GLOBAL WARMING alert - Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years

[MulaMan]

Re: GLOBAL WARMING alert - Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years

oh and since you Fox News Ann Randians equate capitalism with zero government regulation, then I would like to send all of your kids a few cute trinkets from my local dollar store.

It would really suck if we had a government bureaucracy telling us what we can buy our kids...there is no scientific evidence about toxic chemicals in kid's trinkets...it is just a theory...I head it directly from a Chinese goverment funded study..OUTRAGOUS LIBERALS!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34793600...and_parenting/

[renewable]

Re: GLOBAL WARMING alert - Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years

Sounds to me like another variation on Pascal's Wager, more recently encountered in the phrase "It's Not the Nature of Evidence, It's the Seriousness of the Charge."

This is misleading rhetoric. If there were only one catastrophic outcome to be avoided in some dimension of activity, then perhaps doing everything in one's capacity to avoid that outcome would be well advised.

But in the more complex real world that we inhabit, one can postulate dire outcomes for just about any course of action or inaction. Simply being able to hypothecate some catastrophic scenario does not justify enacting some massive global financial scheme that will likely impoverish, even starve to death, many third world residents while enriching yet again some traders at Goldman Sachs.

The Powers That Be (TPTB) have demonstrated admirable skill at formulating bogeymen to justify further constraints on our liberty and confiscation of our wealth. Beware. Simply hypothecating such a bogeyman does not justify some massive response, regardless of what rhetorical florish one adorns it with. You actually have to make your case that both the problem is real and the solution a good one.

Excellent post IMO and very good points. Apart from the very OTT starving to death rhetoric, especially when considering the impacts of AGW on the food bowls of Bangladesh, Africa, etc.

I researched the case a long time before the current hysteria and made my opinion based on that research. I'm happy that virtually all the decision makers in the world have now decided that AGW is a probable threat, although I think that their actions will be too little, to late.

It is now the climate scientist conspiracy theorists that need to convince the decision makers that the case is not real and that no solutions are needed.

[Ghent12]

Re: GLOBAL WARMING alert - Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years

Excellent post IMO and very good points. Apart from the very OTT starving to death rhetoric, especially when considering the impacts of AGW on the food bowls of Bangladesh, Africa, etc.

You worry about potential impacts of AGW, but probably have limited knowledge of the current effects supposedly attributable to AGW, nor do you likely have much knowledge of the current crises which are directly attributable in the magnitude of their impact to political actions taken to combat AGW. Starving to death is over the top? It's the present reality.

I researched the case a long time before the current hysteria and made my opinion based on that research. I'm happy that virtually all the decision makers in the world have now decided that AGW is a probable threat, although I think that their actions will be too little, to late.

It is now the climate scientist conspiracy theorists that need to convince the decision makers that the case is not real and that no solutions are needed.

In your research "a long time before the current hysteria" (which would mean in the 1960's I suspect), did you find mention of a decade of "non-warming"?

[c1ue]

Re: GLOBAL WARMING alert - Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years

Some people on this thread really need to think about the precautionary principle rather than just believing that they know everything.

There has already been considerable discussion on the AGW equivalent of Pascal's Wager.

I will merely point out that the true costs of CO2 mitigation are extremely high. Other than Lord Stern, all of the other analyses I have seen show that the costs of CO2 mitigation are equal to or greater than the postulated damages.

At that point, why bother?

As for the 'science' - it is difficult to trust the science when there is so much else going on.

The ongoing Pachauri investigation being undertaken by Richard North, for example, is showing a very nice conflation of Indian offshoring oil and steel interests with IPCC and the various agreements (Kyoto et al).

http://umbrellog.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1008123

More recently - the UK snow spell combined with a clear cross the board UK government lack of preparation is causing more people to ask questions as well, which in turn is raising more interesting issues on the conflation of AGW with plain old power-mongering:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...arts-here.html

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event

Fortunately the children in Britain have received this rare opportunity to witness snow...