“[T]he biggest problem [with sustainable development] arises when authoritarian environmentalists hijack the phrase.”

He adds:

“Then, sustainable development becomes either no growth at all or limited growth of a type approved by an elite few – wind farms, yes: nuclear power no; organics, yes: GM no. This is why, so often, environmental organisations try to portray business as the arch-enemy of sustainable development. Like biodiversity, another key word from Rio, sustainability is thrown into the argument to block development and growth, to conjure up a return to an imagined, usually rural, Utopia.”

And lastly:

“[Sustainability] is easily employed to soften the fact of change and, in doing so, it undermines human dynamism and adaptability.”

In a nutshell, Stott’s argument is that sustainability is an unrealistic attempt to seek equilibrium in a chaotic world.

Mind you, Stott considers himself “left of centre”.

(Source: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Philip_Stott)

This is what environmentalists dare not say. Except the likes of ACT and those who dare to question the hegemony of the mainstream environmentalist elite.

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A central problem of the human predicament discussed in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment is that we’re small-group animals trying to live in ever more gigantic groups – and not doing very well at it. If catastrophe can be avoided, we’re stuck with gigantic groups for a century or more, and very large groups “forever.” It therefore behooves humanity to start asking itself how to maintain the small group coherence and interests that make people comfortable while greatly damping down intergroup competition and substantially enhancing the intergroup cooperation desperately needed to solve the human predicament.

Can human cultural evolution be directed away from its current trajectory toward disaster and diverted toward creating a prosperous and equitable long-term future for society? The answer is, “yes, it could” if the small-group animal “family” attitudes can be properly channeled. The basic requirements would be quite simple – a set of overlapping and intertwined ethical-environmental steps toward sustainability such as suggested below and over the next few weeks here at the “Eco-Compass” blog. Whether such steps will be taken is, of course, an entirely different question. But here’s the first of the steps we should take:

One: Put births on a par with deaths.

Human beings have always fought against early death from accident, hunger and sickness, and in the past century or so have employed improved sanitation and the use of pesticides and antibiotics to good effect in raising life-expectancy. But given the horrendous potential consequences of the explosion of human numbers following reduction of the death rate, we must pay equivalent attention to reducing the birthrate as well. As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living – including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multigenerational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations retaining a happy, sustainable life style.

To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies. The goal must be to halt population increase as soon as humanely possible, and then start reducing human numbers until births and deaths balance at population size that can be maintained without irreparable damage to our life-support systems.

http://www.islandpress.org/bookstore/details.php?isbn=9781597260961

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Asserting that I would continue to tax the same way as we do, I would prefer not to have a “flat” tax. The progressive tax means that I pay the same rate for the first 30K? and 60K? (I am not sure where the brackets are just now) as the guy with the biggest income.

If there were a 4th bracket, I’d be paying the same as he does on everything up to 100K

The key consideration here is that the effect of taking away a buck from someone who has 30K and someone who has 300K is a very different thing. That’s one of the issues with it. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, provided for a progressive system as well.

OTOH, taxing pollution appeals to me.

respectfully
BJ

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The only evidence we have that we aren’t accurate is that computer modeling done twenty years ago doesn’t agree with current temperatures exactly. This isn’t “hopelessly wrong” so much as hopelessly (and shamelessly) unscientific. Both the IPCC and Hansen have been refining and revisiting their work and are doing quite nicely thanks. Projections (which argue from a set of events that must also be true) and predictions which require that we be correct about the surrounding circumstances, are two different things. IPCC and Hansen provide projections, not predictions and were working with machines that were not as capable as your workstation is.

Hansen did quite well with what he had in 1988 and he has not left the field, but has refined and improved his work since.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-pro jections/

McIntyre dismisses Gavn Schmidt, but does not refute nor answer his points,

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/09/well-lookee-that.html

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/04/rtfr-i-rather-strange-push-back-has .html

nor is he any more accurate when discussing sea ice.

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/08/water-water-everywhere-and-all-berg s.html

McIntyre is not a scientist, he is a statistician. He’s fairly good at holding people’s feet to the fire but he is not producing science. Like most critics, he can’t produce what he is commenting on. His problem is that he doesn’t do much more than stir up the savages.

I can only repeat: You are arguing against yourself when you say just how much CO2 has increased. The lack of any measurable climate response is evidence against your alarmism.

Wat… its clear that you are trying now. You are however, still misreading stuff.

First of all, tell me where all the CO2 is coming FROM…. where would that be? Us. This CO2 isn’t coming from the warming of the ocean. That’s simply risible.

Second. Examine what other influences there are on the temperature record. Are we getting more solar insolation ? Hmmm… nope, no trends here… though we CAN see why we might expect it to be a lot cooler than it actually is, given that nothing is holding the temperature higher.

http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/open?pubNo=lrsp-2007-2&page=arti clesu6.html

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml

Now the FIRST guy I showed you, remember? The Quaker? He did a nice composite stat to give relative contributions. You are so intent on rejecting everything that isn’t 100% proved that you may have missed what he was doing. It’s good work.

With the solar cycle doing its darnedest to depress temperatures, the best we can do is flat. What happens in the next cycle? IMHO you’re riding for a fall, In another 8-10 years the truth will be even more obvious and you haven’t begun to address the risk management. If we work on CO2 reduction and we are wrong, we lose opportunity costs and people at the margins find it hard to stay alive because of diverted resources.

If on the other hand, we fail to work on it and YOU are wrong, we’ve probably written off human civilization and half the human population. Not to mention the animals and plants.

Then there is also the other niggling detail about CO2 which I pointed out and which you have completely ignored. Ocean acidification. The link is up there…. I won’t repeat it.

At least you DID answer with what you thought was evidence that CO2 was insignificant. It wasn’t actually. You provided instead, evidence that a 20 year old computer modeling exercise wasn’t a perfectly accurate projection. That was NOT what is required. Showing that CO2 is insignificant would require something more telling than McIntyres repertoire of whines. It would take a lot of serious problems in the MODIS model, the solar influx, the radiative models and the satellite data. There is too much redundancy showing up in this work for it to be easily dismissed as coincidence. That’s the problem with McIntyre. Step back and examine what he would like to have you believe. In terms of coincidence. Possible? Yes, but not plausible.

You won’t get “proof” until after the fact. Then it could well be too late for the species. Actually in science, there is no such thing as scientific proof that such-and-such is true. There’s the theory and there’s the experiments to test it. AGW theory has had a lot of testing.

respectfully
BJ

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Your claim that “that there is no identifiable change in the climate’s behaviour – either rates of change or the recent peak temperature compared to the MWP.” is pure bullshit.

There is a lot of evidence that the climate has changed since the MWP (and especially in the last 100 years), and not only temperature has changed. Have you read about declining rainfall in SW Australia, to name just one of dozens of signals that the climate is changing?

Another question: what qualifications (formal or otherwise) do you have in climate science, or any related science? I know for a fact that some of the posters on this blog _are_ qualified in climate science or very closely related disciplines. I would be inclined to put more weight on what they say than someone who is not qualified in the field.

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You’re absolutely right, I misread it.

However, you’re still absolutely wrong to claim that a temperature difference averaged over 5000 years tells us anything about what happened on the decadal and century timescales throughout that period, and those are the timescales we’re talking about here. Comparing the two is simply insane.

So I repeat, there is absolutely nothing unusual about climate change over the last 100 years or so. Neither the rate of change nor the peak temperature some ten years ago are in any way remarkable. It was only the entirely fraudulent Hockeystick which got people thinking otherwise.

The Co2science site continues to collate the output from a large number of scientific studies from around the world which have demonstrated that the MWP was warmer than today and global in extent:

http://www.co2science.org/data/timemap/mwpmap.html

bjchip

- “If you haven’t worked out that the debt based fractional-reserve system requires continual “growth” just to break even then I’ve given you too much credit.”

I’ll forgive the awful pun if you explain just why you think this is so.

As for AGW, the point (again) about the historical climate/CO2 correlation is that it has been widely used to suggest that it proves just how potent the gas is, when in fact the truth is wildly different. Sure there’s some feedback, but then there’s also feedback with water vapour. However, I’d point out that there was no runaway feedback loop; no tipping point. The evidence, then, is that the feedback is negative and that climate sensitivity is low.

- “Who made predictions about this year’s temperatures? Wasn’t any scientific group I know of. Might have been some amateur making an extrapolation based on ignorance but the science doesn’t predict stuff on that short a scale.”

Hansen 1988?:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2602

Or how ’bout the IPCC predictions:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/0 01317verification_of_1990.html

They were hopelessly wrong, and it is no coincidence I fancy that they were wrong on the up side. The point here is that if their predictions had been accurate then we would have some reason to believe them when they claim they understand the climate, have modelled it accurately, and so are in a position to say that there is something a bit weird going on.
As it is, they have been proved completely wrong so their pronouncements that they know what the weather “should” be doing can be dismissed out of hand.

- “That works out to 59 times faster than CO2 has ever increased, including in the transition out of the glacial stage”

And?

I can only repeat: You are arguing against yourself when you say just how much CO2 has increased. The lack of any measurable climate response is evidence against your alarmism.

- “I’m going to ask you what your EVIDENCE is that CO2 is insignificant.”

I think we’ve just answered that: On the one hand you keep going on about how much more CO2 there is, but on the other you have to face the fact that there is no identifiable change in the climate’s behaviour – either rates of change or the recent peak temperature compared to the MWP. And now we’ve had a decade of cooling. So all the evidence is that you are talking out of your hat.
And let’s not forget, increases in atmospheric CO2 levels have a rapidly diminishing ability to influence the climate because of the nature of the “greenhouse” effect. The effect of increased CO2 on the atmosphere so far is too small to detect, yet CO2 has already had the greatest bang per buck it’s ever going to have.

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Also, you don’t pay tax at 39% over your whole income, and everyone pays personal income tax on the same tax scale (excluding WFF etc for the moment).

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I guarantee none of our MPs has been muzzled. We’re also not trying to make our party look like someone else’s. And we don’t have a problem with people knowing what our goals are, hence the very complete information on our website.

“Care to name three COSTED Green party policies?”

Costed to what degree? I can say that our transport policy and tax policy for instance, are funded from existing budgets based on reprioritisation. We cannot fully cost all our policies with the resources we have. That is not hidden. But a party needs policy across the board. No one has claimed it would all be implemented at once. The extent to which it is implemented depends on what is doable at any point in time. If we could only do 10% of what we want due to the financial crisis say, then that is still better than going in the opposite direction.

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http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/10/21/counteri ntuitive-result-of-the-day-brain-drain-edition

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The GINI index measures inequality. It isn’t useful to have zero inequality. It isn’t useful to have massive inequality.

you want everyone to be equal

Not at all. I set a couple of goals to work towards and recognize that the work will never end… Those goals are that every child born gets an equal chance, a competitive education, decent health and dental care…. what kids need. The second goal is that people who work hard get rewarded for hard work and pay a fair share of taxes – including me, and people who stick their hands in my pocket so they can have a second yacht to water ski behind, get them broken off at the wrist – including you.

I am not sure what YOU want… but characterizing my position as you did is not excusable. Now I really must go.

BJ

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