Bishop Hill Painter slipped
Mar 4, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: sensitivity James Painter has an amusing article in The Conversation, the left-wing campaigning website paid for by your taxes.
In it he writes about certainty and uncertainty in the global warming debate and takes issue with Nigel Lawson's appearance on the Today programme (along with just about every other left-wing campaigning academic it seems).
Framing the climate challenge as risk assessment has been gaining considerable traction among some politicians. Lawson’s response to the question was to argue that even if there is a problem of global warming, it will have only marginal effects.
It is worth asking how he can be so certain of this low likelihood, what his level of confidence is and on what science it is based. This is what would be required by any risk assessment: he would have to show how he had come to this risk evaluation and why he was so confident in it, when so many other scientists are saying the impact could be huge. In any case, merely saying “nobody knows” doesn’t make his case.
You would think that someone with the luxury of an academic position, someone with the time to read and read and read, would actually have taken the time to discover what sceptics think about climate sensitivity rather than just writing and writing and writing about his ignorance on the subject.
He could start here. Oh yes, and watch this space on Thursday for some interesting developments on this front.
Reader Comments (55)
Sounds a little melodramatic. Are you sure it wasn't Ghostbusters rather than IPCC AR5 WG1?
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Mayor: All right, all right! I get the point!
The trouble with authority figures is knowing whom to believe.
Parents sent me postcard from their Arctic cruise. 'Here's a lovely polar bear licking a wounded seal but your Dad says they must be vicious buggers because they've eaten all the king penguins'.
The Conversation is a hoot even though my taxes support it. In a previous article their regular abusive commenters were waxing lyrical about how there is no "hiatus". I called them "hiatus deniers" once and the moderator left it but after that any comment with "hiatus denier" was removed.
Apparently "denier" is a term only they can use and "hiatus denier" is verbotten. As CPL Jones used to say, "they don't like it up em".
@Nick Darlington
@BBCR4Feedback prog is controlled by orchestrated activist campaigns possibly with implicit cooperation of the prog makers
- One sided adverts for alarmists have happened 4 times in the last 12 months.
- Barry Woods uncovered evidence that activists are running orchestrated campaigns .. in the first instances the "public" who spoke all had the same names as well known activists, then the last time they actually discussed the campaign on the transistionstown forum. That was followed up by the prog the week before last, where they just said they were still getting complaints about Today. Even though I for one certainly write and sometimes officially complain, the prog is presented as if no nondramagreen views were received from listeners.
(Such EVIDENCED conspiracies are highly important [like how ABC planted a highly controversial audience question] And I am perplexed that when we catch warmists red handed, other skeptics don't pick up the ball instead they prefer to get bogged down talking about radiative forcing etc.)
To be fair to The Conversation moderators, they also don't like the use of 'lying denier', which I was accused of being. The comment, together with my reply in which I pointed out in passing its clearly libellous nature, has been removed.