A few pieces of data from the past few days:
* US Republican views on evolution have shifted significantly in the past 4 years. In 2009, 54 per cent said Yes to the question “Did humans and other animals evolve over time”, and 39 per cent said No. In 2013, those numbers have shifted to 48 per cent No, 43 per cent Yes. Other evidence shows that college-educated Repubs are more likely to have crazy views on evolution, climate science and so on than less-educated Repubs.
* Globally, November 2013 was the hottest November on record. In Australia, 2013 has been the hottest year on record.
* (Via Harry Clarke) Abbott’s senior adviser Maurice Newman has a piece in the Oz blaming the carbon tax/price for the decline of Australian manufacturing
Looking at the last point first, anyone who understands economics can see that the decline of Aust manufacturing is primarily due to the same long run trends that have reduced agriculture to a tiny proportion of economic activity, and secondarily due to the overvaluation of the $A (relative to PPP), reflecting the mining boom and other factors. If Newman doesn’t know this, he should. Newman’s nonsense on this point illustrates something more fundamental. You can’t deny climate science without screwing up your understanding of economics and politics.
This observation is strengthened by the second point. Climate “sceptics” claim to prefer data to models. But in fact they will all explain this data away. The truth is that they are all (I mean this literally, and without exceptions[1]) religiously committed to a position that no evidence will shake.
The final point illustrates the processes that are making it impossible to be a sane, honest rightwinger. The numbers reflect two processes
(i) People with sane views are ceasing to identify as Republicans, while those with insane views are shifting to become Repubs
(ii) Committed Republicans are resolving cognitive dissonance by becoming creationists
The processes are slightly different in Australia, where creationism remains a fringe position. But how can the likes of Akerman, Blair, Bolt, Devine and Stutchbury continue to parrot the arguments of American creationists without at least assuming that creationism is a defensible viewpoint?
The final step in the argument is addressed to a hypothetical sane, honest rightwinger. How can anyone take your stated views seriously when you fail to acknowledge that most people who share them are either fools or liars?
fn1. To be more precise, I don’t give up hope that some rightwingers will give up the entire package – climate denial, rightwing economics and all. But outside a conversion experience of this kind, these people are impervious to evidence.
John Quiggin 
Climate change deniers who find affirmation in the fact Antarctic cruise ships are blocked by summer ice should also note it is expected to nudge 50C at Lake Eyre today.
I do know some right wingers and they are not dishonest. They are very ‘nice’ people – knoq their manners and how to patronise, but they would be quite happy to ‘breed out’ of the gene pool people like me who do not live up to their requirements for a society that suits them.
I have argued with the male part of this couple, he was a fellow student during my undergrad degree, an older man who was so well off he didn’t need to work. Who said he wouldn’t do any more work because the govt just took all his profits in tax, so he undertook a psych degree to try and show that lefties were all wrong.
His wife just nodded like a fool and looked to him for her beliefs.
He couldn’t do that – he couldn’t find a way to show that ‘leftist’ psychology was wrong, but not to be daunted, he said to me after one drawn out debate which I clearly won with evidence and rational argument, he said “Ok, rationally you are right but I just know you are wrong. Something will come up in the future to show that you are wrong.”
@Neil Hanrahan
I would argue that Freud’s defence mechanisms – particularly projection – are the best thing that he did.
Freud really did understand the way wealthy white males who were raised in sexually repressive cultures thought and not much has changed for men from this class.
Well, there are sane, honest republican citizens, it’s just their unexamined, firmly held beliefs on climate change, evolution, and other matters of science that are crazy. Although perhaps that rules out the honest part
I know of sane, honest but ignorant right wingers. I guess it’s defining the point at which ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse.
@rog I think the combination is due to temperament than anything else. While there may be philosophical differences the coalition promotes competence and pragmatism. This combination of Tory and Whig (Conservative and Liberal) is happening in other Anglophone countries like the United Kingdom and the United States. My reading is that they are not reflexively believers in change for change sake, they have a healthy respect for tradition and institutions even when changing them (happy to explain the contradiction here if need be) but are by-and-large pragmatic and competent.
In contrast, those on the left tend to have a naïve faith in the power of the State (at least I and others view it as naïve) and tend to change society based on abstract principles or concepts. This can mean that some radical and potentially beneficial changes are proposed but conversely mean that people can’t trust them to manage the affairs of state.
@JulieThomas I can use examples when I am debating leftist individuals which are very similar. Both left and right have their fair share of the ideologues and “insane” individuals. Sometimes though it is useful to have these people around for no other reason than by being so intransigent that they can allow you to test and confirm/deny your political hypotheses across a number of topics.
@faust This “competence and pragmatism” seems OK until you scratch it; it was the competent and pragmatic who misjudged financial institutions and misjudged foreign policy aka War.
Underneath it all the “competent and pragmatic” know that there are limited resources and they dont want to be left out; their share is proportional to their estimation of personal ability.
I find it hard to get past this fact ;- Climate science is currently a very very large part of the world scientific community and apparently 98 % of them say the world is changing fast because of human activity. Why so many can get past that fact is a question for psychology and sociology. There are fairly simple answers -the only hard bit is acknowledging that you must work that way too.
Why is it that if anyone says ‘maybe markets arent perfect all the time ‘, some think you said ‘the government should run everything all the time ‘? (you know who you are!)
One of my biggest beefs with these neo-lib-con extremists is how easily and thoroughly they have convinced everyone in the Western world that human nature is essentially selfish so we best design our society (and economics) around the new virtue of greed. Human nature is selfish and altruistic. It is now commonly assumed that the saying ‘Charity begins at home ‘ means to look after your own first. Its original meaning was that children must be encouraged to care about others as it is easy to raise selfish bast##ds rather than caring nice kids.
@faust
@faust “This can mean that some radical and potentially beneficial changes are proposed but conversely mean that people can’t trust them to manage the affairs of state”.
Best wishes for the new year, and please keep working on that very troublesome cognitive dissonance of yours.
@rog Financial institutions were regulated before, during and after the crash. The argument that they were unregulated does not stack up. Furthermore, what exactly is the left-wing view on financial institutions? Public ownership does not confer safety a la the failed State banks in Australia in the 1980s. You can demand that the banks be highly conservative but expect people from vulnerable backgrounds to be denied access to credit. Michael Milken the chap to basically created the market for high yield (‘junk’) bonds received death threats until the early 1980s for financing African-American companies. This type of activity (financing vulnerable people) is usually demanded by the left but it requires financial institutions to be risk-takers (and profit makers) which the left does not want.
Talking about war, I seem to recall two Democratic Administrations (Kennedy/Johnson) who scaled up the US assault in Indo-China. Waging war on other countries is not the sole preserve of the political right.
Competence and pragmatism, even when they are not actually in display, are still two qualities that those who find themselves in the right wing church search for.
I should just make one slight amendment: …Mike Milken the chap *who* basically…
@faust
So you are able to take an above it all approach and see that both sides do it? You are the observer and can interpret the right for us?
But you missed the bit where I explained that the big difference I see between left and right. People on the right think there are two types of people and one type – losers like me – should die out. The left do not think this.
And I do wish you would answer my questions on the other thread. What does the right have to offer in the way of building a good society?
@JulieThomas What a shocking thing to say! I have heard from leftwingers that I am scum and should die as well. Let’s protest together. But I don’t then turn around and lump an entire group of people who have those views in and label them cruel or heartless!
Building a good society? What is a good society? Is it one where there is charitable giving, family units are held broadly together, people live in a safe and harmonious environment? Many people who are labelled the “religious right” believe in such notions. They believe that a disciplined school environment, pro-family tax policies, and promoting religious institutions are ways to achieve this.
But it does not really answer the question of what is a “good” society. Unless you provide a definition around that then we may be speaking at cross purposes.
@trev Look at the current Australian political environment. The previous Labor Government proposed and implemented a whole range of, at times radical, legislative proposals. Yet because of their basic incompetence are now on the Opposition Benches. You can come up with brilliant ideas but if you can’t implement them then people won’t trust you for a very long time!
Plainly, I’d say its possible that there can be sane and honest right-wingers, depending on how one defines the concept. Most of us start with very loose and therefore incoherent conceptions of the polity and more broadly, the sweep of what may be described as mutual obligation. As Marx commented all those years ago in the 18th Brumaire, the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling class, and given that this is a privileged and property owning class, the ruling ideas will, this side of soc!alist revolution, be ideas favouring the exclusion of working humanity from power and thus be of the right. It would be paradoxical if most people didn’t start off with a right-wing perspective. People who are in prison are defined by their “prisonership” and their ideas take as given that social reality. Capitalism is a far more subtle prison than Long Bay can ever be and it mystifies with awesome power. Ruling classes neither become so nor remain so by accident.
So you can be sane and up to a point honest and be a right-winger, though at the very least you will probably need to be intellectually lazy or distracted or dissonant to be so for any length of time. After a while, a right-winger will have to work harder and harder to suppress the incoherence in their paradigms of community, favouring always that which causes them least cultural discomfort and becoming dissonant about inconvenient truths. Perhaps the rightist will begin choosing to stay amongst those sharing he same dissonance and eventually be me unhinged by the absence of any check on their misanthropy and ignorance. This seems to be what has happened in the US. Being an adult American right-winger would make sanity and honesty very hard to maintain indeed. You might well be even more isolated than those of us on the far left.
I see being a right-winger as a kind of social pathology, endemic in societies shaped by unwarranted privilege and the concomitant social exclusion and which left untreated can ruin humans on a grand scale, but which, with careful reflection and just collaboration with others, one can conquer, in the process, seizing one’s humanity.
Oops …
@faust
Classic ignorant right-winger.
There have been drastic changes in US banking regulation which correlate beautifully with stability in the banking sector. The US banking system in the early 20th century was very unstable culminating in 1929 crash. In 1933 Roosevelt introduced various regulations of which Glass-Steagall was the centrepiece. There followed about 5 decades of unprecedented stability. In the 80’s, the Reagan administration began the serious undercutting of these regulations, adding loopholes so they could be avoided. A similar story was taking place under Thatcher in the UK. Undeterred by the 87 crash this program was continued by Democrat and Republican politicians until Glass-Steagall was finally repealed in 1999. From that point on we moved into an almost unprecedented era of deregulation, until the entire global economy crashed.
The story of financial industry regulation isn’t really the whole story of the GFC, but it’s a huge part and statements to the effect of ” but there’s always been some regulation” are uninformed, asinine nonsense.
@faust
I asked for some writing or thoughts from the right about how one goes about the task of building a good society. However you want to define it, is not the question.
Did you miss that simple request? Where have ‘the right’ written or talked about society and what would be a decent society?
@faust
@faust Love your sweeping assumptions! You don’t believe the Murdoch powered MSM had anything to do with creating the impression of incompetence in the centre-right ALP government? I’ll believe the international rating agencies, the World Bank & the IMF on this one.
@faust
Financial institutions were regulated before during and after the crash….
..not if you accept the evidence http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf
The crash was man made, avoidable and due to a failure to regulate.
I am not going to go through all of Faust’s list of schoolboy howlers, but I will address a couple. All he does is map the contemporary meaning of left and right onto the nineteenth century and then claim happy precedent for the contemporary right.
It is true that Lincoln was Republican. It is equally true that in 1877 the Republicans stole the presidency by agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South and allow the former slave-owners to take control of Southern state governments, often by force alone. I’m not sure abandoning African-Americans in the South to another century of de facto apartheid is the kind of glorious rightwing success that Faust is eager to instruct us on.
It is equally true that most of the staes, interests and population groups that voted Southern Democrat in 1860 now vote Republican. The reason I say Faust’s retrojection of our notion of left and right is extremely misleading is that the party of Abraham Lincoln morphed into the party of Jefferson Davis after the Civil Rights Movement. Lincoln must be spinning in his grave over ‘Republican’ governors and legislatures defending the the use of the Confederate flag.
Faust assigns Roman catholic emancipation to Wellington, exclusively and solely. There is no mention of O’Connell, the popular agitation in both Ireland and England, or Wellington’s fear, as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that O’Connell’s movement would lead rapidly to an independent Ireland.
In Brazil the monarchy enacted emancipation. The slave-owning aristocracy responded by overthrowing the throne and establishing a republic with de facto apartheid. Does this mean Brazil should, in Faust’s world, immediately recall the Braganças?
No.
Your question is answered.
Happy New Year.
In the 1960ies when Kennedy and then Johnson enacted the raft of Civil Rights legislation that changed the “old”south Johnson said that would cost the Democrats the southern vote
Events have proved him right,as the Repoublicans ,mostly hard liners now hold all the seats in congress with a few exceptions, across the”old” South
This has freed the Democrats however from an old reactionary bloc whoc made the Demoicrats a curious amalgam of conservatives and progressives…and made the Republicans so right wing as to be unelectedable
Going back to Maurice Newman; his comments appear to support the contention that it is possible to be factually errant and economically illiterate and still be very successful in business. This is not a right/left issue, but would tend to suggest that factors other than rationality and knowledge are key to corporate success. My observation of the matter would support the contention that successful corporate captains excel in a narrow range of social skills; the ability to be charming and ruthless with an unhealthy moral disregard for guile and dissimulation.
In the current economic phase, whatever term one wishes to use, the dominance of the corporation with the sole objective of making money against every aspect of human and environmental respect has rightly gained these figments of modern capitalism the descriptive psychological profile of a psychopath. Perhaps the skills to run one successfully require a complementary profile.
More to the point, seeing the destruction of the environment in left/right terms is probably unhelpful. The predisposition of the straighteners and fixers, the apostles of narrowness, to use Keating’s terms, to ride roughshod over sound argument and more importantly, sound policy, purely for the satisfaction of winning (whether financially or in the realm of public opinion) does not require a debate, which those on the side of rationality are likely to lose, but a concerted civil action to both discredit these destroyers and demonstrate an alternative.
Its a bit tribal, and so is AFL. The thing about AFL is that reality bites you in the bum. You can insist all you like that yours is the best team, or your style of play is best, but a couple of thumping losses tends to shake your confidence.
Without this regular reality check, you can easily spout your sides mantra. Without the reality check, opinion makers can make out that you are winning when you are losing.
I think the right are currently more deluded than the left (my side). And I think it is a mixture of delusion and dishonesty, with the Bolt’s of this world being rather less delusional.
@Alan
Thanks for making these points. I was too lazy to respond, but you’ve nailed it.
John Brookes Would you regard the ship stuck in the Antarctic reality biting people in the bum ?
Clearly they thought it would be a lovely jaunt ,following in the footsteps of Mawson , doing a few cursory experiments and showing how the climate had changed.And now here they are, disrupting several supply chains, costing millions and rapidly becoming a laughing stock. How could this happen?
@chrisl
Do you really believe this kind of thing, or is it all tribal pointscoring for you?
Believe it or not, I intend this question seriously. Can you really believe, on the strength of obviously silly claims from people like Bolt (utterly unqualified, and with a long track record of being factually wrong) that you are smarter and better informed than the thousands of scientists who have devoted their lives to studying various aspects of this problem – unwillingly, so in the case of people like ecologists and marine biologists who have enough problems without climate change loaded on top.
@Hermit
Not bad, the highest temp recorded at Lake Eyre was 61C.
@Julie Thomas
So you were wrong, big deal.
@Megan
Thank you for your interest. I see no advantage in satisfying your curiosity so will not. I was prompted to require someone who was making ill-informed and abusive comments to put his credentials on the line as I suspected that he was, with some not negligible degree of probability, just someone who had been an employee solicitor retired with disability pension or other benefits as a result of mental/emotional problems. He appeared to have some slight knowledge of the law just a millimeter or two above the level of the bush or barrack room lawyer. He doesn’t seem to have responded. Perhaps if you asked him to he might.
@Neil Hanrahan
I see our comments crossed paths.
That’s a shame – if your judgments are on the public record I see no reason not to direct me to them. You claimed to have held judicial/quasi-judicial roles and it would be interesting to read some of your judgments.
On the other hand, you may have adjudicated a year 7 debate, once – in which case it would most likely not be of any interest.
@Oliver Townshend
Yes it’s insulting both ways but it doesn’t mean it isn’t true in the sense that a lot of the psychology of religious belief is involved in many cases. As other’s have pointed out tribalism is one and tribalism is readily apparent on this like most similar blogs (whether left or right and whether one is talking about climate or some other subject). A way of ordering a good part of one’s world view is another even if it is apparent that most people hold somewhat inconsistent views of different parts of reality at the same time, a phenomenon not unknown to the those who have researched economic and investment psychology and people’s instinctive feel (usually dodgy) for probabilities.
@Megan
If I thought you really entertained that final amusing jibe as possibly capturing the truth then I wouldn’t think anything you were likely to say about anything important worth a moment’s attention. But you do know better I think. Despite that mild compliment based on your posts I would invite you to disclose what, on your CV, would add to your credit when making assertions on this or any blog…. Sauce for the gander……
@Neil Hanrahan
I never claimed to have held judicial/quasi-judicial roles – you did.
Having made the claim you are now being coy about supporting it. Matter for you.
@Megan
I find your questions posed to Faust about evidence for the social advances he claims for the right rather odd. Surely it is not evidence that you want but a careful analysis to exhibit the association of those well understood advances with the right. Perhaps like JQ you are in want of any real understanding of right wingers or anyone indeed except those that you can classify as friend or enemy. Or if not “understanding” then “definition”.
The part of the great Anglo-Irish nobleman the first Duke of Wellington in facilitating Catholic Emancipation even though in his case it was somewhat against his instincts, invites attention to what you, JQ – or Faust – regard as right wing. In terms of the right and left which sat in the Etats Generales Wellington was of course Right,as were the Bishops and it seems reasonable to regard all, in current terms, as Right who voted for the abolition of the slave trade in 1806 since only a handful were even elected by propertied city dwellers. And so on, but surely you know all those commonplace facts. So give us what is missing, viz. your idea of what is/was/will be right wing.
JQ your response had nothing to do with the question I posed (to John Brookes) And what is with the obsessoin with Andrew bolt? Around 53 per cent of people voted right of centre last election. Please …get out more
Clearly they thought it would be a lovely jaunt ,following in the footsteps of Mawson , doing a few cursory experiments and showing how the climate had changed.And now here they are, disrupting several supply chains, costing millions and rapidly becoming a laughing stock. How could this happen?
@chrisl
A ship stuck in ice. Proves what exactly? The world just had the hottest November ever, and you are hoping to trump that with a ship stuck in ice?
When it comes to dishonesty, you can take one isolated piece of information and, ignoring the great body of information already in existence, claim that your thesis is proved.
I’ll be entirely honest about my opinion of global warming. I think its real, and human caused. I also believe it will be very damaging. But I’m less sure of that last bit. Many lefties take a strange view of global warming, seeing it as an opportunity to don hair shirts and make a CO2 free penance. I can’t see this – but it is a huge problem.
Global warming is not part of an attack on capitalism. It does mean that yet more regulation of unfettered libertarianism is necessary. But that is no big deal.
And we (the lefty intelligentsia wannabees), use Bolt as a kind of short hand. We could use Albrechtsen or Sloane, or Devine or lots of others. But Bolt is only 4 letters long, and harder to misspell, and typifies the right wing demagogue.
The Macquarie dictionary new words committee is currently considering adding an extra meaning to “bolt”. Submissions for the definition are now open. Do your worst.
@Neil Hanrahan
Presumably you are familiar with the convention that questions involve a sentence with a question mark as its final punctuation?
I didn’t ask Faust a question in this thread, AFAIK.
Having recently displayed an inability to comprehend a fairly short and simple Judgment of a Federal Court Judge, I suppose it is unsurprising that you seem to have confused my comments with someone else’s (perhaps Julie’s) questioning of ‘Faust’.
There’s every possibility that you are a nice person, but you are certainly pompous beyond all reasonable justification.
@Megan
I won’t applaud you for being against the Iraq war because I don’t know your reasons. However i do note that while people presumably left of centre like Richard Butler and Kevin Rudd were loudly declaring that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and “everyone” (scil. who matters) believes it, I proferred the lonely view that the one person who really wanted everyone to believe in the WMDs was Saddam Hussein. Well, not “everyone” but he really did need the Iranians, the Saudis and his own generals and Iraqis generally to believe he had them which was a completely adequate explanation for him behaving as though he was concealing something. Of course I had no idea of the degree of incompetence we would see in US government (actually at all levels) in the 21st century: Whatshisname the first Administrator who disbanded the Iraqi Army and sacked all the Baathists; the handling of Hurricane Katrina if you like; the appointment of people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to positions where they could spread OUR secrets to all and sundry; lack of regulation of the financial sector; budgetary profligacy and waste at all levels including “entitlements”, cost of health care, vast cost overruns in everything, partly fostered by corrupt or near corrupt lobbying etc. So I was willing to be agnostic on the basis that if the US knew what it was doing and had the political stamina and ability and wlliingness to deploy the very expensive military means for as long as it took our grandchildren, and Iraqis’ grandchildren might look back and approve the Bush Admiinistration’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately my doubts were justified. I would even go so far as to wonder why the US didn’t simply threaten the Taliban government in Afghanistan with bombing them (as Clinton used bombing in the Balkans but even more ruthlessly) until they handed over Osama bin Laden. (I can’t believe that the US incompetence extended to thinking that they were going to get some economic advantage out of some pipeline or mineral resources).
Would a Crean or Beazley government have refused to go along with the US in invading Iraq? I doubt it. BTW, what position should have been taken on the sancitions which, thanks to the way Saddam Hussein responded may well have cost the lives of many Iraqi children for years before the invasion?
On the bright side, it looks as though our highly imperfect but still very creative major ally is going to get another chance. It’s fracking is going to give it another 15 or 20 years to solve its huge problems. Can anyone cheer me up by giving reason to suppose it will? Mind you, even if it doesn’t solve them it isn’t going to be the basket case that it might be if its population was ageing like that of Japan and Europe. Without compulsory voting it should be able to stagger on with a very unequal society as long as they can resurrect much of the middle class, or rather create conditions in which 50 per cent of the population can do it for themselves.
John Brookes That is a pretty reasonable answer.Lefties do seem to to want to take our lifestyles away and I am not sure why that is.Just live your own life as you see fit. Do no harm to others.
A ship stuck in ice.Proves what exactly.Reality
@Megan
Are you losing the plot a little? Not only did i not suggest that you had claimed some sort of judicial or quasi-judicial position I specifically referred to someone else’s possible want of legal credentials but then added a suggestion that, having shown an interest in what I may have done or written elsewhere you might disclose similar information about yourself. However, the lay down case is your denial of asking a question of Faust, not to mention your rather arch if not supercilious (pompous?) grammatical point.
This is what you said:
The world according to Faust:
right wingers have done things like:
-help abolish slavery,
-fought for Roman Catholic emancipation,
-opened the world up to free trade,
-outlawing women and children in mines,
-opened up democracy to previously non-franchised,
-and enacted progressive reforms such as primary education and an expanded university system.
Is there any evidence to support this?
*****************
I would prefer to give people the impression of pomposity than careless inaccuracy or of leaving big holes in an argument.
@Neil Hanrahan
The people who knew best that Hussein had exactly zero WMD were the neocons and their establishment media accomplices who firstly convinced “us” that he did and secondly that an illegal war of aggression was the correct course to follow.
I couldn’t care less for your applause, thanks.
@Neil Hanrahan
Comprehension is quite evidently not your strong suit. That question was both rhetorical and general.
@John Quiggin
Good, I see reference to the thousands of scientists etc. So perhaps you can answer the question about where that almost mythical figure of 97 per cent of some lot of people or other who are supposed to be relevant comes from. And whether it is worth a row of beans.
I remember reading somewhere that some minor thesis by some undergraduate was the source of the 97 per cent originally. But more recently I have seen it being claimed as the figure which (coincidentally) was arrived at by someone looking at all (really?!?) the published peer-reviewed articles on some subjects and counting those which seemed to be affirming some (and what?) version of the AGW is real and dangerous thesis and those which were not (what counted for putting them into the for or against or agnostic category I have no idea). Against that I recall someone getting up a petition or statement by some 30,000 scientists of all persuasions, some 9000 with doctorates, who, who were willing to say that they were unconvinced of the AGW is real and dangerous hypothesis. Do you have any position on this “consensus’ business JQ? And do you have any faith in those doing the literature review which is the product of the IPCC’s editors, contributors etc.? Since, whether you accept the Laframboise evisceration of the IPCC or not it is clear that there are plenty of pretty dodgy or merely unqualified people associated with it, what faith should one place in it and what is the rational basis on which one should assess what it reports both in its Summary for Policy Makers and in its other chapters?
@Neil Hanrahan
Yes, the vast majority of actual climate scientists do believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW). You can read Naomi Oreske’s book on it. As for the 30,000 signatures, with the supposed 9000 Phds, maybe they were all right wingers? Have a look at http://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project.htm
All you’ve demonstrated is that mud sticks, and that the anti-AGW crowd have been throwing a lot of mud.
Or maybe you are just trying to prove Prof Quiggin’s hypothesis about the existence of sane honest right wingers?
@Neil Hanrahan
You must have been a very interesting “judicial/quasi-judicial” person to appear before.
I’ve often heard it said that some people recall hearing or reading somewhere things which are absolute bollocks and yet believe them to be true.
@Neil Hanrahan
The references for the figure of 97% are available from NASA. You may care to read the material at that link.
Lest you be too busy making judicial and semi-judicial decisions, the papers they cite are:
You are welcome to hunt for your undergraduate among the authors. Equally you are welcome to retract your nonsensical claim about having read something somewhere about someone that says something or other that you are not completely sure of.