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Posted on 11/03/2011 10:16:16 AM PDT by ventanax5
I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.
(Excerpt) Read more at bishop-hill.net ...
“Page not found”. Suppressed by the warmists??
I like to say that the human race has as much influence on our global temperature as a mouse huddled in the corner of a high school basketball court has on that room. And even then I am probably overstating it.
Maybe a cockroach.
We flatter ourselves to say otherwise.
We should not identify a conservative position and then insist that scientists conform to it.
That is the way of the Inquisition of Galileo. Conservatives are not Flat- Earthers. As long as there is a legitimate difference of opinion on a scientific issue-and global warming certainly qualifies as that with the majority of scientists still probably in favor of the theory-there can be no conservative position on the science. It is a matter of science, not politics. There can and should be a very conservative position on what to do about the science. If one rejects the science of global warming, the conservative position obviously is not to do anything about it. If one accepts the science of global warming, the conservative position is to apply market principles and solutions rather than statist nostrums.
I think Newt Gingrich's trespasses across the Green line have been exaggerated. It is not a conservative value to hold science hostage to ideology. In other words, if one is scientifically persuaded to man-made global warming, it is not a breach of conservative ideology to admit it. It is not a conservative maxim that the sun revolves around the earth. I do not hold with global warming, but if someone is so persuaded by science, Gingrich's solution of the free market for the problem is reasonable.
His attempts to apply market principles to deal with global warming are a reasonable conservative solution especially if Newt Gingrich, like the author of this piece, was deceived by the hockey stick fraud.
I know CO2 is a green house gas because green houses use it.
Ah, very nice. This is basically where I am. I am not a denier either, probably more skeptical that this fellow, but ultimately I believe as he said above, even IF, then the steps taken to mitigate (which in the end would be useless), would be far worse than any probable effects from GW.
“By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative re- porting the media has forgotten how to do. In America, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwith- that.com; in Canada, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit ex- posed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org; here in Britain, Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the Climate- gate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net; iIn Australia, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannen- ova.com.au.
The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.
In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confir- mation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.”
I highly recommend reading the whole article. It might be the best thing I have read on climate change.
Of all the comments, I found this one to be special:
"If anyone knows how to contact Mr. Ridley, please let him know of my sincerest thanks.""What a mix of emotion this brought to me. There is no Internet emoticon I can apply here."
Nov 1, 2011 at 11:33 PM | Anthony Watts
To anyone familiar with Anthony Watts, that comment is peculiarly poignant...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/thank-you-matt-ridley/
Watts' own comment: "If there’s one speech about the climate debate worth reading in your lifetime, this is it."...
...to feed their plants...
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