So what. Who cares about what the degrees they hold are in look at what their degrees are in. If they have a PhD in English Lit, Geography or Environmental Science, then they are just so much waste paper in this debate.

If they have a degree in earth sciences, climatology, geology, or computer modelling then they become worth listening to.

Rubbish – what counts is scholarship and academic rigour.

If you are dealing with feedback effects on non linear systems then mathematics or physics is probably where your skills lie for example.

As for computer models of the climate or any other complex system for that matter the meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz showed and quantified their limitations many years ago now.

A great deal of seminal science has been produced by people originally outside the field. And a great deal more by multi disciplinary teams.

Your reliance on the qualifications of speakers is short sighted. There are any number of dissenting views on many aspects of the CC debate with PhDs

I am just trying to work out if you have the slightest understanding of the subject or the intellectual capacity to understand the subject and if not I am wondering why you think your view is relevant?

So what. Who cares about what the degrees they hold – look at what their degrees are in. If they have a PhD in English Lit, Geography or Environmental Science, then they are just so much waste paper in this debate.

If they have degree(s) in earth sciences, climatology, geology, or computer modeling then they become worth listening to. If they have degrees in more than one, then they are even more interesting. If they publish in a peer-reviewed paper then I really start taking them seriously.

The CCDs have a lot of crap paper talking about things that they don’t know about. Sure there are a couple worth listening to with reasonable qualifications and experience for dissenting theories. Many are from the fossil age of geology, but still worthy of respect. But the majority of the scientific ‘support’ for CCD theories is just junk backgrounds in geography and the like, often paid. Most of the respected names on the CCDs lists are just a CCD idiot appropriating someones name from a paper as ‘supporting’ the CCD position.

There is no equating junk science from the CCDs doing ‘summary’ slanted papers from other peoples research, with real scientists trained and working in the field doing research.

You are just another fatuous pillock of a CCD without any understanding of the issue.

It already has as land is converted to biofuel production and Corn is diverted from feeding people into making methanol

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/how-the-rising-price-of-corn-made-mexicans-take-to-streets-454260.html

Why will food production decline? Why will transport degrade? They may both change, but that doesn’t mean they have to get worse.

That’s the daftest denier argument yet – “we have to let the patient die of a fever because attempts to treat the fever might kill him”. Mmm, yes, and we had to destroy the village in order to save it.

It isn’t “humble’, it’s profound arrogance. And before you dismiss this as “argument from authority’, I reply that it is not authority alone, but the data and science that underlies that authority, and furthermore that I much prefer that kind of authority to an “argument from ignorance’.

Nope. You misunderstand me. Again. I am not contradicting anything the climate experts say about climate, including the fact that the experts are up front about feedbacks being unresolved. That is what qualified scientists say. It is, they say, a very hard problem. And it matters: large temperature changes rely on feedbacks, not on the direct effect of greenhouse gas.

My point is that their projections are not sufficient evidence for action. That is a question of more than climate science. It is one of economics, of international law, and of personal values, among other things. Action is costly. Climate change is costly. Both action and non-action could possibly be disastrous. There are trade offs. I am not convinced that the process being followed goes sufficiently beyond the climate, which it needs to do because other disciplines besides climate matter when writing policy. The case for policy rests on certainty which, by the scientists own admission, is not there. Scientists’ call for action takes them outside their area of expertise. That is what I contradict.

I strongly suspect the policy process is corrupted, and that the environment will be harmed by resulting policy. The Hadley emails raise serious questions about whether the research is also partly corrupted. Surely it is reasonable to look into how serious this corruption is before committing trillions of dollars. For context, $50 billion is the total aid ever given to Africa, and 2 million die of dirty water there every year. Given the scale of funds involved, delaying climate change policy for just one year could see funds shifted toward a very real and certain problem.

This would not be the first time unintended, but nevertheless real, group think among educated people has had adverse consequences. It is surely not arrogance to point to important things that remain uncertain and ask for some of that uncertainty to be resolved before diverting funds away from the many other problems still waiting to be solved.

Your reliance on the qualifications of speakers is short sighted. There are any number of dissenting views on many aspects of the CC debate with PhDs.

No by hunger as food production declines, food storage and transport systems degrade because they are “emitters”.

Don’t you nongs realize how much stupid green policies have already impacted world food prices and the consequences of that for the poor? And how much more they will be if you keep this nonsense up.

There are real world problems, such as hunger, malaria, lack of clean water etc which are all but intractable but instead of focusing on them and addressing them our elite have gone into flights of fancy about hypothetical 6m sea level rises 100 years from now from scientists who don’t even follow the elementary rules of science. Tui moment these CRU fellows have ‘fessed” up now they have lost all the raw data that their projections are based on.

No, that’s what you want them to be saying. What they are actually saying is that that is the course we are on:

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

Fast-rising carbon emissions mean that worst-case predictions for climate change are coming true

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. …

6C rise: The consequences

If two degrees is generally accepted as the threshold of dangerous climate change, it is clear that a rise of six degrees in global average temperatures must be very dangerous indeed, writes Michael McCarthy. Just how dangerous was signalled in 2007 by the science writer Mark Lynas, who combed all the available scientific research to construct a picture of a world with temperatures three times higher than the danger limit.

His verdict was that a rise in temperatures of this magnitude “would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe”.

He said: “It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”

Very few species could adapt in time to the abruptness of the transition, he suggested. “With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean.

“As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

“The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But, with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.”

Millions or even billions may also die from policy action.

Mmm, yes, all killed by exploding green light bulbs I suppose. Sigh.

Feedback loops are not magic, and they are happening. I’ve already discussed two, thawing arctic ice releases methane frozen in the tundra (there are billions of tonnes of it there), and decreases the reflection of heat from the Earth’s surface, both of which add to warming.

These effects are not mystical. The basics of feedback loops are well known, and the effects are happening. Really happening:

Meanwhile, the scientists have for the first time detected a failure of the Earth’s natural ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide released into the air.

They found significant evidence that more man-made CO2 is staying in the atmosphere to exacerbate the greenhouse effect because the natural “carbon sinks” that have absorbed it over previous decades on land and sea are beginning to fail, possibly as a result of rising global temperatures.

The amount of CO2 that has remained in the atmosphere as a result has increased from about 40 per cent in 1990 to 45 per cent in 2008. This suggests that the sinks are beginning to fail, they said.

Professor Le Quéré emphasised that there are still many uncertainties over carbon sinks, such as the ability of the oceans to absorb dissolved CO2, but all the evidence suggests that there is now a cycle of “positive feedbacks”, whereby rising carbon dioxide emissions are leading to rising temperatures and a corresponding rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

explain why policy is necessary right now when 80-90% of a 6C warming cited above depends on feedbacks nobody yet knows exists.

Easy, you’re wrong, feedback exists and it is happening. Your ignorance will not prevent it.

It isn’t “humble”, it’s profound arrogance. And before you dismiss this as “argument from authority”, I reply that it is not authority alone, but the data and science that underlies that authority, and furthermore that I much prefer that kind of authority to an “argument from ignorance”.

I do not want to shoot the messenger but if he is not passing the message on because he does not understand it I do have questions.

So what are your qualifications and why should these allow you to hold up humanity from reaching agreement about what is the most important issue facing it?

Surely your view is not just about the authority of the messenger?

I am quite certain that the difficulty researchers are having with feedback is not resolved by dropping an assumption of climate linearity! In any case, not an assumption behind anything I’ve said, quite obviously.

In fact show me the wording or subtext that allows you to infer the three assumptions you put on me. Show me. Either you’re not reading what I wrote or you’re playing the straw man. Poor show.