OFF: UK's premier green awareness festival under threat from police and local council.

[Pascoe Brock]

Easy Jon, if you've annoyed anyone you've had help
I think FoFP has pointed out before that the list can self-govern and my own
opinion is not to get too carried away with the context of a single thread
(or distraught)
as for 'Bat Shit Crazy", I felt compelled to top that (without of course, in
_reality_, actually being such)
I think Mike made a single profound point with his comment about warming
being more noticeable in the USA
as for you, running around with drummer chicks and having female housemates,
you might just not be ugly, and this combined with your education could be
distracting from "knowing everything"
whatever global warming is or isn't, my life (if anyone else but me could
see it as such), has been on hold like nothing in the past 6 years, although
it's always on hold months out of the year. Could this thread please now
mutate into how to make central air conditioners turn into super-coolers, or
could I fill in somebody's collection with some Bainbridge CD's in trade for
large sun-shades?
I'm considering suicide since I am stuck in Texas and don't think I can take
one more year of this
Beyond that, I want to carry "spontaneous rainforests" in my pocket
I've given you something larger NOT to be a skeptic about
skeptic=still keeping entirely pathetic thoughts in context
the disclosure clock is coming down upon you, skeptic was simply a way to
keep some people from pooping themselves and thw world's political system
out of anarchy, but clinging is no longer allowed after 60 or a hundred such
years
time to find out clearly what you're not before doing anything under the
presumption that you are
the sun went down thank god




On 8/15/09, Jonathan Jarrett <jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
>        Dear All,
>                  allow me one more on this. I realise I've started annoying
> people but it's because of that I'd like to try and make an attempt at being
> more reasonable than `bat-shit crazy'. The good opinion of the list matters
> to me and so does being able to admit I'm wrong. Anyone who's not interested
> in further climate change stuff from me by all means hit delete now, and
> perhaps anyone who wants to take it up with me further will do so off-list.
> Okay?
>
> On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Paul Mather wrote:
>
>> (Or, perhaps you meant to say, "There is bugger-all evidence I'm prepared
>> to accept."  That's quite a big difference.)
>>
>
>        No, I'm not that far gone, though I do appear to have been very
> angry about something or other lately, this wasn't the only rant I've
> written though the others are thankfully not public. Thankyou for attempting
> to administer the argumentative slap in the face to the hysteric. I have the
> problem that I don't want to become an atmospheric chemist or read at that
> level; I'm reliant on reports of consensus from informed people. I'm also
> prepared to be swayed by them so I'm taking you very seriously here and am
> ready to accept I've drunk too much of the wrong Kool-Aid or whatever. Let
> me try and find a more reasonable place to stand than I managed last time.
>
> Like I said, you should read a bit more.  There are numerous,
>> easy-accessible sources that debunk these arguments.  How about what the
>> American Geophysical Union think about your medievalist concerns:
>> http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0319.html.  (And, the AGU had such a
>> lack of consensus they decided to publish a formal position on the human
>> impacts on climate:
>> http://www.agu.org/outreach/science_policy/positions/climate_change2008.shtml;
>> just like many other learned societies and leading science journals.)
>>
>
>        Let's have a look at the AGU stuff then. I can handle a *bit* of
> science, so as well as the position statement, which is, well, a position
> statement whose foundations are essentially the reputation of the authors, I
> also had a look at the paper they link to from it, originally published in
> _Eos_:
>
> http://www.agu.org/eos_elec/99148e.html
>
> Now, Paul, you have to admit that if I wanted to have that kind of argument
> I could quote-mine that paper for something in support of almost everything
> I said in the previous post: the uncertainty over whether CO2 vs.
> atmospheric heat is correlation or causation because of historical
> precedents that don't, well, correlate with causation; the question of what
> order CO2 rises and heat rises have occurred in and which may therefore be
> leading which; the complications of modelling when a great many processes
> appear to affect what they want to model; and that CO2 is only one of a
> whole bunch of pollutants with which we should be concerned and the one that
> nature appears most able to soak up in ways we don't entirely understand.
> Though their conclusions are in line with the position statement there, the
> caveats and conditions are so prevalent that it's hard for a reader to see
> how they get to that position without having
> read everything they cite. I could source a far more rabid uncertainty
> critique than what I wrote, just from that paper.
>
>        The problem is of course that that paper is now ten years old, and
> the position statement *it* links to has now gone, presumably replaced by
> the 2008 one. So perhaps I and the little reading I've done are ten years
> behind. Is the degree of certainty we've achieved over what's going on in
> that time enough to lead from that paper to the current position statement?
> I just find it very difficult to understand how all those caveats and
> conditions and complications and problems with local data can be got round
> to the point where we can actually talk about a consensus here that isn't
> partially a faith position--which is why the word sceptic is the one that
> springs to mind. But certainly as you say it's no problem finding backup for
> that position in a far more consistent form than for the claims of the
> sceptics.
>
>        As to that little reading, by the way, I do agree with you that
> Anthony Watts is a problem source and that he finds what he wants to find.
> Also, he writes so damn much that repeats itself that I long ago gave up
> reading it. But the paper I linked to, though I saw it on his blog, was by
> someone else, Steven Goddard, though a look at some of *his* other posts
> suggests I may have over-rated his ability to talk sense. It's only about
> computer modeling anyway, not about the actual data we currently have.
>
>        The historic perspective, however, I have from a paper I saw last
> year at the International Medieval Congress by Sebastian Payne, who is the
> Chief Scientist at English Heritage. I grant you that this doesn't make him
> a atmospheric scientist, but neither is he a denier; indeed he argues that
> we have to deal very urgently with the effects of climate change, he just
> doesn't think the current climate situation is very unusual in
> long-historical terms. If you want to evaluate his position a presentation
> from a paper of it is online here:
>
> http://www.britarch.ac.uk/sites/www.britarch.ac.uk/files/node-files/EH_Payne.pdf
> with abstract here:
> http://www.britarch.ac.uk/conservation/climate/ifa2008
> The abstract of the paper I saw is here:
> http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2576&year=2008
> Regrettably I can't see that he's actually gone into print with this
> anywhere, though it isn't really his job.
>
>        Anyway, even that much poking round the web finds a whole load of
> stuff that makes me want to swallow a lot of what I was saying. Not all of
> it, but a lot. (In particular the Climatic Research Unit at the University
> of East Anglia have a lot of useful stuff online that's easy for someone at
> my level to swallow:
> http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
> ).
>
> I suppose skeptic sounds nicer and more fearless and romantic than denier.
>>  I agree with you about the pollution; peak oil; over-reliance on fossil
>> fuels (especially oil) with no urgent transition plan in sight to an
>> alternative energy policy; conscience salving via offsetting; and a lack of
>> use of renewables.  But, I think you're plain batshit crazy on the earlier
>> stuff. (I calls 'em like I sees 'em.) :-)
>>
>
>        I clearly went too far with that. (Sorry.) What I mainly wanted to
> argue was that "carbon" (rather than CO2, even, though that too is suspect)
> has been fetishised into the sole cause of climate change, which is one
> thing if it gets people to pay attention because it's easier to swallow than
> a message of austerity. It's another thing, however, when plans like `carbon
> tariffs' for industry and so forth get ahead of stopping them, for example,
> pouring metal salts into rivers or generating *other* greenhouse gases that
> trees *don't* breathe, and when carbon offsetting threatens to actually
> comfort people out of making necessary and urgent changes to their resource
> usage. Somewhere in there I got all tangled up in how much crap there is
> surrounding all sides' presentation of anything resembling science in this
> debate. I may well not be properly equipped for telling crap from verifiable
> fact in this field.
>
>        I will hold to the environmental historians knowing what they're
> doing with the historic data for the moment though. Yours,
>                                                           Jon
>
> ObCD: Mother of All Bands - _Insect Brain_
> --
>      Jonathan Jarrett, Cambridge    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
>   =======================================================================
>  "With Capitalism, man exploits man.  With Socialism, it is exactly
> opposite"
>                         -Robert Anton Wilson
>