Shows how much he knows.
In his piling on Simon Kuper’s effort in last weekend’s Financial Times to write-off the skeptics as irrelevant, Roger Pielke, Jr. writes:
The debate over climate science is over and has been won by those who assert a human influence on the climate system.
Sorry, Jr., but that was never the debate. The skeptics had always acknowledged that point, e.g., most notably through recognition of the urban heat island effect and land use
The debate was (is) over the climatic impact of manmade greenhouse has emissions — and that is very much open to debate.
Jr. is so deluded that he thinks “The battle for public opinion has essentially been won” — or at least that’s how Kuper quoted him in the FT.
But putting aside any enviro-commissioned polls asking loaded questions of the woefully ignorant, thankfully our government is not designed to act on the basis of a real or perceived domestic mob and thankfully it doesn’t typically act in concert with the global mob.
So Jr.’s points are both wrong and irrelevant.
Well, as a guy a lot smarter, a WHOLE LOT SMARTER, than Pielke said:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.”
Davifd Larsen,
There has been no proof presented by the warmistas that the current temperature/climate changes are anything other than natural.
The has been no proof presented by the warmistas that a warming climate would be deleterious to mankind. Yes, there has been much fudging, waving of hands and modelling, but little discussion of the advantages of two crops a year in Canada and Russia. The two largest countries in the world.
Again, theory is not a law of science. No greenhouse pseudoscientist has, as of yet proven:
1. Any correlation with carbon and oxygen heating the earth surface
2. Why the earth’s history is replete with heating and cooling due to solar activity and no trace elements
3. Why excess heat is created in a system from organic, trace elements when energy in a system MUST be accounted for in that system.
The problem is that everyone had gone to strawmanning (yourself included Mr. Milloy), and thus everyone is winning at once. The only people that we can say have truly lost are the extremists on both sides. I call them the Apocalyptics and the Absolute Denialists. Those who say we are all going to die are being consistently ignored. Those who say that global warming is thermodynamically impossible are being ignored. The thing is, the two Pelkies represent the real argument. Sr disagrees with the consensus and believes that the proper action is to not reduce CO2. Jr agrees with the consensus and is in favor of real but effective action to reduce CO2.
I think a good compromise would be to focus on real environmental issues. Let’s save the rainforest for its own sake, not for ludicrously extrapolated extinctions or some idiotic thought that it might stop polar bears from going extinct. Let’s install wastewater plants along the Ganges so that Indians can have clean rivers, or create emissions controls in China so that their children can enjoy the free, clean air that we do in the West. That way, everyone wins. The do-gooders do good and feel good about it. We get to stop the endless loop of worry and ineffective action, and we can relax.
The debate on soft recreational drugs has been won by the prohibitionists yet their usage among the general public has never been greater.
Perhaps we should just leave those pampered self-conscious elites with the illusion skeptics are irrelevant, whilst the real world moves on by itself and skeptically so. 🙂