Love him or hate him, the man can win a debate. Andrew Bolt shares the results of the National Press Club Debate in Australia writing:
No wonder the warmists hate debate
The National Press Club debate’s results:
Lord Monckton – 10
Former Greens adviser Richard Denniss – 1
Journalists – 0.
Watch the video of the debate in full:
really does have a coronet and clock on !
should of course be
really does have a coronet and cloak on !
Australia is currently going through an incredible political moment in history.
Julia didn’t actually lie when she said there will be no “Carbon Tax” if she were elected. But, she wasn’t elected. She made a deal with the also unelected Greens to become PM. This is a deal with the devil and she must wear it.
Personally, I would hang them all as an example to future politicos who think politics is just a game, rather than about real lives of people.
Well, of course he won. The good lord Monckton is one of the most intelligent debater that is still active, the other ones kinda of snoozed off, permanently (the too early cowards).
What I think are the two most difficult issues for the horrible, terrible, terrorist, for crazed climate communist hippies with Lord Monckton are that he’s a luke warmer and he’s actually making proper references to the opposite, both of these equivocally confuse the crazed climate communist hippie extremists in their terrible logic of the horrible alarm.
And why are them crazed climate communist hippies so into his looks, I wonder? He being married and all, obviously have the looks. I’m figuring the sodding crazed climate communist hippies are trying out for marriage breakers!
the man can win a debate……
Al….baby.
The medical anology is just fine. I have just sent a note to the local paper. “My own mob, endorsed by the august Royal College of Physicians, let blood for a thousand years, and a bit more when you did not get better.” Likewise the consensus was that air came out of arteries, even though they carried swords and used them freely. In 1562 in Switzerland they tied a bloke to the stake and lit him for suggesting that blood came out- they knew how to fix “deniers’. A professor taught me that you cut out a melanoma with two and a half inches all round. I asked what you did for one on the nose and was told to sit down and shut up as they did not occur on the nose. I have only cut eleven off noses and have not taken both eyes and the mouth as well yet. Everyone knew that acne was caused by eating peanuts and chocolates and picking your zits in the mirror. I saw adolescent lemurs who grow glandular areas on the cheeks and rub them on tree boughs to mark out their territory and found the microscopic appearance was identical to acne. True or not the difference that yarn makes to an adolescent is spectacular. Consensus in medicine is a good sign to get your antenna up. Nowadays emphasis on “evidence based” but check the evidence anyway. We were warned not to read medical journals much for the first few years as we would not have the nous to sort the wheat from the chaff. Peer review was not mentioned as properly done it may ensure integrity but it sure does not ensure truth. I judged debates at Uni and scored it 9:1. The press did better than I expected which tells you something.
Any doctor who thinks like the Warmists that we can’t be wrong should read ” The Greatest Benefit to Mankind” and be very humble. Any warmist should be using double speak and weasel words so they won’t look quite so stupid in a few years time. Geoff Broadbent
In all this arguing over semantics, I get quite peeved over the use of the term “carbon” when it is really “carbon-dioxide” that is being discussed. Carbon-dioxide as I know it is one molecule of carbon combined with two molecules of oxygen. So the two terms are not interchangable.
And when mention of X megatonnes of “carbon” reduction is spoken about, does the tonnage include or exclude the oxygen component?
Then there is the definition of carbon-dioxide as a “greenhouse gas”. To my simple mind, oxygen is a greenhouse gas since oxygen is what is emitted by plants in a greenhouse whereas carbon-dioxide is normally absorbed in a greenhouse.
OK, so the smart ones will say I am confused since they are talking about the heat reflective properties of carbon-dioxide in that it traps the reflected heat just like the glass in a greenhouse.
But again, my simple mind concludes that the glass of a greenhouse blocks far more convective heat loss than reflective heat loss, and carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere does not block convective heat loss, so the analogy is poor.
Somebody educate me quick, I don’t have much time left.
Interesting how Lord Monckton cites actual papers, while his opposition cites the nebulous “thousands of climate scientists.”
I was taight the mnemonic at school “Do men ever visit beaches” , D = Duke, M=marquis, E=earl, V=Viscount, B=Baron” all are address as Lord. Just because the British parliament no longer wants to acknowledge the heriditary peers doesn’t make them any less valid. As a Commonwealth Subject I would still address him as M’Lord.
You all need to see the National Press Club ‘debate’ in its Australian context. Firstly it’s the first time 2 opposing speakers were chosen for what is a sole speaker invitation with time for press questioning after (get the precedent here?) and secondly PM Gillard after promising not to introduce a carbon tax in the last election campaign, has backflipped completely on that promise and just released details of a $23 tonne intro tax on ‘carbon’ (not CO2E note) devolving down the track to an ETS at a much higher rate. Opposition leader Abbott is promising to reverse it at the next election and polling shows around three quarters of the votes (2 party preferred as we have preferential voting) agree with him right now.
In that context notice how the NPC debate was really not about the science of AGW but focussed on the science/veracity of warmist policy prescription/s, albeit the protagonists had opposing views on the AGW science itself as having been settled. With no real substance other than ‘we gotta do sumpink’ appeal to emotion by Dennis and fallback on the insurance principle, Monckton simply agreed to agree with that premise and then proceeded to provide a damning actuarial anlysis based on the warmists best science ie notably the IPCC’s best scientific estimates. In the absence of Dennis, or any single economist, Lord or layman being able to debunk his calculations and sums, he rightly claims economic victory of fact over fictional emotion. Indeed he openly challenged all the press present to do their homework and prove his actuarial analysis wrong. Notice how none of them asked Dennis to do so, or if he couldn’t or wouldn’t, then logically we all had to defer to Monckton’s superior science re policy prescription/s. The only alternative is to accept the warmists’, post-normal science methodology and rely upon the settled consensus of voters. Take your pick warmists but either way you’re cooked according to those voter poll intentions. Frying pan or the fire, or as Monckton so poignantly posed- what about some comet bats while these warmists are at it folks? Game set and match!
The entire extreme AGW hypothesis falls apart if the planet’s feedback response is negative rather than positive. (See links below.) I do not see comments above or at the Real Climate blog addressing the published data. The Real Climate response is name calling and blocking of those who persist in bring up the facts that disprove the hypothesis.
The extreme AGW supporters and those who will profit from the trillions of dollars spent: on carbon trading, on the carbon monitoring bureaucracy, and on carbon sequestration do not want a debate because current and past observational data, analysis, and the paleoclimatic record does not support the hypothesis. It is necessary to cover up the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age to prevent the general public from understanding that planetary temperature changes cyclically with correlation to the solar magnetic cycle (There are almost a hundred published peer reviewed papers support that assertion and the mechanisms.) The 20th century warming has not exceed the temperature range in the last 1000 years and most certainly has not exceeded the warmest period in the Holocene interglacial period.
Calling people “deniers” and appealing to consensus is a propaganda tool. Stating the science is settled is not justification for wasting trillions of dollars. The general public has no idea how much public funds is proposed to be wasted on this boondoggle and how little benefit will result from those expenditures. That is the issue that needs to be discussed. Well meaning people need to understand that critical analysis is required to optimize public policy.
I specifically challenge anyone including those writing in the RealClimate blog or anyone in the Media to try to present scientific evidence and a logical argument why trillions of dollars should be spent and an estimate for what the trillions of dollars will be spent on and what specific will result be achieved after the trillions of dollars are spent.
What CO2 level do you want? How much public funds is required to achieve that level? Hansen has stated 340 ppm. Atmospheric CO2 is 390 ppm now. The observational data indicates the IPCC prediction models are obviously incorrect. Is that not relevant? Plants eat CO2. We are carbon based lifeforms. The biosphere is significantly more productive when CO2 levels are higher. That is a fact not a theory. Is that fact not relevant?
What is the point of reducing atmospheric CO2 if the planet’s feedback response is negative? Note there is limited public funding to spend. Massive taxes of companies will have an effect. It is ridiculous that we have proceeded to this point without critical honest discussion of the facts and reality.
The current and proposed spending related to the extreme AGW hypothesis is not getting public or scientific attention as those in the media are not doing their job. Calling anyone a “denier” who critically discusses the issues provides a very effective cover for the AGW corporate and bureaucratic leaches.
As most are aware Western Governments have a sever financial crisis to address. Trillions of public spending will need to be cut to balance budgets to avoid a currency collapse. There are fixed limits to economic science.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data
[1] Climate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data. It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem in climate prediction.
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy_pubs.html
LIMITS ON CO2 CLIMATE FORCING FROM RECENT TEMPERATURE DATA OF EARTH
The global atmospheric temperature anomalies of Earth reached a maximum in1998 which has not been exceeded during the subsequent 10 years. The global anomalies are calculated from the average of climate effects occurring in the tropical and the extratropical latitude bands. El Niño/La Niña effects in the tropical band are shown to explain the 1998 maximum while variations in the background of the global anomalies largely come from climate effects in the northern extratropics. These effects do not have the signature associated with CO2 climate forcing. However, the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback.
Recently and independently two of our media quoted alarmists explained that a greenhouse works by letting in the sun light to warm the ground, which warms the air and the house stops it blowing away. It actually works by transmitting the shorter wavelength higher energy infrared from the sun in but not transmitting the low energy longer wavelength infrared from the plants out. Sometimes they blow in a bit of CO2 to give the plants more building material. Usualltythe materials chosen are glass or clear plastic. Earth has chosen water vapour, methane, CO2 and a few odds and ends to make up the last 1%. The reason CO2 does not matter much is that it absorbs infrared in three specific wave lengths with gaps in between and once saturated they cannot widen. You could be forgiven for wondering why the alarmist professors do not comprehend such simple physics. Geoff Broadbent
A good debate. Denniss was no slouch. However, he can’t get past the point that consensus is not science. Capernicus was a skeptic, Galileo was a skeptic, and Einstein was a skeptic.
Popular opinion does not make truth. If it did, Nixon would have been the greatest US president. He carried 49 out 50 states in the 1972 election.
Smokey says:
July 20, 2011 at 12:50 pm
“The people who obsess about whether Viscount Monckton is a real Lord or not…”
____
Need to seriously get a life. Who cares what title by birth he has or hasn’t? It adds no more or less credibility to his arguments. Best to look at the number of peer reviewed scientific research papers he’s written on the subject of climate to see what kind of credentials he has to speak on the subject of climate…oh, yeah, that would be a problem…so what other criteria could be used?
Gates says:
“Need to seriously get a life. Who cares what title by birth he has or hasn’t?”
Well, R Gates certainly seems to care. No doubt the article title tortures our 75/25 wacko.☺
Climate science is a branch of environmentalism, in terms of its recent recruits. It’s not as though there were lots of objective-scientist climatologists sitting around who bought into this scare. Rather, scare-mongers recruited, credentialed, and “placed” followers in influential positions.
Warmism is inculcated in its students’ texts and classrooms, and thereafter in faculty lounges, etc. It’s biased by those things (e.g., it is strongly pro-regulatory & pro-precautionary, and suffers from a messianic delusion and a finger-pointing reflex), and also by the whole fields’ prominence being dependent on there being a credible threat of catastrophe. Then there’s the bandwagon effect, the fashionable fad effect, the academia-nut effect, etc. It’s just advocacy research, dressed up in bafflegab.
Here, free for all, is a word I coined yesterday: Nonsensus!
R Gates says – “Best to look at the number of peer reviewed scientific research papers [Lord Monckton]’s written on the subject of climate”
as usual, some things are not as simple as they may appear at first.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/sppi_press_release_monckton_paper_peer_reviewed.html
Anyway, to resolve the issue in a scientific manner, and to get away from the field of personal attacks, why don’t you simply address the paper itself and tell us whether it is correct.
Seems very odd that the google website which addresses Lord Monckton’s comments about the IPCC admitting in its AR4 report that climate cannot be predicted by models because of its complex, non linear, chaotic behavior (listed in James Sexton’s comment) is now showing a 404 error. I had made earlier reference to this site and read the exact IPCC statement as noted by Lord Monckton in his debate. I am suspicious that google may have dumped this site because too many people were seeing the truth.
@SteveE – you say:
QUOTE
Firstly, according to both GISTEMP and HADCRUT3 (satellite data only began in 1979), the global temperature trend since 1970 is 1.6–1.7°C per century. Secondly, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has been accelerating (not linear). The rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 in the 2000′s (2.2 parts per million by volume [ppmv] per year) was in fact 47% faster than the rate of increase in the 1990s (1.5 ppmv per year). Monckton uses these incorrect assertions to create the support for his incorrect argument – that if we continue with business-as-usual, global temperatures over the next century will increase at a constant, linear rate (or slower).
ENDQUOTE
By your own numbers you actually AGREE that warming was faster when CO2 was increasing at 1.5ppm per annum than today when its increasing 2.2ppm per annum. You demonstrated that warming has slowed with increased CO2 rate of production. Congratulations for supporting Monktons argument.
R Gates
According to your theory on papers published I should only listen to this doctor on vaccinations
The story began with the publication in 1998 of a study led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Appearing in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, the report connected the MMR vaccine to autism and stomach problems in 12 children, a supposed new bowel-brain “syndrome.”
End
Good thing I didn’t listen to this peer-reviewed doctor
An in-depth investigation just published in a prominent medical journal alleges that a decade-long effort to link childhood vaccinations with autism was really an elaborate hoax perpetuated by a British doctor who has since been banned from practicing medicine in that country.
The doctor’s original research, first published in 1998, turned many parents away from immunizing their children, which some experts now link to recent outbreaks of illnesses that had once been well under control.
“The MMR [measles-mumps-rubella vaccine] scare was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud,” Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, which published details of the new investigation on Jan. 5, said in a statement. “Such clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare.
End
The sad thing is children will keep on dying thanks to this doctor,because parents still believe the hoax.
So much for peer review,works really well doesn’t it?
Michael Crichton is the man I really miss. His debates were great.
Watching this whole debate, it was rather thin on science which disappointed me, but what can you expect from two non-scientists. But in the one bit of science that Monckton did bring forward, he seem to get it quite wrong. He seemed to say that human’s have caused the equivalent of a near doubling of CO2 concentration since 1750, and the climate in central England had only warmed by 0.9C (which he said is a good proxy for global temps).
Now, I don’t know how he has computed this equivalent “doubling” of CO2, but the last I checked, CO2 has only gone up by about 40% since 1750, going from 280 ppm to 394 ppm. So, if you took the true doubling since 1750, that would be mean we would be at 560 ppm. If we take 0.9C of warming then to have occurred by the actual 40% increase of CO2 since 1750, then when we arrive at the true doubling of CO2 of 560 ppm by 2100, then taken as a simple linear projection that would equate to somewhere around 2C of warming by that date, and of course, even with some modest positive feedbacks (such as sea ice melting, water vapor increases, and methane releases from arctic permafrost melt) it is not hard to see how 3C of warming would easily be attainable with a doubling of CO2.
So, honestly, what is he talking about when he says an equivalent doubling of CO2 since 1750?
You can jump to the point in the video here, and decide for yourself about his “doubling” comment and the 0.9C warming we’ve seen so far:
in my previous post, I tried to post the exact point in the video, but for some reason the link failed. Lord Monckton’s comment about the doubling of CO2 since 1750 and the 0.9C temperature increase can be found at approximately 41:10 in.
Larry Hamlin – is this what you are looking for:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm
14.2.2.2 : “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.“
Nolene,
You raise a very good point, and that’s exactly why I form my opinion based on the consensus of peer-reviewed scientific research. Note: This consensus is not a consensus of opinion, but rather a consensus of research findings. Big difference. Consensus of findings in peer reviewed research is the key to moving science forward. It is foolish to base any scientific opinion on one or even two or three research papers. But has the papers grow and all begin to point towards the same general thing, then you start to solidify your position. That’s why my opinion has been formed after reading hundreds of papers over many decades.
R. Gates says:
July 20, 2011 at 10:46 am
Ah, if only scientific truth were determined by who could win a debate.
R. Gates says:
July 20, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Watching this whole debate, it was rather thin on science which disappointed me,
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Ha ha ha. Ready, fire, aim.
Ooopsie