Eddie:
I concede and agree your point when you say;
“What is required is that AGW theory should ‘better’ explain current climate change than any other theory or hypothesis. That is, the evidence should be more consistent with, and not falsify, AGW theory over other hypotheses.”
OK. But AGW does not – repeat, not – explain anything better than the null hypothesis that all the recently observed climate changes have the same cause as similar changes that recently preceded them.
As I said, it is the duty of those who provide a hypothesis to prove it. To date no evidence – n.b. none of any kind – has been provided to show that AGW exists. This is in stark contrast to evolutionary theories that have an immense amount of empirical supporting evidence at all levels of complexity from the molecular to the species.
In response to my saying;
“And as I explained to you previously, actions taken in response to the AGW hypothesis threaten the lives of millions of people.”
You reply
“Lack of action against AGW may also threaten human life. That said, sceptics are quick to condemn warmists for ‘alarmism’, but are just as quick to indulge in their own form of alarmism.”
No!
Action to cut carbon dioxide is certain – yes, certain – to kill millions of people, mostly children. And I explained why this is a certainty. It would be a criminal act comparable to the holocaust to deliberately kill millions because otherwise something (e.g. AGW) “may” happen. So, as I said;
“In other words, the AGW hypothesis is like somebody shouting “Fire!” in a crowded room because they think a fire could exist although there is no sign of a fire.”
The shout of “Fire!” is alarmism and asking people to keep calm is not.
You say,
“I was talking about the ability of climate models to forecast long-term warming, ie the injection of additional heat energy into the atmospheric system. The models used to forecast long-term effects are not suited to the short term.”
Really? The GCMs are not suited to predict the short term? Then what makes you think they can predict anything? No model has existed for sufficient time to have demonstrated predictive skill over decades and/or centuries.
A model cannot be trusted to ‘project’ climate effects that nobody has experienced when it cannot emulate the climate effects we all experience. Only a blind fool or a religious bigot could think otherwise.
Then you assert:
Ch 6 of the Working Group Report – The Physical Science Basis has an extensive discussion of the “hockey stick” reconstruction of recent temperatures and shows a hockey-type graph on p 467.
The IPCC has dropped pretence that the discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) is other than twaddle. A “hockey-type graph” is not the MBH hockey stick. Indeed, Michael Mann was Lead Author of the IPCC chapter of IPCC 2001 that presented the hockey stick (although the ‘hockey stick’ was copied into other chapters and the SPM of that report). Choosing Mann as the Lead Author was guaranteed to ensure that he would present his own graph that revolutionized climate history by removing the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). He was not Lead Author of Chapter 6 of WG1 of IPCC 2007 and its “hockey-type graph” reinstates the MWP and LIA albeit with lower ranges than almost all publications indicate.
Please discuss what I say and not ‘straw men’. The Jeb character in this forum does enough of that without you doing it, too.
Then you say;
“A conspiracy requires above all secrecy, and yet sceptics are screaming to the rooftops about this alleged AGW conspiracy. Just another piece of illogic from people who also demand ‘debate’ with those they believe are inveterate liars.”
Wow! Now that is a list of invective in two short sentences.
Firstly, I have been denying the existence of such a “conspiracy” since Bottcher first proposed it in his 1996 paper. Indeed, a denial of it I posted in 1997 is at
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
AGW skeptics are “screaming to the rooftops” that AGW is unproven and unlikely, not that there is a “conspiracy”. Almost all the skeptics see a bandwagon, and nobody needs to conspire to get people to climb on the bandwagon when it is heading in a direction they want to go.
AGW skepticism is purely logical.
And the title “liars” is thrown about with abandon by AGW proclaimers but not by AGW skeptics (look at this forum for examples of this).
Then you quote me out of context when you cite me as saying;
“It matters not if some people do or do not accept the AGW hypothesis.”
Clearly, your selected quotation of my words implies I was suggesting that AGW is not an important issue and not an important political issue. And that implication results from you presenting those words out of their context. Indeed, you stress the misleading implication by saying;
“It does matter if you want to have a “debate” about climate.”
However, in their original context my words do not suggest any such thing. My complete paragraph says;
“It matters not if some people do or do not accept the AGW hypothesis. The truth of a matter is important not who says. And the truth is that global warming has stopped. Joe D’Aleo puts it clearly at Icecap
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/cold_april_for_the_united_states/”.
Again, the Jeb character provides all the quotations out of context that anybody could need, so there is no proper reason for you to do it too.
Then you obfuscate by confusing global warming (GW) and anthropogenic global warming (AGW). And you say;
“… most sceptics would reject the claim that ‘until 1998, AGW was occurring’. In that case, sceptics who claim that ‘global warming stopped in 1998’ are in effect saying: ‘until 1998, global warming was not occurring, and it stopped in 1998’. This further piece of illogic shows that the 1998 claim has little to do with science and a lot to do with ideology.”
But all my contributions to this forum have made a clear distinction between GW and AGW. Furthermore, I have made it clear in my postings here that there is no conclusive evidence that AGW is happening and there is no conclusive evidence that AGW is not happening, either. My position has been perfectly logical and consistent, and I have been opposing ideological positions. Indeed, in answer to a question posed by Gordon Andelin I included reference to a URL that I told him included “the pro-AGW ‘take’ on this for non-scientists” although I am extremely doubtful of the existence of AGW.
Importantly, AGW is an ideology. It is a hypothesis with no supporting empirical evidence of any kind that is being used as the reason and the justification for political actions.
The fact that AGW is an ideology is spelled out in Chapter 2 of Working Group 3 in the report by IPCC 2001 where it says:
“Perhaps the most powerful conclusion emerging from both the post-SRES analyses and the review of the general futures literature is that it may be possible to very significantly reduce GHG emissions through integration of climate policies with general socio-economic policies, which are not customarily as climate policies at all.”
Simply, this IPCC conclusion calls for changes to socio-economic policies that are not climate policies (at very least, this conclusion provides an excuse for such changes). And the Chapter’s Introduction states that these changes are intended to achieve “a more desirable future state” based on “societal visions of the future”. (There are many differing opinions on what would be a “a more desirable future state” (c.f. those of Mussolini and Marx) but the Chapter does not overtly state its definition of “desirable”.)
Furthermore, this conclusion derived by the method that generated it for the purpose stated in the Chapter is an abuse of science. Indeed, it is not science to make predictions of how to change the future by use of selected scenarios when – as the same IPCC chapter admits – “no systematic analysis has published on the relationship between mitigation and baseline scenarios”: this is pseudo-science of precisely the same type as astrology
It is a defence of science to demand some evidence for the ideology of AGW when those proclaiming that ideology assert it is “science”. And if attempting to defend science against its abuse and misuse makes me an ideologue, then so be it.
Richard
