Tim the plumber

x Harold Squared, on 24 Jan 2015 - 8:21 PM, said: ! Moderator Note If you are going to make claims, you need to back them up, i.e. post a citation. Otherwise this is just trolling, and will not be tolerated. Do not respond to this modnote in the thread. x You could have asked him to cite his sources rather than come down like a school teacher finding a boy smoking behind the bike sheds. Maturity. What??? In a debate about why you are or are not a global warming skeptic the argument turned to the effects of warming on the UK population. A paper was introduced which said that if it warmed up by 2 degrees and there was no change in behaviour there would be 5,000 more deaths per year. I said that we would change our behaviour. That populations which live in hotter places did not show lower life expectancies, in fact they live longer when comparing people of equal wealth. So far I have not seen any logical or reasonable reason why the power of the moderator was brough in to attack me for saying this. If you can explain why it is wrong to look at populations which are living in the conditions which are predicted as the base assumption of a paper to consider if the results of the paper are correct and reasonable do tell! Which, when that includes making adjustments to the warmer weather, is garbage. Ever heard of a control group? You take a population, divide it into different groups, then apply the factor you are testing to one group. The result is the difference between the 2 groups. Not the number the test group produced. When you attack somebody by saying that their post was out of order you also post a do not respond notice in your big green moderator "I'm better than you!" style. You will expect me to start a thread about any future such attacks against me and posible other where I feel it is waranted. You can then have a clear field to explain your attitude and maybe I will become convinced you are not an .......

OK, I stand corrected. Still nervous about spreading it all over the place, but that might be my general dislike for an industry which keeps telling me it's safe and then having accidents which result in bits of the planet being uninhabitable for thousands of years.

Well if you have peer reviewed papers which show that the world warming up by 1 degree is something other than a 1 degree increase in temperature please enlighten me. What does it all mean then??

I believe that the papers in the list are not all saying that warming is imaginary. That is definately not a widely held view. I believe that the papers in the list all to some extent show that the problem of AGW is over hyped. The Greenland paper you chose which says that the centre of the ice sheet is not warming is thus showing that any melting is likely to be around the edge and not a general fall in altitude of ice. That clearly means that the projected 1m sea level rise by 2100 is off the cards. Also just because a paper assumes a situation as basis for looking at the damage doen by that factor does not mean that the effect of a weakening of the North Atlantic drift will be as bad as predicted. The general argument from the skeptical camp is not that CO2 plays no role in heating the Earth but that the effects of increased CO2 are being vastly over hyped.

Drivel. The paper was posted as evidence of what the negative impacts of warming would be. You then retreat to "well you have to look at one variable at a time". Utterly unscientific drivel. Ever heard of a control experiment? Ever heard of the real world? Why is it wrong to consider how people live in warmer places when considering the imapct of a little warming? This is why people get angry about your utterly biased moderation. You post your stupid "DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS ATTACK" things when you have clearly lost an argument. That is a form of dishonesty. Grow up.

http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Or how about the idea that the level of increased heat from a doubling of CO2 in the air is very little. The Royal society gives a figure of 3.6 watts per square meter. https://royalsociety.org/~/media/royal_society_content/policy/publications/2010/4294972962.pdf That's just over a degree c. I don't think that that is any sort of trouble. I would prefer the world to be 1 degree c warmer. That would need the CO2 in the air to be about 800ppm.

Which bits of the world do you expect to experience colder weather as a result of global warming? You can see why people get angry around here when a sensable question gets that sort of response. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yep, that appears to be the position. So this U235 is fine to have hanging around the house then? No need for the expensive storage we have today? Or is it that the process of it's decay creates loads of other more highly radio active stuff that give you cancer? Also urainium is highly toxic in nature all by it's self. No need for the stuff to be in the food chain.

1 I do not argue about the ability of space based instruments to measure the temperature of the Earth's surfcae. 2 I would expect modern science to be able to deal with a fairly high amount of cooling. The rich world would be OK, the poor would be in deep trouble. I do think that a 1 foot sea level rise over a century is a very tiny thing. Last century it rose by 180mm. That's more than half a foot. How many cities did we lose to that? The next century will be almost twice as bad. Except that we have far better machinery to tackle this slight issue. I live in England in the UK. Today our health service is overloaded with patients. It's winter and every winter we have a glut of new patients. This winter is especially difficult due to many factors even though it's been a mild one. The NHS (national health service) needs more money. Lots of it. People are dying due to the lack of money in the NHS and supporting services. We are spending billions of pounds building wind turbines that don't usefully produce electrical power. I consider billions of pounds per year wasted in subsidies to rich people wrong when there are people dying as a result of lack of funding for their medical needs. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2014/early-winter-stats What happened in 1766? Obviously as we have better measuring of weather we will break records all the time. That is in the nature of statistics. Have we had a period of massive damage due to such events? No, we have not. Which places do you think that global warming will cause to become colder? Which tropical civilisations vanished during hot periods? The evidence I give for cold times being bad for civilisations is the fall of the Roman Empire when the climate and caused crop failures and the German tribes famously crossed the Rhine on foot when it was frozen over. The Roman boat squadrons which normally patroled the border were a bit knackered by that one. 800 AD was a cold time. Obviously the detail of the past has been smoothed by the time distance whilst we see the present in ever greater detail. So the freezing of the Rhine does not show up so much on these graphs. Mothythewso, I do have a problem with nuclear power. It's the only thing I can see which is a credible threat to humanity as a whole. That these fail safe power plants keep blowing themselves up and making reasonable large bit of the world too toxic to allow humans to live in like 3 Mile Island etc is not my biggest concearn. One day a war will wander it's course over a nation which has these nuclear plants. It could easily happen in some of the former Soviet nations but it could be one of the richer places. The USA was the richest and possibly most stable nations in the early 19th century. It did not stop it having a civil war. Nobody saw the Paris riots of 1968 coming and they had some chance of becoming a genmeral uprising. The 2 gulf wars involved the very extensive use of depleted urainium as balast for shells and bombs. Spreading the stuff over sand seas where it will be blown about and powdered to ever finer dust making sure that it gets into the biosphere very efficently. Still one way to deal with the disposal problem. Throwing lots of money at developing new technologies is a fantastic idea. We, just in the UK, spend billions of pounds on silly wind turbines which whilst they look great don't make electricity very well. Transfering that to R+D would be a very good idea. Speeding up the day we find a better way of making power than burning coal by 1 year would save vast amounts of money and lives. Coal mining has to be one of the worste jobs ever. I expect that doing that would have a solar power system which was cheaper than coal within the decade. Bingo! AGW is a worry of the past. As it is it's likely to take a couple of decades for that to happen.

So you think that there are people on this science forum who are not aware that human activity is held, correctly I think, as the cause for increases in CO2 in the air? Have you ever come across any post here which has held that view?

Yep, some doctors and scientists can be influenced by money. Who would have thought it, they are just like the rest of us. So why is it that you don't apply the same skepticism to the reports from the scientists who will only get the next research grant if they go along with the consensus on AGW?

If there is something in this thread OP beyond the fact that human activity has increased CO2 in the air please tell me what it is. All I see is an emotion piece which has no, ... erm.. point.

In a discussion about the impacts of increased temperatures on human health in the UK you, or who ever, posted a paper which discussed the impacts of a 2 degree rise assuming that our behavior did not change as a result of that temperature rise. I talked about the fact that we would change our behavior and that people who live in warmer places live longer, other factors aside. You say that I am out of order because my point is not relevant to the impact of a 2 degree temperature rise. Can you explain why my point about comparing the life styles and life expectancies of people in different climates is not relevant and comparing the death rate assuming we do not alter our behavior is at all relevant? I currently do not at all understand your reasoning.

I am far more afraid of cooling than warming although us rich people will be OK either way. The scale of sea level rises predicted by the most catastrophic predictions are very minor. I am not a climate scientist but I am a builder type of man and know how expensive it is not to build a 1m high sea defense. Beach front property almost anywhere anybody lives is very worth protecting with a little concrete. Cold times have been when there has been mass starvation. When the Roman Empire collapsed. When vast droughts wiped out civilizations.

My apologies. I tend to get a little punch drunck here. Ooops, i got the wrong quote first time and the thread is rolling fast. That was the philosophy bit i was responding to.

No, those are direct insults. The ad hom thing is about attacking the person rather than the argument. Saying that somebody has presented something which is a lie and thus they are a luiar is clear and part of the debating process. It is, when linked to what they have done wrong, not an ad hom. At least that's how I see it. But OK, if this is a "NO INSULTING THE SCIENTIFICALLY DISINGENUOUS " forum I'll moderate my approach. Lying gets me all ryled up, I might flip now and agin though. If you think that talking about how people live in a warmer place is out of order in a discussion about how we would live if it got a little warmer you are .... well ... I have no words for that... strange is a start.