http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ic-adviser

On gut instinct I'd go with Lawson's view, though both seem worried about how they and their views are perceived...

While towns and cities are a few degrees warmer than the countryside the measurements are generally made well away from such disturbances. Lawson is a climate change denier and has a past for such claims.

[quote="Amnesia10"Lawson is a climate change denier and has a past for such claims.[/quote]

It’s that word again. Usually used in the same tone of voice as when it’s used following the word “Holocaust”. He is arguing another side - which is good because people are all too willing to fall in line over this due to media pressure and very well selected language which makes you look bad if you fail to do anything other than agree to it. At best, you feel there is a hint of Emperor’s New Clothes to it. At worst, it’s like a religion running its own Inquisition. I suspect the climate change lot would want to burn Lawson at the stake if there wasn’t a carbon footprint involved (better tweet that before someone else does.....).

My attitude is that it is highly likely that it is true, but even if it were not true the outcomes if it were are so horrifying that we should be doing everything that we can to arrest the rise in temperatures. If the Atlantic conveyor stops then the UK will return to severe winters which most of our homes are simply ill prepared for. We have squandered the North sea oil revenues so cannot use them to help us. The costs of making changes now are a lot lower than they will be once this is proved and we are a few more years along to the polar caps melting. I would have thought that the opening of the North West passage closed for millennia would have been clear evidence that the world was warming.

I have to agree. I consider the evidence towards man made climate change to be significant but not overwhelming, but every time I hear someone use the phrase 'climate change denier' I get the idea that the person using it is actually thinking 'BURN THE HERETIC!!!!'

Those of us who are scientists understand this : no proposition, no hypothesis should ever be considered 'beyond debate'. Gallileo was tortured because everyone believed the Sun moved round the Earth. How could this not be true? It was obviously the case. You can see it moving in the sky. Next, we all believed the Universe ran entirely to Newton's laws and that all things were the same from all viewpoints until an Austrian clerk proposed otherwise. Then even Einstein's most mathematically valid theories were partially rewritten by quantum mechanics. There are equally valid examples in economics, biology, social sciences...

Most of the things we have believed in with absolute clarity and fervour have turned out to be wrong. The default position of the rational mind is perpetual skepticism.

Jon

It's too late to stop the temperature rise, even if those in power were ever going to do anything about it. We should be looking at coping with the results of climate change/global warming/natural earth cycles/whatever.

It ain't gonna be pretty.

Yes but what can Nigel Lawson add that a scientist cannot? Scientists should consider all options, but as a politician I suspect that the real reason for being a skeptic is that it would seriously impact living standards if any government were to impose such actions necessary to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

It depends whether the scientist involved has an ulterior motive. A lot of climate research is based on extrapolation and models that are unproven, and given that a lot of people have their income linked financially to climate change, they have a vested interest in keeping it going. The reluctance of pro-climate change people to enter into proper, rational debates with the sceptics makes them appear slightly less credible than they would do otherwise.

Empirically, the fact he is not a scientist. A discipline creates a mindset. To only listen to the voice from one discipline is to get, essentially, one view. Scientists present the rational position but in the real world, sometimes the most rational decision is not the best one. The most dogmatic one rarely is.


Well, since they appear to be doing a fair job of impacting living standards in general anyway ... Note that that aspect should be a valid consideration. There is only so much 'pain' a society can withstand before it collapses. It's valid to say 'we will have serious problems with climate change unless we do this this and this' but if, in doing 'this this and this', we cripple our economy and society to the point it can no longer readily function anyway, is it therefore the better option? This is the kind of thing you need a diverse set of voices to understand. The scientist can tell you what the probable consequences of an action are, but he can't tell you whether you're doing the right thing or not.

Jon

Yes but if our climate is changing then the impact of that will be profound. At that stage the costs of making the changes will be far more. I already have a very low carbon footprint and water footprint below average. Our leaders should be preparing us for the coming changes even if they are hard. If they fail to do that then they should be held accountable.

Now, one thing I do believe, even given what I said above - Anyone who predicts anything about a system which is fundamentally chaotic, or in which people are directly involved for more than three weeks into the future is guessing. Lots of things in the universe are 'clockwork enough' to be able to predict far into the future e.g. the motions of the planets. Nothing involving weather or climate is that predictable. The very first recorded example of chaotic behaviour was a printout of a weather prediction model that changed every time it was run. And nothing where the actions of large numbers of people are involved is predictable either in the long term, because despite what Isaac Asimov might tell you, large bodies of people do not in fact act in a predictable manner.

The planet's climate is changing. That is fairly reasonable to say, because the planets climate is inherently unstable. It would be odd if it didn't change. The effect that may have on us and how we might react to or mitigate that is, I believe, impossible to predict. I believe pretty much everything about the human race in the long term is impossible to predict. 30 years ago, for example, could anyone have predicted what the effect of a weird DARPA research project on sharing data between computers would have on the world? The change going on now in the Middle East, wars even, wouldn't have happened if we didn't have high speed, one to many and many to many forms of communication that governments found hard to block or control. Yet 30 years ago it was an academic curiosity.

The world is a vastly complex system which we barely understand at any level, physical, economic, social... I'm inherently skeptical of anyone who tries to tell me how things will be in 10 or 20 years time because the one thing history has taught us is what is going to happen is not often what we think is going to happen.

Nevertheless, I actually agree with a lot of the ideas of the climate change lobby - I think a lot of what they are telling people to do is a good idea, regardless of what effect it may or may not have on the climate. But anyone who says 'you must do this now or in 30 years this will happen' is, to my scientific mind, talking out of their rear end.

Jon

Yes the world is very complex and many of these problems might not exist in a 100 years. The population might fall as a result of falling birthrates, which will significantly end many of the problems that we face. Though we still need to leave the world in a better state than we inherited it.