There’s no longer any serious debate among climate scientists about either the reality of global warming or about the fact that its substantially caused by human activity, but, as 500+ comments on my previous post on this topic show, neither the judgement of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, nor the evidence that led them to that judgement, has had much effect on the denialists[1].
And the Australian media are doing a terrible job in covering the issue. I’ve seen at least half a dozen pieces this year claiming that the whole issue is a fraud cooked up by left-wing greenies, and January isn’t over yet.
The latest is from Peter Walsh in the Oz. Walsh is still banging on about the satellite data, and the Medieval Warm Period, suggesting that his reading, if any, in the last few years has been confined to publications emanating from the right-wing parallel universe. But that hasn’t stopped the Australian from running him, and a string of others.
If an issue like genetically modified food, or the dangers of mobile phones was treated in this way, with alarmist cranks being given hectares of column space, most of those who sympathise with Walsh would be outraged and rightly so.
Walsh does make one valid point however, saying. “If your case is immaculate, why feed lies into it?” To which, I can only respond, “If the cap fits …”
fn1. At this point, the term “sceptic” is no longer remotely applicable. Only dogmatic commitment to a long-held position (or an ideological or financial motive for distorting the evidence) can explain continued rejection of the evidence.
John Quiggin 
A tsunami (IPA pronunciation /suˈnÉ‘Ë?mi/ or /tsuˈnÉ‘Ë?mi/]) is a series of waves generated when water in a lake or the sea is rapidly displaced on a massive scale. Earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions and large meteorite impacts all have the potential to generate a tsunami. The effects of a tsunami can range from unnoticeable to devastating.
Andrew
My comment upon Dogz behaviour was not gratuitous. It was both pertinent and metaphorically accurate. Why is it that pro-natalists are so squeamish about sexual references? Deep guilt complexes?
I would hope ProfQ is a bit more secure in his view of the world and expression of it. But if not, that’s fine. No point beating around the bush with misplaced assumptions is there?
Your assumption base is quite breathtaking in what it innately discounts.
You do not acknowledge the massive upswing in resource demand effected by those emigrating to the first world consumer states. Or that this upswing then directly leverages back upon the resource sacrifices made by the nations that they are leaving behind. You also ignore the likely 1-2 generation lag (at least) in reduction of fertility that tends ot apply within these immigrant demographics
You obfuscate ( probably to yourself also which is worrisome) the basic fact initially posed that gross population levels are increasing in the Western countries both overall and in most nations. In some, like Australia, the US and Canada, the rate of increase is significant. You hide this increase behind an undue focus upon natural fertility rates.
You state that Japan’s population would shrink without immigration. But you do infer that it is growing due to immigration. So then – it is growing!!
You infer the claim that many European nations are actually shrinking but fail to identify that these are places such as Estonia, Ukraine, Hungary, Russia, etc. The West?? Highly marginal examples I’d say, on a number of criteria.
You assume that a loss of numbers from developing nations via emigration will be maintained as a static net loss over time against their local natural increase. You ignore the fact that these losses are both a drop in the bucket against rates of local increases and are also likely to act as a primer toward continuing local fertility. You ignore completely the relevant dynamics that are necessary to develop and maintain a genuine population restraint in these swelling nations. You apply broadbrush vagary that is convenient to tolerating the highly problematic status quo condition being examined.
This behaviour is redolent within your advice that I read and apply economics to these issues ahead of arithmetic. I agree with you within your terms. Why would you want to apply the consistent rigor and measurability of a hard science to your status quo dreaming when you can apply the malleable principles of a socially imagined one? One that poses as a base constant the lovely notion that we just need to want more of something for it to appear.
Why would I think you’d laud those cited interventions? Because they directly keep the crazy growth machine that you adore ticking along at a rate suitable to ‘investors’. Because they act to maintain the population increases that you deem are essential to socio-economic health. Sorry to have not researched your life’s work before commenting. I merely relied upon logic. I readily admit the error in doing that when communicating with belief systems.
Avaroo
Your view of population decline being a crisis is a transmission of the one-sided hysteria being promulgated by magnate-driven mass media.
How can having less mouths to feed and service within a future looming with energy decline and climate change be a crisis?
Seriously, please tell me how more into less is a good thing, on either per-capita or a system’s management basis. It appears that you are being unduly influenced by the profit takers. Probably because they have managed to convince you that you are one of them.
You say that population increase stems from having too many children.
In totality yes, but in a national context it also includes the rate of net immigration.
Nonetheless, both are directly factored by prevailing cultural views of land and heritage.
Your comment whilst literally true, is inadequate to effectively deal with this critical issue. It leaves you as a bemused bystander, able to believe that what is contemporarily flashing past is a singular unerring reality and the nub of huge crisis should it stop. In fact it will be a huge crisis if it doesn’t stop. Very simple arithmetic tells us that.
Again, could we all stop with personal attacks, please. Not only is it a pain for me to deal with, but if I miss any from ‘my’ side I have people like Yobbo complaining about bias.
“Your view of population decline being a crisis is a transmission of the one-sided hysteria being promulgated by magnate-driven mass media.”
Since I live in the US, where the populations is NOT declining, I couldn’t really be accused of hysteria on the issue. But it is a serious issue in many countries, where the populations are declining.
“How can having less mouths to feed and service within a future looming with energy decline and climate change be a crisis?”
Well, this might not be so good, if pensioners outnumber pupils by 2009 in Scotland.
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=552&id=2470062005
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/01/24/do2402.xml
How is Scotland to support all those pensioners and un-needed teachers?
“What can be done to save Scotland? The Scottish Executive would like Scotland to have control of its own immigration, as the province of Quebec does. Quebec’s collapsed birth rate has also cost it its dreams of nationhood and, like Scotland, it looked to immigration to save it, since when it has attracted a lively range of jihadist cells for whom Montreal offers the advantage of being a terrorist-indulgent neighbourhood only a stone’s throw – or a bomb’s – from the Great Satan’s border. As the estate agents say, it is location, location, location. Glasgow has no such unique selling point.
Where are the immigrants going to come from? The birth rate is falling everywhere but the pre-modern world, ie, Africa and large swaths of Islam. Assuming that a talented Indian wished to leave his own land, which has the fastest-growing middle class in the world, why would he eschew America or Australia in order to go to Aberdeen and spend his working life supporting the elderly unsackable hordes of superfluous primary-school teachers?”
“You say that population increase stems from having too many children.”
hmm, no never said anything even vaguely close to this.
Now come on….does it get any more picturesque than
“elderly unsackable hordes of superfluous primary-school teachers”?
🙂
John
Laudable desire but can you perhaps provide suggestion on how best to deal with postings that are the result of apparent cultural obsessions rather than rational understanding.
There are a slew of identities who keep re-iterating unsubstantiated points of belief and worse, engage in repeated summary dismissal and blanketing of reasonably detailed postings.
This begins to appear as a personality issue rather than a logical one. I admit that annoyance can make a response to them unecessarily aggressive, and that should be curtailed. But even when properly measured, response is necessarily going to be personal in its aim. It cannot rationally be anything else.
Avaroo
You are heralding imminent crisis within various nations due to declining population. This active concern is very likely due to a pervasive and persuasive sense of reality transmitted to you by mass media interests. This is an influence transmitted without the benefit of adequate conscious dialogue upon all of the inherent issues, and one very carefully dramatised by, amongst other psychological tools, a constructed hysteria about consequences.
Where you live is a complete distraction to this point of our discussion.
The challenges of demographic profile that you cite are the direct result of the boom growth in western populations that followed the world’s largest ever war and the economic situation that immediately followed it? Are you saying that we have to keep growing our population forever to accommodate the mutations due to this unique symptomatic event?
It is absolutely clear that we either rectify this structural defect or we run ahead of it with growth until we collapse from not being able to run any further. As awkward as this restructure may seem it will never be any easier.
The quote you offered from wherever is nonsense. It is linear and obsessive in its approach to the point of mindlessness.
As for misquoting you. I apologise. I mistakenly mirrored the meaning of what you said. However it was still completely consistent with the meaning of what you did say and the point being discussed. To say that you “never said anything even vaguely close to this� is either disingenuous or a sign of poor comprehension of the actual discussion.
“You are heralding imminent crisis within various nations due to declining population. ”
Actually, the nations are themselves doing this. Read my link to the articles about Scotland. You can easily find such articles written about and by Germans, Italians, Dutch, Austrians, etc.
“The challenges of demographic profile that you cite are the direct result of the boom growth in western populations ”
That nations I’m talking about are not even keeping their populations steady, much less experiencing a boom.
“However it was still completely consistent with the meaning of what you did say ”
it wasn’t even vaguely close to anything I actually said.
Even France, which seems to have recovered its birthrate somewhat over the last year or so, appears to have done so based on muslim births in France, not through the birth of native Frenchmen. Does that count as a recovering birthrate for a “western” nation? Although France may be western, are the people actually being born there “western”?
Averoo
Your third paragraph quotes an incomplete sentence of mine to enable you to then make a statement that completely avoids and distracts away from the points I had presented.
Your first two paragraphs contrive to side-step the point I was making.
Your original comment:
Actually, it (population reduction) stems from peole just not having children.
My erroneous response:
“You say that population increase stems from having too many children�.
My reference to your comment was literally incorrect as already admitted, but completely consistent in meaning within the context of the argument. The two statements are the inverse elements of the exact same condition. A genuine correspondent would see the obvious nature of the simple error and deal with the essence of the discussion as it is very clearly implied.
You are not a genuine correspondent.
Waste your own life if you like talking in self-serving circles, but luckily I don’t have to let you waste mine.
John Quiggin mentioned astrology. When Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich “The book that nobody read” (Heinemann) ran to earth 276 copies (he guesses there were once 500) of the 1543 edition of “On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres” by Nicolaus Copernicus, hemade a surprising discovery. There were few annotations by astrologers-astronomers of the day in the short section saying that Earth does not occupy a preferred location at the centre of the universe – but goes around the Sun.
Instead, there were many in the longer part where he explained how to predict the orbits of the planets. These people were looking for a quicker and easier method than that of Ptolemy, dating from the second century. Things went along much as before until Keppler picked up the new idea in his “New Astronomy” of 1609. At about the same time Galileo stirred things up in Italy with his new-fangled telescope. Despite the Vatican’s best efforts (“Revolutions” was placed on the Index in 1611, and not removed until 1835) astronomy has triumphed over astrology.
The first ‘modern’ scientific paper proposing a Sun-Earth connection was read to a sceptical Royal Society by Herschel in about 1800. This correlated sunspot numbers with English wheat prices. In 1852, Sabine did a paper correlating sunspot numbers with variations in Earth’s magnetic field. A century and a half later, a flood of new papers deal with aspects of the variable Sun-Earth connection.
Astrology made its comeback (it could have been earlier – someone may have a reference) with I Charvatova, of the Geophysical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague. In 1988 she wrote (in Russian) a paper “The relations between solar motion and solar variability”. In her ‘Conclusions’ she says:
“A coincidence of all known prolonged extrema in solar activity with the inverse extrema of the deviations from the J-S (ie Jupiter-Saturn) order was demonstrated on a time interval longer than 3000 years. The prolonged minima in solar activity probably come in the basic, ca 180-yr cycle. … Our results, thus, seem to confirm a continual direct connection between solar motion (ie around the centre-of-mass of the solar system) and solar variability. … This allows us to use our simple approach to predict solar activity, which has a great influence on all terrestrial, geophysical, biological phenomena, even though the proper physical mechanism has not been discovered yet.”
Theodor Landscheidt (2003) “New Little Ice Age intead of global warming?” refines the analysis by using all four Jovian planets (adding Uranus and Neptune. His paper can be accessed on-line at: mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Calen/Landscheidt-1.html
and is well worth a read.
But Charvatova and Landscheidt have only half the story. Most ot he angular momentum of the solar system is held by the giant outer planets, and they put great inertial stress on the Sun as they drive its irregular orbit. But as yet less well recognised , the small inner planets (particularly Mercury) keep the Sun in a perpetual state of highly variable electromagnetic resonance (the Dickman Cross). These inner planets orbit the Sun – not the centre-of-mass of the system. There are TWO rather different sorts of astrology going on.
About the planets, mainstream science has passed from the ridicule stage (Velikovsky 1960), to the anger stage (Landscheidt 2003). When will planetary influences reach the third stage – self-evident?
Bob Foster, we are at least in agreement that AGW scepticism is equally credible with Velikovsky and astrology.
Figure 1(b) “the past 1000 years� in the Summary for Policymakers is the icon of TAR. This “hockeystick� graph of Northern Hemisphere temperature shows 900 years of gentle cooling with only minor fluctuations (handle), followed by 100 years of abrupt warming (blade). The Mediaeval Warm Period and subsequent Little Ice Age cool periods didn’t happen. IPCC’s “consensus� has set at naught 30 years of palaeoclimatological study, and hundreds of observation-based and peer-reviewed papers published in reputable scientific journals.
Bob, this paragraph is a terrible – made worst because you claim to possess expertise in palaeoclimate. Anybody, with even the remotest familiarity with the hockey stick literature will be well aware that none of the papers claim that the MWP or LIA didn’t exist.
As one example, here is a quote from Mann’s 1999 paper which (since, you clearly haven’t read it) is where the hockey stick was extended out to include the MWP:
Our reconstruction thus supports the notion of relatively warm hemispheric conditions earlier in the millennium, while cooling following the 14th century could be viewed as the initial onset of the Little Ice Age sensu lata.
It does however, confirm my theory, that global warming sceptics are no different to creationists.
Assuming that humans all dropped dead from a disease 300 years ago then what would be the current climate trend according to the best climate models? Would things be cooling down or warming up or staying static?
You would see most of the temperature rise upto the 1950s, then a bit of a dip, then largely constant.
Sort of off-topic, but if the Ruddiman hypothesis is correct, then instead, you’d see a very significant cooling trend starting 300 years ago, as forests reclaimed the land reducing CO2 levels.
Greg,
What is ‘pro-natalism’ – those in favour of births? Are you against them?
Your comment about Dogz was gratuitous, and offensive. Just because he dares to disagree, and provide some opinion and evidence, you accuse him of masturbating. He may be, but he appears to have both hands on the keyboard at the time, and not be so distracted that falling into abuse becomes an argument, unlike you. Your response to avaroo is little better.
I will leave most of the rest of what you said to one side, but on Japan and most of Western Europe you are simply wrong – Japanese fertility is close to 1 (as I am sure you are aware, replacement is 2) and there is effectively zero immigration, so the population there can be expected to start to drop rapidly as the ‘boomer’ generation starts to die. In Italy, the rate is 1.28 and most of the rest of Europe is trending the same way.
If anything, in the long run, the greater threat facing humanity is simply failing to replace ourselves, leading to a long term decline in population. Past about 2050 to 2100, most, if not all, projections of human population start to go into reverse.
I would advise against using simple arithmetic where complex models are involved, Greg. You seem to be applying the Malthusian theory here – although you may not be aware of it – and Malthus has been proven wrong time and again, simply through one simple error. Malthus assumed that, given a fixed quantity of resourses, only an arithmetically increasing quantity of output could be created. This is simply wrong – it ignores the effects of technological development, which has allowed for a geometric increase, which means that, for the first time in history dietary sufficiency was achieved in the 1960’s, and it has only got better since.
Andrew Reynolds wrote : Oil is an exception, as I am sure James would hasten to point out – it is finite in nature – but we have had this argument before.
No, Andrew, we haven’t ‘had the argument’.
We reached an impasse.
For my part, I attempted to argue (but not in quite so many words) that it is reckless folly to continue to increase the rate of use of our finite non-renewable resources before we know, with some degree of certainty, that replacements for these resources can be found on the scale necessary to keep our whole global society functioning into the foreseeable future.
For your part, you asserted that with the magic of the free market, solutions to all the looming resource shortages could be found without elected governments even needing to make any decisions about our societies’ allocation and use of resources and without, for the for the foreseeable future, any slowdown of the exponential growth in human population or per-capita consumption.
Obviously, it is was going to take a lot of effort, on my part, to definitively refute this assertion, so I chose then not to pursue it to the end and have left it for others to draw their conclusions from what had been written.
Greg, thank you. Your refutation of all the usual nonsense arguments for population growth, which have been repeated in this forum, is badly needed, especially given the bizarre stated intention of our Queensland Government to crowd another 1.1 milion people into South East Queensland by 2026, when we don’t even have enough water and power generations for SEQ’s existing population.
Bob Foster,
Any references (ie links) to information about:-
a) the Landscheidt Minimum
b) the Maunder Minimum
Hi Terje,
Since Bob hasn’t given you a coherent answer, I’ll give it a go.
The Maunder Minimum is a real event. It was a period when sunspot numbers dropped dramatically. It has sometime been associated with the Little Ice Age. Here’s a good source.
The Landscheidt Minimum is more interesting. The term “Landscheidt Minimum” is much more common in the internet than what it is in the scientific literature (I did a search on the ISI Web of Science and google scholar and got zero hits for “Landscheidt Minimum”). As far as I can tell, the “Landscheidt Minimum” used by internet crackpots to refer to the minimum of the 179 year solar cycle. It is (as far as I can tell) named after Theodor Landscheidt, a solar scientist who worked on the relationship between planetary cycles and solar cycles has been basically ignored by the scientific community (he had an H-index of 3 – which is pretty poor) but taken up enthusiastically by global warming sceptics and astrologers.
Andrew Reynolds,
The ‘geometric’ increase in our technological capability is based on the geometric increase in the rate of destruction of our natural capital, largely fossil fuels.
Only when our technological capabilites can increase geometrically, and in doing so, consume no more than the interest provided by nature, instead of, in about three short centuries at most, all of the capital, will Malthus have been proven wrong.
James,
The result of the argument that we had was an impasse – that means that the argument has been completed and, I thought, we had agreed to disagree. I would not have put the result of the argument the way you did, but, I will not quibble with phraseology, unless it is abusive. I would argue that the elected governments’ decisions will almost invariably be wrong either in target or means (or both) – you disagree (I presume), so another impasse.
As for Greg’s ‘refutation’ – to me it was, at least in part, unclear. He apparently identifies a ‘structural defect’ in Avaroo’s argument and goes on to state something that is ‘absolutely clear’. I cannot see that it is clear in either a relative or absolute sense.
.
I am starting to wonder if Greg is a RWDB doing some trolling.
Ken, thanks for the reference to Ted Landscheidt. In addition to what you stated, he has also been the only person I know of who was able to predict an El Nino (actually a couple of them) more than a year in advance … He predicted them publicly, and those of us who were interested at the time watched his predictions come true.
While (as you point out) this did not earn him a lot of citations in the scientific literature, I fear that you are once again falling into the consensus trap. The test of his theories is not whether they were widely quoted, or whether there is a consensus about them.
The test of his theories, just as with any theory, is whether it can successfully make falsifiable predictions.
His theory was able to. So, you can say what you want about his “belief in astrology,” but the fact remains that you were’nt able to predict El Ninos, neither was I or anyone else. He was.
He did so by considering the effects of the planets on the angular momentum of the sun, noting that the pull of the planets disturbed the sun’s angular momentum, and is thus responsible for some of the variations in the suns magnetic field. You can call that “astrology” because it posits an effect of the planets on the earth, or call that “astronomy” because it posits an effect of the planets on the magnetic field of the sun, which then effects the earth.
But whatever you call it, you couldn’t predict El Ninos and he could, so I’d think twice before dismissing his theories out of hand.
All the best,
w.
Our technological capabilities already increase geometrically without consuming more than the interest provided by nature.
Eg microprocessors. They’re made from small amounts of sand. A few thousand researchers worldwide and a few factories are all that is required to keep that little juggernaut rolling along.
Yobbo, you say:
John Quiggin, you say:
Yobbo is quite right to complain of bias, John, because while I approve and support your request that we stop the personal attacks, you are one of the offenders here. You started this thread with an unbelievable personal attack on everyone who doesn’t believe the REVEALED WISDOM OF AGW, saying:
This is absolutely not the case with myself or most of the “sceptics” that I know. Appropriately, the very first comment on the thread was an objection to your most unpleasant personal attack, which you simply shined on. This, of course, makes some people wonder about your credibility when you say, oops, I “missed” a left wing-nut going off the rails …
Perhaps you could jump-start the process of getting rid of personal attacks on your blog by retracting your unwarranted slur. It would go a long ways towards re-establishing your currently somewhat frayed credibility in the matter of personal attacks.
w.
Andrew Reynolds,
Dogz wasn’t ‘dar(ing) to disagree’. He was taking a cheap shot at a view point which I had attempted to carefully explain on this forum, in response to a question you, yourself, had previously asked me. I would add that it’s a viewpoint I had reluctantly come to accept only about 13 months ago and one which is obviously not yet regarded as mainstream.
When Greg, wholly justifiably, took Dogz to task for his cheap shot, Dogz patronisingly responded :
Greg had already said of his subsequent response :
If you wish to further rebuke Greg, then, please, at least place what he wrote in its proper context.
Dogz,
As far as I am aware, each microprocessor requires a huge amount of fossil fuel for its manufacture. Also, the factories required for their manufacture require huge inputs of fossil fuel in order to be built.
Can you tell me of any brand and make of microprocessor which has been manufactured purely with solar, wind or geothermal energy?
(Incidentally, I happen to think that microprocessors are probably a more sensible product on which to expend the earth’s non-renewable resources in the manufacture of.)
This is getting infantile, JS. If describing my comments as masturbation is “wholly justifiable” yet “lighten up dude – it was satire” is patronising, then we’re a little too far apart to have a sensible discussion. I vote to close the thread.
James,
While Dogz’s comment showing the parallels between the actual effects of the course of action you propose and those advocated by the Mormons and other groups commonly accused of being religious extremists was a touch over the top if taken seriously, I do not believe that accusing someone of “jerking off” is a serious method of argument, nor is it one that is proportionate to Dogz’s post. There are some parallels between your argument and theirs, just as there are parallels between some of the arguments I make and those of anarchist extremists. You have pointed out those parallels in my argument in no uncertain terms and Greg has also attempted to do the same with my POV and that of a (straw) paleo-conservative. I simply pointed out where I differ from those groups and moved on. Greg responded with abuse to Dogz, avaroo and me and has been, at least by implication, rebuked by our good host.
Greg looks like he may be an interesting addition to the commenters on this blog, but I just hope he learns to accept that there are those of us who do not accept that the consensus here is always correct. If he wants a blog that only agrees with itself a move to the daily flute may be appropriate.
.
PrQ,
I hope I am not speaking out of turn here or trying to state what your policy should be. I just feel that Greg’s responses were particularly OTT and similar in style of argument to some of the RWDB trolls that have been banned in the not too distant past after failing to pay attention to your requests to moderate their language.
Hi Willis,
Bet you fall for the fortune tellers who have a string of successful predictions too.
Landscheidt’s predictions were way overrated. He allowed himself very generous error margins. His model (I can’t believe that your quoting from a model – perhaps I should get some quotes from your earlier posts) doesn’t even hindcast that well.
Seriously, if you believe Landscheidt’s garbage, nows would be a good time to put your money where your mouth is (Bob, this applies to you to). Landscheidt has forecast that there will be cooling similar to the Little Ice Age by 2030. James Annan and Brian Schmit are taking (or at least trying to take) bets with global warming sceptics.
Ken, when you stop the personal attacks (“bet you fall for the fortune tellers”) you’ll get a response. Until then, I’ll treat you like the child you are acting like, and ignore you in the presence of your betters.
w.
Willis, given that you stopped responding to me on John’s other global warming post when I pointed out the multitude of flaws in your think on coral reefs, while still repeating the same points, I’m not particularly worried.
But, for the record, nice dodge on defending Landscheidt’s “predictionsâ€?.
Andrew
When someone starts quoting obscure material, arcanely referenced, that ends up having no connection at all to either the genuine logical case that they are attacking, or its poster, I think auto-erotica is a reasonable metaphor. You don’t? Tough. You find it offensive? Fine. That’s your prerogative. It’s a bit rich though to expect to impose that narrow view on others by launching a campaign in pusuit of administrative sanction. But go for it.
I personally find highly offensive your obtuse views on the infallibility of the market and its supposed ability to overcome the basic arithmetical functions of growth and finity. It offends my basic sense of reason. It offends the basic scientific platform of understanding which our society claims as the fabric of its transcendence over those that went before it. But if this were just your isolated view my upset would be easy to deal with.
More critically I’m offended by the religious sway this nonsense view has within contemporary society. The economic alchemists are maintaining the spin of a social identity of scientific objectivity and progress whilst they walk the global community down a dead-end garden path of mindless, accelerated resource exhaustion. As you so clearly state as your own position, these ‘technicians’ don’t care a whit about the simple science of it. They believe in economic magic. I am quite horrified by the serious threat this poses in the not too distant future to me and those I care about. With that awful horizon very distinctly in view I get very offended when the acolytes of this sociopathic growth dogma duck, weave and purposefully misinterpret the distinct points of concern and implausibility that are raised about their beliefs. They sit smugly upon the high decks of the mother ship Status Quo and bluntly repel all cogent inconvenient premise.
But I don’t call for your moderation because you offend me with your methods that ignore real premise. I realise this is a personal view. I also realise that working with logical argument to extract empathy toward reality from an economic growthist is like drawing oil form tar sands – seems plausible in concept, but in reality the result is not the worth energy expended. So I will end this dialogue with a few final observations.
Regardless of your segmentation of the various categories of it, Japan has a net annual increase in annual population. It is small, but upon a base of 127m, any % increase is a lot of extra people annually. That it isn’t enough to keep to a bloated demographic pyramid in ‘ideal’ shape is a problem to be solved not serviced. When a thinking person considers that Japan’s current population has exploded from 43m in 1900 as a direct result of access to masses of cheap petroleum, they would tend to see a benefit in striving to manage a net reduction in population with oil depletion now looming as it does. Chasing a growth rate of just 1% would deliver Japan a population of 254m in 2074. That seems to me a far greater problem to inherit than a top heavy demographic pyramid. The latter is a temporary condition. Although I guess a famine would quickly make the former quite transitory as as well.
As for using simple arithmetic on complex models, I suggest you complexify your overly simple model to consider a timeline of experience and probability beyond just the brief fossil fuel age which conveniently but very temporally underpins your ‘proofs’ on Malthus.
Pro-natalism most pertinently relates to active and formal political effort to stimulate and maximise domestic birth rates. Forget looking out the window at the cheek to jowl poverty and deepening resource shortage. Multiply or bust. While we are at it let’s not eat fish without scales or let our womenfolk outside while they are menstruating. How progressive is this population thing?
Dogz,
I never wrote that describing your comments as masturbation was “wholly justifiable”.
I wrote that Greg Wood’s rebuke of your cheap shot was “wholly justifiable”.
Greg,
Let’s start from the bottom of your post and move up. You continually seem to mark me as some form of person that is all for some form of action to increase birth rates. Not so. I am just against attempts to impose, or even persuade people in either direction. People will make their own decisions based on their own lives, their own needs and their own belief systems. This is increasingly occuring as people gain better control over their fertility. I have made my own decisions in this line, along with the relevant people, and that, to me at least, is the way it should be. I would strongly oppose attempts to force me to do otherwise.
Just as I am not a ‘pro-natalist’ (how many ‘-isms’ can you invent in a thread?) I am not an ‘economic-growthist’. What I oppose is government action to impose any solution. It is not the market, economic growth, religious fervour or any of the ‘-isms’ you constantly call on that I believe will work, but the combined efforts, intelligence and, yes, errors, of the billions of people on this planet, as revealed through their interactions with each other. Some of these are economic, and can justifiably be called as part of the market economy. Some of them are social interactions, some are arguments, some are even on blogs.
At the moment, all I can see from you is someone running around pointing at a perceived problem shouting ‘it’s a problem, we are all doomed’. You then say that anyone who does not agree with you offends you.
I presume (because I see no evidence that you have any other plan) that you want strong government intervention to fix it. If not, I apologise, withdraw and ask you to give us mere, offensive, mortals the benefit of what you wan tto actually do about it.
If you are going to say we need government intervention, that is where you and I diverge. All I can see when I look at the history of government intervention, beyond the basics of defence, law and order, education of the disadvantaged and some infrastructure is a history of failure. I do not think that strongly coercive approaches to tackling AGW will work and they are likely to be counter-productive.
.
Correct me if I am wrong, Greg, but beyond pointing at the problem I can see no evidence that, unlike PrQ an, to an extent, James Sinnamon, you have suggested a plan of action.
Andrew Reynolds, cc Greg Wood,
.
I feel obliged to comment on Andrew Reynolds’ advice to Greg Wood on the grounds that I care enough about my discipline, Economics, to see a need to speak up.
Andrew Reynolds advises Greg Wood:
a) To consult a dictionary on ‘scenarios’
b) “On the question of resourses [sic] – I would suggest a quick look at a book on economics rather than mathematics. If resources are being depleted then their price goes up – a simple enough rule. The prices of the basic commodities used for industrial production have been, almost without exception, dropping in either absolute of inflation adjusted terms for most of the last century, interrupted only by the occasional war.”
I am amazed and astounded – Andrew Reynolds keeps on dishing out his lack of knowledge of Economics with such confidence that it is a worry. Not long ago, I was the recipient of Andrew’s sermon.
I provided Andrew, at his request, a list of some of the major contributions to 20th century economic theory. Had Andrew opened the cover of even one title, he could not have avoided noticing that the content is full of mathematics. All references I provided were from mathematical economics. The list does not contain one that is particularly relevant for environmental economics – it wasn’t the topic at the time. I spent considerable time, and patience.
Andrew, I don’t care how far and wide you want to spread your gospel by means of persuasion. I have one request though; please leave Economics out of it.
If you want, you can make use of your own advice for people to consult dictionaries – eg to check the spelling of resources.
Ernestine – sheesh, one misspelling in a comment and you feel the need to nit-pick on spelling. Oh, well.
On economics – I did do several units of a degree in it and, yes, I did notice that some mathematics were involved (I finally switched to Commerce because I, in my youthful arrogance, thought the Keynesianism and socialism I was being taught to be useless). I was not saying that to understand economics you need to ignore mathematics, but Greg’s (IMHO) simplistic attempts to say that his economics analysis was all simple mathematics were (again, IMHO) wrong.
I qualify that with a further reference to Alfred Marshall’s advice on the inclusion of mathematics in economics – one with which I heartily agree.
If I was wrong on the point about scenarios (Ernestine – please check James’ link and see if I was) I apologise and withdraw, but I cannot see a scenario (defined as “a postulated sequence of possible events”) in what James was linking to, merely problem identification and maybe a couple of disjointed projections.
PS – I have requested a few of those references from my library. I hope they come in soon. I have not had the time to read much in the area since the late 1980’s and I am looking forward to it.
PPS – am I wrong in my point on the drop in price of resources and, to extend it, oil?
How do you integrate your concerns with global warming with the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time, over the last three and a half million years, our planet has been subject to horrid ice-age conditions.
I have no doubt that the human species has had an effect on the climate. But it is without controversy a good effect. Since typically interglacial periods last only 6,000 to 10,000 years. And our current one is already a lot longer then that.
How is it that you dumb-leftists can get all uptight about warming WHEN WARMING IS GOOD and the overwheming balance of risks is on the cooling side.
This is all very well known to science. The understanding of the Milankovitch cycles has been around many decades now.
Willis,
Point of clarification: JQ’s polemic was not a personal attack. For an attack to be personal it must implicate a person- general attributes don’t make the cut. This is not to say it wasn’t objectionable to global warming skeptics/denialists, (as indeed it was intended to be), but I can assure not more so than bombs dropped from your side about the intellectual honesty of people who believe in the revealed wisdom of AGW, which were legion. I think we can all agree that these types of comments have a place in argument, (as they are, after all, instructive), while those of a personal nature do not.
Majorajam, thank you for your clarification. You say that
Following your reasoning, for you to say to a black man “All niggers are scum” is not a personal attack at all, since no black people are mentioned by name. Then let the black man know that “we can all agree that these types of comments have a place in argument (as they are, after all, instructive), while those of a personal nature do not,” and see what ensues …
Sorry, I can’t follow your logic in this matter. JQ has said that every sceptic is driven by dishonorable motives rather than by scientific belief. If he said that about every black man, you’d rightfully be up in arms calling him a racist. But for sceptics, it’s all right … say what???!?
To me as a sceptic, that is a personal attack. He is not attacking my views on lapse rates. He is not attacking my ideas on frog extinctions. He is attacking me personally, making a false and scurrilous claim about my motives.
Which, of course, makes JQ’s protestations about other’s attacks suspect, and make his “accidental” overlooking of other such attacks on sceptics look much less like an accident. My guess is that they are in fact accidental, as JQ strikes me in his postings as a man who wants to do the right thing — but they don’t look quite so accidental when he is making personal attacks himself.
w.
PS – Finally, you say
As you likely already know, your claim that “it’s no worse than what the other side is doing to us” is generally not viewed as one of the stronger arguments for the morality or proprietry of a given course of action …
PPS – My own view of people’s motives is that error and haste are generally a much more likely explanation of human action than is evil … and that this applies to me as well as to other people. For the overwhelming majority of us, it’s like the song says:
This thread is little more than a punch up. Nothing gets explored everything gets refuted before it is even properly explained or discussed. Everybody asserts facts and the questions are more like the spanish inquisition than any desire to understand how the other person arrived at their beliefs.
If people change their position on something (or are perceived to) then it is used against them as a point of weakness. Which undermines almost all attempts at persuassion.
It’s been interesting but its becoming a futile waste of time. Lots of bright people here, but not much in the way of real dialogue.
I agree that such an outcome was almost inevitable given the way that John opened this discussion. Of course it is hard to be both moderator and speaker.
Andrew,
Thank you for your reply. Yes, the reference to the dictionary was a cheap shot. Most people make spelling errors on posts.
To illustrate the difference between information which is of interest in contemporary commerce (market prices of commodities, such as oil) and the information which is of interest to ecological and environmental sustainability (and commerce in the very distant future) we would have to have future (not futures) markets today where the price of a barrel of oil to be delivered in say 2100 is determined today. We don’t have such markets. The year 2100 is not all that far into the future. So, a lot of prices are missing. Hence we can’t rely on ‘market forces’ to deal with the ‘big economic questions’ of our time. This is a rough verbal description of what is meant by ‘incomplete markets’.
Ecological and environmental sustainability is intrinsically of interest to Economics because the basic research question of Economics is the material (as it pertains to the subject matter of natural sciences) welfare of humans. IMHO, it is not possible for ‘economists’ to address these issues in isolation from scientists. I don’t think ‘unanimity’ among scientists is required or possible, given the nature of scientific research. However, I do think that a minimum of common understanding of methodologies is required between economists and scientists and it seems to me mathematics and mathematical economics is more suitable for this purpose than dictionary definitons. This does not mean that after a somewhat satisfactory answer to a particular problem area has been found (interim report, if you like), the ‘stuff’ shouldn’t be translated into English and other languages as Alfred Marshall advised more than a century ago.
I further venture to say that the complexity of biological systems is such that hopefully more mathematicians become interested in the intersection of natural science and economics. The history of the development of economic theory (not political) shows very clearly that progress was made only because new mathematics was applied to economic questions, including the entire body of theoretical models I call ‘non-dictatorial resource allocation systems’ (individuals’ preferences are taken as axiomatically given and the respect for human life is made precise by assuming people want to live – hence a minimum wealth constraint).
So, I hope to have provided a brief explanation why I am asking you not to treat introductory economic textbooks as some sort of alternative solution and why I don’t call myself an economist (even though I have a ‘licence’) but a permanent student of Economics.
Willis, Terje,
I think you give JQ too much credit. If his personal attack on sceptics was cock-up rather than conspiracy he could have immediately retracted it. Instead, he reinforced the insult with subsequent remarks, and when asked to justify himself by addressing specific concerns, simply waved them away with vague appeals to authority.
I have no doubt many well-known sceptics warrant JQ’s description. But many AGW proponents are equally ideologically driven, and equally unthinking in their analysis of the data.
Of course it is his blog and he is free to slander whomever he chooses, but he should remember that blanket denigration of entire segments of the community only serves to diminish his own credibility.
Well, we seem to have got into third-stage “He said, she said” at this point, so unless anyone has anything new to add, I proposed to close things off soon.
I will defend myself briefly by pointing it that I never asserted that all critics of AGW had dishonourable motives. However, I stand by my judgement that, at this point, anyone who fails to accept that the evidence strongly favours AGW is displaying dogmatic commitment to a long-held position and cannot propertly be described as a “sceptic”.
You might defend yourself even better by showing how your views on global warming are integrated with your views on glaciation. Which is really the same subject if you think about it.
We BETTER be able to warm the climate through the further release of CO2.
Or the planet is in big trouble.
On any reasonable interpretation that’s precisely what you asserted. Your original footnote:
“Sceptic” is the common term used to describe “critics of AGW”. So according to you all “critcis of AGW” are either dogmatic, ideological, or paid-off. None of those are “honourable motives”.
Weasel all you like JQ – you said what you said and you no doubt believe it.
I think the whole thing is a fraud. Because I think most people who were (lets say) against Kyoto if polled would, as a best guess, suppose that there is some human effect on the climate. The idea that none of them do is a straw man set up for the purposes of gratuitous abuse.
Its the scaremongering among the press and science workers that is what a lot of us are entirely skeptical about. In my case I’m gobsmacked by the stupidity of it all. Especially since only a few of the prominent scaremongers are professional climatologists.
A proffessional climatologist is likely to assure you, without hesitation, that Chicago (for example) will be buried deep under ice within 4000 years. And he will be thinking a lot sooner.
Let us hope that the scaremongers are technically right and we can burn off all the coal in the world, in pursuit of the good life, to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
JQ, in an attempt to move on past personal attacks, let me ask the following question to you and the folks on the list who are AGW adherents:
What evidence do you have that humans are warming the planet?
Let me discuss some parameters of my question, to save us from going down some blind alleys.
1) I’m asking for evidence, not theories.
2) I’m not asking for evidence that the earth is warming. I’m asking for evidence that humans are warming the earth, which is a totally different question.
3) Results of computer models are not evidence. If you think they are, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you at a very good price, and my computer model provides ample evidence that you’ll make a great profit on the deal … what’s that you say? You don’t believe my model results are “evidence” that you’ll make big money? What are you, a denialist? …
4) Saying “CO2 is rising, and the earth is warming, therefore CO2 is warming the earth” is neither evidence nor logical. Instead, it is an example of a logical error called “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. This is the error of assuming that if A happens before B, therefore A causes B.
5) Yes, in a theoretical planet with all other variables held fixed, theory says that rising CO2 will warm the planet. However, on our marvelous and mysterious planet, we have only the sketchiest idea of what the feedbacks in the system are. Thus, the theory that CO2 will warm is planet is just that, a theory, and not evidence.
So, let’s move past the personal attacks and theoretical meanderings to a real question — what is the evidence that you are accusing us mean, cruel, misguided sceptics of “denying”?
My best to everyone,
w.
I have some small circumstantial evidence. In that our current interglacial is already a great deal longer then most if not all of the last twenty. If things had gone to plan the white death holocaust would have closed in before Buddha, Pythagoras and Confuscious showed up on the scene. So perhaps our forest-burning ancestors as well as the industrial revolution have had some effect ………… FORTUNATELY.
People we have to refocus here. The scale of the global warming fraud is far greater then this tiny issue of whether there is some human effect or not. And we have to assume that many of the leftists who are pushing this may be akin to the leftists who would have been pro-communist in the old days. That is to say they may be and many probably are Utopian Eschatologists like their fascist and communist forbears.
They may wish to see us all dead.
Conservatives seriously have to refocus here. We tend to think of dumb-left-wingers as merely soft-headed. When we have done this in the past it has often been to our detriment. You want to put the hat on every now and then which allows you to think of them as very very devious and unspeakably evil.
Graeme … wow. Didn’t expect those claims in response to my question about evidence … however, your idea about the length of the interglacial period has been overtaken by new studies.
Until recently, all the evidence (i.e., the “Vostok” ice core long term, other ice cores shorter term) showed that the interglacial periods had all lasted about 10,000 years. As you point out, ours has already lasted longer than that, and there has been much speculation about the reason for the length.
For that reason, there was much interest in the recent EPICA ice core, which extended our knowledge back into the past. One reason for this interest was that the interglacial immediately prior to the oldest interglacial in the Vostok record is the interglacial most similar to ours. (By “most similar”, I mean that the Milankovich cycles of precession, obliquity, and eccentricity are most like those of the current interglacial). Because of this, everyone wanted to see how long that interglacial lasted.
In the event, the EPICA core revealed that that particular interglacial, the one most like ours, lasted about 25,000 years … which (either fortunately or unfortunately) blows your theory, as well as your “evidence” of AGW based on that theory, clean out of the water.
Finally, while I have gotten a lot of abuse from those you call “leftists”, I sincerely doubt that many of them are “very very devious and unspeakably evil.” This sounds like a line from a Dr. Doom comic book … they may make unpleasant personal attacks, but I don’t get the impression that they “may wish to see us all dead.” Mostly, they seem to be folks who, like me, occasionally let their lips get ahead of their logic …
Thank you for posting,
w.
I suspect a lot of them are incredibly evil. Because their position precedes this new information you have laid on me. And where do you suspect all those communists went when Reagan obliterated the Soviet Union?
If we look at the Utopian Esachatological movements you see that they never die. They go underground and bubble up in anoher form. And communism comes straight out of a long line of Christian Heresies extending backwards at least a millenium.
Now tell me this. My information comes from a pretty recent book by Brian Fagan. The Long Hot Summer. So do you have any links to this new discovery.
And the science behind it or the reportage of it could easily be swayed by the dumb left who must surely (under assumptions that would have been made prior to this discovery) suspect their fraud could break at any time.
Furthermore while I consider that your new evidence sounds rather good it can scarcely be definitive. Since what you are telling me is out of whack with the Milankovitch cycles, the movement of which were known years ahead of your ice findings.
And what I understood about them is they would put us very favourably toward a glaciation now if one could get up a head of steam. But the path where three roads meet comes in 2,000 years from now. And the really strong danger period lasts until at least 10 000 years from now. And if 10 000 years from now we are frozen over there will be 60 000 years to wait before all three cycles come together to thaw us out. Which craps on the worst fantasies of the White Witch of Narnia.
Now ok. I can see that the last time I had a good look at this the data may have been out of date. But what I’m seeing is sort of neutral periods which tend to favour the ice but aren’t a biggy so long as its thawed. But will allow the ice to keep spreading if its already doing so. And then when I looked at it (with as I say likely outdated info) I was seeing a sort of inner core of about 8 000 years where I was presuming the three cycles had come together and were totally decisive. And about 2 000 years either side of that where there was a strong effect but not necessarily a decisive one.
So your 25 000 year assumption ‘by correspondence’ just doesn’t ring true for me. Who is it saying that the period you are talking about is the one, oh-so-much like our own? And on what basis?
Because it doesn’t ring true.
The other thing is the timing about when these things start and when they end which gives a punter a lot of confusion since its a bit arbitrary. Some folks date the interglacial to about 12,000 years ago. But then the ice started melting 18.000 years ago and looking back over it there is a lot of room to muck about with the starting and finishing point of these things.
Anyway. Explain further. This is not me being lazy. But the net is so polluted by the global warming fraud that I cannot get much sense out of it. And I don’t get time to go to the State Library much anymore.
I wouldn’t be so sure. The depopulationist envirofascists would probably like to see most of us dead (excepting themselves of course). I dare say there’s at least a couple of those folk around here.
On your evidence question, as per our discussion on the 600+ thread, computer models can be evidence, if they are validated reliably. The Bureau of Meterology does a halfway decent job of predicting the weather tomorrow, based on computer models and measurements taken today. I don’t see how those models’ predictions are not “evidence” for what the weather will be tomorrow.
One way to link the models’ predictions back to data is to see them as a kind of summary of prior data. They’re tuned to fit prior measurements, and they are validated every single day by predicting tomorrow’s weather. There’s so much data that the models do a pretty good job and generally don’t overfit. The problem with the GCMs is not that they are models per se, it is they don’t have anything like the same validation, nor the same level of understanding as the (more local) models used by the BoM.
(BTW, a fact I only recently discovered: the BoM relies heavily on prior weather patterns to predict the weather. They essentially find days in the past where the weather pattern was most similar to today’s and then look at what happened the next day. You could call that the no-model (nonparametric) approach to modelling).