Global Warming on C4 - Monbiot in the Guardian

My point is that if you take his actual article as written and helpully posted by Jimi it is very difficult to find fault with. You may ascribe all sorts of beliefs and motives to him, but the actual points he made appear to me to be perfectly sensible.

In particular, I share his concern that daft notions like creationism, etc. are too often given equal standing with respectable evidence-based science. This is deeply pernicious and needs to be challenged. Despite the growth of political correctness, all viewpoints are not equally valid!

I'm not sure about the idea that doing something to reduce CO2 emissions will somehow bring about the end of capitalism. Maybe I've missed some of the vital steps in that particular argument...
 
I have to disagree - it is totally trash such a poor mockumentary without automatically supporting the other side.

The fact is the programme was deliberately misleading and as such added nothing to the debate.

I would welcome a reasoned debate on what global warming really means - and how we should tackle it - the programme didn't give that
 
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The result of his sort of thinking has now infected government to the extent that we are now being told that carbon emissions have to be cut by 60% by 2050 regardless of the fact that this will condemn the next generation to a miserable existence.

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But this can be achieved by "investing" in schemes in India or wherever, rather than here in the UK, according to David Millibrand.

Presumably, this type of thing wont be available to individuals, but will be a way for big business and government to get around it.
 
Monbiot's article tries to present the (admittedly flawed) Channel 4 program as dependant for its argument (mainly) on the work of a scientist he discredits, and avoids some of the issues raised in the film. In particular he does not tackle the valid point that there is now both a body of scientists dependant for their funding on perpetuating and reinforcing the ideas that man caused global warming, plus a vast body of politicians and bureaucrats who have their careers staked on it, and on the doubtful premise that we can actually do anything about it.
Monbiot completely ignores the evidence that long before the industrial revolution the earth has had eras of higher average temperatures than we have at present. I cannot now remember all of the arguments in the film, but Monbiot himself is guilty of cherry picking, and of presenting a one sided view. He too has joined those that denigrate anybody who disagrees with the global warming hype.
 
Scientific funding on the whole is completely outside political influence. It's granted by scientific bodies on the basis of the idea and past history. The competition is intense for those funds, and the results are peer body reviewed, which means if you hand in politically motivated research, you career will be short lived in the main stream scientific community.

You have to understand that to understand scientific research worldwide, and peer review. There will always be the odd exeption, as in any field, but largely it works this way
 
I take it you've never worked in pure research then?

Oil money was never an option when I was in it. You went through reams of paper work applying to the scientific bodies who handled the bulk of research awards, unless you got lucky.
 
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In particular he does not tackle the valid point that there is now both a body of scientists dependant for their funding on perpetuating and reinforcing the ideas that man caused global warming

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As someone entirely dependent on science funding bodies for employment and research funds, I simply do not see how that can be so.

Apart from industry research - ie carried out by industry for industry - all other research in the UK is conducted by people employed by Universities or Research Institutes (almost all of which are funded by the UK research councils). All of us spend most of our lives writing grant applications, writing papers and reviewing other people's grant applications and papers. It is a mad system, but no-one has come up with a better one.

Pretty much the same applies in Europe and USA. In fact more and more funding is going to large international consortia and the traditional 1 man and a post-doc research is fading fast.

To get funded you must have good publications, to get publications you must have good funding. Both of these stages are savagely reviewed by your fellow scientists who are desperate to find fault because that increases their credibility and takes you out of contention for the same pot of money they are fighting for. Success rates on a grant application vary widely but are typically around 20%.

UK funding has been pretty much static for many years. The idea that there is additional money available for research on climate change is just wrong. There has certainly been moving around of money, research councils play these games all the time of strategically trying to ‘steer’ the UK research base by allocating money here or there. But ultimately it all comes from the same pot. There are pressures around the edges to spin your grant application towards trendy areas but these are responding to, not driving, funding policy.


So how can a sort of systematic self-delusion creep in? I do not know. Let’s take an extreme example from my world. Every biologist ‘believes’ in evolution by natural selection and it is the basis for our thinking about virtually every biological question. If someone tomorrow ‘disproved’ evolution, the work and careers of almost every biologist would collapse around their ears. But I could, and have been, funded to investigate apparent anomalies in response to selection. That is because they are of huge scientific interest. Had I discovered a system which would not work under the Darwinian model I would have got a paper in Nature, rather than a minor note somewhere else. In other words, I am under real pressure to find data that contradicts orthodoxy. There is simply no mechanism for a pro-evolution bias to work even though ‘belief’ in evolution is total in biology.

I am sure it is the same in climatology, I would never be able to publish a paper along the lines of the infamous C4 documentary, not because it contradicted mainstream belief but because it lacked scientific rigor. If a proper observation was made and if it stood up to peer review it would be publishable regardless of its relationship to some imagined orthodoxy.

The system is very far from perfect, it is slow to respond because it requires so much preliminary evidence before a new line of approach will be funded; it is often said that Darwin or Einstein would not get funding for their big ideas! But the idea of scientists chasing money from a particular faction is simply incomprehensible.
 
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But the idea of scientists chasing money from a particular faction is simply incomprehensible.
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Wasn't there a controversy about this happining with money from the tobacco lobby a while back?

Who funds the funders? After all, if you are a politicina/bureaucrat with funding money to hand out to a funding council, you want to know it won't be wasted don't you. "Waste" may well mean "not on your pet projects and aspirations".

I used to have modest lifestyle aspirations, but apparently, according to PC warming othodoxy I'm not allowed them anymore.
 
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Wasn't there a controversy about this happining with money from the tobacco lobby a while back?
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Yes. That was tobacco industry scientists with tobacco indsutry money. There is no equivalent in climate change that I am aware of.


<<Who funds the funders? After all, if you are a politicina/bureaucrat with funding money to hand out to a funding council, you want to know it won't be wasted don't you. "Waste" may well mean "not on your pet projects and aspirations".>>

The bulk of uk funding is from governemnt allocations to research councils with significant other bits from various charities. We are all encouraged to find industry partners, I am not sure how much that ammounts to but probably not much.

Funding councils make their own allocations with that money. Government certainly could steer the spend. At one extreme, they could say, 'spend all your phyical sciences allocation on studies that assume climate change'. But they don't! They may say spend a load of money on climate change, data collection and prediction. They probably are putting a lot of emphasis there right now - you could find out easily enough. But as I said, I really do not see how that could bias the data to a pro human cause of CC position. The overwhelming deciding factor in assigning money is 'scientific excellence' That is determined by referees and panels made up of my peers. I know the system is strange and illogical, but I don't see how it can be made a political plaything as you suggest.


The calls are all open and available on the web for all to see.
 
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But I could, and have been, funded to investigate apparent anomalies in response to selection.

[/ QUOTE ]It's these anomalies that so exercise the grey cells. There are plenty of observable anomalies in every day life before you start to read a bit and dig deeper. The first book I read (after Darwin) was called (from memory - it's a while since I read it) 'The neck of the giraffe - or where Darwin went wrong'. Not presented in a particularly scientific way so you may have dismissed it but it did point out some interesting anomalies.

Hardly a day goes by that I can't be heard muttering " How the **** could that have evolved?" - with subsequent raising of eyes upwards by my wife and children!
 
But boringly, they all turn out to be fully explicable in terms of simple evolution by natural selection.

I would love to have found something that didn't work in Darwinian terms, but I didn't, I just found some nice little biological stories that perfectly fit a Darwinian model once you look a bit closer.
 
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Yes. That was tobacco industry scientists with tobacco indsutry money. There is no equivalent in climate change that I am aware of.
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So Big Oil, Big Car Makers and so forth have not provided any funding either. That confirms that those who say otherwise are just background noise.

This comes back to the problem that there are a group, allegedy smaller, but no less qualified or independantly funded, who do not agree that global warming is generated by mankind. At this stage we are forced to re-examine the political goals of some of those supporting the orthodox/PC view. And that is where the problem lies. They DO have an agenda and are not that unwilling to say so, and what it is. If their noise was also cut out do the number of qualified (regardless of agenda) supporters change significantly? Bearing in mind that there are apolitical greens and political ones, who may also be scientifically qualified and involved.

At this stage we start to see the beginnings of an ad hominem argument at which stage reasoned debate falls down. "You are wrong because you are a Lefty/Capitalist Pig/too stupid to understand" gets in the way. Regrettably doubters, sceptcs and those whose research finds other answers are subject to this sort of attack in the popular and technical press by virtue of imposed wisdom.

I wonder which side would have been supported by Galileo?

Chelonam Mobile
 
I agree that there is a lot of noise from people standing around on the sidelines with their own agendas.

If you just confine yourself to asking the question "what is the concensus position of scientific opinion published in proper (ie peer reviewed) scientific literature" then you are as near as possible to a truly objective view. As I said, I honestly doubt the willingness or the ability of the scientific community to distort their present understanding of the facts.

You don't even need to require that they are independent scientsists as the review process will take care of that. Those tabaco industry stooges did not publish their 'data' in real journals. They just made a lot of noise and muddied the issues.
 
I totally agree with you.

The trouble is that when people on both sides of an argument forget the facts and start exagerating and speaking well outside their understanding, it creates a fog of confusion.

When on top of that politicians start hijacking a real concern for their own short-term ends - if only to show off their green credentials - then it provides an oportunity and a motive for the whole thing to be blown apart.

Let's face it, if there wasn't at least the possibility of a solution that also cost money and threatened lifestyles then there would be no debate at all.
 
" I'm not sure about the idea that doing something to reduce CO2 emissions will somehow bring about the end of capitalism. Maybe I've missed some of the vital steps in that particular argument... "

Yes, indeed you have

Quickly - a 60% cut in CO2 comes from a 60% cut in energy usage.

Which means the end of almost all industry, transport systems, food production and distribution and importation of food.

Which means poverty, starvation, 3rd world levels of health care, life expectancy etc etc

Just like the beloved Soviet Union used to have

Welcome to the endless queue for bread which doesn't exist.

One view could be that what they failed to achieve by industrial action and economic blackmail in the 1970s they are going to achieve by "greenery" in the 21st Century.
 
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Quickly - a 60% cut in CO2 comes from a 60% cut in energy usage.


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No - a 60% cut in CO2 comes from reducing the amount of fossil fuel we burn

That can be either improving the efficiency or moving to using other sources of energy (renewables, nuclear).

Alternatively we could invest in "Carbon Capture" technology for our fossil-fuel burning power plants.

When you look at it in detail 60% over 30 years is not that hard a target to achieve
 
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