Wednesday
Feb112015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Matt Ridley on bloggingheads
Feb 11, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Here's a long interview with Matt Ridley, which is notable because it is all so civilised.
(Direct link to video here)
Reader Comments (19)
Forgive me but where is the interview?
Only watched short extracts so far, but this is very very good.
I can see the player, but it won't play for me
It seems to be an embedded player of some sort. I'm running Firefox 28 with adblocker plus on, on XP and it's working fine.
On right mouseclick I get "Movie not loaded..." and "About Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.296".
Nothing is playing; according to my web debugger no connection is made on left mouseclick.
Works for, on Android phone, on clicking a new window opens with the Blogging Heads webpage and the video plays.. beginning with Ridley saying hw was elected to the house of Lords where half of the other ones were not selected.
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Takes a few seconds to load
Yes...as he says, they'll likely vote him out of the HoL. If you listen to him its clearly not an alarm issue and big money/time/effort has been wasted. Time for asset seizure I think...could get lessons learnt?
Lessons learnt....LOL
As a longtime commenter at BhTV (I also commented on this dialogue) I was not surprised to see the immediate attacks by the in-house ad hominem crowd.
Still, the fact that Bob Wright has gone in a few years from ridiculing anyone who couldn't see the obvious AGW to someone willing to let Ridley have his say is great progress and as you can see I thanked him for that.
An excellent discussion of key issues on the climate. But the creation of property rights is not mentioned - without this there would be NO climate agenda, no debate.
Making the atmosphere into property to be rented for use is a very big deal indeed. I like to think of renting parking spaces for CO2 as a way to describe it, because it allows one to discuss the rise, and increase in rentierism - be it virtual on the web with Google ads, or the use of e-permits for CO2 being traded.
So let's talk about the creation of property rights. Why is capitalism creating the need for everything to have a price? Why can't the atmosphere remain free of charge?
Cumbrian Lad:
"I'm running Firefox 28 with adblocker plus on, on XP and it's working fine."
Wow. Just wow. ;-)
Very fair interview.
Ooooh the forces will be cross. Can't let sense into the argument or the ugency might fade. If the urgency fades then action might slow. If the action slows then reduction of CO2 slows and half of sod all is nothing.
Fay - A snappier way of putting it is 'taxing the fresh air'.
Howard - I know, but if it ain't broke...
Why is capitalism creating the need for everything to have a price? Why can't the atmosphere remain free of charge?
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Fay, it's not capitalism that is doing this - it's quite the opposite. Taxes and mandated behaviour are products of the governments concerned using their power to extract money from the productive sectors of society.
It's Ok in parts. Very curates egg and I think curate is the appropriate word. He is utterly confused by his religion and finds it impossible to come to terms with the fact eg; that temp rise between 20s and 40 was just as fast as between the 80s and 2000.
He gets a lot of the problems with climate models and sea level but doesn't have the depth of knowledge or couldn't find the opportunity to express it.
In general, I liked it and would like to see a similar debate between Ridley, Betts, Yeo, Glummer, Pope, Slingo and Lindzen and McIntyre.
Is there a transcript for those of us that are video disabled?
I didn't have time to watch the whole video yet but speaking about first ~20 minutes, I love it - I couldn't say it better.
To Fay & Johanna: people are often confusing capitalism and democracy. Capitalism is economic system. Democracy is political system. They're independent, you can have either without having the other. China is a good example of capitalism without democracy. And in many democratic countries, significant parts of economy are out of capitalist system. Education and medical care are the most common examples, I think.
Kasuha on Feb 11, 2015 at 11:38 PM
"Education and medical care are the most common examples [of significant parts of economy outside the capitalist system]"
You mean the State run sectors of those industries. There are many examples in those industries that do not need direct State support to continue their existence.
RW - but that is still half a degree since 2005
Matt replies "No, I said 3 hundreths of a degree, not 3 tenths"
RW - oh I may have heard it wrong
Thats around the 9:20 mark
...Jesus is that the level of these true believers ? Yeh they KNOW the deniers are wrong, cos 'they watch fox news' yet these guys have art student feeling for maths ie they are clueless.
..from the blog comments it does seem his regulars are like that.
A summary of the key points might be useful. Here are a few:
* Experience of previous scares that turned out to be overblown.
* Huge climate funding would be in trouble if they acknowledged AGW exaggerated.
* IPCC AR5 didn't give central estimate of ECS - if they had, it would have been lower.
* Liberal bias in academia.
* Climate policy harms the poor - higher proportion of income paid on energy.