On 'denial'

I gave this release from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition a quick once over yesterday before forwarding it to my son at school.

It has become commonplace knowledge, and is unchallenged, that global average temperature has not increased since 1998. This corresponds to a 9-year period during which the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast, did increase, and that by almost 5%.

The greenhouse hypothesis - which asserts that carbon dioxide increases of human origin will cause dangerous global warming - is clearly invalidated by these data.

As if that were not enough, a leading computer modelling team has recently published a paper in Nature which acknowledges what climate rationalists (the so-called “sceptics”) have always asserted. Which is that, contrary to IPCC assessments, any human influence on global temperature is so small that it cannot yet be differentiated from natural cycles of climate change. The same modellers have even predicted (after the start of the event, of course) that cooling will now occur for at least the next few years.

This morning I see that Chris Trotter has titled his Dominion Post column, The moral equivalent of war. Um. What could that be about I speculate.

"...the fight against global warming must become the moral equivalent of war. The threat we face is much greater than the threat posed to the world by Hitler....indeed the argument is strong for an all party coalition dedicated to bringing us through the crisis. Nor can there be the slightest suggestion that anything other than full equality of sacrifice constitutes the guiding principle of our climate change policies. And most importantly, we must learn to recognise the nay-sayers, the special pleaders, the not-in-my-backyarders, and the climate change deniers for the Quislings that they are and treat them accordingly."

By doing what exactly?

The only war going on here is between emotion and reason.

And I will borrow a quote from this week's Maxim newsletter,

"Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely."

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800 - 1859