There is another way to descend into anarchy and tumult that I’m not sure you are recognising. If, through indecision, the external conditions become sufficiently changed the original discussion may become irrelevant and the outcome determined not by discussion or decision-making, but by external conditions. Therefore any process of democracy also has to accomodate these external pressures and realities if it is not to fail or become irrelevant.

The approach you suggest can become indistinguishable from failing to do anything. It may not be possible to rest aside opinion entirely (is it ever possible?), and the data will always conflict to some extent. As such, to advocate setting aside opinion may be to advocate inaction until it is too late.

In this sort of environment the most sensible thing seems to be to make an educated and informed judgement as to where the middle ground is on a lot of the evidence. Its a very crude way of making a decision, but seems to me to be the best way. And when on one extreme you have groups suggesting that we can still debate whether humans are contributing to climate change, and on the other you have scientists such as Hansen (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/07/climatechange.carbonemissions) and Lovelock saying that we, as humans, have pushed the planet past various climate tipping points, the middle ground appears to be that climate change is definitely happening and that we need to do something to both mitigate and adapt to it quickly.

So say for the sake of argument that the above statement is accepted as the middle ground. There is then a balance to strike between collating additional evidence and actually doing something about it. To me, the balance tips in favour of doing much much more to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and that this is currently more of a priority than collating additional evidence (although this should and is going on alongside any mitigation and adaptation). Why? Because the implications of Hansen being right are immeasurably more serious than Monckton being right.

And this, I think, is the position taken by the majority of those advocating action on climate change. Of course there remains the possibility that either Hansen or Monckton are correct. But basic risk analysis suggests that to hold either of those positions is a bit silly if you are making a judgement on secondary evidence.

From the philosophical position weak democracy degrades into anarchy and tumult, preluding a reestablishment of authority - I’d say it depends on whether the person in the relevant position is actually correct on the substantive points, rather than just the details.

To a large extent that depends on whether intellectual, technological and economic developments are equally matched.

You appear to be answering the polar opposite of my point. I was obviously unclear, let me try again.

BenM recommended a page on the RealClimate web site, which he noted in passing was not peer-reviewed. Nothing too appalling there.

However, the page he linked to started with a criticism of other web-sites that it described as “non-peer reviewed”.

My question is why a site that is non-peer reviewed criticises its opponents for being non-peer reviewed.

As I stated previously, I do not have a fixed opinion on the global warming debate, I’m just trying to educate myself. I find it difficult to determine which sites to trust.

Good question. Seems to me that the consensus is around the AGW arguement, but the political will to do something about it is meagre, to say the least. What do you think should happen next?

To paraphrase Warhol: in the present everybody who shouts will get one second of recognition. Then… what happens then?

I don’t think it is hypocritical to quote or even comment on peer reviewed science. Why would you think it was?

Or would you prefer an unarbitrated battleground? Seems to me that libertarians and their friends need that, ’cause they’ve lost any realistic scientific arguement.

The point about peer review is that you cannot come up with stuff, oh I don’t know, like DK does, without being challenged. I have yet to see a word of what he says on climate science appearing anywhere, much, except his blog. As far as I can tell, he does not engage with serious science blogs, preferring to muddy the waters elsewhere. Far less, of course, presenting a closely argued, peer reviewed paper pointing out the errors of the vast majority of climate scientists. Now, that would be amazing. Perhaps he could co-author it with Lord Monkton.

Ho, hum.

The kind of Libertarianism one confronts on nearly all blogs is actually nothing of the sort. Scratch the surface and all one really gets is repetition of some dearly held conservative prejudices.

In this, an analogy can be made with the way believers have rebranded creationsim as “Intelligent Design”. Blogger “Libertarians” are no more than arch conservatives at root, with all the wrong-headed assumptions about the world that flow from that. The Libertarian label is fluff, dressing up the usual simplistic conservatism in more intellectual-sounding garb.

It’s so transparent.

That all seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? Mind you, it is only what I and others have been saying for years (and there is more news coming to The Kitchen on that front soon).

It remains to be seen whether anyone will listen. The omens—in the form of the MSM’s failure to even admit this exists—are not good. After all, if it turns out that we eeeevil deniers are right and CO2 emissions are nothing to worry about, then there are going to be an awful lot of alarmists with egg smeared all over their fat, lying faces. And a good many of those alarmists are members of the MSM and of government

As such, we will be faced with the unedifying spectacle of governments the world over impoverishing their peoples with absolutely no justification whatso-fucking-ever…

Well, no. It doesn’t. Because an idiot like DK has been saying something “for years” makes it right? I don’t think so.

Here is another point of view, probably as long held as the daft Devil:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/12/you_too_can_be_a_distinguished.php

Oh, you missed it? What he said was this:

“many of those alarmists are members of the MSM and of government.

“As such, we will be faced with the unedifying spectacle of governments the world over impoverishing their peoples with absolutely no justification whatso-fucking-ever…”

It sounds to me like a tit, trying to talk to us into being tits.

Won’t wash DK.

Well, it makes better sense to me, anyway.

Sorry about that…

I go away for a day and we get all this… I’d remind you that this thread is about the left not being angry enough, and frankly I find your particular brand of politics gets me as angry as hell. Which, truth be told, is what you intend.

However, deep breath, tell us DK, what exactly is your position on climate change? Just to remind you of something you supported , The Manhattan Declaration.

These folk say this, embedded in one of DKs’ posts:

http://devilskitchen.me.uk/2008/03/manhattan-declaration-on-climate-change.html

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

These are DKs’ chums.

Note: Their second point is that there is no Anthropogenic (Human caused) Global Warming whatsoever. Their final point is that Human caused climate change is not a crisis.

It takes a certain type of genius to believe and subscribe to both these views at the same time.

To spell it out, you cannot say that human-caused climate change is not a global crisis without admitting that there is human-caused climate change. If the libertarians admit that much, then they should surely adopt a precautionary principle, rather that bitch, which is all they really do.

The consensus on AGW seems to me to be rock solid. It is fringe folk, economists, libertarians and assorted other nutters that are trying to make a wedge. Fortunately they are losing, however, if we beat this thing, they will smile at you and say, “what was all the fuss about?”

It is cheap politics, not science.

“Realclimate is written by climate scientists. It’s a blog and so is not peer reviewed itself…”

And yet when I follow the link to Realclimate that you gave, the very first sentence says:

“Numerous myths regarding the so-called “hockey stick” reconstruction of past temperatures, can be found on various non-peer reviewed websites…”

So are they peer-reviewed, or are they hypocrites?

(Asking as one of the many who has no fixed position on global warming and finds the arguments curious.)

To deal with the common AGW denier canard about the post war temperature drop - the slight dip was caused by rapid industrial production of reflective aerosols after World War 2. Worldwide legislation on the control of pollution in the 1970s caused the decrease in concentrations of these chemicals and so global temperature reverted to its present relentless warming trend. Without those aerosols, the temperature would have risen in the period.

Also, when will AGW Deniers also understand that 35 years is a mere blip in the timescales we’re talking about?

Track temperature changes back 800,000 years and the correlation between rises in CO2 and rises in global temperature is unarguable.

In that time there has never been so much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today, and the consequences for temperature are easily interpreted from the data we have.

Realclimate is written by climate scientists. It’s a blog and so is not peer reviewed itself, but it links to peer reviewed research to support its articles. Which is more than can be said about 99.9999pc of all so-called climate change “sceptic” sites.

“Steve McIntyre, you might recall, was the gentleman (with McKitrick) who showed the Mann et al. hockey-stick graph, that the the IPCC’s initial Reports were based on, to be false.”

Um, but they didn’t. And it isn’t.

First of all Mr McIntyre is a miner. McKintrick is an economist. They raised a query as to the correctness of the inclusion of pine cones and tree ring data from North America in the models.

Whether or not they are makes no difference to the outcome of the graph that got termed “the Hockey stick”. It is still part of the suite of evidence used to inform the IPCC reports.

DK can enlighten himself here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/

DK does write about AGW quite a lot, but the articles he cites are selective, the quotes taken even more so. I noticed a lot of stuff on his site wittering on about a cooling phase since 1998. But that was an exceptionally warm year thanks to El Nino. To take that one year as a reference point is fundamentally dishonest. The underlying warming trend going back over a hundred years is still relentlessly upwards, faithfully tracking the rise in CO2.

For a libertoonian, you’re being rather Daily Mail. What exactly do we see?

(I mean in real life, not “if a newspaper takes the 10 worst things that happen in a given day in a country of 60 million people, and reports on them again when the person responsible is caught, again when they’re committed for trial, again when they’re tried and again when they’re sentenced, then the newspaper will list some really terrible things that have happened. Shock horror!” sense…)

1) “the NHS is expensive” is not the same claim as “the NHS is cheap but unfairly funded”. If everyone in the country were given bottom-of-the-range Argos DVD players, but you were forced to pay for all of them, then the players would still be cheap.

2) literacy in the 99% sense has always been defined as “the ability to read and write a simple sentence”. No, I can’t provide a list of the simple sentences used in the 1930s. Nor do I think it’s particularly worthwhile arguing with someone who believes that everyone was literate back then - do you not know any people over 60 who’re working class or who’ve worked with teachers? Have you not, y’know, asked them about whether they encountered people who couldn’t read beyond writing their own name, and sometimes not even that? Because I have, and there were plenty of them…

3) the “ways in which the Times study is flawed” can pretty much be summarised as “the Chinese don’t like it, because they’re good at science and bad at humanities, so they think only science should count”. But even if you follow the Chinese methodology, you still get 2 British universities in the top 10 and 4 in the top 25. That’s pretty good, no? [BTW, the Chinese survey pegs UCL below Nottingham. That's a strong indicator there's something very weird going on with its methodology.]

Now, if that site had been run by an company with equivalent links to say, an oil company, you’d all be up in arms.