This is interesting. Excerpt:
The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.
The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.
Dr Oreskes’s study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientific adviser.
However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.
They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.
Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication – but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been “widely dispersed on the internet”.
Well, they will be now.
I have for a long time wanted to know not just about global warming itself, but about the alleged expert consensus concerning its man-madeness. This should stir up a good discussion.
There is a tendency among free marketeers to say that global warming is all nonsense, not for the good reason that they actually think it all nonsense, but because they see it being used to establish a world government, which they oppose for other reasons. And I am sure that many who insist on the reality of global warming and of its man-madeness do so because they want a world government, which they favour for other reasons.
Yet there is no logical reason why one should not be a free marketeer who believes in the reality of man-made global warming, or a world governor who thinks it is all hooey.
Personally I am a free marketeer, and a sceptic on global warming, in the sense of not being persuaded that it is happening catastrophically, or that it is man-made. Note: a sceptic, rather than a disbeliever. I am a global warming agnostic rather than a global warming atheist. (And I think the religious vibes of this debate are all too real. The Environment seems to have replaced God for a lot of people.) I genuinely want to learn more about this alleged horror, on the off chance that I might be able to climb down off the fence, in one direction or another.
Question, what measures should a free marketeer who believes for sure that global warming is taking us all to catastrophe, is man-made, and is reversible, favour?
I say: develop technology more. Let us all get a lot richer. Meanwhile, devise a technical fix for the damn thing. And then rattle a big tin and do it. All the while arguing about it in forums like this one, and on the internet generally. (Interesting how the internet is undermining unacknowledged bias in the specialist science media as well as in things like CBS.)
But then, I favour most of that anyway, even if global warming and its man-madeness are hooey.
