From The Spectator, an excellent article on the climate change phenomenon by Mark Imisides.

In a previous article, I discussed how climate science has grown from an obscure theory in the late 80s to a worldwide colossus that will soon overtake the oil and gas industry in terms of its size. How is it that despite the scientific case for a climate apocalypse comprehensively collapsing some 20 years ago, we have seen a 16-year-old girl (at the time) being invited to address the United Nations, weeping children marching in our streets, and a federal election outcome in which this issue dominated the political landscape?
Where did we go wrong? And by ‘we’ I’m referring to those of us termed sceptics – people who understand the science, and the house of cards that comprises the notion of Anthropogenic Climate Change.
Mainly, we have fallen into the trap of thinking that just because the evidence is on our side, people will come around to our way of thinking. Or to put it another way, we naively assume that everyone is as interested in evidence as we are.
They are not. The Climate Change industry is a massive global entity with unimaginably large financial and political interests. There is too much at stake for those involved to sully themselves with things like evidence…
The time is ripe for a major political party to take up the cudgels and go to the next election on the ‘cost of living’ platform by tossing every initiative or program with ‘eco’, ‘green’, and particularly ‘renewable’ in the bin. Peter Dutton, I’m looking at you.
How do we do it?
Put simply, we must learn the art of the polemic. The art of rhetoric. We must recognise that there’s no point in having evidence on our side if we don’t know how to use it.
We begin with this proposition. There is no case for reducing our carbon footprint unless all four of these statements are true:
The world is warming.
We are causing it.
It’s a bad thing.
We can do something about it.
No rational person can have any problem with this, and if they do, we need to find out why.
Here’s where we have to decide which of these points we want to contest. Remember, you only have to falsify one of them for the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.
Most sceptics, in my view, pick the wrong fight. They do this by attempting to prosecute the case based on one of the first two points. This is a mistake.
Here’s why.
Arguments about whether the world is warming revolve around competing graphs: ‘My graph shows it’s warming. If your graph shows it isn’t, then it’s wrong – no it isn’t – yes it is – no it isn’t…’
This argument also looks at Urban Heat Island Effects, and examines manipulation of data by government agencies.
This is a poor approach to take because:
You’re never going to prove your graph is right.
You can be very easily and quickly discredited as a conspiracy theorist (Brian Cox did this to Malcolm Roberts on Q&A a few years ago). People just do not believe that government agencies would manipulate data.
We should not fear a warming world. Records began at the end of the last ice age, so it’s only natural that the world is warming. And the current temperatures are well within historical averages.
As for arguments about whether we are causing the warming, this is even more problematic. The various contributions to global temperatures are extremely complex, involving a deep understanding of atmospheric physics and thermodynamics.
With a PhD in Chemistry, this is much closer to my area of expertise than Joe Public, but I am very quickly out of my depth. I recognise most of the terms and concepts involved, but know just enough to know how little I know.
Sadly, many people on both sides of the debate don’t understand how little they know, nor how complex the subject of atmospheric physics is, and it is nothing short of comical seeing two people debating about a subject of which both of them are blissfully ignorant.
This approach is taken simply because it is so tempting. We can point to the Vladivostok ice cores that prove that CO2 follows temperature changes. We can ask why the cooling period from 1940-75 coincided with the greatest increase in CO2 production the world has ever seen. It’s very tempting. But, I’m sorry to say, it is simply a futile approach.
The bottom line is this – they simply don’t change anyone’s minds – ever. Having seen these arguments used for years, and having used them myself, I cannot point to a single person that has said, ‘Oh yes! I see it now…’ The whole point of arguing, or debating, is to change someone’s mind (including, at times, your own). If that isn’t happening, then it’s futile to continue with the same approach.
I think the reason both these approaches fail that most people do not believe that all these experts, and the government, can be wrong. You say the world isn’t warming? Oh, I’m sure you have the wrong graph. You say that CO2 is not responsible? Oh, I’m sure the government scientists know more than you do.
This then brings us to the third point. Why is a warmer world a bad thing?
This is even more tempting than the first two points, as it’s so easy to prove that a warming world, so far from being a crisis, is actually a good thing. The reason for this is that, unlike with the first two points, they don’t have to look at a complex scientific argument. They just have to look at the weather. Are cyclones and hurricanes increasing? Are droughts increasing? Are flooding events increasing?

Eemian Period 125K years ago. temperatures a tiny bit higher than now and sea levels 20 metres higher than now.

Is AGW bad? Do you live under 20m above sea level?

Yes. We are warming at the rate of 2°C per century and the rate is picking up.

There are 50,000 years left of this interglacial.

Deforestation? Who knows. Be enough CO2 to continue the warming.

We also may not have to warm the whole extra 8°C either—Antarctica losing over 100Gtons ice a year will see bigger losses as the warming continues. How much longer do the Thwaites and Pine Is glaciers have?

Oh yes, “no danger from the warming”—if only!

But I see you want to merge Cats and Critters and environment. Wanting to spread your board bans?

Re merging the two boards—I see Bobby is totally lost. Dubyne is proven wrong—no GSM now. Not that a mini ice age would inevitably follow a GSM.

The only posts Bobby makes—off topic crap that belongs either in my MRB or the Finance and Economics MRB. Like I said—he is lost.

Put Bobby in Fringe (and bring along all his ice age/warming/cooling crap) and he can post about any old rubbish he thinks of! He would be happier—his hero Blight might even return!!!

There is nobody else left here with any idea of the environment or ecology. Hence i suggest merging the Environment (minus ice age nonsense) and Critters and Gardens with me as Mod. You get tedious because of your desperate need to pretend change is not happening you might cop a ban from the merged board.

You got booted from my MRB because you were trying to argue aspects of climate science we had already argued at least once. Even in “Intro to AGW” which was just to set the scene.

Face it, change terrifies you.

But it is changing ever more rapidly and that scares you.