Richard: “Action to cut carbon dioxide is certain – yes, certain – to kill millions of people, mostly children… It would be a criminal act comparable to the holocaust…The shout of “Fire!” is alarmism and asking people to keep calm is not.”
So accusing people of genocide is an example of ‘calmism’. Remind me to stand clear when you really erupt.
“The GCMs are not suited to predict the short term? Then what makes you think they can predict anything?”
As I said, some models are not suited to the short term. Others are.
“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.”
Civility, please. You are confusing weather and climate. Equally important, the distinction between the long and short term models is actually a distinction between specific events and general scenarios. Take the analogy of life insurance. The actuary who calculates your risk cannot say exactly when and where you will die, nor what you will die of. Nevertheless, the actuary has sufficient information about you and your cohort to be able to persuade his company to make a substantial monetary bet against your premature demise.
The assumption underlying claims about the impossibility of forecasting is that we know nothing about climate. In fact, climate science is based on well-established principles of physics and chemistry, and the CO2 thesis has been around for 150 years.
Even more so, the claim that we cannot project or produce future climate scenarios is also based on the assumption that the climate system is utterly chaotic. Not so. We know with a fair degree of certainty that water will always precipitate downwards, that warm air will rise, that weather systems will move from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure, and so on. While it may be generally acceptable to say that weather is ‘chaotic’, that chaos operates within limits, and we can know those limits.
“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).”
A quick Google search will show that AGW sceptics also freely use the ‘L’ word, eg: “Other Al Gore and global warming liars…Gore Lied, Poor People in need of Energy and Technology Died…It is ignorant idiots like you that that allow self admitted Liars like Al Gore…”Liars , Damned Liars and Al Gore…Earth Day is a holiday for liars…The Biggest Liars On Earth: The UN’s Global Warming Panel”. And so on.
“Clearly, your selected quotation of my words implies I was suggesting that AGW is not an important issue and not an important political issue.”
No it doesn’t. I well understood that you were arguing that truth does not depend on the messenger. My point was that debate requires good faith and in particular consistency. To claim that global warming is not occurring, but that anyway it stopped in 1998 is to change horses in mid-stream.
“Then you obfuscate by confusing global warming (GW) and anthropogenic global warming (AGW).”
No I don’t. This is what I said: “…the term ‘global warming’ is an accepted shorthand for ‘anthropogenic global warming’ or AGW”.
“But all my contributions to this forum have made a clear distinction between GW and AGW.”
I’m glad you agree that changing the argument half-way is a poor debating tactic. You have mostly been careful to use phrases such as ‘warming phase’ and the like to reflect your position, but most sceptics do not.
