The foregoing posts summarize why I believe that the CAGW Hypothesis is wrong. However, I am willing to consider in good faith arguments, evidence, or ideas I may have missed. Please feel free to share them, keeping in mind the Rules I laid out in Section 1. Thank you.
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Brazil84's Weblog 
September 14, 2008 at 7:01 pm |
Perhaps too narrow a forum (CAGW is wrong). Other topics are also of great interest:
Implications of CAGW being wrong.
How best to combat CAGW crowd (this site obviously one way).
History of CAGW argument, relevant players, motivations, etc. How did we get here?
Distracted off topic feedback I know, but I have great interest in idea and enjoy all types of forums that follow different sub-topics. These distractions do have the dis-advantage of not lending themselves to logical argument or fact sourcing. Plus Im the only one providing feedback so far, so I feel free to ramble.
September 15, 2008 at 7:04 am |
Thank you for your comment. Yes, this blog is very narrow. I started it because I enjoy debating CAGW, but I was not satisfied with the moderation of discussions in other fora.
There are plenty of blogs and websites devoted to the issues you raise. And I agree, those are fascinating issues.
September 29, 2008 at 9:48 am |
There are clouds on the horizon. You want to go ahead and have the BBQ anyway. You might be right. But if you’re wrong millions of people will suffer and die (you can find these predictions on the IPCC website).
If we do things to try to stop climate change no-one gets hurt – albeit we all have a lot of adjusting to do. If climate change turns out to be a hoax nothing is lost. If it’s not a hoax, and we do nothing, we all suffer – big time.
September 29, 2008 at 10:12 am |
Thank you for your comment, Simon. I note that you have violated Rule 1.1 by attempting to shift the discussion to “what should be done” instead of the issue of whether CAGW is a hoax.
Nevertheless, I will respond because I think it’s an interesting question. First, I take issue with your assertion that “nothing is lost” if we do things to “stop climate change.” Here’s a question for you: Why is it that a storm or natural disaster that kills 0 to 10 people in America will kill thousands of people in the third world? The reason is that America is a wealthy country which can afford to build sturdier buildings; to build good roads and other infrastructure which can be used to evacuate people and bring help to disaster victims, etc. The fact is that wealth has a big positive influence on human safety and well-being. And reducing CO2 emissions will absorb a great deal of wealth.
More importantly, your argument is essentially moot because places like China and India are not going to cut their CO2 emissions. China, in particular, is now the world’s largest emitter of CO2 and its emissions are growing rapidly.
September 30, 2008 at 8:39 am |
In another place you claim this is not like a religious argument. I think in your case it is – basically you refuse to believe the worlds climate scientists and I do believe them.
As for rules, you break your own rules aplenty – making sweeping statements without factual support. I could question many of the assertions you make – both in the comments you’ve left on other places, here, and in your main text. You seem to be playing a game, and it seems to amuse you. Good luck.
That I think you are wrong is an act of faith at the end of the day. I wish you were right.
September 30, 2008 at 8:54 am |
“In another place you claim this is not like a religious argument. I think in your case it is – basically you refuse to believe the worlds climate scientists and I do believe them.”
See FAQ 6.1.
By the way, do you consider Richard Lindzen to be a “climate scientist”? Since you claim to “believe the worlds climate scientists,” can I take it that you believe Richard Lindzen? Or is it the case that you believe only those climate scientists whose conclusions you agree with?
“As for rules, you break your own rules aplenty – making sweeping statements without factual support. ”
Pursuant to Rule 1.4, I respectfully request that you identify by number which rule you feel I have broken and quote the exact language of mine which you feel breaks said rule. Thank you.
__________
Oh, and have you abandoned your apparent argument that CO2 emissions can be substantially reduced with little or no cost to society?
September 30, 2008 at 9:34 am |
“I could question many of the assertions you make – both in the comments you’ve left on other places, here, and in your main text”
Please feel free to do so. As long as you follow my rules, I am happy to consider your arguments/evidence in good faith.
October 3, 2008 at 10:07 pm |
Simon, my rules are designed to promote honest debate. The rules require that you provide examples if you make a general claim. They also require that you clarify your position.
You claimed that I break my own rules “aplenty” and yet you have failed to say exactly which rule or to quote me where I do so. As far as I can tell, your statement is false and in any event, you have not followed my rules of debate.
You are hereby banned. Goodbye.
October 10, 2008 at 9:33 pm |
Kinda harsh, I was looking forward to observing that kook getting slapped around a little more before being banned.
Slow down and enjoy it
December 23, 2009 at 12:45 pm |
Not a bad start, not bad at all. In addition to the straw men, the appeals to authority and such, the ones I come across most often are the credentialism – no one but a ‘climate scientist’ could possibly understand this, and the demented bleating about ‘it hasn’t been peer reviewed’.
Following hard on that are facile rote ‘Could you give some examples of that’, ‘What alternatives have you proposed’, and similar.
And following on from that, many posts contain strange uses of language. I’ve noticed that many ‘discussions’ simply consist of people on either side of this talking past one another. The constant use of key phrases like ‘peer review’ also started to jar, as it suggested deeper meanings to these terms.
Quite by accident I happened across a couple of posts which I’ve added below, and while it did not initially sink in, I suddenly realised what they were saying, or indeed admitting:
Lets say we have something we consider a pressing issue, or would like to make a pressing issue, of worldwide concern.
Oh, I don’t know, perhaps the worlds going warm up and we’re all going to die.
How to prove it? Trouble is, climate/weather is this pesky chaotic or similar system, and nothing can be predicted. And we’ve got that damn scientific method, popper and company, that demand all sorts opf things.
But hang on, we have post modernism, and we know all about narratives and the like, so for this super urgent problem of ours, we’ll just define this new type of science that covers it.
We’ll just take lots of stuff in each bit that we say is important, and combine them. So, if we need temperatures over a thousand years we’ll take from 6 different places, and combine all the bits where they agree, and discard or hide any divergence or decline, and call that the temperature record.
Then we’ll decide whats important to our issue and what we want to blame for it, and create lots of models using them
Then we’ll run lots of simulations on our models and tweak them to sort of match our combined data from above, and then use those tweaks to do lots of runs into the future on the models.
Then all those runs will give us a range of results and we can say that we have some consensus results from our consensus models using consensus data.
Now it’s a bit difficult to falsify this, so we’ll just say that instead it has to be peer reviewed by the right people, and we’ll be careful to define everything so that it supports our consensus – e.g. when we say ‘good data’ we mean data that supports our consensus, bad data doesn’t. When we say climate change, it automatically means ‘man made’, and so on.
And we can call it ‘post-normal science’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/mar/14/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
http://i-squared.blogspot.com/2009/12/green-snake-in-grass.html
Rgds,