A Place to Stand

  This letter went out to all and sundry and was published by the Courier today. The Courier seems to be changing its name to the "Scotland Courier" which may explain it or it may be the mention of local boy made good Adam Smith.

One problem which has been highlighted by Murdo Fraser's opponents in the campaign for Conservative leader is that even if he won it would take a 2/3rds majority to wind up the party and that might not be forthcoming.

However I believe the Conservative's opponents have long ago answered that. The Co-Operative Party is both part of the Labour Movement and a legally separate organisation but the distinction on the ground effectively non-existent.

This may seem an historical anachronism though occasionally they have threatened to make use of it, in a less than ethical way, by renaming Labour regional list candidates.

At least in the short term, it would be then be easier to attract groups, such as UKIP to form a "big tent" organisation of people who think market freedom is more effective than windmillery and the "socialism" Labour, the SNP & Greens are officially committed to (the LibDems being merely committed to the weird doctrine that economic liberalism is officially "illiberal"). With 5 elected parties in Scotland there must be a niche for one that understands Adam Smith.

Sir John Cowperthwaite understood enough to bring Hong Kong from poorer than Gaza to richer than Britain and I do not believe that tradition entirely gone or suitable only for export.

     The editing is reasonable. While I like Cowperthwaite as a counter example to the claim that modern Scotland is inherently socialist it is very much out of left field. The suggestion that UKIP might be willing to enter a "big tent" is very much my own, undiscussed with anybody in it, but we aren't the Judean People's Liberation Front.

Some stuff from yesterday.

Fit - C4 had an interesting bit about Validimir Putin having been shown on Russian TV bringing up a Greek Amphora and it turns out he hadn't actually discovered it.  The fact that in the original film the stuff was clearly marked out by white tapes underwater would have tended to make that clear at the time but apparently this is proof of how much Russian TV is slanted in his favour.

Not Fit - the original photo-op. Nor should it have been but if it wasn't newsworthy then is it not slanted to say it is now.

Not Fit - Any reporting whatsoever of the fact that for many years, as Andrew Neather boasted, the government deliberately hid from the people the fact that they were running a programme of mass immigration to "elect a new people" in Britain. (Though Sky has)

So, assuming that the broadcasters are not entirely government propagandists, pushing stories against their chosen enemies and censoring their lies and frauds Putin bringing 2 pieces if vase ashore in a marginally slanted photo-op is infinitely more important news, in Britain, than the fact of the British government importing millions of immigrants, against the interests and wishes of the British people.

A Fit Way to Spin - On Newsnight last night they had a talking head, the editor of the New Statesman (who to my elderly eye looked about 15), saying that the Conservative and indeed all the big party Conferences were almost empty. That their fringe events were almost entirely sponsors from big business, fakecharities (though that word is never used) and government. That, with the hollowing out (that phrase was used - possibly because it is a legitimate one in business) the conferences were only being kept going because the parties make lots of money and that perhaps it is time to end them.

An Unfit Way to Spin - would have been to make the obvious point that all parties are simply a charade designed to give the appearance of democracy when in fact every political issue is promoted or censored by the state controlled media. It wasn't made.

Fit - That the last growth figures have been recalculated to 0.1%. Still a suspiciously convenient figure since it is not technically zero, though well within margin of error of it.

Not Fit -  Since the state media line is, under all circumstances, that we need bigger government, that this was achieved with an, after inflation, increase in government spending of 1.3%, despite all the false claims of "cuts". So despite what we are told the "cuts" cannot be the cause.

Fit - Lots and lots of "news" (beeboid talking heads) about how "quantitative easing" is needed.

Not Fit - That despite the Monetary Policy Cttee's legal duty to restrict monetary supply increase ("quantitative easing") to keep inflation around 2% it is now 5.2% and they are making no slightest attempt to fulfil the duty they are officially paid for. Inflation is simply government parasites stealing from us by breaking their promise of the value of the non-interest bearing bonds they print (aka £ notes).

Accidentally Fit - Tina Fey interviewed in Frost on Satire (BBC4) saying Sarah Palin is very intelligent. I don't know how that wasn't noticed since all the others, who hadn't actually met her, were doing the normal "Palin is an imbecile" line which has been the media explanation for her popilarity over 4 years among ordinary people. It is clearly wholly false but the media scum have to be contemptuous of the ordinary people they are swindling to allow themselves to sleep at night.

  A comment from Dr Philip Bratby on Bishop Hill which is chilling enough to repeat. It is clearly a significant threat both because of lack of capacity and because throwing intermittent wind power into it destabilises the grid.:

Arguably the most important piece of infrastructure in the country is the grid (transmission and distribution). If it fails the economic damage will be enormous and people will die by the thousand. How long can most people survive with no electricity (for most people this means no shops, no travelling, no frozen food, no cooking, no heating, no work, etc etc). So you would think that the most important job of the energy ministers would be maintaining the integrity of the grid. This means ensuring that the grid code is rigorously applied, i.e. that generators connected to the grid enhance its stability and integrity. So what do we find? Well of course the grid code is relaxed so that harmful generators like wind turbines can be connected to the grid. And what does our chief energy minister think of a policy designed to destroy this most important piece of infrastructure? He thinks wind turbines are pretty and beautiful. Truly we are governed by buffoons.

  I have posted this on 10 "LibDem" sites. We will see how many, if any, don't censor it.
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In fact only 4 out of 10 wholly censored it. One even had the courtesy to give an answer, non-factual though it was.
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  UKIP have what appears to be not so much a hile in the "warming consensus" scam as ots virtual disintigration:

 50 scientists named as part of the IPCC consensus who have openly denounced the fraud.
Starting with saying that the vital phrase the scientists agreed on "“The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected” was censored from the policy document by non-scientists.

  A major story which will be censored by the MSM
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Gore faked a film experiment
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The most recent excuse for warming alarmism - ocean "acidification" is a fraud - proven elsewhere previously but worth the confirmation.
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40% of scientists don't work for the government (actually 30.0 + 4.9 + 5.9 =41.1%). Useful because iit gives figures to the statistical unliklihood of not one of them (1,992,528 in America alone) supports the alleged consensus. Not vital but some alarmists on "scienceblogs" had claimed to doubt it .
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Low Carbon Crony Investment Conference
Alex Salmond says of Scots taxpayer subsidies for sea turbines ""It's a turning point like the discovery of a new world or the change from hunter gathering to agriculture,"  "paradigm shift", "great leap forward for mankind". He predicted 130,000 jobs will be created in the low carbon sector - since economists say each subsidy dependent "green job" destroys 3.7 he is actually saying he intends to destroy 480,000 jobs.
 
The engineer while naturally being enthusiastic admitted "We have got to get the cost down. The industry's technology is still relatively immature." and the government' current subsidy £35m fund was a "drop in the ocean"
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Climate change is certainly not an exact science. In fact, if the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World is anything to go by, it appears to be a wildly inaccurate science. Spiked

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More than one in four people in the capital are currently unable to meet their energy bills as rising prices and welfare reforms threaten to send even more into fuel poverty.


A report by London Councils today warns that rising fuel prices means that fuel poverty could be a key issue this winter.
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Catastrophic weather events over the last 2000 years. Nowadays we don't know when we have it easy. G/T Pournelle
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There is potential for shale gas elsewhere: in the south-eastern county of Kent, the south coast, the Mendip Hills in the west, the east Midlands, and Scotland's Midland Valley.

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And on a different scare story - the anti-nuclear LNT one:

However, research from eminent scientists worldwide, including radiation experts at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute (LRRI) -- the only facility in the world dedicated to respiratory research -- debunks the LNT hypothesis, especially as it relates to lung cancer.
Now, a mathematical tool developed at LRRI will help scientists measure those health benefits. Through their research, they support a proven alternative to LNT, which is called low-dose-radiation-activated natural protection (ANP). Using a hormetic relative risk (HRR) model, they can actually show that ANP provides a radiation benefit.

Following yesterday's post here are 3 responses:

David Price

Fully support the X-Prize suggestion.

uanime5

While no federal taxes may stimulate the economy there’s no guarantee that the economy will grow sufficiently to make up for the loss in tax revenue.

It would also require all companies to provide private healthcare for their employees because the NHS would be unaffordable.

Bazman

No nuclear safety, no taxes and a prize for the largest marrow with no buyer. What a load of shale.

    I thank David Price for that, it is good to see somebody in Britain willing to look at new ideas on their merits. Bazman is engaged in fact free trolling. Uanime5 is, I believe, greatly overstating in the scare story about needing to dismantle the NHS (I doubt that would even be possible in that sort of timescale). Laffer's proposal is for a short term tax holiday. In the long term if we achieved China's 10% growth not only would the tax base increase 10% annually (doubling in 7 years) allowing repayment even if government spending is only kept flat, but also the ratio of borrowing to GNP drops fast (from around 70% to 35%), making it sustainable.

   The important thing from my point of view was that Mr Redwood did not choose to dispute that all 3 of these are credible ways out of the recession, less painful than years of cuts and far less painful than decades of faux "cuts" which seems to be government policy.

   I assume the reason he does not propose them is that believes, as I do, that they are simply too innovative,  libertarian and incompatible with a massive overgovernment to be acceptable to the current Conservative party.

  When I say that our political leaders can't be entirely stupid and having been told the consequences of the Luddite policies they are pursuing must be aware of them I am sometimes asked why they would want to deliberately impoverish us.

This is from George Orwell's 1984, a book which may not be the last word in political philosophy but certainly depicts politics believable enough to have been chilling to several generations.

"From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. ... But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. ... the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. ... But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ... Ignorance is Strength"

Therefore the parasitic political nomenklatura must deliberately impoverish us, tax us, make us spend time living with pointless regulations. if they wish to continue dictating to us. Which they obviously enjoy doing.

"... If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity."

Now is that not a description of the catastrophic warming fraud; or of the Homeland Security bureaucracy who have never found 1 terrorist; or of anti-nuclear hysteria; or of the passive smoking regulations? Passive smoking doesn't kill, forcing people to stand outside in midwinter does - the same applies to the enforcement of unnecessarily high electricity prices.

"Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. ... A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. ... If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."

  Doom forever is specifically what the ecofascists want. They specifically believe that we are running out of conventional resources and will soon be forced back, permanently, to a medieval level of society. Yet are absolutely opposed (and desperate to invent preposterous scare stories to help them) to any new technology or discovery of new resources (eg nuclear and shale gas) that unquestionably can assure permanent wealth.

  There is no fact based dispute that we can have a society many times wealthier than we currently have any time the politicians are willing to get out of the way (or are removed). That we can have unlimited electricity at about 7% of the current cost. Inexpensive housing far better than is currently built. Low taxes because we need not pay for the vast amount of state parasitism we do. Far cheaper products of all sorts from bridges and tunnels to beer by doing without that parasitism.. None of the "global warming" restrictions should cost us a penny because there is no damaging warming - it is a deliberate lie promoted by government and its various ecofascist hangers on. and propagandists.

   Nor can there be any fact based dispute that those in power know all of this. If they thought they were doing anything useful they would be able to give coherent reasons, or at the very last reasons which, through ignorance, they thought were coherent.

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”   Mark Twain

    No it is not run by imbeciles. If it were they would be willing to defend the alleged beliefs they use to steal from us. As anyone reading this for any length of time will have seen the alarmists/parasites/fascists etc simply refuse to defend their alleged opinions with anything other than insults and obscenities. They know the facts will never be stated in the media Nobody who honestly held such opinions would fear honest discussion.

    QED they don't.

  Power for most people in politics is a far stronger driver than wealth. I don't claim any personal sainthood - it is simply that my driver is to play a role in getting the human race to develop its full, literally godlike, potential in a universe in which we may be the only intelligent life. That, to me, is power on a level that Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Jefferson barely dreamed of - it just happens to mean I have to be committed to human wellbeing.

    Here is a comment I put on John Redwood's blog. John is clearly one of the most honest and furthest from imbecilic people in Parliament. He knows, on a fiscal basis, what is going wrong and knows CAGW is a fraud. However he is unwilling to go the last step and acknowledge the extent to which government technological Luddism impoverishes us all and could be ended. This is a comment I put in response to an article he wrote giving 5, largely, fiscal, things needed to get out of recession. John consistently puts a short answer to questions put at the end of such comments, usually correctly pointing out the error.

6 – Allow the building of as many new nuclear power plants as there is a market for, where appropriate cutting regulations or creating a legal method whereby regulations can be challenged for being more than 4 times more onerous, on a cost/benefit ratio, than those for other industries. It would take 3 years to complete the first reactor but the knowledge that electricity costs were going to drop by as much as 90% would greatly encourage investment immediately. There are other industries where government Luddism is preventing progress (eg shale gas and GM) but this is the most obvious.

7 – economist Arthur Laffer —Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Laffer argued that the best way to stimulate the economy is to have “no federal taxes at all.” http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/07/08/106670/laffer-taxes/

This is a variant on #3 but goes so much further that it is effectively new.

8 – X-Prizes. Put £10 billion annually into technology prizes, for example a commercial space shuttle, McCain's $300m battery prize & the $1m laboratory extension of life M=Prize. This would make Britain the world technology leader in just about everything. In a way it is a Keynesian stimulus but instead of burying money in bottles to let people dig them up it would produce activity which is inherently the most productive of any and is insufficiently rewarded because of inherent limitations of the patent system.
Does anybody doubt all of these would work?

He didn't answer to this and I have put up an ancillary

Then I take it that nobody does doubt they would work

If tried.

  We will see if there is a reply and if there is I will put it here. But the obvious fact is that he does indeed know that these and the other things I have proposed would get us not only far out of recession but into a growth rate considerably exceeding China's 10%. That we could, as individuals and as a society, end any worries about poverty of any sort.

   And knows that there is no way his party, which is the most progressive and growth orientated of all those in Parliament will go for it. Though they have promised a "relentless forensic" pursuit of growth they simply do not mean it in any way. Indeed that there is no way that it is politically allowable for even the most progressive MPs to speak on the matter.

  Following the Scotsman's  decision not to publish either letter I made in reply to Stephen Moreton's announcement that he is the sole scientist anywhere in the world who supports catastrophic warming I contacted him. This is a fisk of his response (my comments in bold)., headed by my repetition of the request on Friday
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Mr Moreton I note that you still have declined to answer my question regarding your publicly alleged not being ultimately paid by the government.
I note you have made no attempt to clarify your repeated claim that somebody paid by a government paid organisation is not ultimately being paid by the government. That claim is clearly false.

If you choose to continue to refuse to answer the obvious assumption is that you are indeed ultimately paid by the government despite your claims. This is not the first time someone claiming to be an alarmist scientist not paid by the state has been found to be less than truthful.
If you refuse to come clean journalistic standards must require the Scotsman to check your claim and if it is not factual to say so or allow me to produce a letter saying so.
Until this is proven either way the default assumption must be that not only is there not a single independent scientist anywhere in the world who believes in the catastrophic warming scam but that those promoting the scam have repeatedly shown that they are willing to tell any lie whatsoever to push it.

 original message

Dear Mr Craig,

.....You are not the only one whose letters don’t get published. My brilliant ripostes frequently fail to make it into print, or are edited (sometimes badly) if they do. The Scotsman is worse than the Courier, although the latter failed to print my reply to your last one there in which you scraped the Oregon Petition out of your barrel. After reading my reply (copied below) you will probably be thankful it was not printed, and you will never dare cite that worthless piece of rubbish again. Never mind, plenty of other deniers have been taken in by it so I’m sure I’ll get another chance to debunk it.

As for “catastrophic” warming much depends on what you call “catastrophic”. James Lovelock, of Gaia fame, is about as independent of anyone and anything it is possible to get, and he takes a particularly apocalyptic view of global warming. (So there’s another non-government scientist for you.)

Lovelock is interesting in that when I first asked this question he was the only person named by the environment correspondent of the Independent. When I asked on hundreds of other sites worldwide the only person to give a factual answer was somebody on a South African site who named Professor Lovelock. In fact, since seeing the climategate fraud he has reversed his opinion suggesting alarmism is not "sane" http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-think-that-sceptics-have-kept-us-sane.html It is understandable you do not know this since media coverage has not come close to matching the coverage of his previous opinion.

I would regard a redistribution of rainfall over large tracts of the planet’s surface, the resulting disruptions to agriculture, wildlife, the environment, the acidification of the oceans, and even one meter of sea-level rise (even if it takes centuries), and the inundation of densely populated coastal regions, as “catastrophic”. Wouldn’t you?

One such redistribution was what made the Sahara so fertile during the Climate Optimum that there are cave paintings in its centre depicting hippopotamus. If any such disruption did not reduce crop yields more than the 25% increased CO2 appears to have raised them then that is not a net loss.There are regional variations in the ocean already far greater than any change credibly proposed. In fact you should not speak of "acidification" of oceans but of neutralisation since they are currently marginally alkaline. Is there any evidence that a change of 0.o1 ph would be catastrophic? I think the Dutch have shown, with horse and cart technology, how a rise of 1 metre, or considerably more, need not be "catastrophic" even over centuries, don't you?

As for non-government-funded scientists, a number of things come to mind, namely:

I can’t understand why you have such a bee in your bonnet about this. Just what is your point? It seems like some sort of conspiracy theory, in which case my published letter exposes it as nonsense.

Scientists working in industry are not government-funded. They are paid by their employers, whether their employers get government subsidies, or not. And there are industrial scientists a plenty who accept the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) whether they are engaged in relevant research or not, and whether their employers receive government money, or not (most don’t).

Nearly all professional bodies accept the seriousness of AGW, but are not government funded. They get their income from members’ subscriptions. Like the Royal Society of Chemistry, of which I am a member. Whilst I have seen an occasional letter from a denier in their magazine, “Chemistry World”, most writers on the topic take the majority view, whether they hail from academia, industry, or retirement. If such societies were not representing their members when they made statements on AGW you can be sure their members would make their disagreement known.

Scientists are well known for speaking their minds, whether politicians want to hear them or not. So any idea that they toe the line on AGW to keep their paymasters sweet is just daft. Any scientist who could disprove AGW would be famous, in line for a Nobel prize, and rich from the lecture circuit and book royalties that followed. Any journal that published such a paradigm-changing paper would see its circulation and reputation soar. People who think scientists are just saying what politicians want to hear do not understand how science works.

“AGW is false” is what politicians would actually love to hear, the exact opposite of what the scientists are saying. After all, raising taxes, raising energy prices, and imposing further burdens on industry in these hard times is hardly a vote winner. Anyone who thinks politicians want to promote AGW is nuts. Yet that is what some deniers claim.

Occam’s razor – the simplest explanation is often the most likely. The simplest explanation for why most scientists are concerned that AGW is a threat is because that is what the evidence says.

1 - You should look at your compatriot's dismissal of research funded by the tobacco industry of research showing tobacco does not cause lung cancer. In this case your compatriots were largely right.


2 - If the funds come from government they are government funded. "He who pays the piper calls the tune" Incidentally the OECD found a net negative correlation between government funding of science and useful research.


3 - I don't know about yours but the Royal Society gets £45 million from government. They cannot be considered impartial on things their paymaster wants.


4 - An example of a scientist of considerable eminence who felt it impossible to speak her mind before retiring. http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/01/funding-used-to-suppress-warming.html


5 - They are promoting it. It does give them cover for raising taxes and regulating us. I know of no elected politician who has said that they intend to raise taxes without such an excuse.If you look at the funding (eg £450 million a year to NERC) it is impossible to conclude that politicians have not been pushing this. If you doubt that politicians are supporting this read the transcript here http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/9/27/guilty-men-and-guilty-women.html
Occam's Razor is precisely why any real scientist must require the alarmists to prove that complex catastrophic increases in global temperature, outwith historical experience are happening even though, currently, they aren't..

For a long time I kept out of the AGW debate, sticking to my usual hobby horse – bashing religion, especially creationism. But when I did finally start looking at both sides, spurred in part by the awful “Great Global Warming Swindle” film, I found the same pattern of misleading and phoney arguments employed by the deniers that I was used to seeing amongst creationists. Cherry-picking, nit-picking, misrepresenting, conspiracy theories, bogus “experts”, and so forth

Has there not been considerable cherry picking among alarmists. eg Joneses "hide the decline"

Just recently I have had to deal with the endlessly recurring bullshit claim that global warming stopped in 1998, a year with an exceptional el niño effect. In print and on the forum (where I post as “steve660”) I have tried to patiently explain how to handle graphical data, the importance of taking into account confounding factors, and why it is stupid to start at an outlying point like 1998. But it all falls on deaf ears/blind eyes.

Yet in 1998 no alarmist suggested that that year's warming was not part of the trend and indeed if Hansen's 0.4 C a decade had not been false it would have had to have been.

And there’s the feeble attempt to rebut the existence of a consensus by referring to an article by Lawrence Solomon in which he totally misses the point of the paper by Doran and Zimmerman he attacks. I have lost count of the number of times that one has popped up in the Scotsman forum. It seems to never die no matter how many times, or in how much detail, I, or others, explain where Solomon has gone wrong. And so on and on, for fallacy after fallacy. Truly it is like arguing with creationists (which I have been doing since my student days in Edinburgh 30 years ago).

And you are no exception. Roy Turnbull did a good job of showing up your misrepresentation of Greenland ice melting research,

We will disagree on that. I don't think he did and indeed there is no dispute that the Atlas' Greenland claims were wholly false.

and my unpublished letter to the Courier exposes the ridiculous Oregon petition. Now you refer to the Medieval warm period. More denier nonsense that has been debunked to death yet, like the heads of the hydra, no matter how often it gets decapitated, it keeps popping up again.

The Medieval warm period was warm in the North Atlantic region, but not elsewhere. It was not global. Globally, the earth is warmer now, than then. Another denier myth destroyed by beautiful facts. But such niceties are lost on the deniers in their quest to cherry-pick and misrepresent the data to fit their conspiracy theories.

That is not true. It is a claim based on the lack of written records from Australia etc for which there are other obvious reasons. There are records of it in China.

Maybe you could try checking your claims before sending them to the papers. It might save you the kind of drubbing Roy Turnbull gave you. A good place to start is skepticalscience.com, which has most of the common denier arguments listed, along with answers. Or you could watch some of the many entertaining videos on youtube by Potholer54, greenman3610, and others.

"Skeptical Science" has been reduced to censorship. It thus cannot be considered scientific. This has been discussed on Bishop Hill, a site I would thoroughly recommend to you if you want intelligent debate. http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/9/20/cooking-the-books.html

You say you, “genuinely do find it difficult to understand how an unbiased observer can conclude, if you do, that we are experiencing catastrophic warming”. Simple, I follow the evidence, and also what those more knowledgeable than I (i.e. climate scientists) say. I find it difficult to understand how any scientifically literate person can deny AGW, catastrophic or otherwise. But, as most deniers are not scientifically literate, I should not be too surprised about them.

Sincerely
Stephen Moreton

So what is the evidence that convinces you we see catastrophic warming?

Unpublished letter to the Courier, 14 September 2011

So Neil Craig has been unable to find “a single scientist who supports the catastrophic warming scare and is not paid by government” (14 September). Well now he has – me.

He may object that, as an industrial chemist, my work is not in climatology. But that is true of nearly all the “scientists” on the infamous Oregon Petition, which he enthusiastically cites.

I do not and never have made that objection. To understand that fraud is going on all that is necessary is to understand the scientific method and for that you only need to be a scientist (I would make an exception for self described scientists such as "astrology scientists","creation scientists", most "political scientists", "anthropology scientists" and many "economists").

To join this petition one merely has to claim to have a science degree, and fill in a form. One does not have to be a practicing scientist, let alone a climatologist. Or actually have a science degree. Irrelevant subjects like dentistry, surgery and engineering are included.

The boss of the IPCC is a railway engineer. Have you publicly disputed his qualification in the same way?

This, perhaps, explains why it contains pop and film celebrities, duplicate entries, spoof entries, dead people and commercial companies. Only a few hundred have any background relevant to climate science. And, when 30 of these were checked, only 11 said they still agreed with it.

As there are around 63 million scientists in the world, Mr Craig’s 0.05 % of mostly irrelevantly qualified ones is a joke. When the views of the top climate scientists are polled, the consensus exceeds 97 %.

No wonder this worthless petition is widely ignored. It deserves to be.

Now who is cherry picking. The "97%" was of a selected group of a selected group of a selected group of government funded "climate scientists".  If your objection to the Oregon petition, that it contains only a tiny proportion of scientists, is genuine you must acknowledge that it still vastly exceeds the numbers signed up on which the self styled "consensus" is built.

Particularly since you say that people paid by organisations paid by government do not count as paid by government I must ask for some supporting evidence that you are in no such way indirectly paid by the state. Great claims require great evidence (something alarmists should bear in mind) and if you are claiming to be the only scientist worldwide (apart from Greg Laden on "scienceblogs who is a liar) who is not paid by the state yet supports catastrophism then it is reasonable to ask for real evidence.

Neil Craig
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  The other alarmist scientist to claim to be the only scientist anywhere in the world to support CAGW is assistant anthropology teacher Greg Laden referred to on Friday. His response has not been to attempt to dispute the facts, nor to make any excuse but to say that he is permanently censoring me. Most of the "scienceblogs" sites have, unsurprisingly, made similar decisions.

     For every "scientist" within a particular subgroup to be a complete liar, is obviously incompatible with them having any respect whatsoever for the truth let alone any scientific principles.The ecofascists have sunk to new lows. There are no circumstances whatsoever under which anybody supporting CAGW claiming to be a scientist or indeed political leader, who is not a corrupt liar, can refuse to condemn such liars.

This is an absolute touchstone to their integrity. Scienceblogs have clearly failed it and I very much doubt if there are more than a handful of  CAGW supporters, "environmentalists" or main party politicians who will not prove to be equally personally lacking in any slightest trace of personal integrity.

But I am willing to publish a response from Mr Moreton if he feels he could usefully do so, or indeed from any alarmist who feels able to condemn dishonesty or indeed put a credible case for warming. We shall see.