The Cock Beck in Full Flow under Aberford Bridge
The debate over man induced climate change continues with the new [ConDem] government making PC noises about costs associated with combatting AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming]. To me the idea that they can do anything or that it is expedient given the evidence is a huge fabrication, but it keeps on rearing its “Hydra”, using a different head for each imagined fear: Sea Level Rises; Increased precipitation; glacier melt; artic ice sheet reduction; etc., etc.,
I was impressed to read this article by a legal expert from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He manages to put the whole debacle in a legal framework, from which you can draw your own conclusions. Here is an abstract from the paper and the whole article can be downloaded here.
Abstract
Legal scholarship has come to accept as true the various pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientists who have been active in the movement for greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reductions to combat global warming. The only criticism that legal scholars have had of the story told by this group of activist scientists – what may be called the climate establishment – is that it is too conservative in not paying enough attention to possible catastrophic harm from potentially very high temperature increases.
This paper departs from such faith in the climate establishment by comparing the picture of climate science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other global warming scientist advocates with the peer-edited scientific literature on climate change. A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.
Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization of the American economy, yet they characterize the work of even the most rigorous legal scholars. A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science away from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward increased spending on the development of standardized observational datasets against which existing climate models can be tested.
The paper runs to 82 pages and is best taken in small bites, or if you are reading it on a computer, perhaps small bytes! Anyway it is a refreshing read, looking at the data and how it is presented by the establishment. Remember the UK is committed to an 80% reduction in conventional fuels [fossil based etc.] by, I think, 2050. Yes, they must be crazy, that’s like using the equivalent energy per person as sometime before the industrial revolution, or perhaps as far back as the eighteenth century, when the UK supported a largely agricultural population of less than a third of today.
Naturally in order to comply I am writing this observation whilst peddling furiously to keep the dynamo on my fixed bicycle supplying electricity to allow my latop computer keep going! The broadband supply is being serviced by my pet cat who I harnessed to a framework with a tempting spratt suitably poised in front of her to cause the athletic feline to trudge forward on the treadmill.
You see we are doomed, I’m too tired now, to watch gyro TV, brought to you by, “Wheels go Round on my Bike” by Sturmey Archer cyclo electrics! [Yes they are still going!] and the hydro drainpipe discharged its vast dam of water to facilitate the toilet flush, that’s it for the family ablutions today. Looking forward to meat free BBQ tomorrow!