when
Someone says "seem completely beyond dispute" this generally, in my experience, means the complete opposite.
People all around the world, responding to a survey by Ipsos MORI, have generally agreed with the ideas that scientists don't really know what they're talking about when it comes to the climate – and that governments are using environmental issues as an excuse to raise taxes. These not-so-green views were transmitted as part …
The authors position appears to be that governments have used environmental taxes only as a excuse to raise more income rather than their declared aim of reducing climate change. I can only assume the author is very annoyed that his car is in a high car tax bracket or something similar.
So you base your opinion about climate change on your experience rather than what the scientists have been saying for decades? Try to find a study or ONE respected scientific institution to support the deniers' opinion. You can't because there aren't any. Read up.
Google: NASA Climate Change Consensus
What is "the deniers' opinion" ?
To me the phrase looks like a combination of an ad hom attack and a straw man argument.
As an engineer, I've had lots of people (including scientists) tell me porkies about scientific things over the years, so I like to check out the data. When I look at the surface temperature records (freely available at CRU) I can easily see that a) "climate" (or certainly Global Warmth) changes over time and b) the claimed Catastrophic Warming isn't happening (in fact, contrary to predictions, it's not been "warming" for nearly 2 decades).
So count me in with the folks who are just a bit skeptical about anything that "Climate Scientists" say, especially when they aren't even scientists but Greenpeace, WWF, Prince Charles, the Beeb, etc. And I would be surprised if anyone except a politician wouldn't agree that politicians will use prety much anything as an excuse for more taxes ;-)
(but well done for correct use of apostrophe)
http://liberalbias.com/post/2323/how-to-graph-climate-change-without-liberal-bias/
Also maybe someone who claims the governments are only using environmental concerns to raise more money can explain why they are giving money away to help people insulate homes, buy electric cars, install more fuel efficient boilers, etc? Surely if they are only interested in getting in more money why would they actually spend this way?
Tax and spend explains it. Think who's money it is that Government is spending.
Tax Joe & Jane Public (or hide the tax in fuel bills) and spend it on subsidies for your mates in Big Green. HMM and the EU both give bungs to "Environmentalist" lobby groups so they can lobby them for more Green regulation.
We are doomed !
I did look at your link but it appeared to be just a blog post. IMHO the CRU data is likely to be more reliable. Do go look :-)
Wrote :- "maybe someone who claims the governments are only using environmental concerns to raise more money can explain why they are giving money away to help people insulate homes"
OTOH I don't believe it is just about money. I think it has a lot to do with the sincerly held crazed obsessions of people who, having become politicians in power, get into a position where they can impose their crazed theories on everyone else. Remember, few of these people have a clue technically. The money, if any, is just a bonus. Actually they would spend the last penny they have (from us) feeding their pet craze.
An example is my local council's rubbish recycling collection policy. They change the rules every time a new rubbish recycling officer is appointed, according to the individual's pet theories. Each tries to outdo his predecessor, and succeeds - they have even made it into international news with their barminess.
... explain why they are giving money away to help people insulate homes, buy electric cars, install more fuel efficient boilers, etc?
Too easy, buying votes is one of the oldest ploys in the politician handbook.
As to why some people believe that climate change is both natural and man-made is another easily solved paradox. When you walk outside in Beijing and the smog is so thick you nearly have to chew the air then it's obvious that "climate change" is man-made. The "change" resulting from the typhoon rains leaving a meter of water in the street is equally obvious that it is natural. Nobody knows or really cares about the butterfly flapping its wings in Belize.
And much of what warming was "observed" seems to come from adjustments to the historical record .... Some strange things happening there. According to Aust BOM weather database oodnatatta is no longer the record holder Albany is. This is areal outlier, most of the historical record was adjusted down.
People In Britain, the US and Australia are probably more aware that the mainstream press is entirely AGW-alarmist propaganda. AGW is a strawman argument concealing a NWO political agenda and global environmental bank, GEF, global nevironment fund, funded primarily by Edmund de Rothschild, and whose first director was IPCC co-founder Maurice Strong, long-time associate of David Rockefeller.
The null hypothesis that climate change or global warming is natural hasn't been disproven since the first IPCC report in 1990, and many IPCC scientists, cherry-picked environmental activists, have quit or conplained about the emphasis on the political goal of attempting to demonstrate AGW, rather than the use of valid science.
George W. Hunt followed the AGW movement beginning with the 4th World Wilderness Conference, and his videos include statements by Rothschild and Canadian banker David Lang at the conference also attended by David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong. The Club of Rome was formed in 1968 to develop a plan to market anthropogenic global warming as a means of instituting a NWO global government and global economy. Its report "The First Global Revolution" and "Limits to Growth" detail the Agenda 21 political and depopulation plan. Obama was a co-founder of the Chicago Carbon Exchange, and Al Gore co-founded Carbon Investment Management with former Goldman Sachs CEO David Blood. NASA and NOAA and GISS have been altering past climate data to create an illusion of recent warming for several years.
WUWT.com has links to climate sites and websites with overlays of past published NASA and NOAA graphed data and more recently published data showing alterations. Japan't GOSAT satellite showed in 2009 that CO2 emission from developed countries other than in eastern Asia and north Africa was neglible, and that CO2 emission was almost entirely from oceans, equatorial regions and sparsely populated areas.
http://www.thebigbadbank.com/videos/thebigbadbank/
http://www.swans.com/library/art16/barker40.html#22
AGW really is beyond dispute though - and has been for at least a decade.
The overwhelming evidence keeps mounting and average temperatures, atmospheric CO2 content and the sea levels keep on rising.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2014/6
The combined average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces for June 2014 was record high for the month, at 0.72°C (1.30°F) above the 20th century average. This surpasses the previous record, set in June 1998, by 0.03°C (0.05°F). Nine of the ten warmest Junes on record have occurred during the 21st century, including each of the past five years. June 2014 also marks the second consecutive month with record high global temperatures. With the exception of February (21st warmest), every month to date in 2014 has ranked among the four warmest for its respective month. Additionally, June 2014 marked the 38th consecutive June and 352nd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average global temperature for June was June 1976 and the last below-average global temperature for any month was February 1985.
etc. etc.
The problem comes from defining climate. What is the time frame? A year, decade, century, millennium? Talking about the warmest whatever in the past five years doesn't mean a whole bunch if it takes a century or more of data to show a trend. Have a look at the Vostok Petit data and you'll notice some trends tend to be longer than others and an odd recurring interval that seems to take about 115k years. Which are hiccoughs and which are real changes and the causes is certainly open to debate regardless of what you consider beyond dispute.
AceRimmer, the problem with your statement the taxes will not go to fund education. Politicians are notorious for their taxing to fund their pet projects most of which is designed to get themselves reelected.
I have heard and used this statement many times, "Follow the Money". If one follows the money it will tell who is supporting (in some cases opposing) something. Most politicians if they were assured it could not be traced back to them would continue to increase taxes until everybody had to depend upon the government for every aspect of their life.
Now as far as the warning of the climate. The scientist who study history says that the earth has warmed/cooled (not necessarily in that order) many times even to the extent that ice covered much of the northern hemisphere. Most of these cycles happened before humanity was high enough to have much effect either way. But today it is humanity that is the cause of climate change (global warming) weather humanity is or not because now the politicians can use this claim to increase the taxes (to help reduce the cause of the global warming). These taxes are not used to reduce the causes to global warming but fund their pet projects.
"Couldn't they have done something useful like polled people on what they believe the mass of the Higgs boson to be? Then we wouldn't have had to build the LHC"
In the case of climate change it's OK, because to spend billions on ... oh, whatever ... you just need to be better than 50% certain, or to have a good hunch. But for something important, like the Higgs boson mass, you need to be 99.99999% certain, so the pollsters can't help, unfortunately.
"Who, on average, have no education past grade school, believe in magical but invisible deities, and shit in a field every day? Yeah, I trust their opinion on scientific matters!"
World?
No, I think you'll find that's just the US
(the term 'grade school' gave you away. People in glass houses etc......)
"much though they don't speak English in China, India, Poland or Russia "...
Almost a third of the Polish population speak English, 10% of the Indian population - around 125 million - and 7.5m and 10m from Russia and China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Indian English tends to. E good though the speed and accent need concentration. American on the other hand, xdepending upon sorce and education of the speaker, seems to be a mix of 18th century English / Irish plus lots of compromises from German, Yiddish and East European immigrants as well as Spanish, pidgin and advertising speak.
Scientists do know what they're talking about, but climate change will be used as an excuse for a series of new taxes which will not have any effect at all on climate change. At present, humanity is unable to act at all. It will have to go through real disaster first before anything meaningful will be done,
Unless you're a climatologist, the only honest answer you can give to those questions is "don't know".
People think their opinion is valid because it's an opinion. It's special to them.
No it isn't. The only people who DO know are the people who study it and work on it. No one else is qualified to give an opinion - literally. At least, an educated one.
"The only people who DO know are the people who study it and work on it. No one else is qualified to give an opinion - literally. At least, an educated one."
Well, as somebody who studied climate science to degree level, I'm unconvinced by the claimed scientific consensus, and note that the main scientific cheerleaders often have significant vested interest both reputational, research funding-wise, and in terms of their personal status and orgnisational seniority. In all forms of research, what is looked for will be found simply because the funding is withdrawn from projects that don't produce "promising" results, and because stepping out of line with the establishment will result in loss of funding even for non-related research in future. The East Anglia Climategate emails showed the reality of vanity, unscientific and unprofessional behaviours that those involved think are acceptable, I see no reason to believe that such cultural attitudes have changed.
Having said that, I think the public are wrong that "climate change" is about raising new taxes. Politicians and civil servants by and large have no real world experience, no science or technology background. They've had to choose whether to go with AGW or not, and they have. As a result I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that Western European governments are on a war footing over climate change. Almost every single aspect of policy, be it food, energy, buildings, infrastructure, agriculture, trade, industry is being critically directed by people putting "climate change" beliefs ahead of all other interests. So we despoil the countryside and seascape with wind turbines that are near useless, we are covering nothern Europe with solar panels despite the fact that our biggest issue is power used after dark in winter, having destroyed the power market with renewables, another toxic kludge comes along to pay fossil fuel plant owners to keep it working. Government regulations interfere in every aspect of home building and maintenance, from making it illegal for me to replace a broken window myself on "environmental grounds", to instructing architects as to what the ratio of windows to floor space should be (a number that laughably goes up and down every few years according to poorly thought through ideas of how energy is used and lost). Government bureaucrats scheme to encourage district heating in the UK under the incorrect belief that these are somehow more efficient than large central generation of power, and gas fired heating, and ignore the exceptionally high cost of heat networks. Waste policy tries to encourage both energy from waste and recycling (you can't have both, but policy seems to ignore this). All aspects of regulated industries have a big chunk of capex devoted to overcoming climate change (great for the regulated asset base). We encourage China to do our manufacturing, and happily chalk up the loss of our industrial base as a "benefit" for emissions, and DECC delightedly publish charts showing the reducing "emissions intensity" of our economy. We close perfectly functional coal fired power plant because the EU tell us we should on climate change grounds, ignoring the cost and emissions of the expensive and unreliable renewables. Private landlords will be compelled in a few years time to start putting expensive solid wall insulation on older houses at their own expense, because again government is spending somebody else's money, and because nothing is more important than fighting climate change.
If this were just about raising taxes, then we'd see a fall in the budget deficit. In reality government continues to live beyond its means (in the UK to the tune of £100bn a year), and seeks a narrative for continuation on its previous scale. The War on Terror was a previous narrative that justified the need for lots of government, although it is ringing a bit hollow after ten years of failure, in large part because of the disgraceful failure of the baddies to live up to their part of the bargain. The War on Climate Change will be fought for a good few years yet, but I don't think the proles have a clue how much government is bravely doing to them and for them to prevent it.
The problem is that, climate "scientists", being human, will always fall into the trap of finding evidence to prove the first idea they had. Any counter evidence will be discounted as unreliable, premature and not complying with the theory. That's why the IPCC has only just admitted that the climate hasn't warmed - 15 years after it stopped.
An let's face it, there is just too much fraud in the climate field. Climategates 1 and 2 are only scratching the surface.
I'm not a climatologist but I am something of an expert on computer activity models, having worked with them for the last 20 years.
As such, I am qualified to give the opinion that every single climate model published to date has been horrendously half-baked junk and incapable of providing any basis for projection.
Hate to tell you this, as a former modeller of certain fish populations on computers: but it is possible to know everything about computer behaviour, short of artefacts caused by component failure, including the effects of different usage; biological and climate systems are a tad more complex with many unknows and probably unknowables. We've managed to build some fairly useful models nevertheless. But it is incredibly more difficult than a "computer activity modeller", whatever that is, may imagine.