John Coleman's TV Special Tonight – Global Warming: The Other Side

John Coleman is a corny, old-style weather forecaster here in San Diego who as noted above does all kinds of funny things with his voice to amuse his audience. That said, he’s also a visionary who started the The Weather Channel and is as tough as nails. That toughness will be on display tonight, I’m sure. He was among the first broadcast meteorologists to smell a rat on the subject of AGW.
I will be watching.

Martin Brumby (13:27:55)
I think most [possibly all] of the UK coal powered stations are due to be decommissioned in about 5 years. Also all the UK nuclear power stations are operating past their expected lifetimes. This means that in 5 years we could have lost 60% of our generating capacity. There are no plans to build new coal fired stations, and although a new nuclear program is touted I am not even sure if it off the starting block, and anyway – you don’t build them overnight.
Most of this will be down to the madness of King Gordon, who would rather see Britain destroyed than contemplate a viable energy policy which may offend his AGW beliefs.
Even the £100 billion wind farm initiative is unlikely to have much in place by that time, and as you point out – how effective will it be anyway.

It’s 9.40am Friday where I am and you guys still haven’t reached 9pm Thursday. *sigh* HURRY UP! I want to see the webcast! 😛

Re: Martin Brumby (Jan 14 13:27),
Last week I sent the following letter to the editor of DT:-
“Sir,
Whilst we are all greatly indebted to The Daily Telegraph for the excellent investigatory journalism that resulted in the exposure of the disgraceful state of affairs regarding our MP’s expenses, is it not now the time to assign your intrepid journalists to the investigation of the potential scientific/political fraud that is Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Would not MP’s being allowed to base Cap and Trade policies on unsound science represent a far greater misappropriation of public funds rendering their expenses misdemeanours a total irrelevance?
Or is it The Daily Telegraph’s stance that the “science is settled”?”
Didn’t see it in the letters column, but am I surprised? Bags second with your machine gun!

James Sexton (12:01:27) :”You mean they lied???? How can this be? There is/was a consensus!!!!!”
Sad but true, The Team has been putting the “con” in “consensus” for 150 years. They’ve also taken the science out of conscience.
(Note: I was able to extend the record back 150 years by stitching the snake-oil-salesmen and eugenics proxies to actual measurements taken of The Team)

Mariss:
I just printed Cass Sunstein’s article from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 and am going to read it carefully tonight.
Here’s a particularly interesting quote from Sunstein’s paper:
“We suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.”
Now, this is a real hoot, when you think about it. Two questions come to mind:
Question #1: “Who is it in the global warming controversy that constitutes the ‘hard core of extremists,’ and who suffer from a ‘crippled epistemology?'”
OK, now that the answer to that question is obvious, here’s question #2: “who has been doing the best work ‘introducing beneficial cognitive diversity’ into the minds of that hard core of extremists and their zillions of gullible followers?”
If the answer isn’t clear, I’ll spell it out:
C-O-N-T-R-I-B-U-T-O-R-S T-O W-A-T-T-‘-S U-P !!!!
Thank you everyone, for helping preserve the 1st amendment!
Ken in North Dakota

Mariss, Others:
I finished the first half of Cass Sunstein’s original article, in which he discusses the mechanisms that shape the epistemologies of conspiratorial-minded groups. The second half is devoted mostly to his ideas about government policy–I doubt I’ll find much to admire there. But there are some brilliant observations on pages 12 and 13 that do a pretty good job explaining the dynamics at work within a conspiratorially-minded group known to readers of this site as the “hockey team.” Here is a sample. I’ve deleted the footnote markers.
6. Group polarization occurs for reasons that parallel the mechanisms that produce cascades. Informational influences play a large role. In any group with some initial inclination, the views of most people in the group will inevitably be skewed in the direction of that inclination. As a result of hearing the various arguments, social interactions will lead people toward a more extreme point in line with what group members initially believed. Reputational factors matter as well. People usually want to be perceived favorably by other group members. Once they hear what others believe, some will adjust their positions at least slightly in the direction of the dominant position. For purposes of understanding the spread of conspiracy theories, it is especially important to note that group polarization is particularly likely, and particularly pronounced, when people have a shared sense of identity and are connected by bonds of solidarity. These are circumstances in which arguments by outsiders, unconnected with the group, will lack much credibility, and fail to have much of an effect in reducing polarization.
7. Selection effects. A crippled epistemology can arise not only from informational and reputational dynamics within a given group, but also from self-selection of members into and out of groups with extreme views. Once polarization occurs or cascades arise, and the group’s median view begins to move in a certain direction, doubters and halfway believers will tend to depart while intense believers remain. The overall size of the group may shrink, but the group may also pick up new believers who are even more committed, and in any event the remaining members will, by self-selection, display more fanaticism. Group members may engage in a kind of double-think, segregating themselves, in a physical or informational sense, in order to protect their beliefs from challenge by outsiders. Even if the rank and file cannot coherently do this, group leaders may enforce segregation in order to insulate the rank and file from information or arguments that would undermine the leaders’ hold on the group.
Members of informationally and socially isolated groups tend to display a kind of paranoid cognition and become increasingly distrustful or suspicious of the motives of others or of the larger society, falling into a “sinister attribution error.” This error occurs when people feel that they are under pervasive scrutiny, and hence they attribute personalistic motives to outsiders and overestimate the amount of attention they receive. Benign actions that happen to disadvantage the group are taken as purposeful plots, intended to harm. Although these conditions resemble individual-level pathologies, they arise from the social and informational structure of the group, especially those operating in enclosed or closely knit networks, and are not usefully understood as a form of mental illness.
It seems to me this sheds some light on the machinations of Michael Mann and his inner circle, whose actions would seem to place them (and not their critics) as funcional conspiracists. I have a feeling Steve McIntyre would find Sunstein’s analysis quite relevant.
The whole paper (30 pages) can be downloaded in pdf format from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
Thanks Everybody for your Comments.
Ken in North Dakota

@Anticlimactic (15:25:41) :
Yes, the Large Combustion Plant Directive (from the Real government in Brussels) will mean that virtually all the coal fired power station will have to be shut down by 2015. But the 2015 date is based on them just picking up odd peak demand rather than generating at base load. So when the stations are ‘showing what they can do’ (as they have been doing for the last month) then that 2015 date comes forward.
Expect to see them starting to be shut down early 2012 unless there is a change in policy. But from which political party???
No one has remarked, so far as I can see, that investment in new clean coal power stations using technology developed in Grimethorpe (near Barnsley) in the late ’70s and ’80s would get around twice as much electricity out of a tonne of coal as the old workhorses that are keeping the lights on at present. And with lower emissions. Just a tad more attractive that another £100 Billion worth of wind turbines!
Maggie Thatcher & John Major shut Grimethorpe down and many of the boffins went to America and got involved in designing the most efficient coal burning power stations now operating in the US.
But the government here says there is no future for coal in the UK without Carbon Sequestration. This, of course, will effectively halve the efficiency and has never been demonstrated on a large scale. People working in the industry aren’t expecting to see a real plant working for 10 years.
You couldn’t make it up.