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

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
I think it is worthwhile to counter misleading rhetoric as it arises.

I whole heartedly agree with you.

There has been in this thread no “unsettled climate science” discussed. This entity has proposed some indirectly, but declined to provide any assertions in climate science when repeatedly asked, except for one occasion. He quoted two assertions, and when I asked him for his reasoning to the truth of those assertions, he demurred. As indeed such entities do.

This is not exactly as I remember it; I have tried to answer every direct question. Even when I did it countering with a question, I do not see why the burden of proving some scientific claims should lay on me while you were unable to refute such claims. On the other hand, I cannot recall any replies from you to Roger's questions (posted on 5 October, 2021 at 12:56), or any comments on presented wildfire statistics as well as ECS from my McKitrick and Christy CMIP6 model quote.

As we have seen in this thread, true deniers of anthropogenic global warming will dodge any uncomfortable technical-scientific questions and stand ….. on whatever it is they are standing on.

I would not know about them; one might recall that I wrote on September 23, a few pages back:
"Climate change is real indeed; it has been fluctuating for billions of years. Personally, I have no doubt that humans have influenced it somewhat during recent hundreds of years, but having looked at the research results of scientists in opposition with IPCC "findings" I seriously doubt that arriving at CO2 neutrality would have any significant impact on the ongoing climate change."

I can rephrase that for clarity: yes, I do believe that CO2 emitted as a result of burning fossil fuels contributes somewhat to enhancing the greenhouse effect, therefore also to warming. I also believe that such contribution is largely overestimated by many due to the fact that water vapor is still the dominating greenhouse gas, and capabilty of atmospheric CO2 to block outgoing longwave radiation is nearly saturated at present 414+ ppm concentrations. Borrowing from Dr. William Happer, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Princeton University, on Radiation Transfer:

"... the flux changes from doubling the concentrations of greenhouse gases, a very substantial change, reduces the radiation to space by only a few Wm-2. This is only a few per cent of the several hundred Wm-2 in the natural flux to space, or the 91 Wm-2 change of solar flux between winter and summer. And cloud cover ... further diminishes the influence of greenhouse gases. It
is very hard to convince people with technical common sense that such small changes will have any harmful consequences."  

Would you agree with that? If not, what is your basis for counterargument?

There really isn't much “trench warfare” between climate scientists. That was a decade ago. ... There are a few climate scientists who continue to disagree with major results, such as the Hockey Stick. A few.

Depends on what exactly "a few" means in this context (I hope to be excused - English is my third foreign language, picked up without formal training, I certainly lose in eloquence to you). Decades ago there were only a few hundred climate scientists in the world, now that business is certainly blooming. When I last checked the August 2021 "World Climate Declaration - There is no climate emergency", I counted 920 signatories, most of them with titles suggesting credibility, 9 IPCC expert reviewers among them. Many of them are still active in research, many have published peer-reviewed works. Many of the sceptical scientists were not there. I'd say there is still disagreement in the air.

"I doubt whether even a cooling period that may have started already would bring significant changes to climate policies in a time scale shorter than 5 to 10 years - too many stakeholders have invested too much of themselves into battling CAGW..."
Ah, is this a scientific claim? A suggestion that a global cooling period is beginning? What is the reasoning? Who are the scientists claiming this? Where is it published?

A scientific claim would require a confirmation by a certain period of observation; I clearly wrote "that may have started already". The facts are that we are in the beginning of the solar cycle 25 that some have forecasted to be weak (some have forecasted the opposite); for the Antarctic continent, "winter of 2021 was among the coldest on record"; "an extreme and unprecedented cold weather outbreak, with historic snowfall across some regions" in South America; a cold La Nina started this year and is forecasted in December, again. In my country, most of the months have been colder than the long term average this year, except the times of the June/July heat wave; according to our chief meteorologist, our weather is yet not out of long term bonds and change to a cooler period is possible. Nevertheless, if the 50 year linear annual temperature trend calculated by Dr. Humlum is cyclic (60 to 65 years, 5 solar cycles), we may just have crossed a peak:

Peter Bernard Ladkin: 
 

A mandocello by Paul Hathway. I often capo it up to the 7th fret so I can play it like an octave mandolin. I have a mandolin by him also. But mostly I play flute (simple-system, wooden). Amongst other things, I find the breathing discipline important for mind as well as body. I have a Lejeune, a deKaiser, and a Williams, as well as a loaner unknown-DDR-maker B flute using the Koch/Meyer key design. Before all that I was a fiddler. Still am, I suppose - must try it again sometime….. for now, I am just hoping that my fingers don't all fall off at once.

The picture is by Suzanne Austin, a wonderful local portraitist and quondam band member. 

 

Wonderful, Paul's a lovely guy, I've visited his amazing house / workshop / showroom a few times (so much in such a small space), he and his wife are friends of my sister (so we've also had some pleasant evenings in the pub!). Hoping to get a bit of spare cash some time so I can commission him to build an instrument for me one day. I've never quite got on with teardrop shaped bodies so all my instruments have guitar shaped bodies, which does tend to confuse people, particularly guitarists who pick them up without looking carefully and then realise they have the “wrong” number of strings… I am currently plotting to acquire (via a bit of re-engineering) a guitar bodied mandocello, I was a bass player for many years, and I do like the lower pitch. 

Cheers, Andy

Aivar Usk: 
keep[..] the unsettled climate science in public focus to educate the open-minded, 

I think it is worthwhile to counter misleading rhetoric as it arises. 

There has been in this thread no “unsettled climate science” discussed. This entity has proposed some indirectly, but declined to provide any assertions in climate science when repeatedly asked, except for one occasion. He quoted two assertions, and when I asked him for his reasoning to the truth of those assertions, he demurred. As indeed such entities do.

certainly only until scientific evidence invalidating the course advised by the IPCC would fade and a true consensus emerges. 

Recall the immediately preceding words, “open-minded”. 

As we have seen in this thread, true believers in CAGW and in the need for climate neutrality will dodge any uncomfortable questions and stand their ground…

As we have seen in this thread, true deniers of anthropogenic global warming will dodge any uncomfortable technical-scientific questions and stand ….. on whatever it is they are standing on.

(Just for clarity - RB does not deny anthropogenic global warming, as I read him.)

See? Such general statements about groups of people gets us precisely nowhere in determining the truth or not of specific assertions in climate science. 

Trench warfare between climate scientists will probably continue for quite some time; 

Another assertion about groups of people, not climate science.

There really isn't much “trench warfare” between climate scientists. That was a decade ago. Some of the people fueling that have passed from the scene, notably the protagonists of Oreskes and Conway's 2010 book, as well as many of their reasons for doing so. There are a few climate scientists who continue to disagree with major results, such as the Hockey Stick. A few. But other quondam contrarians, such as Christy and Pielke, I understand have considered it as part of established science for a decade.

the general public is typically unaware of non-CAGW theories that explain mild warming, and of refutations of certain alarmist research papers. 

The general public is typically unaware of the technical details of scientific debates. Indeed, all of of us are typically unaware of the technical details of any debate unless we take the time (and have the technical capability) to get into it.

The IPCC was set up as a forum to see whether a branch of science which some saw as key to human development could regularly derive and issue a consensus opinion on what that science generally saw as settled. It appears that it can indeed be done.

Almost every one of us who has worked in consensus-based gremiums know what their advantages and pitfalls are. How things can be promoted and derailed by people with particular interests. They are very hard to work in. Given that, I think the IPCC is an amazing success story over three decades.

Imagine, if you will, attempting something similar with cybersecurity. 

I doubt whether even a cooling period that may have started already would bring significant changes to climate policies in a time scale shorter than 5 to 10 years - too many stakeholders have invested too much of themselves into battling CAGW...

Ah, is this a scientific claim? A suggestion that a global cooling period is beginning? What is the reasoning? Who are the scientists claiming this? Where is it published?

Roger Bryant:
So what can we do? I tend to agree with Mike that to add some base load nuclear and reinforce the distribution network would be a good start.

First of all, I am convinced that we should do what you have been doing - keeping the unsettled climate science in public focus to educate the open-minded, certainly only until scientific evidence invalidating the course advised by the IPCC would fade and a true consensus emerges. As we have seen in this thread, true believers in CAGW and in the need for climate neutrality will dodge any uncomfortable questions and stand their ground with righteous determination of the knights who said "Ni!" (until they didn't) ?

I agree about the need for re-introduction of nuclear power, based on improved technologies; several types of modular reactors are under development. The idea of getting the power from sunlight is excellent but we cannot live without a stable grid, particularly in the Nordic countries.

Trench warfare between climate scientists will probably continue for quite some time; the general public is typically unaware of non-CAGW theories that explain mild warming, and of refutations of certain alarmist research papers. I doubt whether even a cooling period that may have started already would bring significant changes to climate policies in a time scale shorter than 5 to 10 years - too many stakeholders have invested too much of themselves into battling CAGW...

Andy Millar: 
 

Peter Bernard Ladkin: 
 

… Covid-19. […]  there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease.

Great post Peter, but I would slightly take issue with this point

Yes. I think you are quite right that there are vested interests involved in how we respond to and cope with Covid-19. Some of them are benign – I sympathise hugely with the owners of businesses where people gather, such as restaurants and pubs, and who are looking at, or already have experienced, the loss of their business. They are obviously both vested and desperate. And then there are the large companies such as J.P Morgan Chase telling their staff to come in or get out - I have much less sympathy. 

 Having been posting on these forums for over 15 years now I'm very well aware of the importance of these discussions in the context of wider society i.e. absolutely miniscule!!! 

I'm not sure. Memes have to start somewhere, and some of them start in places like this. But of course it is happenstance. 

Unless you are a bot, that is. A lot of forums are plagued by bots, and they have gotten a lot better since I first encountered one on an aero forum in 2007. But what they mostly tend to do, as you indirectly point out, is shut down discussion rather than encourage it.

 

But thanks Peter for your hard work on this thread,

I am glad to know that some people appreciate (some of) my contributions! Thanks!

P.S. Peter, What is the instrument in your photo???

A mandocello by Paul Hathway. I often capo it up to the 7th fret so I can play it like an octave mandolin. I have a mandolin by him also. But mostly I play flute (simple-system, wooden). Amongst other things, I find the breathing discipline important for mind as well as body. I have a Lejeune, a deKaiser, and a Williams, as well as a loaner unknown-DDR-maker B flute using the Koch/Meyer key design. Before all that I was a fiddler. Still am, I suppose - must try it again sometime….. for now, I am just hoping that my fingers don't all fall off at once.

The picture is by Suzanne Austin, a wonderful local portraitist and quondam band member. 

Some interesting points throughout this thread. As it is now around 100 posts and 500 views I wonder if it will be locked like the last one.

We certainly have a climate/environmental problem. Do we have an emergency?

A significant part of the solution will be engineering, there will also have to be societal changes.

How do we decide what to do? In an engineering sense there would have to be a problem description, a timescale, some form of benefit analysis and some form of resource requirements. This would have to be of the complete system lifecycle.

To date we have not done very well. Wind and solar PV are installed parasitically, requiring subsidies and the existing electricity distribution network to stabilise and back them up. Drax would probably be responsible for less overall pollution if it went back to burning coal rather than shipping wood chip from America.

news.sky.com/.../climate-change-draxs-renewable-energy-plant-is-uks-biggest-co2-emitter-analysis-claims-12428130

Most western governments are just fudging the numbers to make themselves feel good rather than making a positive contribution. Let’s move all our energy intensive and polluting industries to places like China and then complain about China’s pollution. Let’s ignore the environmental impact of shipping. Net Zero is another fudge.

I do actually agree with Ms Thunberg’s  Blah Blah Blah speech. I also see FLOP26 as a party for the not so good and not so great which will be lots of virtue signalling and demands for government (taxpayers) money. I can’t see any positive planning coming from it. Does it even make sense to hold it with the current Covid situation?

So what can we do? I tend to agree with Mike that to add some base load nuclear and reinforce the distribution network would be a good start. The newer generations npps have much better load following characteristics than the old plutonium factories. Wind power has a place but the overall energy return needs to be checked. Some more pumped storage/hydro would be good but is somewhat limited in the UK. I doubt that solar PV has any energy payback in northern England and is dubious in the south. Most of the easy home insulation has been done. You rapidly reach a point of diminishing and then zero return.

Trying to do lifecycle benefit analysis is difficult. Is it better to let the old stuff run out it’s useful life and then replace it? Should we scrap things that are still usable and use more resources to replace them with something ‘better’ (what is better??)? If we rush ahead and do everything now (what the activists want) how long will it take to offset the emissions produced by making steel, concrete, copper, batteries etc? Will there ever be  a payback?

P.S. Peter, What is the instrument in your photo??? I should explain that I play (Irish) Bouzouki and Mandola… 

Peter Bernard Ladkin: 
 

So what will be the next big thing? How can we deal with it more humanely? As it turns out, Covid-19. […] But it is different from tobacco/cancer or anthropogenic climate change in that there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease.

Great post Peter, but I would slightly take issue with this point - which I think is relevant to this thread - I've been reading over the last few days the “everyone should go back to the office” / “everyone should be very wary of going back to the office” debate. The science that say we'll kill people if we mix them together vs. the short term economics of the effects on the transport and city centre service industries. (I work in the rail industry, and we have been hit very very hard by covid, but I do NOT think people should risk their lives for the sole purpose of keeping me in a job!!) It's a smaller case of one section of the climate debate: “ok, maybe it is real, but we can't afford to do anything about it because it would damage the economy”. For covid we can relocate coffee shops to  support home based workers, and redesign transport infrastructure to move to a more flexible and network coverage (away form “everyone into cities for 9:00am and out again at 5:00pm”). For climate change, as others have said here, we can build a low carbon economy if we want to using a huge range of different means. But it does mean challenging the “major powerful interests vested” in a short term view status quo economy, who don't possess the attitude, imagination, skills, or downright humanity to see that the economy must change - but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be for the “worst” (whatever that means).

That's made me feel better posting that, even if I probably should have been doing something more useful instead. Having been posting on these forums for over 15 years now I'm very well aware of the importance of these discussions in the context of wider society i.e. absolutely miniscule!!! Still, I suppose if climate change deniers are posting here it's stopping them causing more damage elsewhere…it's just frustrating as someone who would like the IET forums to be a useful place for engineering discussions, and like most other forums on the internet they keep degenerating into a home for conspiracy theorists. And this one's particularly nasty because we should be the ones solving the problem - the scientists have determined the problem, it's taking engineering to sort it. (Despite the fact that our forebears created it! Literally in my case, having a father who was a chemical engineer on gas works for most of his career. But that's irrelevant, as new facts come to light engineering needs to change. Much though I love steam engines.) 

But thanks Peter for your hard work on this thread, as Simon mentioned earlier most of the rest of us can't be bothered any more…which is probably not the right attitude…

Cheers, Andy

edited to correct maths: I didn't seem to be able to subtract 2006 from 2021!

Nick1967: 
 

Does it really matter who is wrong or right?  

Yes, it does. We need to know how the physical world works. First, so we can make life better for everyone (supplying enough food, caring for health). Second, so that in the course of doing the first we don't wreck it (for example, by basing the world's diet on beef). 

The other point is that climate scientists have been hassled and intimidated and threatened by politicians and others for pursuing their science and informing us of the results. Some of that is treated in Michael Mann's 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Columbia University Press). It is thoroughly disgusting. It is not the first time it has happened. Most obviously, it happened with the “Tobacco Wars”. That issue was resolved in two ways. First, tobacco companies may have been powerful (large companies usually do have a short line to politics) but in the end there are just too many good scientists who produce evidence, and more evidence and more evidence. Second, investigation into what the companies themselves knew showed they knew all about tobacco causing cancer and other diseases. In other words, there was in fact consensus. 

I think lessons were learned from the tobacco wars. Climate scientists early on agreed that there needed to be a global consensus-building organisation which published regular reports on the state of the science. That is the IPCC. 

The other, interesting lesson is the connection between the two. Not a scientific connection, but a personnel/political connection, laid out in detail in Oreskes and Conway's 2010 book Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury). 

So what will be the next big thing? How can we deal with it more humanely? As it turns out, Covid-19. This is different because of course it really is an emergency. There is no time for the careful consensus building over decades which characterises the IPCC. The usual pseudoscientific tropes have reemerged with the Covid-19 situation. But it is different from tobacco/cancer or anthropogenic climate change in that there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease. I think, also, that medical-scientifically we have been incredibly lucky with it. The fact that there were vaccines on the roll within months, and that some of them are more efficacious than any existing vaccine for any other illness you can think of. (That of course is not happenstance - it is the result of brilliant science and careful development over decades, and we are lucky in that in some sense the science was “ready for it” when Covid-19 came along. It is no coincidence that the ChAdOx1-based malaria vaccine has shown this year similarly high efficaciousness in its first trials. Hill, Gilbert and Pollard are well on the way to saving the world twice in two years!)

Then there are other matters to which science is important, indeed crucial, but in some sense peripheral, such as nuclear-fission power plants (NPPs). There are people who argue that we need them as part of sustainable development - indeed, you will find people arguing that elsewhere on this forum. And then there are people who argue that NPPs are not sustainable, for two reasons. One of which is waste disposal, which has not ever been solved. The other is the existential risk they pose when they go awry. 

(For me personally, that is the longest connection to scientific-engineering controversy, since I started working at the CEGB running computer code for the finite-element stress analysis of pressure vessels fifty years ago, before I went to college.)

Concerning controversy, there is the mother of them all, of course, evolution/creation of species of living creatures. 170 years and still going strong. Many of the tropes and argumentation styles that one finds in climate-change controversy were developed here (including those used by at least one nominal contributor to the current discussion) and have been thoroughly discussed and analysed by eminent philosophers of science. One imagines there is not a lot to say there that hasn't been said, but actually there is always stuff coming down the pike. 

Then of course there is science itself. What is it? How come it finds the truth? (If there indeed is any such thing as truth to be found, say some.) 

 

 You can't go wrong with the SDGs and good governance so why not adopt them as soon as possible.  

We can certainly agree on that. Others will say it “costs too much”. The paucity of that argument has been pointed out through Covid. As Keynes is reported to have said, nothing ever costs too much if it is effective and feasible (I have just looked for the quote. Can't find it.)

BTW, there is a nice paper in Nature from 2019 by Santer et al celebrating three key happenings in climate science in 1979, one of which was Hasselmann's fingerprinting technique. Nature have made it open-access to celebrate Hasselmann's Nobel Prize. It is short and very readable:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0424-x.epd

Peter Bernard Ladkin:
The McKitrick paper is a piece of what I would call mathematical fundamentalism in statistics. ... 
That may be why Allen and Test didn't see an immediate need to reply. Just guessing, though.

No need to guess - you may have missed that McKitrick wrote:

"I then wrote them again, offering to delay further if they wanted to produce a reply. This time Tett wrote back with some supportive comments about my earlier paper and he encouraged me just to go ahead and publish my comment. I hope they will provide a response at some point, but in the meantime my critique has passed peer review and is unchallenged."

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 may be a great thinker, but I would ask for empirical evidence before engaging into ruining the economy based on hypothetical risks. As has been pointed out in several earlier postings, the evidence for CO2 produced by fossil fuels causing the climate change is inconclusive.

I have no doubt that you are advocating for CAGW and the need for climate neutrality in good faith but as has been revealed, you seemed to have no idea at all that there is actual science behind the contrarian views. I would not hold it against you - the mainstream media is doing everything they can to restrict or at least to ridicule such information and authors questioning the IPCC dogma, therefore people busy at their daily professional activities cannot just stumble onto such information by accident.

Nevertheless, contemporary situation has at least one parallel in history: during Cold War times, many people in the West known these days as "useful idiots" believed Soviet propaganda about that country being peace-loving paradise for their own citizens, and kept propagandizing for the communist cause. Seemingly highly moral ideas were trumpeted by bolshevik sources everywhere while truthful information about oppression, GULAGs, poverty, missing civil liberties, practical slavery of farmers, militarizing all aspects of life etc in "socialist" countries was either not available in details, or believed to be a product of cynical capitalist propaganda. I trust that people who accept that climate science is not settled do not belong to that category, maintaining capability of re-adjusting their position when provided with sufficiently detailed information from trustworthy sources and time to delve into it.