Things I wish I had said yesterday

Sorry.
Sorry, we are not a professional bunch of slick PR consultants with all the figures at our finger tips. Sorry particularly to the students, we sceptics are just amateurs … you deserve better than us, that is why we pay academics to research the whole picture and to present the whole story. The only reason we were there was because the academics have failed.
Sorry … personally, I wasn’t quite sure of the etiquette … eventually I thought it was better to speak up and be damned than sit there.
Thankyou
Thank you for the staff for putting on the debate. The very fact they were prepared to allow debate is a credit to them. On the other hand, why did I have this feeling that we were going to be treated like exhibits to be mocked and have our arguments falsely dissected (when we were unable to defend them) when we went away.
What the hell am I doing here?

Difficult to say at the time, but to be utterly honest I could not see why I personally had to spend my own time and money going to St.Andrews trying to present material to correct the many and obvious mistakes and falsehoods. Why should I be a charity to other people to do what the academics are paid to do, and then be forced to sit there and let them make all kinds of ridiculous assertions about us sceptics, when the fault is entirely and clearly theirs. WHY DO THEY EXPECT UNPAID MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC TO CRITIQUE THE ACADEMICS BAD WORK WHEN THAT IS WHAT ACADEMICS ARE BEING PAID TO DO?
Just look: this graph tells the truth about pre-instrumental warming
No! This graph shows an assumed relationship between tree rings and temperature.
The relationship between tree rings and temperature is at best “suspect” at worst it is entirely useless. This is because the proxy relies on each tree responding to climate (which it does), but it does not take account of the fact trees all grow in a competitive environment. Even apparently sparse trees in the Arctic are competing, and there are the maximum in any one area which the local climate/environment permits.
Change the climate, and yes, those tree that are present will respond with increased or reduced growth, but eventually more trees will grow or trees die to bring them back into the optimum competition. So the forest canopy (not just the trees) will tend to adapt to changes in climate so as to bring individuals trees to optimum competitive growth. That suggests that a better proxy for temperature would be the total bulk of material added by all trees, not the total bulk divided by the number of trees.

Let’s think of a humorous example to make it simpler. A fish and chip shop regularly throws out its waste for the seagulls. 10 birds regularly attend the daily feeding. Each bird receives sufficient chips to warrant waiting outside the chip shop. More birds and there would not be enough chips. So, if another bird came in, the weakest bird or less able would not be able to compete for chips and would have to move elsewhere. Less birds, and there would be enough left even for the weakest … so another bird would still find pickings. So, there is a fairly constant rate of resources per bird determined by environmental conditions.
But suddenly, the chip shop gets new regulations saying it must halve its rubbish disposal. Initially, the same birds arrive, and yes the birds as a whole squabble and fight and by pure chance everyone gets a bit which means most individuals get less. But very soon the weakest seagulls realise there just are not enough pickings and that sitting around outside the fish and chip shop is not giving them enough food. Either some die from starvation, or more than likely they move away to find other sources of food where the cost benefit or food/seagull/hour of effort is again advantage.
So, eventually there will be only ~5 birds waiting outside the fish and chip shop. So, what would we see if we could see the growth pattern in these birds: An initial constant rate of chip eating, followed by a period of relative starvation as the group as a whole adapts its numbers to the new environment, followed by a period where each bird is eating almost the same as it was because the numbers have declined. Obviously if we take longer periods with hatchings and deaths, we can see how a whole population of birds might simply adapt its numbers so that even though there is a dramatic change in the primary resource, this is totally absent in the long term nutrition per bird.
Whilst temperature is not a resource, the effect TREE RING GROWTH shows this to have an effect like a resource.
CO2 is certainly manmade
No! I think the recent video from Salby shows that a substantial component of the recent rise in CO2 is from natural causes. The most galling thing is that we couldn’t just challenge each and every falsehood

But Salby’s video on the origin of CO2 it is something which I would hope every sceptic can watch, it is something that anyone who dares make an assertion about CO2 at a seminar should not only have watched, but should be telling me about..
The evidence is that there is growing climate extremes.
This was just utter bollocks. I even went and read Trenberths so called “evidence” on this, and after I had excluded all the predictions of gloom, all the citing of events (not trends) to prove … that he was nothing more than a cherry picker of doom and gloom out of the normality of the climate. After I had discounted the “growing cost”, which we all know has been proven time and time again to be due to more insurance and generally more affluence and larger populations.
After all that I was pleased to find one trend which I thought deserved serious consideration. This was that the highest rate of rainfall, in the most intense rain had risen. Then I remembered what electronics used to be like at the beginning of this period when data memory was a premium, and no one acquired more data than they needed, so you took average measurements over a longer period, which clearly would have downplayed this figure. And when I checked and found no discussion of this point (hardly surprising) I realised there was not a single trend in the whole paper. Which is actually quite incredible, because statistically, if you monitor enough things enough ought to show an abnormal trend.
What is more the person who was claiming absolute certainty that there had been trends had the gall to claim he had read more climate papers. I was thinking about this on the bus-train home (he probably drove!!). I may only read one or two a week, but over ten years that probably 500 papers. Most of the early ones are probably energy related, most of the later ones are climate. But the main point is it doesn’t matter howmany you read if they are all biased. Unless like the Trenberth report, you cut through the crap that “there certainly are trends” and tease out the real evidence … which shows even he couldn’t find any trends to report … only projections of trends that are supposed to happen.
But the one I found very convincing is the following. And it was their wording “surprisingly we didn’t find any trend. That tells me that what they reported was honest. In contrast, someone like Trenberth and most other papers are wholly dishonest.

1. No evidence of an intensifying weather trend. A project looking at climate extremes reported that: “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years, … So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.” In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. Source: Wallstreet journal
2. Global cyclone activity historically low A research study shows that overall global tropical cyclone activity has decreased to historically low levels during the past 5 years. The researcher demonstrates that much of the variability in tropical cyclone energy during the past 40 years is clearly associated with natural large-scale climate oscillations such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2011GL047711, 2011

In 1690 a quarter of the Scottish population died
When the speaking said: “you must keep this in perspective” at the beginning, I really did want to yell out and ask him about the estimates that a quarter of Scotland’s population died from cold in the 1690s.
I did manage to get in the figure that Age Concern estimate that there are 23,000 extra winter deaths (in fact I think its just accepted official statistics which anyone can look up). I did manage to make the point that in the UK at this rate there will be 2.3million extra winter deaths, and that there is around 700 extra deaths per degree C cooler the winter (For info, this was estimated using official extra winter deaths and Met Office average winter temperatures and then using the spreadsheet linear regression (the only warning I’d give is the regression constant).
The other good evidence of cold stress is the number of witch trials and temperature.

Of course, the above graph doesn’t show whether weather causes witch trials or whether the causation may be the other way around. In which cause, the implication would be that we could prevent global warming by burning more witches.
Finally
Just in case any student finds this, all new commenters are moderated -this is mainly to prevent spam. This means there could be a day before they are posted, but as long as it is civil, I let comments through.