Bishop Hill Richard Bean in Melbourne
May 3, 2012 Climate: other Richard Bean's award winning climate sceptic play is soon to open in Melbourne. The man himself is interviewed in the Australian.
So, I say, although the play seems a gift to sceptics, there's plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis that CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases are contributing to man-made climate change. Isn't there? A look of derision scuds across his face. No, he thunders, utter rubbish.
Every climate model has "failed laughably", he says, and these are the models that are the whole basis for global warming alarmism. The scientists who push their gloomy predictions are politically motivated, he claims, and the politicians are too ignorant to understand the arguments.
"There's one single bachelor of science in the House of Commons. They don't understand a word of it and I bet your government is much the same."
Reader Comments (29)
Not quite.
Graham Stringer MP, who I have talked to in the past is a chemist by training and from what he told me he is certainly not convinced by CAGW.
But he is one of very few MPs....
Bread has turned to roses in Inhofe's basket.
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Peter Lilley is also a qualified scientist. He has demonstrated his scepticism of CAGW on a number of occasions. Andrew Tyrie also seems sceptical. Although I am not aware of any scientific training in his case.
"catastrophilia" sums it up pretty well. Some people really get off on all the eco-doom. It's maybe related to Munchausen's - a need for there to be a "problem" to care about.
Don Foster is a Physics Graduate and Lectured in Phyics Education at the University of Bristol School of Education. I do not know if he has looked critically at the evidence in the climate change debate or where he stands on the subject.
Munchausen's by proxy? ;¬)
You can buy the script of the play on Amazon - recommended.
It ain't just scientists and politicians. Without the active contribution of modern newsmedia always on the hunt for scare stories, we wouldn't be in the current dire straits. Allow me some shameless self-promotion:
Climate science has been lost for twenty years in its own Bermuda Triangle....
I can't wait till Holywood turns this play into a block-buster movie. Then again, I'd better not try holding my breath.
Frosty
"Munchausen's by proxy"
V good :-)
@ Frosty Lol
I don't think you can top the quote by Ernest Benn (1875-1954), uncle of Tony Benn, when he said:
'Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.'
David
Excellent quote! I think the first 3/4 also applies to modern journalism.
A stone flung down the Bowery to kill a dog in Broadway.
H/t A. Bierce.
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Ross Lea: physicists are, apparently, more easily fooled by the incorrect direct thermalisation AGW hypothesis than other hard scientific disciplines. It seems it's because they have forgotten the art of critical analysis of experiments**.
[Tyndall's experiment and the 'PET bottle' version have been misinterpreted: the warming is probably a combination of adiabatic warming from pressure rise [hence it is reduced by slackening the cap], thermalisation of pseudo-scattered IR at the walls and the temperature-dependent absorptivity of CO2 increasing pseudo-scattering rate with temperature.]
I suspect that the PET bottle experiment isn't usually done with a representative amount of CO2, either. Doubling the atmospheric amount in a 10 litre bottle would require less than a teaspoon...
I don't think you can top the quote by Ernest Benn (1875-1954), uncle of Tony Benn, when he said:
'Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.'
May 3, 2012 at 12:33 PM | David
Tony Benn is brilliant at doing that.
May 3, 2012 at 10:33 AM | Peter Stroud
Peter, you mention two of the three MP's who voted against Ed Miliband's egregious 2008 Climate Change Act - the third was Christopher Chope.
Quite heroic really in the face of the 463 MP's that went like sheep through the 'in favour' lobby.
2008 CCA - surely the worst piece of suicidal legislation in UK parliamentary history!
mdgnn - are you familiar with Angstrom's experiments?
He is a brave man. He has challenged the big orthodoxy of today - truly spoken truth unto power.
It would have been so much easier for him in the media world he inhabits to just parrot the conventional platitudes like the Rest of the meejah luvvies.
Oh dear. Reduced to quoting factually-challenged playwrights now?
40 MPs hold science degrees. Not enough, but if this guy cannot even get his basic facts right ......
May 3, 2012 at 10:33 AM | Peter Stroud
Peter, you mention two of the three MP's who voted against Ed Miliband's egregious 2008 Climate Change Act - the third was Christopher Chope.
Quite heroic really in the face of the 463 MP's that went like sheep through the 'in favour' lobby.
2008 CCA - surely the worst piece of suicidal legislation in UK parliamentary history!
May 3, 2012 at 8:23 PM | Unregistered CommenterDougS
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I thought Philip Davies (Cons. - Shipley) also voted against the Climate Change bills in 2008?
http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/mp.php?mpid=40531&dmp=1030
He has certainly made public statements (including an interview on Youtube) that make it clear he is not a believer. He doesn't have a science degree, but he does have a business background, which is often a useful antidote to academic waffle.
He needs to come out and say what he really thinks... ;-)
Johanna said: "I thought Philip Davies (Cons. - Shipley) also voted against the Climate Change bills in 2008?"
Technically he was a 'teller for the Noes' at the third reading debate - there are two MPs for the ayes and two for the noes, who count the MPs voting in each lobby. They don't actually vote, but their names are generally associated with that opinion. That's why the number of MPs who voted against the third reading of the CC Bill is sometimes given as three and sometimes five.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm081028/debtext/81028-0021.htm
NOES
Chope, Mr. Christopher
Lilley, rh Mr. Peter
Tyrie, Mr. Andrew
Tellers for the Noes:
Miss Ann Widdecombe and
Philip Davies
Thanks for clarifying that, DR. I do think he is entitled to be counted as voting against, as he has never made any secret of his skepticism about CAGW. Does this mean than Ann Widdecombe is also a heretic?
I became interested in Davies after watching the first round of the Parliamentary in inquiry into phone hacking (I love the internet - amazing to watch it live from the other side of the world!). Anyway, Davies did a devastating job on Murdoch Jr, while his Committee colleagues mostly faffed around. Based on his business experience, he explored the question of how a hush money cheque for 750,000 quid got signed off on his watch without him (supposedly) knowing the details of why it was being paid. He asked searching questions about the accountability mechanisms for signing large cheques in the company, finding it - as anyone who has worked in business would - very hard to understand why the CEO did not seem very interested in the reason for this huge payout.
Baby Murdoch looked like a dill or a liar. Meanwhile, you could almost feel Rupert cringing. Like all old style magnates, Rupert is notoriously parsimonious and runs a very tight ship when he is in a hands on role. He would have put his executives and lawyers through the wringer before that kind of money was paid out, and even then would probably have tried to find ways to get out of it or reduce it.
It was a great performance from Davies, which encouraged me to find out more about him - and sure enough, he doesn't buy flannel in other areas of interest either.
"They don't understand a word of it and I bet your government is much the same"
Seems that way - Dennis Jensen (MP for Tangely (?sp) ) is currently in opposition, but is one of the few prepared to call the alarmists out.
Any one else with appropriate training - and there are one or two - seems either ignorant of the debate or captured by fear of being derided as a "denier".
The idea that only some "trained expert" can evaluate factual evidence, discern whether a line on Graph A trends up or down, is the Credentialist Fallacy writ large. Many in this day-and-age are rigorously trained, but few indeed are truly educated-- students of humane history made wary of all absolutist claims, literally sickened by rampant displays of careerist drivel and hate-mongering as standard groupthink political fare.
"What was done, what to do?-- a glance told him both. Striking his spurs, with a terrible oath he checked the retreat in an instant that day from Winchester, twenty miles away" ("Sheridan's Ride" by Thomas Buchanan Read c. 1864).
bish,
should be on a previous thread, but u will want to read all of this, tho i'm excerpting Revkin the Gatekeeper finding a way to keep the "death threats" meme alive:
from the Revkin article: Casey Doyle, a student at Warren Wilson College who writes for the Swannanoa Journal, the publication of the school’s Environmental Leadership Center, had the opportunity to speak with the climate scientist Michael Mann when he visited the campus to speak about his book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.”:
3 May: NYT Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin: A Student’s Conversation With Michael Mann on Climate Science and Climate Wars
Q. I understand that you have received threats due to your reporting on climate data. Who or what is the threat?
A. Many climate scientists have received hundreds, and probably now even thousands of threatening emails… attacking us, or using very nasty language to criticize us… Some emails, letters, and phone messages that have been left on my office phone contain thinly veiled threats of violence, death threats. I had an envelope sent to my work address that contained a white powder, obviously it was intended to make we think I had been exposed to anthrax. The FBI had to send that off to the regional lab to test it, and it turns out it was just cornmeal, but using the mail to intimidate in that way is a felony… I’m not sure if they were ever able to track down the person who was responsible, but there are dozens of climate scientists who had been subjected to threats of violence and death threats…. Anytime that the findings of science have come into conflict with the interests of certain industries there has been a fairly nasty effort to try and intimidate the scientists through whatever means possible, and I’ve seen some of the worst aspects of that myself…
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/a-students-conversation-with-michael-mann-on-climate-science-and-climate-wars/
btw no australian media, besides The Australian which broke the story in the MSM, has covered the "death threats" debunked story as yet.
I am not saying it without any base, for instance, if you start packing earlier, you will not be in hurry to pack stuffs like anything. You will go for proper cartoons and boxes. This will keep your expensive things safe and sound.