assumptions they use. Physics demands that there be an effect.

Try to extricate yourself from your … mmm … attitude problem. You’re smarter than this.

BJ

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I order to cooperate one needs consensus. Something this debate lacks.

As I said in a previous comment

“Mankind cannot possibly ‘control’ climate change within the +-1 percent range we currently need to keep this planet in a state where no further climate change is possible.”

So never mind the reason why climate change is happening, even if mankind were not on the surface of this planet, the temperatuere variations are marked. Remember the +2 to -8 on the Vostok ice core graph?

Have a think about what frog said in an earlier comment

“The debate should therefore be not about what it is happening, as the science tells us what is happening, but what its effects will be, how fast they will occur, and what we can do to both mitigate it and adapt to it.”

Maybe samiula is right, we may have a temperature increase to +3 or +4.

What will mankind do to survive?

And what will the weather (climate) be at that temperature range?

One would imaging a lot of melted ice rasing ocean levels, but the higher temperatures would heat the oceans leading to evaporations and cloud formations. Resulting in much higher rainfall on the cooler land mass.

We may have a huge increase in tropical rainforests.

And will the oceans water levels rise that much with so much water in the atmosphere?

And with so much rain cloud around is the earth actually in danger of cooling again because of restricted sunlight reaching the oceans?

Surely a much more worthwhile subject to debate then this constant bikering about “look at this graph” or “you cant measure trendlines on a 150 year history” etc (yes I know I have done it too!).

I think we have established that climate will change (through manmade or through the earths normal cyclical variations — it really does not matter).

What really matters what we (mankind) as a species will do about it.

And to what degree we can make a difference.

I personally dont believe we as a species have the cooperative ability to make a difference, and as such will see a good portion of the current population perish.

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- “You know we haven’t got records that go back to the middle ages and you also know that you DON’T know what the temperature during the middle ages actually was. Please don’t imply otherwise.”

Is that what you said when the Hockeystick was first published? Did you dismiss it because the vast majority of it consisted of historical temperatures supposedly reconstructed from proxies (specifically, tree rings)?

No, you didn’t.

As long as it suited your purpose you went along with it. And, like the others, you fought tooth and nail as the Hockeystick was exposed as worthless. You are utterly shameless.

Are you now saying that all historical proxy reconstructions are invalid? That there is no way of knowing what the temperature was prior to the invention of the mercury thermometer? If so, when did this damascene conversion occur? I’m sure that’s not what you used to claim.

So now we only know the temperature back 150 years. Who knew?

Ari claimed in a previous posting on this thread that “CO2 levels do not fit the long-term trend.”
Are you going to tell him that, in fact, there is no such thing as a “long term trend,” because
we “DON’T know what the temperature during the middle ages actually was”?

Really, you alarmists should get your story straight between you. You’re all telling me different things.

Ari,

- “are you anti all the rest of science? Are there other areas of human scientific knowledge where you believe that all the scientists, all the scientific organisations, and all the scientific press are wrong?”

Can you tell me what in-depth auditing and analysis of the issue these organisations undertake before their governing committees issue these pronouncements?
Surely, unless such auditing is undertaken, their announcements of support are completely worthless?

Take the Hockeystick. It was accepted unconditionally around the world as hard evidence and yet, when an interested amateur finally started to look at what had been done and try to reproduce the findings, he found it to be a completely worthless piece of junk.
And look how the interested parties reacted to his revelations. First they tried to ignore him, and then they tried to rubbish him. Finally, without acknowledging that his devastating findings were completely correct, they quietly allowed the Hockeystick to disappear and said they have “moved on” from there.

So, no. Unless you can point me to the high-quality auditing undertaken by such organisations, I suggest that their statements of support are worthless (in fact, less than worthless. They point to serious problems in the scientific hierarchy which is largely funded from the public trough).

jh,

Please. Are you really claiming that the Hockeystick is valid?

Do you realise that, 9 times out of 10, *random data* fed through Mann’s home-made algorithm will return exactly the same hockeystick shape? Do you understand that the top statisticians in the US have identified exactly *why* this is?

Really, people like you express exasperation at me for disagreeing with a supposed “consensus,” and yet you clearly don’t know the first thing about the issue.

Interesting story about a fundamental flaw in the calculations so far used in those alarmist computer models:-

“Miklós Zágoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center…How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution [which] ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thickâ€? atmosphere…”
http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally +Wrong/article10973.htm

After the Hockeystick debacle, who here is brave enough to say that the politicised and completely shoddy work coming out of NASA’s Goddard Institute doesn’t contain this fundamental mistake?

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You know we haven’t got records that go back to the middle ages and you also know that you DON’T know what the temperature during the middle ages actually was. Please don’t imply otherwise.

People go back 150 years cause that’s what we have fairly good measurements for, it is hardly a conspiracy of alarmists as you are implying.

Also, since the last 150 years provide more accurate information and less variability, the onus is on us to provide competing data and theory for the warming. Since you do not, I will.

http://cc.oulu.fi/%7Eusoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
http://cc.oulu.fi/%7Eusoskin/personal/Sola2-PRL_published.pdf
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/raimund/publications/Muscheler_et_al_Natur e2005.pdf

I note this from Solanki – “Although the
rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers
may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate
change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar
variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the
strong warming during the past three decades.”

That is the scientist who generated the data and has the strongest evidence of any difference.

http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/winter96/article3-fig2.html

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/forcing.html

It isn’t telling us that it explains everything, or most of the warming. It has never been denied that it has an effect. Certainly there are questions to which answers are lacking There always will be but that is the nature of science.

What gets done with it however, IS political as you have always maintained.

Political risk management is to risk management what military music is to music. The drumbeat is “get elected” not “do what’s best”. Economics trumps ecology in the current political milieu and has for all of human history.

However, this has always been about risk management, not certainty.

I redirect attention to this, which is quite clearly understandable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg#

BP

The scientists not in the “all” camp can be counted without taking off one’s shoes at this point. This is how we measure consensus in order to make decisions when we haven’t watched the video and accepted actual risk management principles.

respectfully
BJ

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http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/14/01828/236

The conclusion is here: It doesn’t look so severe in the bottom graph ?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html

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Then the “trend� is zero net warming, and possibly slight cooling, since the Middle Ages, isn’t it.

Do you ever stop to ask why alarmists always (*always*) select a period of no more than 150 years when pointing to the climate history? It’s because it allows them to cherry-pick a start point in the depths of the Little Ice Age. There is absolutely no other reason.
……………………………..
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
‘One hundred years is not enough’

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10/26/20495/240

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All?

>>all the scientists

All?

>>all the scientific organisations

All?

>>all the scientific press are wrong

All?

A list of interesting articles. From scientists not in the “all” camp…
nzclimatescience.net

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P.S. Mouldwarp, yes I get my climate change knowledge from other sources beside realclimate and the BBC. There is New Scientist, Nature, Scientific American, NASA, Energy Bulletin, Celsias, George Monbiot, Hot Topic to name but 8.

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- “not currently being at a record temperature level does not stop the trend from being alarming. A trend is related to the shape of the graph, not the height of a point on it”

Then the “trend” is zero net warming, and possibly slight cooling, since the Middle Ages, isn’t it.

Do you ever stop to ask why alarmists always (*always*) select a period of no more than 150 years when pointing to the climate history? It’s because it allows them to cherry-pick a start point in the depths of the Little Ice Age. There is absolutely no other reason.
Why don’t they pick, say, the Middle Ages when attempting to draw a climate trend to prove their point. It would have far more validity scientifically, because it would include the few hundred years *before* industrialisation – a control period, as it were – so we should be able to see clearly when this alarming CO2 forcing kicks in.

Of course they do no such thing, because there is no effect for them to point at. It just doesn’t exist.

Most of the the warming last century occurred *before* the major post-war industrialisation. Yet alarmist seek to include it in the overall amount of warming, when it clearly cannot be attributed to anthopogenic CO2.

- “the latest trends in temperature and CO2 levels do not fit the long-term trend in a way that has been plausibly explained by skeptics. We know about variance in the sun, axis wobbles, etc… but these still do not adequately explain our variation from the long-term trend that we do know for a fact is both natural and safe.”

This is just plain wrong.

It was the Hockeystick that started it all. It depicted a very stable climate over the last few hundred years, in a slight decline, followed by the dramatic and alarming upturn since around the time of early industrialisation. That clearly-unnatural climate behaviour demanded an unnatural cause, and CO2 was the obvious choice because the long-term climate history showed a strong and clear correlation between CO2 and temperature.

However, it is now clear that the Hockeystick is complete bunk, and that the natural climate, far from being stable, is forever jumping around. The pattern for the last one or two hundred years is *no different at all* from what has gone before. It is quite simply indistinguishable from earlier temperature activity.
Furthermore, we now know that the strong correlation between CO2 and temperature is the *reverse* of what was claimed earlier: in fact changes in temperature are what drove those associated changes in CO2 levels.

So when it comes to the science and the evidence, *everything* has changed in the last few years. There is *nothing* to explain and *no reason* to implicate what are in fact just trace amounts of CO2.

- “given that the IPCC operates on a consensus basis and includes almost everyone, I don’t see why people have reason to complain about any of its findings,”

But how would you *know* of any valid reasons for complaint? Do you ever look outside of realcensorship.com or the bbc website?

Consider just those alarming predictions that come out of the IPCC – “Over time, forecasting researchers have compiled 140 principles that can be applied to a broad range of disciplines, including science, sociology, economics and politics. In a recent NCPA study, Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong used these principles to audit the climate forecasts in the Fourth Assessment Report. Messrs. Green and Armstrong found the IPCC clearly violated 60 of the 127 principles relevant in assessing the IPCC predictions. Indeed, it could only be clearly established that the IPCC followed 17 of the more than 127 forecasting principles critical to making sound predictions.
A good example of a principle clearly violated is “Make sure forecasts are independent of politics.” Politics shapes the IPCC from beginning to end. Legislators, policymakers and/or diplomatic appointees select (or approve) the scientists — at least the lead scientists — who make up the IPCC. In addition, the summary and the final draft of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was written in collaboration with political appointees and subject to their approval.
Sadly, Mr. Green and Mr. Armstrong found no evidence the IPCC was even aware of the vast literature on scientific forecasting methods, much less applied the principles.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080314/COM MENTARY/702895001/home.html

Note that this is not new information; but it is new to you I think.

toad,

Your attempt at sarcasm is basically a retread of something you said a while back.
I answered it then by saying that nobody disputes that CO2 is a greenhouse gas: The point is that we are talking about completely insignificant trace amounts which are totally lost in the vast natural greenhouse effect.

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