Stewart is from the UK and I think his daughters were in the Uk, therefore seatbelt was compulsory.

They do ‘defend’ it. There is a long discussion in AR4 WGI Ch. 6 about criticisms of the methodology, citing Mcintyre Mckitrick, but ignoring Wegman.

‘Effectively you are saying that all laws are immoral and should be scrapped!’

No we’re not, and that’s just silly.

We were arguing that your conceptions of ‘civilisation’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ were ill-conceived.

“It seems to me that that is what is bothering most of the people who are outraged by the BBC programme – they realise that a very large majority of people, if they are convinced that our present way of life is damaging the future prospects for the planet, and that there are ways of avoiding some of this danger by accepting general non-voluntary restrictions upon the behaviour of the population, would gladly accept those restrictions.”

On the contrary, our argument is that the environmental movement has totally failed to resonate with the public, as with the political establishment generally. The use of science, therefore, represents less an argument to convince the public, and more an attempt to legitimise a form of politics which is estranged from human values.

“…the argument isn’t really about AGW, or about the accuracy of one TV programme … but is essentially about a right-wing liberal (in the UK sense of the word) political position versus a more left wing, social-democrat position.”

It’s about absolutely neither. Environmental ethics, values, politics, are neither left nor right wing. Environmental politics are about the suspension of conventional politics.

Any third-year science student will tell you that it flies in the face of physics and scientific logic that you CANNOT use datasets from different sources in the same curve on the same axis of a graph!

To put it simply, if you half-fill a glass with beer then top it up with lemonade, you end up with a shandy. In other words, what you start with is not what you finish up with.

What is the ’scientific consensus’? As we point out in this post, Stewart doesn’t correctly identify it. Or, at least, if he does correctly identify it, then it is a consensus which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As we point out in other posts, many (if not all) political arguments for action on climate change seem to be out of kilter with the ‘consensus’ – take, for example, our many posts on Caroline Lucas, who invents the ‘consensus’ on the fly. Even those who comprise the scientific consensus don’t seem to agree about its meaning. Of course, there are the IPCC, and the statements of the world’s science academies. But the IPCC doesn’t measure the consensus at all, and the academies took no poll. So what is the point of agreement, and how was its magnitude measured against any opposition? For such a powerful consensus that is supposed to be the unchallengeable basis for the total, world wide reorganisation of society, and the regulation of lifestyles, it seems spectacularly inadequately defined.

See the video of Prof. Mike Hulme for a resounding challenge to political arguments for action on climate change, based on the idea that the consensus is that global warming will cause catastrophe.

A proposition can be wrong by itself – and Stewart’s proposition is wrong by itself. We’re not offering a ‘counter-claim’ about the science, because our position is that even the concrete, incontrovertible, unassailable fact of human influence on global warming and climate change does not, by itself, make a case for action.

- A population which is deprived of material liberty necessarily lacks the means to organise itself against its government/opressor -

In effect you seem to be saying that any restriction on civil liberty means that the population is “deprived of material liberty”.

Effectively you are saying that all laws are immoral and should be scrapped! That also seems to be the point that JMW is making. If that is what you are aruing you should make it clear that you are anti- all existing legal restrictions, because very few people agree with you on that point. It seems to me that that is what is bothering most of the people who are outraged by the BBC programme – they realise that a very large majority of people, if they are convinced that our present way of life is damaging the future prospects for the planet, and that there are ways of avoiding some of this danger by accepting general non-voluntary restrictions upon the behaviour of the population, would gladly accept those restrictions. So, as you agreed yourselves, the argument isn’t really about AGW, or about the accuracy of one TV programme (how many do you see which are totally above criticism and debate?) but is essentially about a right-wing liberal (in the UK sense of the word) political position versus a more left wing, social-democrat position. As long as we can agree on that then the debate is a fair and open one.

I’d like to come back and address a few points though, if I may!

Firstly,
Editors, you haven’t been trying to disprove AGW, however you do refuse to accept a scientific consensus (which you didn’t really reject in your first reply). If your nuanced position is to claim institutional bias against all free-thinking people in the world, surely such a position rests on using a scientific argument in this case to bolster a political opinion? Politicising a scientific argument as Ian Stewart has done is certainly dangerous, but aren’t you guilty of the same thing in the main article? In terms of the content of this article, describing the scientific argument in the documentary as being unfairly one-sided as you have done would imply that there is a body of scientific opinion as weighty and well-formed (and peer-reviewed) that contradicts the AGW hypothesis. Your position, then, instead of relying on a rational counter-claim, actually is politicising slight differences of opinion and lingering uncertainty on the magnitude of AGW, as shown in your highlighting of IPCC quotes.
Why would you do this, other than simply to cast doubt on the political motives of the scientific argument? If this is not a clear scientific refutation (i.e. rejecting a hypothesis based on contradictory evidence) – then are you not just as guilty of making politics out of science as Ian Stewart is?
It seems to me that you like the idea of a rational, libertarian society, so why be selective on which parts of the scientific approach you like, then turn your back on parts that don’t agree with your personal ideology?

Secondly, PaulM, to some extent I agree with you on the hockey-stick curve, more a political tool than an effective scientific one. However far Mann et al. may have overstepped the mark with promoting this curve, doesn’t necessarily make it completely irrelevant.
I’d say the main problem is that it’s hard to quantify how relevant (statistically) the curve is, indeed many of the environmental proxies are of dubious statistical certainty, and MacIntyre is certainly correct to point these things out.

But to really discredit the hockey-stick curve, one would need to show that the proxies selected were entirely unrelated to the processes they claim to be sensitive to, which is probably more difficult to prove. Which is why, as Editors have pointed out, the IPCC 2007 report doesn’t rely on it as a centre-piece of the argument, but doesn’t feel the need to defend it either.

All the best,
JM

Yes! Because if we didn’t people would drive five-miles-per-gallon SUVs to Wal-Mart to buy made-in-China goods before heading to the polls to vote Republican and then heading home to watch the results on Fox News!

And that’d be tragic!

“Do you need a law to ensure that you don’t behave recklessly? Is it the threat of punishment that makes you behave in a civilised manner? What kind of ‘civilisation’ is that?”

One that takes a very dim view of humanity; that thinks it’s better to criminalise Everything We Don’t Like because it saves them the trouble of reasoning with other people about The Best Way Forward For Society.

Thankfully not everyone thinks like that.