Farage Murdoch Gove Boris

[An_Inspector_Calls]

"Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option."

http://blogs.agu.org/mountainbeltway/2010/05/07/climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/

Do you accept such statements without thinking? Presumably you might have seen some of the recent data on the subject, read the assessment papers, overheard some of the scandals revealed in the climate science arena and perhaps concluded that just possibly all was not well in the climate science world?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'm no apologist for Mr Gove and am not inclined to believe that there won't be yet another U-turn on this, but on what basis does such a move mark him out as a "hero" and "savant" and in what? The climate has always been changing and it's unlikely to stop doing so because Mr Gove decides to remove it from a schoolteaching syllabus! To cut this out of the national curriculum or indeed any other kind of schoolteaching curriculum is tantamount to implying that climate either doesn't change at all or it's not a factor in the study of geography or maybe even both. How absurd is that?
.

Don't get me wrong. Gove is still an idiot. I just don't believe that politicians should prescribe what is taught.
I continue to think that climate change is partly man-made and that the huge increase in net producers of CO2 (people) is the main cause.

[MrGongGong]

In my experience, if you have a problem it's usually best to assess the causes and weigh up the solutions to avoid wasting effort on either non-problems or wrong solutions.

So given that climate change exists
then we should take steps to try and minimise it's adverse effects on the poorest people......
Arguing over hockey sticks really wont help those living in low lying Pacific Islands for example

[Mr Pee]

It just marks him out as more of a dickhead than we previously thought ........




http://www.badscience.net/2013/03/he...tion-minister/

Do you find it impossible to post a comment without using crude language?

[An_Inspector_Calls]

So given that climate change exists
then we should take steps to try and minimise it's adverse effects on the poorest people......
Arguing over hockey sticks really wont help those living in low lying Pacific Islands for example

Climate change has always existed.
When you talk of adverse effects on poor people I take it you're referring to diverting food supplies from the poor so we can run our cars on ethanol, that sort of thing? Building windmills on peat lands so that we interfere with the drainage, kill the peat and thereby release more CO2 . . . ?

Don't let's think (where did that get us), just DO SOMETHING!

I continue to think that climate change is partly man-made and that the huge increase in net producers of CO2 (people) is the main cause.

Really, even though man's emissions of CO2 are perhaps 1/30th of natural emissions?

[amateur51]

As The Guardian has a distinct tendency to constantly annoy others with its wearying 'politically-correct' liberal dogmatism, some of those others might consider themselves at least mildly entitled to occasionally experience a little bit of schadenfreude at its expense.

Unimportant and even unworthy, maybe, but understandable most certainly.

What's 'politically-correct' about engaging with climate change for goodness' sake scotty? You are the giddy limit, as my Dad used to say

[amateur51]

It would seem that there's a very close correlation between people who stand to benefit in the short term from doing nothing about climate change (politicians in rich countries, corporations profiting from fossil fuels etc.) and people who claim that it isn't happening and/or seek to suppress research into it and any unfavourable evidence produced thereby. That should already tell us something. The more time spent squabbling over the causes of climate change, the more catastrophic its consequences will be, however it was caused. All the verbose sophistry in the world isn't going to alter that.

[amateur51]

In my experience, if you have a problem it's usually best to assess the causes and weigh up the solutions to avoid wasting effort on either non-problems or wrong solutions.

But you were just hailing Michael Gove for removing this very item from the school curriculum.

I know you're a bam-pot but at least be a consistent bam-pot!

[ahinton]

It would seem that there's a very close correlation between people who stand to benefit in the short term from doing nothing about climate change (politicians in rich countries, corporations profiting from fossil fuels etc.) and people who claim that it isn't happening and/or seek to suppress research into it and any unfavourable evidence produced thereby. That should already tell us something. The more time spent squabbling over the causes of climate change, the more catastrophic its consequences will be, however it was caused. All the verbose sophistry in the world isn't going to alter that.

Exactly - and very well put. The problem is, of course, that the very short-termism to which you rightly draw attention might ultimately come to bite all of us, rich and poor people, rich and poor nations alike if nothing (or far too little too late) is done about it.

Another thing that occurs to me is the short-sightedness and complacency that I can only assume to have been born of sheer laziness of the now very rich fossil fuel producing countries in not having looked at less expensive alternatives in the past; had Middle Eastern countries, for example, invested some of their eye-wateringly massive oil revenues in solar energy research and development, they might be trying still to hold the rest of us to ransom for these rather than for their oil (which, whilst being far more environmentally sound, would still be as politically unwelcome).

That said, one of the major fallouts from the way things are generally done now is the dependency culture that seek to ensure that those nations that have the oil reserves stay rich on the backs of selling their wares to other nations, rich and poor alike (although clearly that's much more of a matter of politics and economics than of environmental considerations). It's broadly the same kind of crippling infrastructure that enables some half dozen energy suppliers to hold almost all the cards in UK. Some of this stranglehold could and can be loosened to some extent by those who aim to provide their own energy for their own use and become far less dependent upon the diktats of large energy supply corporations and I'm all for that; it won't sole the problem as a whole, but the less dependency there is on fossil fuels, the less of a stranglehold rich countries and large corporations will be able to maintain.

The fact that environmental air pollution could be drastically reduced by replacing fossil fuel use with other energy sources ought in any case to provide sufficient impetus for individuals, companies and countries to espouse environmentally acceptable alternative forms of energy; the fact that so few of them seem even to be addressing this aspect of the problem further endorses the view that you express in your first sentence.

[amateur51]

Do you accept such statements without thinking? Presumably you might have seen some of the recent data on the subject, read the assessment papers, overheard some of the scandals revealed in the climate science arena and perhaps concluded that just possibly all was not well in the climate science world?

Which ones did you have in mind, Oh Great One?

[amateur51]

So given that climate change exists
then we should take steps to try and minimise it's adverse effects on the poorest people......
Arguing over hockey sticks really wont help those living in low lying Pacific Islands for example

[amateur51]

Do you find it impossible to post a comment without using crude language?

Do you find it impossible to post a comment with no valuable content?

Crude language, as you so prissily put it, is occasionally a useful rhetorical device when dealing with head-in-the-sand merchants like you, Mr Pee.

Back to the Formula One on the Sky with you

[ahinton]

Last time I looked, by world standards, rich countries like Germany, the UK (most of western Europe in fact), and the US were doing lots about climate change

No one is suggesting that these countries are doing nothing about it, but the fact that what needs to be done in order to make drastic cuts to those nations' fossil fuel dependency isn't being done is easily revealed by examining how the electricity that they generate is made and what fuel the vast majority of motor vehicles run on.

so your correlation seems somewhat specious

The only specious thing here is your inability, unwillingness or both to accept that these countries remain broadly fossil fuel dependent where their respective energy supplies are concerned.

In my experience, if you have a problem it's usually best to assess the causes and weigh up the solutions to avoid wasting effort on either non-problems or wrong solutions.

Presumably your experience does not admit of the kind of problem where assessment of causes and devising of solutions might have a time constraint. If solutions may or may not solve this problem in whole or in part but would all bring other benefits such as reductions in environmental air pollution, the argument not to proceed or to delay proceeding indefinitely weakens greatly.

[ahinton]

Do you accept such statements without thinking? Presumably you might have seen some of the recent data on the subject, read the assessment papers, overheard some of the scandals revealed in the climate science arena and perhaps concluded that just possibly all was not well in the climate science world?

Did FF say or suggest that she believes that all IS well in that world? Is what she posted and, more importantly, what she linked to in her post, wholly biased in one direction? Does it or does it not, for example, admit that science and the scientists do not always have all the correct answers just when the rest of us want them?

[MrGongGong]

Do you find it impossible to post a comment without using crude language?

I'm fed up with being polite about these fools

or as someone else put it

"In my life
Why do I give valuable time
To people who don't care if I live or die ?"

and

what I said was the toned down version