The Anti-Civilization Thread

Thread to be closed soon.

Given the tone of some of these posts and the controversial nature of the subject, this thread will be closed around midnight tonight. It's been going on for quite some time already and it's way beside the realm of this board.

M7

Mod 7 said:

Given the tone of some of these posts and the controversial nature of the subject, this thread will be closed around midnight tonight. It's been going on for quite some time already and it's way beside the realm of this board.

M7

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The later being quite an understatement. I'll stick to discussing politics on political forums from now on, where the definition of the word "debate" hasn't been completely lost...

Ziggy Montana said:

That thing you got up your ass, make sure you rince it well before sticking it in your mouth, it's your pacifier. Maybe you should pursue this discussion with Beatydigger: you two deserve each other.

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Hey that reminds me, after you liberals force gay marriage down our throats, the next great move will be gay polygamy. That way you, btyger, and Agrippa can all live the happy Canadian Dream.

I have a feeling that ZM will delete this thread before it will be closed by the Mods.

Ziggy Montana said:

Don't intent to, why so?

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You may be offended by Mods comment about closing the thread. In the past you were fiercy independent in your thinking/behavior.

Ziggy Montana said:

On an interesting note, I'm sure that the skeptics are well aware of the $12,000,000 + Exxonmobile silently passed on since 1998 to corporation think tanks, ultra-conservative institutions and their spokesperson, to discredit the conclusions reached by IPCC.

One of the most prominent detractor of the IPCC report is Richard Lindzen, btw, cited on this thread. His close affiliations with institutions like the George C. Marshal Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, the Tech Central Foundation and, last but not least, the Cato Institute, all ultra-conservative think tanks receiving funding from Exxonmobile should raise flags.

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Once again, attacking the source instead of addressing the arguments presented = lame debating tactic.

Now, because I'm sure you are intellectually honest, I hope you spend as much time trying to assess the credibility of those who write articles you agree with than those you don't.

Since we are on the topic of funding, I'm sure you are aware that, because of the immense popularity of the "alarmist" position, that scientists are under enormous pressure to support that position if they want to continue to receive funding. I'll let you figure out what kind of impact this might have on the validity of the scientific research that supports that popular position.

In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

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Ziggy Montana said:

It also says a lot about the poster here who's been zealously attacking the IPCC report, a 1,600 pages study btw.

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Really? And a 1,600 page study? Thanks for letting us know that there is a direct correlation between the validity of scientific reasearch and the size of the document presented. That's a fascinating theory.

Here's some more stuff for you to debunk, better make it quick, you only have til midnight.

Top scientist debunks global warming

By Simon Kirby

April 11, 2007 09:47pm

MANKIND is naive to think it can influence climate change, according to a prize-winning Australian geologist.

Solar activity is a greater driver of climate change than man-made carbon dioxide, argues Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and winner of several notable science prizes.

“When meteorologists can change the weather then we can start to think about humans changing climate,” Prof Plimer said.

“I think we really are a little bit naive to think we can change astronomical and solar processes.”

Speaking tonight after presenting his theory for the first time, to the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in Sydney, Prof Plimer said he had researched the history of the sun, solar and supernovae activity and had been able to correlate global climates with solar activity.

“But correlations don't mean anything, you really need a causation,” Prof Plimer said.

So he then examined how cosmic radiation builds up clouds.

A very active sun blows away the cosmic radiation, while a less active sun allows radiation to build up, he said.

“So you can very much tie in temperature, cloud formation, cosmic radiation and the sun,” he said.

The next part of Prof Plimer's research was to examine the sources of carbon dioxide.

He said he found that about 0.1 per cent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide was due to human activity and much of the rest due to little-understood geological phenomena.

Prof Plimer also argued El Nino and La Nina were caused by major processes of earthquake activity and volcanic activity in the mid-ocean ridges, rather than any increase in greenhouse gases. [Note by movielib: In all fairness, alarmists have not attributed El Nino and La Nina to global warming.]

Nor does the melting of polar ice have anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide, he said.

“Great icebergs come off, not due to temperature change but due to the physics of ice and the flow of ice,” Prof Plimer said.

“There's a lag, so that if temperature rises, carbon dioxide rises 800 years later.

“If ice falls into the ocean in icebergs that's due to processes thousands of years ago.”

On the same basis, changes to sea level and temperature are also unrelated to anything happening today, he said.

“It is extraordinarily difficult to argue that human-induced carbon dioxide has any effect at all,” he said.

Prof Plimer added that as the planet was already at the maximum absorbance of energy of carbon dioxide, any more would have no greater effect. [Note by movielib: While probably ¾ of the effect from a doubling beginning at 280ppm has already occurred (from 280 to 380), there is still a little warming CO2 can do.]

There had even been periods in history with hundreds of times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than now with “no problem”, he said.

The professor, a member of the Australian Skeptics, an organisation devoted to debunking pseudo-scientific claims, denied his was a minority view.

“You'd be very hard pushed to find a geologist that would differ from my view,” he said. [Note by movielib: among geologists he is probably right. They seem to be the most skeptical of the lot. While they are not climate scientists per se, I think it is a relevant, related field and many climate scientists ignore the geologists' contributions and knowledge at their peril.]

He said bad news was more fashionable now than good and that people had an innate tendency to want to be a little frightened.

But Prof Plimer conceded the politics of greenhouse gas emissions meant that attention was being given to energy efficiency, which he supported.

The professor, who is writing a book on the subject, said he only used validated scientific data, published in reputable peer-reviewed refereed journals, as the basis of his theories.

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And on the (supposedly) scientifically unatackable IPCC report:

April 11, 2007
Here We Go Again: Cherry Picking in the IPCC WGII Full Report on Disaster Losses

Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters

The IPCC WGII full report is available (hat tip: ClimateScienceWatch). I have had a look at what they say about disaster losses, and unfortunately, the IPCC WG II commits the exact same cherry picking error as did the Stern report.

Here is what IPCC says about catastrophe losses (Chapter 1, pp. 50-51):

- "Global losses reveal rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s. One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

The one study? Muir-Wood et al. 2006 that was prepared as the basis for our workshop last year with Munich re on Disaster Losses and Climate Change. Here is what we said when the Stern Report cherry picked this same information:

- "The source is a paper prepared by Robert Muir-Wood and colleagues as input to our workshop last May on disasters and climate change. Muir-Wood et al. do report the 2% trend since 1970. What Stern Report does not say is that Muir-Wood et al. find no trend 1950-2005 and Muir-Wood et al. acknowledge that their work shows a very strong influence of 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the United States. Muir-Wood et al. are therefore very cautious and responsible about their analysis. Presumably this is one reason why at the workshop Robert Muir-Wood signed on to our consensus statements, which said the following:

"Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions . . . In the near future the quantitative link (attribution) of trends in storm and flood losses to climate changes related to GHG emissions is unlikely to be answered unequivocally."

The Stern Report’s selective fishing out of a convenient statement from one of the background papers prepared for our workshop is a classic example of cherry picking a result from a diversity of perspectives, rather than focusing on the consensus of the entire spectrum of experts that participated in our meeting. The Stern Report even cherry picks from within the Muir-Wood et al. paper.

The full discussion by the IPCC WG II has a bit more nuance, but it is clear that they are reaching for whatever they can to support a conclusion that simply is not backed up in the broader literature. Can anyone point to any other area in the IPCC where one non-peer-reviewed study is used to overturn the robust conclusions of an entire literature? Here is the full discussion:

(On Economics...)

Economic losses attributed to natural disasters have increased from US$75.5 billion in the 1960s to US$659.9 billion in the 1990s (a compound annual growth rate of 8%) (United Nations Development Programme 2004). Private sector data on insurance costs also shows rising insured losses over a similar period (Munich Re Group 2005; Swiss Reinsurance Company 2005). The dominant signal is of significant increase in the values of exposure (Pielke and Hoppe 2006).

However, as has been widely acknowledged, failing to adjust for time-variant economic factors yields loss amounts that are not directly comparable and a pronounced upward trend through time for purely economic reasons. A previous normalization of losses, undertaken for United States hurricanes by Pielke and Landsea (1998) and US floods (Pielke et al., 2002) included normalizing the economic losses for changes in wealth and population to express losses in constant dollars. These previous national US assessments, as well as those for normalized Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, but this was before the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.

A ‘global’ catalogue of catastrophe losses was constructed (Muir Wood et al., 2006) normalized to account for changes that have resulted from variations in wealth and the numbers and values of properties located in the path of the catastrophes, using the method of Pielke and Landsea (1999). The global survey was considered largely comprehensive from 1970–2005 for countries and regions (Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, US, Caribbean, Central America, China, India and the Philippines) that had centralized catastrophe loss information and included a broad range of peril types: tropical cyclone, extratropical cyclone, thunderstorm, hailstorm, wildfire and flood, and that spanned high and low latitude areas.

Once the data were normalized a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% per year (see Fig. SM1.1). However, for a number of regions, such as Australia and India, normalized losses show a statistically significant reduction since 1970. The significance of the upward trend is influenced by the losses in the US and Caribbean in 2004 and 2005 and arguably biased by the relative wealth of the US, in particular relative to India.

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http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/p...o_again_ch.html

And, an embarassing graph on the cost of Disasters and Hazards that somehow made it into the IPCC...

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/p...st_embaras.html

I am (Pielke Jr., R.) amazed that this figure made it past review of any sort, but especially given what the broader literature on this subject actually says. I have generally been a supporter of the IPCC, but I do have to admit that if it is this sloppy and irresponsible in an area of climate change where I have expertise, why should I have confidence in the areas where I am not an expert?

Addendum, a few of the many problems with this figure:

1. Global average temperatures do not cause disaster losses, extreme events cause disasters, mostly floods and tropical cyclones.

2. if you can't attribute disaster losses regionally to changes in extremes, then you can't do it globally with a metric only loosely (at best) related to extremes.

2. A 9-year smoothing in a 35 year record?

3. The IPCC has said that 30 years is not sufficient for such an attribution analysis, a 35 year record with 4 degrees of freedom probably isn't either.

4. The Muir-Wood global dataset (if that is what is used) has huge error bars not noted here. Any global analysis should be matched with a regional summation.

5. The Muir-Wood dataset, without error bars, leads to opposite conclusions using a longer record to 1950. Why didn't they show that? I wonder . . .

6. Studies of floods and hurricanes at the regional level, around the world, do not support a relationship of average global atmospheric temperature and disaster losses.

7. A consensus conference with experts around the world came to very different conclusions. What happened to the importance of consensus?

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Mod 7 said:

Given the tone of some of these posts and the controversial nature of the subject, this thread will be closed around midnight tonight. It's been going on for quite some time already and it's way beside the realm of this board.
M7

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Mod 7, please don't end this very interesting conversation. Don't you think it might be better just to edit out the "naughty bits" (meaning of course, the totally pointless deviation into an old argument on Moslems)?

Well....I can't believe I read the whole thing. In fact, so in depth and detailed was this exchange between Justbob and Ziggy that I had to reread some parts multiple times before I could claim to have a comprehension of even half of what they were saying. I can say without the slightest bit of sarcasm that I am humbled by the intelligence of Justbob and Ziggy.

I was formulating my own ideas while reading page after page of this thread, only to find my conclusions stated quite succinctly in the excerpt of the Stern Review posted by Ziggy. That is, the problem of CO2 emissions is of such a scale and nature that it must be handled within an international framework. This is important not only because the supposed effects of CO2 emissions are borderless, but also because the measures that must be taken to deal with CO2 emissions will effect competitiveness, so that no nation will be willing to implement measures unless it competitors are also willing to do so at the same time. As we have seen, the governments of both Canada and the US have cited economic competitiveness in their calculations on what measures they are willing to take.

Another thing that struck me while reading this thread was the repeated drawing of political orientation into the argument. It seems to me however that the problem goes beyond politics. While an argument could no doubt be made that capitalist societies have been the largest contributors to the CO2 problem since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we shouldn't forget that Socialist Russia was a highly industrialized society, as were fascist Germany and Japan. The oil companies in China are state-owned, as is eighty percent of that country's economy. In any case, if the problem is to be solved within an international framework, politic orientation needs to be put aside in the same way that it would have to be in the case of a global pandemic.

The thread has centred mostly on the global warming problem, a issue toward which "violent action" is largely irrelevent due to the scale of the problem. Ziggy, our resident "anarcho-primitivist socialist" (I'm not sure what it means, but it sounds cool), has stated this himself. However, when it comes to localized environmental issues, I personally feel that violence is sometimes the only option. There's always going to somebody who calls it terrorism, but terrorism, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Usually it is the brown-skinned people fighting for their rights that get called terrorists. Make it a white guy doing the same thing and it's called "Walking Tall".

From what I've written above, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that my opinions don't coincide much with those of Justbob. But his arguments and the material he has posted have helped me revise my own opinions somewhat. First, I'm starting to think that there might be basis to the argument that "global warming" might be too ambiguous of a concept to act upon in any meaningful way. Making the goal to keep the temperature from rising five degrees over the next century will be a formidable task for a human race that promised a decade or so ago to reduce child poverty by XX percent, only to fail miserably at that goal. Think about it, if we can't succeed at a specific target like getting food into the mouths of starving children who we see dying on our television screen week in and week out, then how are we going to succeed at limiting a temperature increase of a few degrees over the next three to five generations? It is for that reason that I think that Justbob is onto something when he says we might be better off focusing on limited issues like reducing the emission of cancer-causing chemicals into the environment.

I would like to put forth to Ziggy, JustBob, Korbel and the other great minds in the merbite community that if we consider almost all the core issues tied to global warming, we can find adequate justification to take action on each one even if global warming is considered to be unproven. For example, auto and transportation emissions: these currently stem from the reliance on fossil fuels. We know that fossil fuels, upon which our civilization is highly dependent, are finite and being rapidly depleted. Competition for oil resources is already growing fierce and China and India have barely begun to whet their appetite. Is it unreasonable therefore to propose that quick action be taken to make sure that this precious resource is used optimally? And wouldn't such action ultimately be beneficial toward solving the global warming problem, even if it wasn't our stated aim and even if we didn't believe global warming was happening? Similar concrete and immediate justifications exist for prompt action on deforestation, coal emissions and most of the so-called causes of global warming. Even if we discount global warming, we are looking at a pretty grim future consisting of oil-wars, increased cancer, increased asthma, massive species extinction and reduced sperm counts unless we take action very quickly.