blatham wrote:Well, I'm sorry george, but I see little reason to adopt your view on either the science or the scientists working on these questions (the first because of the second). You suppose ideological motives (or self-interest) on their part but I see the ideology as resting with you and the self-interest as being overwhelmingly resident within powerful business/financial entities who have purposefully funded frontgroups and disinformation campaigns. There is much evidence to support what I've just said and little or nothing to support your claims re the scientific community who've contributed to the recent IPCC report, for example. You have notions about "bureaucrats" or about the UN which act in service of your worldview but which are uncompelling to me and which I see as common to and arising out of a certain political tradition in the US.
Blatham, I believe the truth is that everyone acts to further his perceived self-interest to a large degree. Businessmen seek profits, academics seek promotion, tenure and prestige among their fellows; scientists and professionals of all kinds seek advancement and notoriety often through newly emerging specialties, and government/NGO grants wherever they can be found; apparently disinterested people often seek power and prestige through leadership associations with ostensibly non partisan organizations; ........ I don't know any reliable way to compare the relative effects of these basic human traits among the various groups, but my experience of life tells me that no group is exempt from such things.
I have had a good deal of experience with government bureaucrats, across a fairly wide span of government and, in some cases at high levels. My expressed beliefs are based on those experiences. i am hardly alone in voicing such observations -- they have been the frequent subject of literature in most countries for centuries.
Many who claim to be guided exclusively by scientific principals, and who claim a broad knowledge of environmental and economic effects, are often oddly selective in the principals they choose to apply to hotly debated issues. For example, any practical, realistic scheme to meet the Kyoto goals in the U.S. would require, among other things, the replacement of about 40% of our electrical power generating capability with a emissions-free sources. Given that our hydro-electrical potential is nearly exhausted, and that dams themselves have become an environmental issue, there is virtually no potential to increase this our largest "renewable source" (around 6% of our total production). The most wildly optimistic forecasts for wind and solar power, presently at just under 2% of consumption call for it to - maybe - reach 10% by 2030, assuming the successful development of needed new technologies. The only feasible solutions are massive rationing or tripling our investment in nuclear power. I find it more than a little suspect that the most zealous advocates of catastrophes global warming are virtually all equally zealous in thir opposition to nuclear power -- the ONLY way to achieve their professed goals in the compressed time periods allowed in the doomsday scenarios they so profusely publicize. I can conceive of no way that one could consistently adhere to scientific principles, while holding these diametrically contradictory views.
Many of the advocates of catastrophic warming call for government control of power demand through regulation of things as varied as automobile design, urban planning, the availability and design of appliances, and many other things. This would require and create enormous new powers for government agencies, presumably populated by these advocates and their followers, able to restrict the freedom and regulate the lives of people generally. I hope you don't suppose that the lure of all that power and prominence is not a compelling factor in the psychological (and conscious) motivation of many of these issues groups and the people who lead them. I would have a very hard time respecting your judgement of human nature if you were to suppose that, while businessmen may scheme for self-interest, others are somehow exempt from such motives.
Finally, the criticism I offered of the numerical models used to produce all these doomsday scenarios is based on irrefutable mathematical principles. Chaos theory developed in the early 1970s out of a massive effort by universities and government laboratories to develop reliable numerical simulations of the weather and other global atmospheric phenomena (not to mention some problems in nuclear weapons design involving solutions to similar coupled non-linear equations). The essential finding was that, though these numerical models yielded plausible-looking predictions for the behavior of the modelled systems over time, the specific results bore no more than a random relation to the unfolding reality in the real world. Even today, despite the manifold advances in computing power, the global atmospheric model can't produce a reliable forecast of the weather more than a few days into the future. "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions" is the stock phrase used to describe the cause. Bottom line is that though the physical systems in question obey known, deterministic laws, their future states cannot be calculated with accuracy. The best these models can do is to suggest possibilities. They have no predictive value whatever. I have a good deal of personal experience in this field of study.This was also Michael Crichdon's principal objection in the interview cited above.
