Upcoming: Spectator Global Warming Debate

Can not be there but would love to see the debate, hopefully it will be taped, i for one would buy it. Why is the good Lord Monkton not in the debate, now that would really be worth the price of the plane ticket to see.
Roger i hope your right about it finally beginning

The warmist side hasn’t won a proper debate in ages. because in proper debates you have to follow the rules – no appeals to consensus or appeals to emotion.

It is difficult to win a debate you already lost. Sort of like the fraud paying his barrister with a bad check.

I would love to see a good debate. But this one makes it look like it is a debate between politicians and scientists.
Nigel Lawson and Graham Stringer may be good men, but they are politicians. Benny Peiser may be a good man, but he is not earth scientist or climate scientist.
Tim Palmer is professor of climate physics. David King is listed as former chief science advisor to the government, but he trained as a physical chemist and was even considered for a Nobel Prize. Simon Singh is a science writer… okay, that may not mean much.
Even if Lawson, Stringer and Peiser win people may say “They’re politicians! They’re good at talking. The real scientists are on the other side.”
I would rather see politicians debate politicians and scientists debate scientists. Are there no skeptical scientists in the UK willing to step up for a debate?

K, carry the day, guys! Carry the day. There is much at stake. For this day, the world turns its weary eyes towards you. Do it right, and do it well.
Godspeed.

Would be fun to watch. I see some version of Dr. Strangelove pounding on a hockey stick chart and getting delirious. And some Dead Parrot moments.
But what’s this “Global Warming”? It thought “Climate Change” or “Climate Disruption” was the fuzzy new term. So, a weasel could say, yes, Global Warming Hysteria is over because now we need to shift to Climate Disruption Hysteria. The kind that fears warmcold, and keeps feeding the Green Pig.
Anyhow, it will be fun watching the spin come out of this.

Anthony – you absolutely must inform your readers how we can view this debate in its entirety. I live in the western U.S. and cannot afford the travel, but I, too, would be more than willing to buy a dvd of the debate. Where can we subscribe to it?

Steven Mosher says:
March 7, 2011 at 11:18 pm
The debate is not about the science.>>>
That sentence would be of so much more value of it was followed by what the debate IS about…

Just as others have said here; the balance is wrong. Clearly the scientists in the opposition camp will make hay leaving all sorts of straw men around for the politicos to fall over. I’ve got really bad vibes about this.

I am not convinced that this will be an impartial debate and with Andrew Neil moderating, the chances of the alarmists winning this is quite high.

I really hope that this is a bright light beginning to shine for the skeptics. Make sure that you write to your MP, a letter, not an email. MPs are obliged to answer letters addressed to them at the Houses of Parliament. The only way to get the “great and good” to listen to the rest of us is to be a real pain in the A**, in a nice polite way.
Good for the Spectator, good for common sense, good for true science. The current view of the Met Offfice in the UK is that they would give more accurate forecasts by checking pine cones every morning.

Meanwhile in Australia, the following TV interview was held jus a few minutes ago.
Hot off the airwaves:
Chris Ulman is the new joint presenter on the Australian ABC 7.30 pm news review program.
Chris really got stuck into Julia Gillard, the Austrailian PM who is touring the USA.
He told her, very directly, that the world is moving away from taxing carbon (read CO2 emissions), particularly in the USA.
After the interview, he subsequently went into some detail on this.
He also challenged the PM on the record low rating of her Labor government in the latest public opinion polls.
He commented that the government were doing just as bad a job as did former PM Kevin Rudd.
KR lost his position as PM in large part because he had lost the debate on CO2 taxes.
This is the first time that anybody on the ABC TV has come clean about the real position.

I agree with Ron Cram on his general point. The BBC often pits an alarmist scientist against a skeptical politician or journalist and more often than not the scientist comes across more convincingly, but not always.
However Graham Stringer studied chemistry etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Stringer

Ken Hall 12:31:
Andrew Neil is decidedly sceptical. He won’t let alarmists get away with any of their usual rubbish.

Andrew Neil will be fair and impartial, you just have to look at a couple of his other small debates he had on his own program, regarding climate issues, to recognise this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d23B-R2-qw

This is what is going to be debated:
“The number of people in the UK who do not believe in global warming has doubled in the last two years, according to a poll from the Office for National Statistics. Does this represent an alarming success in a war against science? Or the common sense of a British public who can see the claims of the climate alarmists dissolve before their eyes?”
So it isn’t about AGW as such, but about ‘anti-science’ v ‘common sense’.
Having Graham Stringer, MP, participating is a stroke of genius. He is a Labour MP, but he also is a scientist and was the only one in the various Parliamentary Special Committee meetings about the whitewashes to ask the pertinent scientific questions which infallibly had the likes of Jones, Oxburgh etc squirm.
Can’t go meself, so am hoping for a video. Perhaps someone will do a liveblog, e.g. here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/

As nearly everyone has mentioned: What is the specific question? There is no clarity in the announcement. It may be only a debate over the poll results, and what would be the point of that?

I smell a setup. This will just be an attempt to “whitewash” the “Debate” the same as they whitewashed Climategate.
The Royal Society on the “Against” side?
Come on.

@Joanna
From your experience, how would you expect this debate to pan out?

I would love to watch this and throw in with all the others for a webcast or DVD.
Personally I hope this is about the politics as IMHO the science is not the crux: in the ‘which came first’ debate the politics or the science the resounding winner and inescapable conclusion is the politics.
I mean really, what hard science are they going to promote? Two beakers with thermometers, one with a higher ppm of CO2 and a couple of 100watt bulbs? The only “science” they have is model based. Or maybe they’ll bring up a century dead hypothesis by Arrhenius, that he later recanted?
It is no longer possible even to say with a straight face that CO2 drives global temps due to the fact that CO2 has risen 40% and the temp has gone up in tenths of a degree C (0.7C)…really? That’s going to be their argument?
Whe it sounds like, smells like, tastes like, looks like, and feels like natural variability to anyone with common sense and even a surperfluous knowledge of historical climate, then that’s what it is and that is why they can’t get their message across. No, they will keep it as political as possible with just sound bites of science from the AGW camp (stick and jab, then run away).
Hopefully (assuredly?) Stringer et al will be on their game. Politics is what started this mess (again, IMO) and hopefully that’s where it will end. As soon as all the enabling / motivating / corrupting grants dry up so will the charlatan “scientists” leave town. Who knows? After all the harm they’ve done maybe a few will even be tarred & feathered while others will end up in the pokey. 🙂

The Spectator has been the most critical part of the mainstream British media. The editor Fraser Nelson went head to head with Bob Ward on Climategate and a recent article by Matt Ridley explained the significance of the O’Donnell refutation of Steig.
Some doubts have been expressed about the impartiality of Andrew Neil. If anything he has shown his colours more for the sceptic side of debate both in his blog and interviewing true believers.
Graham Stringer, though a politician now was a scientist: the only one on the Commons Select committee and the only one to have read The Hockey Stick Illusion.
Expect a good debate.

Sorry to disagree with Max, but belief is an inevitable factor in all spheres. The idea that science itself is outside of “belief” is a false belief in itself, one of the biggest delusions of the day, and falsified by many examples from history. Indeed, any poll of opinions is about beliefs – the way someone is thinking based upon their particular received/interpreted knowledge, and is integrated into their world view usually to support it.
It is hard to separate two belief systems (AGW and non-AGW in this case), so both sides wish to take the “pure science” high ground, pretending that belief has nothing to do with it. In both cases it is not true, but neither side can afford to admit it.

I think there certainly is a war on science, but it’s coming from within.
Scientific inquiry has been co-opted by propagandists (and by PhDs who’ve either been bought or brainwashed by politicians and investors who had their eye on making it big in the carbon credits scheme). Science should not be a matter of “repeat after me”. It ought to be about observation and experimentation and learning new things about the world.
It’s time for scientists who genuinely believe in scientific inquiry to take back their field of study. And it’s time for regular folks (like me) to stop nodding and turning the page when we read nonsense in the paper. I’d like to think the game is up. I guess time will tell.

What a shame. There is no sensible motion there to debate.
Just about everybody, whatever his or her view on climate science, will agree that hysteria is bad and sanity is good.

I have a bad feeling about this. I couldn’t believe that this, in fact, was the motion to be debated:
\\ “The number of people in the UK who do not believe in global warming has doubled in the last two years, according to a poll from the Office for National Statistics. Does this represent an alarming success in a war against science? Or the common sense of a British public who can see the claims of the climate alarmists dissolve before their eyes?” //
Let’s take the three sentences in order:
1. \\ The number of people in the UK who do not believe in global warming has doubled in the last two years, according to a poll from the Office for National Statistics. //
Is this an undisputed fact? Seems pretty fuzzy to me. What poll? When? How was it worded?
It if is a fact, the public is stupid because global warming is a physical fact — otherwise this planet would be an ice cube. The is not “global warming”, but “Catastrophic Global Warming” that the public finding increasingly dubious.
So is it the public “do not believe in global warming” or that the public “do not believe in global warming [as an imminent threat to our lives]” As the ridiculous premise is stated it should call into question the competence (and fairness) of the organizing body.
2. \\ Does this represent an alarming success in a war against science? // Yep, sure does. Global warming is a physical fact. If the public does not believe in a physical fact, it must be because they have been fooled into a fantasy. Of course, it might be public science education is atrocious. Or it might represent incredibly bad polling questions. Or bad reporting of poll results. Thanks to a poorly formed premise, this is a mess.
Only the third sentence gives hope to a “skeptic”
\\ Or the common sense of a British public who can see the claims of the climate alarmists dissolve before their eyes? // To argue this one, you must put on display for ridicule the claims of climate alarmists [and alleged alarmists, fortunately this is inclusive]. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. It is a target rich environment.
And then, in the summer of 1988, public concern over climate change reignited dramatically. Heat waves and droughts were already flaring up when NASA scientist James Hansen made his famous appearance before a Congressional committee chaired by Senator Tim Wirth as, outside the building, temperatures reached an all-time high. Hansen said to journalists afterwards that it was time to “stop waffling, and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”.xxiii As the summer wore on – with Hurricane Gilbert, the worst forest fires in a century and the Mississippi River falling so low that barge traffic was halted – the media leapt on climate change as never before. The number of American newspaper articles about global warming rose tenfold between 1987 and 1988; and by September 1988, polling found that 58 per cent of Americans had heard or read about the greenhouse effect http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/birth-of-IPCC.html

The picture accompanying the advert is a bit worrying … bloated plutocrat using the world!

It really is sad. Here are these people at The Spectator sincerely trying to promote rational debate, and yet they completely fail to formulate a motion that would promote rational debate.
It’s still not too late. The Spectator should have another try, and if some of their advertised speakers then say they aren’t happy to debate a straightforward one-simple-sentence motion, then so be it.

“The global warming hysteria is over”
The assumption that man-made CO2 caused the Warming. The believers believe this assumption and the sceptics are sceptical of this assumption.
“Time for a return to sanity”
Understanding the importance of trying to prove an assumption to be right or wrong using an Atmospheric chamber (Jaworowski, 2007) or the Atmosphere of Mars (Ferenc M. Miskolczi, 2007) to prove that Man-made CO2 has produced an irrelevant 0.01 Kelvin increase in over 100 years.