Thanks for the reply.

Can I say that I am, frankly, delighted that you have come out on the side of evidentially based politics?

Lets let the evidence take us where it may.

A word to the wise? It was not at all clear that that was what you thought. Your writing style needs revision. Try emphasising the positive thoughts up front. You’ll get a lot more kudos.

Remember also that, when you write on this interwebby thingy that it is not just thee and me. Other folk read, but don’t write. You, and I, have a small audience. Try writing for them. It works for me.

We both agree that human endeavours are both the origins and solutions of the problem we are faced with and we both agree as to the logic of many courses of action in order to do the best we can to take the correct preventative measures against the worst that can happen. I find it ridiculous that we are splitting hairs over how direct the consequences of the changhing climate on our society are. All I am trying to warn against is the potential for additional or as yet unseen consequences that may or may not be more damaging, which remains an area of investigation still incomplete. The environment is an ecosystem after all and includes all the feedback loops which should be expected of one.

I find it more helpful to identify points of agreement and work from there rather to find the points of disagreement and build a cleavage. But as they say…if you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger.

So, I take it, that you agree that applying the precautionary principle is the only sane option?

Apologies, I thought I’d replied to you and I hadn’t.

Yes, Douglas there is an amazing amount of consensus among the scientific community that the environment is an issue to be taken seriously, but there is also a wide degree of difference over the specific outcomes of increased levels of basic greenhouse gases in the environment.

No there isn’t.

It is quite obvious what has to be done.

There is absolutely no consensus that green politics or the policies of the Green Party are the answer.

Agreed, do you think I’m a Green or something? I just detest this politics beats science beats paper game you are playing.

The concern is that because the balance is being tipped nobody can say with relative or absolute certainty what those outcomes will be, where they will occur, with what severity they will occur and what longer-term knock-on consequences are likely.

You are playing games here. The balance is most certainly being tipped, and it is us that are doing it. The outcomes are within a range of possibilities, none of which are less than severe.

It is because there is uncertainty about the result of the possible changes that the environment has developed into a political issue about how we can prevent or minimise those adverse effects we can predict, and is reflected by the existence of the green movement. This presents a challenge to the established political forces, but in no way refutes the applicability of (at least some) current partisan analysis.

Maybe.

Personally, your complete lack of any evidence beyond your own words suggests, to me at least, that it is you that does not know this subject. May I press you on that matter?

Before you engage, remember, I am quoting, you are not.

The concern is that because the balance is being tipped nobody can say with relative or absolute certainty what those outcomes will be, where they will occur, with what severity they will occur and what longer-term knock-on consequences are likely.

It is because there is uncertainty about the result of the possible changes that the environment has developed into a political issue about how we can prevent or minimise those adverse effects we can predict, and is reflected by the existence of the green movement. This presents a challenge to the established political forces, but in no way refutes the applicability of (at least some) current partisan analysis.

Don’t believe in God and he doesn’t exist, you’ve lost nothing
Don’t believe in God and he does exist and you’re condemned to hell
Believe in God either way and the worst you can be is just wrong.

OK so I’m not that religious thus maybe there is a hypocrisy in the time honoured example of game theory above but the point still stands. Whether we are doing this damage ourselves or whether it is just natural cycles, by taking a bit of stock in our actions the worst that can happen is what was always going to happen and out of our control. Why should we actively choose a stance that logically provides us the only opportunity to cause our planets downfall (if we’re being melodramatic!)?

Fair enough. Just a few points.

You then go on to highlight your assumption that the direction of evolutionary processes is necessarily one-way.

Where do I say that? What we are talking about is a die off of species. Every time that has happened in the past, other -new – species have arisen to fill the ecological niche that became available. This has, AFAIK, taken millions of years. But despite it having always been the case. it is certainly not my contention that the new niche holder is in fact any better than the previous niche holder. It’s just a different one, that’s all.

There is an endemic problem in serious debates over issues such as climate science: big ideas must be simplified into digestible bite-sized chunks in order for their consumption by their intended mass audiences as no part of the modern media is designed for the capacity to carry complex messages for the full understanding of the subject. Not even the greatest experts will claim full knowledge of all the prescient facts, but your average Joe (or in this case Douglas) on an unaccountable message board in the interweb ether will!

I’d have thought that was obvious. Which is why I have done my best to reference everything I’ve said. On this particular subject there is, indeed, a consensus amongst scientists to quite an astonishing extent. I, as much as you, take exception to being lectured by folk that don’t back up what they say and mess up, say, geological timescales and human ones So, and this is where I take issue with you, there is wriggle room and there is the clear blue yonder. Or fatalism, which I am pleased to know you don’t suffer from.

Sorry if I have attempted to insert facts into a debate. If you have any facts to present, please do so. Though they always spoil the purity of the political game, don’t you think? By the way, I have never won a popularity contest in my life.

This is one of the reasons the ‘left /right’ distinction of political discourse is obsolete, if it ever existed in a real sense in the first place. It’s also a direct demonstration of why this so-called ‘left’, or ‘progressives’, will never form a coherent and unified front to prevent the pretty boys and populist orators winning power with losing arguments. If this is what the Green Party can offer, then they are best left to vanish into the obscurity they came from.

You describe me as a fatalist, but nothing could be further from the truth. I do admit that I’m no great hulk with the power to affect the smallest details in a million families lives, although I also recognise that while any small difference I make/can make is only a drop in the ocean it is still contributory to the overall result.

You then go on to highlight your assumption that the direction of evolutionary processes is necessarily one-way. Please spare us your prejudices, you are being manipulated by various agenda-setters to blindly agree with their prescriptions in a fit of emotional panic – not the best frame of mind to make an independent and fully rational decision. For the record, both increases and decreases in biological diversity fit within the scientific evolutionary model, it is simply a personal value judgement to claim the merits or demerits of either.

There is an endemic problem in serious debates over issues such as climate science: big ideas must be simplified into digestible bite-sized chunks in order for their consumption by their intended mass audiences as no part of the modern media is designed for the capacity to carry complex messages for the full understanding of the subject. Not even the greatest experts will claim full knowledge of all the prescient facts, but your average Joe (or in this case Douglas) on an unaccountable message board in the interweb ether will!

Seriously, Douglas, I’m sure you can quote predicted average changes until your doomsday arrives, but can you communicate the qualifications and limitations of these messages with any effectiveness of efficiency? I’m really not sure you’ve grasped the complexity of the subject with which you are clearly grappling, so attacking any slight to your position won’t help either the popularity or practical resolution of your stated cause.

I did know all of that. Perhaps the worst you could accuse me of is a bad analogy. It is also the case though that a largely immune population makes the transmission of a virus, say, much less effective. It protects those that have not been immunised as well as those that have.

You say I have no way of knowing whether APG is preventable or reversible. Well, there have been a lot of papers published that suggest that it is preventable or reversible.

See page 24 of the IPCC Summary Document for Policy Makers. Which seems to be the up to date position.

You do sound as if you do not know what inoculate actually represents. Does it prevent our bodies being infected? No – what it does is allow our bodies to know the problem, understand the threat and have the blueprints ready to take rapid action to handle the onslaught and neutralise it. With a virus, we inject weak, non-reproducing or dead viruses and so the immune system has a chance to manufacture the antibodies. When you see it again, we can handle it . We can “inoculate” against floods by having flood defences, drainage, flood plains, houses on stilts, pumping stations, dykes and if the worst comes, means to evacuate populations and then care for them – the water still comes, but the disruption and suffering is reduced significantly. Right now the South of England is not “inoculated” against heavy snow, whereas Scotland or Russia is, for example.

and @59: you have no way of knowing if anthropogenic climate change is “preventable” or reversible.

What you say is true. It is the scale and the immediacy of the potential catastrophe that is a matter of concern. It is also , to me at least, the quite extraordinary fact that something that is preventable is treated with such insouciance. I don’t think I’m actually guilty as charged of ‘magical thinking’. It ain’t rocket science.

Yes it is but so what ? This is the problem with the climate change debate, it’s dressed up as science when it’s largely an appeal to primitive emotion. It’s detractors are depicted as luddites because they apply rationality and scale (i.e science) to the problem. The world has always been about to end, it’s been to our adaptive advantage to believe that as it’s kept us safe from genuine risk. The problem is we now have so little real risk (at least in the west) that the mechanism has gone haywire and no longer serves it’s intended purpose. The Ice age predicted in the 1970s didn’t cause as much panic as climate change does now because in the scale of risk it was eclipsed by the possibility of nuclear war. Now that we don’t have that to worry about, we are worrying about the weather again. Climate change is Noahs’ ark writ large.

People have always died, wars, famines plagues, floods. More people died from an uncontrollable event, the Spanish Flu epedemic, than died in the controllable event that preceded it – The first world war. You are falling into the humanist trap of assuming that because we can control some things, we must control all things, aka magical thinking. We just don’t make that much difference, or to put it another way, we aren’t that important.

I speak for myself, but your contribution adds nothing of substance.

Please leave your ridiculously narrow minded politics at the door. This debate has become at least about substance and not about petty party squabbling.

Go away. Start your own thread.

You have added sweet FA to the, at least, fifty odd posts. Folk are talking, and idiotic political bullshit – such as your own – demeans those us who are trying to think this through.

Bloody hell, where to start?

The earliest folk that you, or I, would probably see kinship for are circa 164,000 years old. Which is not much time against the living Earth that has existed for 3.8 billion years ago, or so. See here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017145252.htm

This is what the world looked like during the last ice age:

http://www.scotese.com/lastice.htm

See that wee bit called the UK. It was frozen to hell and back. That Ice Age ended about 14,000 years ago.

You, and thomas, are both playing a game of no consequences. You are playing geological time scales off a riff of human time scales. And thus, we are not responsible, or able to alter our own behaviour in order to assure our continuation as a viable species. Bullshit!

In an absolute frame of reference you are obviously correct. But your ‘plasticity’ is someone else’s dead family. Or dead species. Us for instance. Plasticity does extend to substitution of ecological niches, including our own.

It is all very well to get philosophic about consequences, it can be realistically argued that we are a failed species, after all. And if that is how you see it, well our collective brains are worth, what, shit?

True?

If I actually understood what you meant by this:

So we are in agreement then, but while all the evidence is indicative and only the general thrust of it is conclusive the rhetorical arguments will remain endless.

Warming, cooling, droughts, flooding, new phenomena of weird weather, greater extremes of variation, extra weather cells, different patterns of climate or a mixture of all these and more, nobody really knows, but we all see it happening and experience the consequences. Will any of this start new conflict over resources, new migration patterns or spur biological evolution? Probably, but nobody can pinpoint any direct influences with any real accuracy, so we shall continue to bicker over correct legislative changes to manage the societal shift.

What do you mean “only the general thrust is conclusive”? As far as I know, I’ve been arguing that it is conclusive. Conclusive in the sense that we need to get our fingers out and deal with it.

Your second paragraph starts badly, and ends worse. It denies the anthropogenic catalyst and it denies a huge body of evidence that suggests that rather than spurring biological diversity, it is quite likely to do the opposite. Of course, if you measure time in millions of years, then you are correct, ecological niches will eventually be filled. Your childrens children will not, sadly, be around to see this happy outcome.

The direct influences on ecological catastrophe, at least for our ecology are pretty obvious.

What I’d asked Roger was how Libertarianism could answer a real world, real time problem. I might not agree with his answers, but frankly Roger at least tried, you strike me as a fatalist.

And now on to Matt Munro….

Chris Keating: “What about the Lib Dems?” Are you obsessed? This post is specifically about the Green Party and Labour. Be patient and Mr Osler or someone else will explain to you why the Lib Dems are not the answer for the left.

Sorry to sound cynical but I grew up in the 70 when the ice age was coming, and if that didn’t kill you the nuclear war would, oh and computers and robots would do everything so we’d all have so much leisure time we’d only have to work part time in paperless ofiices……

So we are in agreement then, but while all the evidence is indicative and only the general thrust of it is conclusive the rhetorical arguments will remain endless.

Warming, cooling, droughts, flooding, new phenomena of weird weather, greater extremes of variation, extra weather cells, different patterns of climate or a mixture of all these and more, nobody really knows, but we all see it happening and experience the consequences. Will any of this start new conflict over resources, new migration patterns or spur biological evolution? Probably, but nobody can pinpoint any direct influences with any real accuracy, so we shall continue to bicker over correct legislative changes to manage the societal shift.

And from what I can read all the major parties are convinced (to varying extents) that the threat is real, requires real political solutions and is an actual electoral issue.

So where do you stand on the prospect of the first new coal-fired power station in a lifetime at Kingsnorth in Kent and the renewal of nuclear power generation capabilities amidst the growing demand for electricity? Is the failure of this government to provide the regulatory framework to support renewable feed-in tariffs offset by it’s determination to provide security of energy supply levels, or is the framing of the debate falsely formulated?

The Green Party policy of expanding the biomass capabilities for the energy industry and highlighting the peaking of oil production levels doesn’t appear to fully address these issues, so I’m still not sure how it can be viewed as a realistic or relevant vehicle for any coherent political philosophy.

Perhaps you can both crawl out from under your shells and provide some help here…

In terms of the science, I’d refer you to what I highlighted at post 37, ‘Dog bites Man’, shock horror!

Please direct me to a site where reasonably qualified climate scientists argue that the views of the IPCC are a load of hooey.

The Royal Society publish this on their web site, perhaps you’d care to read it?

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=6229

I’m sorry if my analogy to vaccination was not as clear cut as I’d have liked, what I was getting at was this. If a significant percentage of the overall population is vaccinated, then those that aren’t, are also protected, as transmission is less efficient. That was the point I was trying to make. The fact that you, for instance, are ‘doing your bit’ is one step along the way to having sufficient folk acting in a sustainable way that we could ‘Save the World’. (Now where have I heard that phrase before?)

Thomas@46 – “aspects of the changing climate” is not the same as “climate change”. If we do not know the impact or effect of action, we need to ensure the scare-mongering is under control. Hint: it is not.

douglas@47 – sincerely, I should have said “duck!” as any shots were aimed at the IPPC and hangers on, not you personally! The IPPC report is very suspect, I am afraid, as the summary was created by politicians and (until very recently) the ruling was no evidence was to be in the full report that contradicted with the politically-drafted summary. This may have changed (links anyone?).

and @49 – yes, jabs. Our jabs are precautionary defensive measures to protect from the effects of the disease that is out there still. The current efforts about global warming is like trying to kill mosquitos instead of finding ways to protect against malaria ( Nets are better than swamp drainage!), or trying to eliminate polio without inoculation – we need our country “inoculated” against the effects of global warming as at least if not more pressing than trying to reverse it. The Green Movement appears totally oblivious of this (and in saying that I am being VERY charitable) and the politicians are along for the totalitarian ride.

Years ago, when the evidence for APG was somewhat less persuasive than it is now, I argued that we should apply the precautionary principle. This requirement to know exact outcomes before we do anything is not a philosophy I share. Many of us have been immunised against MMR, and yet there was no certainty that, had we not been immunised we would have caught MM or R. That is the precautionary principle. Try scaling it up a bit.

I’m not at all sure that the debate is framed in quite the way that you state here:

The problem with discussing the environment and especially climate change is the entire concept is framed to demand collectivist answers. You in your post above have tried to close down any discussion about the causes of climate change to force it into the AGW space, for example, so by your book you have brought a plague upon your own house.

I have been reading the latest summary drom the IPCC and it is their view, not mine that what is happening to the climate is driven by human activity. You can get something more than a flavour for their view, here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/11/17/ar4_syr_spm.pdf

or, if that’s a bit much, and to be honest I’m still reading it, the key point for this debate is summarised by Tim Lambert, thus:

Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.

Most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica) (Figure SPM.4).

and this one:

Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5oC (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5oC, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe. {3.4}

There is high agreement and much evidence that all stabilisation levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialised in coming decades, assuming appropriate and effective incentives are in place for their development, acquisition, deployment and diffusion and addressing related barriers. {5.5}

So, this bout of climate change is not about natural fluctuations, it is about what we as human beings are doing. So don’t shoot the messenger!

It is perhaps worth pointing out that quite a number of these alternatives are likely to decrease the individuals dependency on central generation, if not eliminate it entirely. And be green. What I want to see is a politics that sets the objective of getting us there.