I hope the Climate Activists are proud of the effect their lies are having on the younger generation

Roger Bryant: 
 

Peter,

The message you are trying to get across seems rather confused. 

That is, you can't make out what it is that I am saying. Let me try again, and then extend it some. I gave a list of technical matters of climate science where you seem to have a different view from me, and asked for your reasons. I listed some six issues which have come up. 

What I was hoping for is that you would have some technical reasoning which, for example, I could put to a third person like this: “I believe A, because <my reasons>; Roger disputes that, he believes <something else that contradicts A>, for <Roger's reasons>.” That is normally what happens in scientific disputes. But I don't yet have a coherent view of <Roger's reasons> that I could summarise in any reasonable way. 

On some matters I don't even get what the issue might be. There seems to be some issue about global (or, as you prefer to put it, GLOBAL) versus local or hemispherical effects; you seem to think that what is one cannot be the other.

Let me try to say why I don't get that, through an analogy. Say I have a house with two apartments in it. There is an entrance hall, and the two apartments are left and right off the entrance hall. When both inhabitants are making dinner, the smells and the warmth are most noticeable inside the apartments. But some of it leaks. If you're outside the door of the one, you can maybe make out what they're cooking; same with standing outside the door of the other. They also both generate warmth through cooking. During the cooking process you likely won't notice the warmth, but gradually over the evening the warmth will spill over into the entrance hall until everything is in thermal equilibrium. (I have a fairly large old building with three floors plus roof space plus cellar in which managing this equilibrium is quite an active task.) Asking what's LEFT-APARTMENT, what's RIGHT-APARTMENT and what's LEFT+RIGHT+HALL doesn't really help all that much in managing the equilibrium (either of heat or of smells), and suggesting there is a distinction which makes those three domains exclusive to each other would be contrary to basic physics, as well as experience.

 

[RB] If you go back to the reason I started this thread the AGW dogma requires ‘scary’ graphs to display in newspapers and on Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future websites. 

Since you keep bringing this up, maybe it is time for me to address this? 

The young people demonstrating on Fridays are doing so manifestly because they think that anthropogenic global warming will ruin the world within their lifetimes unless something is done about it, and they don't see the older generations, which more or less run the world with their accumulated wealth and power and politics, doing anything substantial about it. Are they right about that?

You don't think they are. But maybe they read a 50 year-old textbook on climate such as Barry and Chorley, or maybe they read John Houghton's 30-year-old Complete Briefing, in which evidence for, and rough calculations about, the extent of anthropogenic global warning are presented in such a way that the more intellectually capable teens are certainly capable of understanding it (and indeed presenting it to their classmates). 

(Let us leave aside here the question of whether politicians of the older generations are in fact doing anything about it, or, even if they are trying, succeeding.)

So there are these books, these sources, that have been around for decades, and get updated (none of these authors are still alive, but it is conceivable that someone else may take over Barry and Chorley, as happens often with standard texts in medicine and law). Those authors did not write that material with a deliberate attempt to deceive; indeed, just the opposite: they wrote them as a deliberate attempt to educate people in climate science. They are not lies. I don't see how anybody who had even the slightest professional contact with the authors could ever think they were. They may be, in various ways, mistaken (as you might think), but they are most obviously not deliberate attempts to deceive, which is what a lie is. 

I've read some of that material. I know the reasoning; I think much of it is right or approximately right. I think there is anthropogenic global warming and I think (contrary to what I thought ten years ago) that it is now making a considerable difference to the occurrence of extreme weather events to the point at which in some places (such as California, as I have expressed in detail) there is a increasing political problem as to how life must change in order to accommodate it. That is my view. Whatever others think I may be doing, I am not arguing that view in public with an intent to deceive. I really believe it.

You must know this. Yet (look at the title of this thread) you call these technical contributions “lies”, even though you know they are not. That is a deliberate attempt on your part to deceive. I think it is morally wrong. 

Roger Bryant: 
 

Peter,

The message you are trying to get across seems rather confused. 

That is, you can't make out what it is that I am saying. Let me try again, and then extend it some. I gave a list of technical matters of climate science where you seem to have a different view from me, and asked for your reasons. I listed some six issues which have come up. 

What I was hoping for is that you would have some technical reasoning which, for example, I could put to a third person like this: “I believe A, because <my reasons>; Roger disputes that, he believes <something else that contradicts A>, for <Roger's reasons>.” That is normally what happens in scientific disputes. But I don't yet have a coherent view of <Roger's reasons> that I could summarise in any reasonable way. 

On some matters I don't even get what the issue might be. There seems to be some issue about global (or, as you prefer to put it, GLOBAL) versus local or hemispherical effects; you seem to think that what is one cannot be the other.

Let me try to say why I don't get that, through an analogy. Say I have a house with two apartments in it. There is an entrance hall, and the two apartments are left and right off the entrance hall. When both inhabitants are making dinner, the smells and the warmth are most noticeable inside the apartments. But some of it leaks. If you're outside the door of the one, you can maybe make out what they're cooking; same with standing outside the door of the other. They also both generate warmth through cooking. During the cooking process you likely won't notice the warmth, but gradually over the evening the warmth will spill over into the entrance hall until everything is in thermal equilibrium. (I have a fairly large old building with three floors plus roof space plus cellar in which managing this equilibrium is quite an active task.) Asking what's LEFT-APARTMENT, what's RIGHT-APARTMENT and what's LEFT+RIGHT+HALL doesn't really help all that much in managing the equilibrium (either of heat or of smells), and suggesting there is a distinction which makes those three domains exclusive to each other would be contrary to basic physics, as well as experience.

 

[RB] If you go back to the reason I started this thread the AGW dogma requires ‘scary’ graphs to display in newspapers and on Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future websites. 

Since you keep bringing this up, maybe it is time for me to address this? 

The young people demonstrating on Fridays are doing so manifestly because they think that anthropogenic global warming will ruin the world within their lifetimes unless something is done about it, and they don't see the older generations, which more or less run the world with their accumulated wealth and power and politics, doing anything substantial about it. Are they right about that?

You don't think they are. But maybe they read a 50 year-old textbook on climate such as Barry and Chorley, or maybe they read John Houghton's 30-year-old Complete Briefing, in which evidence for, and rough calculations about, the extent of anthropogenic global warning are presented in such a way that the more intellectually capable teens are certainly capable of understanding it (and indeed presenting it to their classmates). 

(Let us leave aside here the question of whether politicians of the older generations are in fact doing anything about it, or, even if they are trying, succeeding.)

So there are these books, these sources, that have been around for decades, and get updated (none of these authors are still alive, but it is conceivable that someone else may take over Barry and Chorley, as happens often with standard texts in medicine and law). Those authors did not write that material with a deliberate attempt to deceive; indeed, just the opposite: they wrote them as a deliberate attempt to educate people in climate science. They are not lies. I don't see how anybody who had even the slightest professional contact with the authors could ever think they were. They may be, in various ways, mistaken (as you might think), but they are most obviously not deliberate attempts to deceive, which is what a lie is. 

I've read some of that material. I know the reasoning; I think much of it is right or approximately right. I think there is anthropogenic global warming and I think (contrary to what I thought ten years ago) that it is now making a considerable difference to the occurrence of extreme weather events to the point at which in some places (such as California, as I have expressed in detail) there is a increasing political problem as to how life must change in order to accommodate it. That is my view. Whatever others think I may be doing, I am not arguing that view in public with an intent to deceive. I really believe it.

You must know this. Yet (look at the title of this thread) you call these technical contributions “lies”, even though you know they are not. That is a deliberate attempt on your part to deceive. I think it is morally wrong.