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The Great Global Warming Swindle
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Merrick
Merrick
2148 posts

Re: The Great Global Warming Swindle
Mar 13, 2007, 18:55
DM, forgive the tardy reply, I've been offline.

The science of the programme has been roundly trounced here in my absence, it seems. Do please say if there's any of it you feel has not been dealt with.

I'll just go through the things that don't seem to have been responded to.

The previous thread you refer to as a 'feeding frenzy' was pretty clearly argued. Only one participant started using outright insults calling people 'fools'.

You made the point about theories being disproven then too. And I replied that yes, that happens, other theories remain constant. Just because the theory of the sun revolving round the earth was disproved doesn't mean I'm going to stop believing in Newton's theories about gravity any time soon.
http://www.headheritage.co.uk/headtohead/u_know/topic/32192/threaded/405923

Your central theme then, repeated in paraphrase here - that as there can be no control experiment therefore all theories on climate are akin to belief in the tooth fairy - is palpable nonsense.

You claim to have a scientific background yet can't grasp the concept- and ask not to have it explained to you - that because something isn't definite doesn't mean it can't be dealt with in terms of likelihood and probability, based on the weight of evidence. Which is a fairly basic scientific concept.

You said I 'totally failed' to respond to any of the science in the programme. That is simply untrue.

I had posted a response that rebutted the stuff about CO2 being natural; about it being only a small part of the atmosphere; about the difference between carbon moving in the carbon cycle and burning fossils adding more; about there being no historic precedent for CO2 affecting global temperature; and about global cooling theory.

Most of the rest of it was about the credibility of the IPCC and some of the programme's participants and the logic used, which is surely relevant.

That does not count as 'selective cheap shots'. Dismissing it as such shows a reluctance to properly debate the issues.

Weather forecasters do indeed get lambasted for getting the forecast wrong. It is one thing to say 'a warmer climate leads to warmer wetter winters and hotter drier summers for the UK'; it's another thing to say exactly which year will get the hottest summers or what day the floods will come on.

The newest climate modelling computer at the Met Office is doing a good job of the climate prediction though. We know this because they do 'backcasting'; taking a random day from the past and feeding their data in to see if what they would predict is what occurred. It's still not exact, but it's certainly good at it.

You said 'the majority of contributors were professors (all clearly well qualified tin the appropriate areas)', which is not the case. See my previous comments about the credentials of Philip Stott.

You say that you are against the 'bad science and fundamentalist positioning which characterises this debate', yet will gladly talk of the 'strong evidence' of climate change being sunspots, the 'authoritative sources' who are presenting false data as fact.

If someone really claims to be able to contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus on an issue, you should check first to see if their evidence is actually 'strong' and if they are 'authoritative'. When something sounds unlikely, that's often because it is.

Yes there were professors involved in the programme. But when you can have professors like Stott and even more qualified ones like David Bellamy robustly defending disproven data on climate change, professorhood is clearly no guarantee of sound knowledge.

This is why it's important to go with peer-reviewed material, so that anyone with a counterpoint can present their data.

The fact that you are so sceptical of the pro-anthropogenic arguments yet so ready to praise the ill-founded anti-stuff doesn't show neutrality.
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