The Official Daily Rant (on Climate Change)

[icyfroth]

Reposted from Facebook with permission from Steffen Pederson.

"The fact is, Climate change is real! Nobody can argue against that fact. Nobody actually does!

So what's the debate?

'Climate Change Deniers', as alarmists like to call us, are people that believe the climate is what it is. It has changed for 100's of millions of years, it will change for 100's of millions more!

'Climate Change Alarmists' as us deniers like to call them, are people that believe Man is the reason the climate is changing. Man has caused it, Man can stop it!

This is my Rant so this will be based solely on my view and opinion from what I have learned or at least think I have learned.

To me, it doesn't matter who is right or wrong!

Man currently pumps untold amounts of emissions into the air, untold amounts of pollution into our land/air and sea's, and does untold damage through mining, deforestation, urbanisation etc etc.

Whether this affects the climate or not is actually irrelevant. We MUST STOP! We MUST find better ways to fulfil our energy needs and we must find better ways to house and feed our growing populations. We must reduce this man made damage because even the simplest of minds can recognise it cant be good for us. Also, we must make things sustainable. Some of these things take time so time is what we will take.

Again, this in my opinion has nothing to do with climate change but if I am wrong, it's a win win situation. We will not be hurt by changing these things.

Creating a Tax to reduce these things and allowing governments to put this tax back into their general revenue is NOT, and never will be the answer.

If governments were serious in their beliefs of man made climate change and the imminent dangers they believe it imposes, they would simply legislate to reduce and or stop these things.

They do not! Infact, by government logic, the more emissions generated, the more money they make. It is a futile exercise about feeling good. They can look the people in the eye and say 'see, we are doing something about climate change' but the fact is they are not.

The problem is, The climate IS changing. Every dollar we waste trying to stop it, will be a dollar we will not have to spend on the actual damage climate change will cause. Small nations will suffer, sea levels will rise, draughts will be the norm in some places, flooding will be the norm in others. We will not be prepared.

While the battle goes on about who was right and who was wrong, people will die. I believe we can actually learn to live with these changes and relocate and or adapt accordingly. todays cities will be tomorrows farmlands, todays farmlands will be tomorrows cities.

We do need to impose a tarrif of sorts on man.

Not a carbon tax that hits some people here or there or makes business suffer but a small levy that each and every one of us should be prepared to pay.

It is our world. This money should be put into an international climate fund that should be used as the climate changes more and more.

The truth is, we don't know which way the world will change so is hard to plan ahead. This money would be needed more as reactionary measure. western nations could and should be preparing for what we believe will happen through future planning anyway so this money would not be needed by those that can prepare for it themselves.

There are,  however many nations that do not stand a chance against whatever climate change brings. This is where this money will be needed. If the climate doesn't change dramatically for many years, this fund would grow to great proportions. We can help those that cannot help themselves.

I don't know all the answers to this but going on our current path of taxing emissions and putting the taxes into general revenue for me is NOT the answer. we are being played for suckers. My post is not trying to say I have the answers, it is trying to change the current climate debate questions. I have no doubt there are many other who have great ideas about how an ever changing world can be adapted to suit our wants and needs. We are a resilient lot."

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I so agree with this post.

Yes, Earth's climate is in natural constant change. We know that.

Human industrial activity is causing a dramatic impact earth's climate and we need to sort what we need to take from earth to sustain ourselves (and there's plenty to go round)  from what is just being gobbled up by insatiable and rapacious profiteers.

 

[icyfroth]

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@debra9275 wrote:
So he's not a scientist nor anyone who's qualified? just some bloke's opinion from FB?

Ok, lol

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Yes Deb. He's not a scientist or anyone. Just some bloke who happens to have an opinion I regard relevant enough to repost from facebook to here.

You may disregard it as you are quite within your rights to do so.

[icyfroth]

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@the_great_she_elephant wrote:

So the opinions of the general populace aren't relevant She-el?

So your opinions are also irrelevant?

I think you'll find that when I offer an opinion here  on any matter requiring expert knowledge I am usually very careful to include a  link to a credible source.

And it was you, yourself who accused Am of picking on irrelevancies when she asked who Steffen Petersen was.

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The subject matter is the relevance here, She-el, not the author.

If you have an opinion to the subject at hand, you're welcome to post here.

If you want to bicker about who the author is, you have no place here and should take yourself to a thread where you can display your arrogance to better advantage.

[cherry*135]

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@icyfroth wrote:

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@am*3 wrote:

Who is Steffen Pedersen?

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You have a wonderful talent for sniffing out the immaterial, Am.

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You must know who he is icy. I didn't start a thread quoting him.

[cherry*135]

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@icyfroth wrote:

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@the_great_she_elephant wrote:

So the opinions of the general populace aren't relevant She-el?

So your opinions are also irrelevant?

I think you'll find that when I offer an opinion here  on any matter requiring expert knowledge I am usually very careful to include a  link to a credible source.

And it was you, yourself who accused Am of picking on irrelevancies when she asked who Steffen Petersen was.

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The subject matter is the relevance here, She-el, not the author.

If you have an opinion to the subject at hand, you're welcome to post here.

If you want to bicker about who the author is, you have no place here and should take yourself to a thread where you can display your arrogance to better advantage.

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Really?

If a article/facebook post was quoted that was written by, for example, a credible Australian scientist or a bloke from the local fish and chip shop.... the author has no relevance to the readers? I think not.

There must be millions of daft facebook posts  posters on forums could quote.  Do we want forums filled up with quotes from facebook posts from unknown people with no credentials on topics they speak on - e.g. climate change?

[the_bob_delusion]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg

[poddster]

Does it matter who the person is expressing an opinion?

I am sure that there is a plethora of people who have valid opinions without being famous, or having any other attribute besides expressing a valid opinion.

Take J C for instance wasn't he the son of a carpenter? yet 2000 years later the opinions remain and have reformed the outlook of half the world 🙂

[icyfroth]

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@am*3 wrote:

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@icyfroth wrote:

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@am*3 wrote:

Who is Steffen Pedersen?

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You have a wonderful talent for sniffing out the immaterial, Am.

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You must know who he is icy. I didn't start a thread quoting him.

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He's just a regular poster on facebook Am. I don't know him anymore than I know you. What I do know is that I find his opinion relevant and interesting enough to repost here for discussion.

You may wish to discuss it or not, that is your prerogative.

[cherry*135]

Did you know Prince George has a sister? 

That is in the news (not a facebook rumour).

[cherry*135]

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@icyfroth wrote:

He's just a regular poster on facebook Am. I don't know him anymore than I know you. What I do know is that I find his opinion relevant and interesting enough to repost here for discussion.

You may wish to discuss it or not, that is your prerogative.

But if you just wish to bicker about "credentials of the author", I invite you to bu66er off and go find yourself a subject more worthy of your free Uni education. 

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First readers want to know who wrote the article/text posted. Who he/she is...what are their qualifications/experience in the topic they speak on.

Second, if we want to discredit the person who wrote it and say it is a lot of hooey, then we are free to do so. Without being told to get lost etc..

Should we all start quoting crackpots posts from facebook now?

p.s there is no 'free' Uni education in Australia, get your facts right before you start trying to insult other posters. Why do you always stoop so  low and use personal insults? Nothing to do with the topic. A reflection on you, not me.

[poddster]

The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'

What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?

By

Joseph Bast And

Roy Spencer

May 26, 2014 7:13 p.m. ET

Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the "crippling consequences" of climate change. "Ninety-seven percent of the world's scientists," he added, "tell us this is urgent."

Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous." Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, "Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.

One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.

Ms. Oreskes's definition of consensus covered "man-made" but left out "dangerous"—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen,John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren't substantiated in the papers.

ENLARGE

Getty Images/Imagezoo

Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a 2009 article in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union" by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master's thesis adviser Peter Doran. It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed "97 percent of climate scientists agree" that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.

The survey's questions don't reveal much of interest. Most scientists who are skeptical of catastrophic global warming nevertheless would answer "yes" to both questions. The survey was silent on whether the human impact is large enough to constitute a problem. Nor did it include solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.

The "97 percent" figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.

In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe "anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for 'most' of the 'unequivocal' warming." There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.

In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso,Nicola Scafetta,Nir J. Shaviv and Nils-Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch—most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change.

Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.

Finally, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that "human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems." Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing "anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing."

Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

We could go on, but the larger point is plain. There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.