Our problem is climate change is not our problem

"... it is hard to make people value the long-term future as much as the immediate future."

and other pearls of wisdom from the mind of Lord Rees of Ludlow, astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal, can be found here.

"Global warming poses a unique political challenge for two reasons. First, the effect is non-localised: the CO2 emissions from Britain have no more effect here than they do in Australia, and vice versa. That means any credible regime whereby the polluter pays has to be broadly international.

"Secondly, in politics, the urgent always trumps the important, and one has to accept that the consequences of climate change will be predominantly felt more than 50 years from now. It is not going to produce disasters in the next 10 or 20 years, so it is an investment in the interest of the next generation.

So, what do we tell our kids? "Sorry, but it was always going to be your problem anyway."?

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The last time co2 levels were this high, we dragged our knuckles around

If you were to believe global warming deniers, climate change is all right because the climate changes all the time.

True enough; but the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were sustained at 387 parts per million (ppm) was 15 million years ago, during the Burdigalian stage of the Mioscene Epoc, according to XXXX of UCLA in his paper XXXX.

Unlike now, 15 million years ago CO2 levels were on their way down, allowing global temperatures to slowly cool and ice sheet to be formed on the poles. Grasslands underwent a major expansion; forests yielded to a generally cooler and drier climate overall.

There were evolutionary losers; the closest relatives to elephants and sea-cows, the Desmostylians, became extinct. But we early chimp-hominids did rather well out of having to stand on two feet at the edge of the forest to scan the savannah for the saber-toothed predators or the ruminant prey co-evolving with the greatly diversifying grasses. By the time our primate ancestors had evolved into early man, co2 levels were stabilising, the carbon cycle settled, the world’s temperate regions started to become established, and the climate started to follow the wobble in the axis of the earth as it travels around the sun.

Both human (Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Homo) and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus) lineages diverged from a common ancestor about 5 to 6 million years ago and the climate became more benign, steadying into a pattern of ice-ages of low atmospheric CO2 punctuated with long interglacial periods.

Greenland started becoming covered in ice three million years ago when high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels dropped to levels closer to that of the pre-industrial era, and methane became trapped in the permafrost in the tundra of the high latitudes.

This suited Australopithecus, who lived, and could now follow the seasons that were forming as Africa’s climate started getting drier, making hunting and gathering predictable enough to develop stone tools. Their brain was 35% of the size of the modern man, big enough to help them exploit the forest and grassland habitats that got them their varied and seasonal diet.

Peak CO2 levels over the last 2.1 million years averaged only 280 ppm; today, CO2 is 38% higher.

Then a between 2.5 million years ago and 1.5 million, after Australopithecus evolved into Homo erectus, our brain grew from 600ccm to what it is now, about 1350ccm. The drying climate forced us to develop language to learn to get food in more adverse circumstances. We became serious tool makers and started wearing clothes as we headed out of Africa to Europe. Handily, we had tamed fire, so we were in good shape to tackle the next series of ice-ages. Pleased with ourselves, we developed jewelry, and then social hierarchy. In short, our current interglacial periods, called the Holocene, has been stable climatically and this has witnessed Homo sapiens explode into the Bronze Age, into agriculture, into civilisation, and into history. It’s been one wild ride, one that’s included a trip or two to the moon.

Not bad for that early chimp-hominids standing on two feet at the edge of the forest peering over the savannah grasses those fifteen million years ago, wondering what its chances of a good meal were.

But we really do owe our success to a stable climate.

Over the last 20,000 years our population has boomed from 6,000 to 6,000,000,000, most of that during the last 8,000 years of the 12,000 year Holocene, during which the average pre-industrial CO2 levels are 280 ppm. Now, instead of throwing rocks we got the bomb. We’ve played with remote control buggies on Mars, and we get pics from our probes pressing ever on into the reaches of our galaxy.

However, not without a cost; having poured enough CO2 into the atmosphere to change the climate since 1850, long-term temperature trends have been going up at a rate unprecedented in all geologic time. Today, we find CO2 concentrations at 387ccm again, only this time the trend is on the way up, not down, and we don’t have the same benign prognosis as faced us last time, over that savannah clearing. Biodiversity, on which a healthy and bountiful environment depends, is predicted to fall, not grow like it did last time. Variety of food available to us will shrink as food chains fall apart and ecosystems fail, and economies falter. We know from past experience that the great carbon sinks of the planet, the oceans, will become more acidic eating away at the calcified micro biology of the bottom of the ocean, wiping it out. Already we can see that the permafrost is not so permanent, belching methane as it warms up. You might have seen the famous farting ice on You Tube.

This time, despite the prognosis we face under a business-as-usual scenario, we do have one major advantage: We don’t drag our knuckles on the ground any more, and as we survey our future for risk and reward, we have an understanding of the world we face, and how we impact it, and what we have to do to reduce that impact to a sustainable one.

The moral of the story of man is that we are happiest when living in the predictable climate of our pre-industrial years.

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Climate change: In graphics

Graphic depictions of the IPPCs predictions for emissions scenarios for the turn of the century. One way or another it is going to be hotter.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk It is "very likely" that human activity is the cause for climate change, scientists from over 130 countries have concluded. The graphics below illustrate their predictions on just how much global temperatures may rise over the next century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that temperatures are most likely to rise by 1.8C-4C by 2100. But the possible range is much greater; 1.1C-6.4C. The maps above show how a range of three different scenarios will affect different parts of the planet. The emissions scenarios, A1B, A2, B1, used to create the maps above, are based on a range of detailed economic and technological data. These versions of the future consider different population increases, fossil and alternative fuel use, and consequent CO2 increases. The broad range of outcomes they show is displayed in the charts below. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas, its rise since the industrial revolution is clear. Burning coal, using oil and deforestation Global Warning Climate Change

Take out a global warming denialist

If you seriously want to take the global warming sceptic to task, here is your ammunition. And why shouldn't you? The sooner they are extinct, the sooner the rest of us can concentrate on our survival.

h/t Fallenmonk

clipped from fallenmonk.blogspot.com NewScientist.com has done a great job in compiling a list of the 26 great misconceptions about Global Warming and climate change. This is an amazingly complex subject and the naysayers have endless arguments disclaiming the facts about how our world is changing for the worst. Now with the resources at NewScientist you can find a link to a specific article that in turn link to original research that will help you understand the details and refute arguments against Global Warming. For those who are not sure what to believe, here is the NewScientist round-up of the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions. There is also a guide to assessing the evidence. In the articles they've included lots of links to primary research and major reports for those who want to follow through to the original sources.

The relationship of truth to science

Seed Magazine explores an interesting topic in their latest edition.

clipped from www.seedmagazine.com Seed editor-in-chief Adam Bly on truth in science. by Adam Bly Posted April 30, 2007 10:17 AM We are living in a moment where our traditional sources of truth—legacy news outlets, heads of state, community leaders, etc.—have diminished in standing. Our collective cynicism, mirrored in our media through satire and irony, has helped expose an assault on reason and the often corrupt machinations of politics. And we're left having shifted the power equation but desperately lacking new ideas to fill the void that we have revealed. So now what? We are urgently in need of rational thought. We crave truth. Where does science fit in this pursuit?

Global Warning Climate Change

One Bolt doeth not a thunder-storm maketh

Climate change denial advocate, Andrew Bolt, doesn't know that the increase in average temperatures from around the globe, measured over time is what we commonly call "global warming". That's a lot of individual measurements, in the googles, yet he persistently claims to debunk the theory based on his observations of the temperature on any one day somewhere in the world. :::[Andrew Bolt Blog: Snowing on the warming parade]

Love the headline:

Snow won’t dampen global-warming rallies

And the story isn’t bad either:

The weather forecast for Saturday’s global warming rallies in Grand Rapids and Holland calls for snow and cold rain and temperatures in the 40s—about 10 degrees below normal.

For some, this might make global warming a tough sell.

It's a neat trick of the skeptics; I am sure it will get his regulars howling, "If they can't get a seven day weather forecast right, how can they get one of them one hundred years climate-model forecasts right, huh?".

Hmmm. Here's what global warming looks like as a snapshot of a real-time compilation of a gigantic network of ocean-borne sensors on bouys. The blue represents unexpected cooling, the yellow through to red represents unexpected temperature increase, and the white tells us that this area is as we would expect. As it should be. :::[The Age]
The absurdity of picking on a single temperature point somewhere in the world, "Grand Rapids and Holland", to support the "no-global warming" hypothesis; Yet Bolt soldiers on with his cunning brand of mendacity.

This is what one of his regular commenters, Nobull Warning, posted to the "Boltmoderators bouncing his blog", and then emailed me saying, "just in case it doesn't get posted, would I...?".

Dear Andrew,

The snowmaster speaks. This bit caught my attention...

"... but if we're really reasonable about it, we're not talking about individual weather on individual days," Locke said. "We're talking about something much larger, on a global scale, which science has been tracking for decades."

Funny that, a cultist calling for reason.

I thought the journo was ok, but a bit fuzzy with this line.

Opponents in the debate say natural events such as solar activity are causing the warm-up.

Everyone knows there are no opponents in the scientific debate, and as for the media debate, well that's just a pr smog job.

Nobull Warning from Leichhardt

Would I?

It wasn't the Bolt Moderators who roughly bounced me out his blog, it was the big man himself. Totally unreasonably too, I thought. Figures.

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IPCC's clarion call

Coming to an IPCC Report near you. :::[SMH: Window closing on planet's chances]

"Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt."

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due out tomorrow, and that is some of the wording just agreed upon between scientists and governments after last-minute objections from the US, China and Saudi Arabia over wording and graphics sparked an all night dispute.

I've been listening to the BBC coverage of the release. AGW's happening. And it's alarming. There is no other word. There is good observational data, now, to prove that the climate-models are accurately forecasting. Game over for sceptics, and game over non-renewable energy sources. Or it's game over for life as we know it. That's what they are telling us.

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UK politics now just a climate change auction

I started blogging about global warming, I dunno, about 14 months ago. Mainly out of a sense of frustration born of the media and greater public attitudes towards climate change. The media reported a 'debate' on global warming, while science reporters (and I) knew there was no question in the climatology community that it was happening. Big time.

It was an awful time. The media gave 50% of time to the reporting the facts of global warming, and 50% of the time to skeptics making a living from disputing these facts on decidedly unscientific grounds. Thinking like, "It's sheer arrogance and utter hubris to think that man can affect the climate", became reported as if this was reasonable logic. I would not have believed it, other than the fact that I had just witnessed an uncritical media swallow all the stories the White House spun, whole, and end up embedded in a UN unsanctioned military adventure trying to relive the Ted Turner Gulf War I glory days. Any Orwellian bullshit was possible. I was staring at a future that that I had been warned about in fifth form English literature. So I blogged, inspired after reading Flannery's The Weather Makers.

But by now the harsh reality of Iraq rented the cosy fabric of this mediaverse, and all sorts of light is streaming in. An Inconvenient Truth has woken the globe to global warming, and The Stern Report gave a financial framework for us to contextualise the problem within. Al Gore has an Oscar and Tim Flannery is the Australian of the Year. Hard to believe.

And now UK politics is a law and order, war on terror, national security, climate change auction. The Tories, Labour and Lib Dems are scrapping it out to take the green crown ahead of the Climate Change Bill tomorrow. Hot button issues are green house gases, green taxes, nuclear power, renewable energy and recycling. The truth is the winner.

We live in interesting times. :::[The Independent: Which political party is the greenest?]


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Back to reeducation camp for global warming ex-skeptic

In September 22, 2006, Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine published his Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore. Reason Foundation had been in receipt of $250,000 of ExxonMobil's money since 2000 - to promote a contrarian media view to the scientific consensus on global warming.

Earlier in the week, Bob Ward, the British Royal Society's senior manager for policy communication, had sent a letter to the oil giant ExxonMobil accusing it of funding groups that misinform the public about the reality of man-made global warming, asking it to cease and desist.

It's safe to say that Ward may count the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine and Reason Online as one of the 39 groups that he believes misleads the public on the issue of climate change. If that's the case, then at least some of the information that Ward says "misrepresents" climate change science may be past articles written by me. So the question is: Why did I do it? Did ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond hand me brown paper bags filled with stacks of unmarked bills in the back of taxis while whispering, "Ron, we're counting on your widely read and highly influential articles to help stave off the Green onslaught against our soaring profits"? Or was I a simple-minded dupe, passing along misinformation supplied to me during expensive lunches at the Palm by corrupt scientists who had been paid off by the oil giant? Or perhaps I am just generally skeptical of end-of-the-world scenarios and believe, as Carl Sagan famously did, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?

It's extraordinary that he didn't look at the extraordinary body of evidence that had been accumulating since before the first IPCC conference in 1988. Extraordinary he chose to base his skepticism on the discrepancy between ground temperatures, and atmospheric temperatures measured by satellites and by balloons. That's it.

Ronald Bailey's conversion was sudden. The day the scientific peer-review process established that satellites and weather balloons had not be measuring temperatures correctly, and that in fact the atmosphere is indeed experiencing upward trends in warming rates, as predicted by earlier climate models, he publicly recanted.

In August 2005, Science magazine published three papers that went a long way toward resolving the issue. One paper found that Christy and Spencer had failed to take proper account of satellite drift, which produced a spurious cooling trend to their dataset. Another found that the operation of weather balloons also tended to add spurious cooling to their data. When the corrections were made the satellite and weather balloon datasets were in better agreement with the surface thermometer datasets that showed higher warming trends. On the day that the studies were released I wrote a column for Reason in which I declared that my skepticism of man-made global warming was at an end. The column was titled, "We're All Global Warmers Now." The first line read: "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up."

The Committee for Reeducation note that the conversion is not total, and recommends further rigorous attention in this matter.

In the column, I quote Christy saying, "The new warming trend is still well below ideas of dramatic or catastrophic warming."

[...]

I reviewed former vice-president Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth for Reason. I agreed that Gore has "won the climate debate" and that "on balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science" though I argued he exaggerates just how bad future global warming is likely to be.

We further note that he has tried to deny that he is nought but a 'corporate shill', employing the same scant logic that makes the Reason Magazine masthead a major misnomer, and which fuels the media 'debate' on the scientific consensus.

ExxonMobil has been a supporter of the Reason Foundation. Folks at the foundation confirmed when I called yesterday that the company has donated a little over $250,000 since 2000. The company's latest contributions were $10,000 in 2003 and $20,000 this past January. The last contribution poses a possible conundrum for hard-line corporate conspiracy theorists because it arrived about five months after I declared, "We're All Global Warmers Now." I would suggest that ExxonMobil supports the Reason Foundation because my colleagues robustly defend the free enterprise system.

Er, ExxonMobil has given Reason Foundation $230,000 since 2000 to deny global warming, and then five months after the public conversion of Bailey, Reason's science correspondent for nearly eight years, they get another $20,000 in the post. And he uses this to deny he is a shill? There's a lesson for you in speed if you were the ship-jumping rat type.

Good Members of the Committee for The Global Warming Apocalypse Reeducation Unit of the One World Government, come on? You can bet your bottom carbon trading offset investments that, if Reason was so far off the money on the science and so slow on the evidence, their invoicing of ExxonMobil wouldn't be any quicker.

Our constitution allows us to accept conversions-in-full only. My recommendation to the Committee is for further reeducation - Ronald Bailey is to be subject to 500 hours of watching An Inconvenient Truth, and a further 25 hours of Al Gore's live PowerPoint presentations.

He'll have plenty of time to look at ALL that science that he got so wrong for so long. And to think about how much carbon dioxide was actually emitted into the atmosphere on his watch, and during his long career working for ExxonMobil funded think tanks. For penance he will write an insiders tell-all about big fossil-fuel's long and hard campaigning to sow public confusion about the global warming scientific consensus. Upon doing so, the Committee should determine his conversion as complete, and reset Ronald Bailey's status to good chap, and action all consequent privileges under the Single Government of the Global Carbon Economy.

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Cheney's money talks of an inconvenient truth

Dick Cheney is a scary guy to boldly express dissent to — no matter who your are.

If you are swarthy and have a beard, you run the risk of being rendered by the bloke's private army. Even if you are a CIA agent, you're not safe . A newly discovered hazard of the job — like you need more problems in that role — is that you risk being outed on his instruction for something you didn't do.

Like Valerie Plame was.

So if you were his investment funds manager you would pretty much tell him what he wants to hear, right?

Not, it seems, if your name is Jeremy Grantham, who is basically Cheney's money - talking - and the topic is global warming. :::[AOL News]

Step forward, Jeremy Grantham -- Cheney's own investment manager. "What were we thinking?' Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.

Titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data," Grantham's philippic^* adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.

What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined.

"Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change," he writes, "and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain."

Yet "there is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures," he writes. "The U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well-funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company)."

That's Exxon Mobil.

As for Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, who appears everywhere to question global warming, Grantham mocks him as "the solitary plausible academic [the skeptics] can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field."

And for those nonscientists who are still undecided about the issue, Grantham reminds them of an old logical principle known as Pascal's Paradox. It may be better known as the "what if we're wrong?" argument. If we act to stop global warming and we're wrong, well, we could waste some money. If we don't act, and we're wrong ... you get the picture.

As for the alleged economic costs of going "green," Grantham says that industrialized countries with better fuel efficiency have, on average, enjoyed faster economic growth over the past 50 years than the U.S.

Grantham says that other industrialized countries have far better energy productivity than the U.S. The GDP produced per unit of energy in Italy is 50% higher. Fifty percent. Japan: 60%.

And China "already has auto fuel efficiency standards well ahead of the U.S.!" he adds. You've probably heard about China's slow economic growth.

Grantham adds that past U.S. steps in this area, like sulfur dioxide caps adopted by the late President Gerald Ford, have done far more and cost far less than predicted. "Ingenuity sprung out of the woodwork when it was correctly motivated," he writes.

There is also a political and economic cost to our oil dependency, Grantham notes. Yet America could have eliminated its oil dependency on the Middle East years ago with just a "reasonable set of increased efficiencies." All it would take is 10% fewer vehicles, each driving 10% fewer miles and getting 50% more miles per gallon. Under that "sensible but still only moderately aggressive policy," he writes, "not one single barrel would have been needed from the Middle East." Not one.

I repeat: This is not some rainbow coalition. This is not even Al Gore. Grantham is the chairman of Boston-based fund management company Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo. He is British-born but has lived here since the early 1960s.

I love this bit: "What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined." Apoplexy anyone?

==

^*Global Warming Word Watch: Phi·lip·pic

n.

1. Any of the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon in the fourth century b.c.

2. Any of the orations of Cicero against Antony in 44 b.c.

3. philippic A verbal denunciation characterized by harsh, often insulting language; a tirade.

==

Other unflattering things I've said about Cheney

==

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Florida tornado kills 19 - withdraw emissions now

When I hear of a suicide bombing that kills a big number in Iraq straight after the Iraq Study Group withdrawal recommendations, I think, "C'on Bushy, surely this prompts you into taking the recommendations more soberly, and spurs you into a frenzy of remedial action?".

So the day after the release of the 2007 IPCC report telling us there is only a less than ten percent chance we are wrong about global warming, when I read of a tornado killing 19 in Florida, I think same.

Except now I can't stomach using the jovial "Bushy" to mask the depths of my feelings towards his incompetence - I am forced to see him as more defoliated and dumber in the light of reality, "C'on Twiggy^*, surely this prompts you into taking the recommendations more soberly, and spurs you into a frenzy of remedial action?": :::[SMH]

I am cautious attributing a single extreme weather event to global warming - one swallow doth not a summer make - but come on people, if you look up you can see entire gulps of swallows passing. We are way into the season.

Here is a summary of what the IPCC report has to say about extreme weather: :::[The Age: Key points in the UN experts' report]

Hurricanes

■ The report says it is "more likely than not" that a trend of increasing intense tropical cyclones and hurricanes has a human cause. It expects tropical cyclones to become more intense in the future. "There may not be an increase in number, there may be a redistribution to more intense events — which is what has been observed in the Atlantic since 1970," Mr Stott said

^*With apologies to Twiggy Lawson.

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2007 IPCC report released to the world

The much awaited 2007 IPPC Report was delivered in Paris last night: :::[SMH]

A turbulent future of violent storms, devastating drought, higher temperatures and rising sea levels is inevitable, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its 1200-page report in Paris last night. The work of 2500 scientists over six years, it is considered the most authoritative evaluation of climate change ever produced.

Great solemnity had marked it's release European cities. The 20,000 light bulbs on the Eiffel Tower were turned off for five minutes the night before, and blackouts were staged in the Colosseum in Rome and the Greek Parliament in Athens. The Spanish were not to be outdone and the Puerta de Alcal in Madrid, the Giralda Tower in Seville and landmarks in the ancient Mediterranean city of Valencia were plunged into darkness. There has been a sea-change in the general public awareness of global warming since the 2001 IPPC Report, boosted by the worldwide success of An Inconvenient Truth, and the conversions of big business to the need for a carbon price signal, and of the powerful Murdoch press to the cause. The release of the Stern Report knocked out the denialists argument that changing the status quo would send our economies into tailspin. It turns to the opposite is true - the cost of not reducing emissions is estimates to be 20 times the cost of not doing anything.

Six scenarios depicting temperature rises from 1.1 degrees to potentially 6.4 degrees Celsius are presented, along with the claim that it is 90 per cent certainty that we who burn fossil-fuels are the cause of the global warming of the last 50 years. The anthropogenic cause is now defined as "very likely" , whereas in the previous IPCC report it was defined as "likely", or a 65 per cent certainty.

The scientists have finished their job. Only fool waits for 100 per cent certainty of an impending and irreversible disaster.

The rest is up to us. The situation requires immediate and urgent and lasting action.


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Michael Duffy: New green heresy hunter

SMH's Michael Duffy has a crack at painting the 80% or so of us who acknowledge the science of global warming as members of a new green religion. It's an old motif that is done the rounds of the fossil-fuel think-tank shills who pose as journalists, but Duffy's own brand of spin is good for a belly laugh: :::[SMH]

In my lifetime I've experienced two religious movements, Christianity and Marxism. Now there's a third, the belief our civilisation is doomed unless we take urgent and significant action to reduce our output of carbon dioxide.

He's light-on in justifying this outlandish claim, and it is painful reading his tortured logic.

Late last year World Economics, a reputable and mainstream British academic journal, published a lengthy rebuttal of the review by 14 experts. It's worth quoting from the abstract at some length because the rebuttal has been almost completely ignored. Google Australia gives it 10 references compared with more than 10,000, mostly adulatory ones, for the Stern review itself.

That's fundamentalism in action, too.

Google might be surprised to know their algorithm shows fundamentalist neo-green religiosity. Go, the Gaiagle Algorithm. But you have to get dragged to the last sentence of his concluding paragraph before we see the point Duffy has been labouring so hard to make:

The non-religious view of global warming is this: we know the world has warmed slightly over the past century, but we don't know how much of this was caused by humans and how much by the natural variations in temperature that occur frequently. We have no idea if the warming will continue or, if it does, whether this will be good or bad.

"No idea if the warming will continue... "? This sounds familiar; "no idea whether there is a link between cancer and smoking... ".

"... or whether this will be good or bad". No? Not the findings leading to the first IPCC in 1980 at the Rio Earth Summit? Not those resolutions of Kyoto Protocol in 1988? Not the entire corpus of climate modeling studies? Not the scientific consensus measured by Naomi Oreskes as total? Not the Stern Report conclustions which tell us that not doing something will cost us 20 times what we need to spend on combating global warming? Not the observed climatic effects of climate change events, like the collapsing of the Lars B iceshelf? Not the recent public conversion of the last hold-out politicians like Howard, and Bush? Not the cry by big business for a carbon price signal, so they can get on with the business of makeing business plans?

None of this dents Duffy's faith. What can you say?

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Who is Frank Luntz? And why should you comply?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frank I. Luntz (born February 23, 1962), an American pollster. Luntz formed The Luntz Research Companies in 1992, and maintains offices in Arlington, Virginia and New York City. He is considered a master of the art of political propaganda, and his use of language has led to his career as what is termed a "compliance professional," someone who uses whatever means may be at hand (propaganda, marketing, polling, sales, politics) to induce the compliance of a target audience.

Frank Luntz is the advisor to big fossil-fuel and their back-pocket Administration. He advised them on "target audience compliance".

Although Luntz later tried to distance himself from the Bush administration global warming policy, it was his idea to discredit the idea of science to keep the issue from influencing voters in the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections. Luntz has since said that he is not responsible for what the administration has done since that time. Though he now accepts the scientific consensus that there is man-made global warming, he maintains that the science was in fact incomplete, and his recommendation sound, at the time he made it. ^[1]

Is this true? Sort of, and sort of not, and if true, then just true, just by the skin of its truth. I guess that's Luntz's job. No one had tested the scientific consensus up until that point, given that it had not been successfully challenged within the science community, rather it was added to as the picture became more complete.

The United States presidential election of 2004 was held on Tuesday 2 November 2004. The incumbent President, Republican George W. Bush of Texas defeated his main rival, Democratic Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts with 51% of the popular vote...

Then in the December 2004 issue of the journal Science Naomi Oreskes published "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" and established that it was uncontested amongst scientists.

The current scientific consensus is that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been attributable to human activities"[2]. The extent of this consensus was the subject of a study—published in December 2004 in the journal Science—that considered the abstracts of 928 refereed scientific articles in the ISI citation database identified with the keywords "global climate change". This study concluded that 75% of the 928 articles either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view — the remainder of the articles covered methods or paleoclimate and did not take any stance on recent climate change[3] [4].

By dint of a month Luntz could semantically claim the 100% consensus had not been measured. He now accepts the scientific consensus on global warming, but his work lives on in the handicraft of professional skeptics, like Andrew Bolt.

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