An overview of the political process from Climategate to present.
As I was writing a note today I explained why I felt there was little more for the sceptic to do because “Scepticism is about basing your views on the evidence and the evidence is now very very clearly in favour of our view that there is no scientific basis for this claim of catastrophic global warming – and what warming there will be is very likely to be beneficial. So, if you still believe the doomsday prophecies, you are either doing so because of a religious belief or are just clinically mad. And, because I’m neither trained to deal with religion or psychiatry, there’s not a lot left for me”.
But what about the politicians? You might ask. Well I haven’t forgotten them, I just think that after the way they shafted everyone else by jumping on the bandwagon, it’s not my job to stop them being shafted at the next elections. I’m not some charity for politicians. They’ve done nothing at all to help themselves and have largely been some of the most obnoxious and hateful people toward us sceptics. So, let them find out for themselves what real people think about their nonsense. In the way that hurts them most.
A really good kick in the ballot box!
Thing is. It’s not all over. I was thinking about the new paper and the get together with Nic Lewis and Anthony Watts.
It’s always good and a hopeful opportunity when opposite sides have constructive, friendly meetings but there have been quite a few false dawns on finding mutual ground between sceptics and warmists. So many, that now I’m not sure I’d know if we hit a real (excuse the phrase) tipping point.
I’ve never thought most warmists were bad people but I suspect we don’t look at the world in the same way, so even if we broadly reach an agreement on the science we’d still not be on the same page. Dr Betts has asked on more than one occasion if we can now move on to what we do about AGW. Well… no. Because without a good grasp of what sensitivity to CO2 we are looking at then even current actions on global warming are wrong. I’d include in that, all the silly conferences and treaties. We are currently operating on a ‘we must try anything’ policy for global warming. OK correct that, ‘we should try anything but stuff that loses elections and clips the wings of wealthy left wingers’. It seems it wasn’t the celebs who flew in for the climate marches that were responsible for their emissions but the politicians who have prevented zero CO2 transport from being available.
No matter how close our views of AGW mesh, assuming it’s closer to our end than further away, the scientists will never make it clear to the politicians that the goal posts have been moved. Many of them will still think in terms of Al Gore’s movie when the term consensus is used. They will still expect apocalypse style weather deterioration, 100m sea level rises and mass extinctions. Without a wakeup call nothing will change. The most effective pressure will come from right wing budget bosses like Osbourne because they’ll erode the cash if they get the opportunity.