You only need to look at fuel consumption in cars in the US to see what happens when the government doesn’t get involved.

I’m not going to reply to everything – it’s 3 in the morning. But I did want to pick up on this:

What happened? Well, GM went bankrupt, that’s what happened. The price of gasoline meant they couldn’t get away with shitty, inefficient cars that burned fuel for the sheer perverse hell of it.

As for the rest, I don’t believe that global warming is a 100% certainty, nor do I believe anyone can accurately quantify what any effect might be. Is there enough evidence to justify switching to a command economy as the only means of saving all life on earth? Because, really, that’s what we’re talking about here. Different motivation but same end result. Environmental impact might be something the market cannot correct for, but that doesn’t meant to say politicians have suddenly acquired the capacity and ability to run a command economy no matter how urgently they feel they must.

Is Environmentalism is incompatible with laissez-faire Capitalism? Yes.

Markets can be regulated towards a specific societal goal. And they need to be in order to be compatible with Environmentalism.

Charlotte, you might want to look up “externalities”, as the environment is one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

“Of course, just saying, it’s very true that free markets have tended to make things more efficient over time. Pollution is waste, after all. Think how much cleaner modern cars are compared with older cars, how much cleaner modern electric trains are compared with the hideous diesels we use in this country and the coal powered trains that came before.”

Yes and those industries have never had any input from the government whatsoever.

You only need to look at fuel consumption in cars in the US to see what happens when the government doesn’t get involved.

And the idea that “free markets have tended to make things more efficient over time” is not that great an insight. Free markets or not, things weren’t going to get worse were they? Pretty much the only way is up.

“Suppose for a moment that AGW is wrong. Thousands of scientists and billions of dollars of funding and, most importantly, enormous amounts of credibility, depend on it being true. If it were shown to be false, the reputations of all those scientists who have declared it incontrovertibly true will be dashed beyond salvation. They have an enormous incentive now to keep the theory going whatever the science may actually say. Anyone who has staked their reputation on being right- even in quite trivial everyday matters- knows this. It’s human nature.”

And just one scientist, just a single one, who came out and showed climate change to be a massive fraud, is all that is needed to end it. They would be world famous, maybe inline with Einstein, if they did so. Why wouldn’t they?

Do you also believe the moon landings were faked?

“Now in theory, that cannot stand against “evidence”. The problem is, the scientific method is supposed to be sceptical- that is, nothing is proven. Instad, we have scientists claiming certainty, and saying nobody can disprove them. But this is a classic fallacy. We cannot prove that crop circles are not made by aliens either. This simply isn’t science that can be knocked down with a disproof, since any contradiction is simply incorporated into the theory. If it gets hotter, it’s AGW. If it gets colder, it’s AGW. The signal being sought is smaller than the noise. It looks very strongly like pathological science on a massive scale.”

Yes science is skeptical. Yes science can’t prove anything. But no-one truly thinks that AGW has been “proved”. Scientists do say something like “AGW is happening”, but that is just short hand for “AGW is happening at the 95% (at least) confidence level”, in the same way that saying “We evolved” is short hand for “It’s extremely likely that we evolved”. This is how the English language works. If you want all the error bars, then go read the papers, but even that won’t be the whole story, because what if, instead of humans causing climate change, it’s actually caused by the invisible pink unicorn?

You can’t prove any statement about the empirical world, so when someone asks you how your day was, do you reply “Work was rubbish, at least I’m 99.9999% certain it was” and other such clarifications, or do you speak like a normal human being?

“As I said, it makes no falsifiable predictions at all. In Popperian terms, it isn’t science. In more practical terms, it’s impossible to disprove something which makes no specific claim other than a vague prediction.”

AGW makes no falsifiable predictions? How is “the global surface temperature will probably rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the twenty-first century” not a falsifiable prediction? If the temperature doesn’t rise then it’s falsified.

If it is falsified, then obviously future predictions need to be altered. Maybe it warmed more? Revise upward. Maybe it warmed less? Revise downward, and clearly AGW is less drastic than once thought. Maybe it didn’t warm at all. Complete revision required. That’s how science works.

“That in itself is something worth noting. AGW isn’t a theory. It is a prediction, based on science. Natural Selection is a theory, the Big Bang is a theory. AGW is simply a prediction. That is to say, it is like using evolutionary reasoning to predict that in a few million years, polar bears will be aquatic. It may be true, or it may not be true. It’s not in the same league as a theory.”

AGW is a theory. And it’s a theory that produces several predictions, all of which are testable and falsifiable. Evolution is a theory. But it also makes predictions e.g. if you separate a population of a species into two habitats, then after a suitable length of time (I’m no biologist so I don’t know how long) mating between two organisms, one from each group, will not produce fertile offspring. That’s a prediction. There are many more, and more detailed and precise ones than that, but none have been falsified for evolution so far.

You also make the mistake of assuming that AGW is some event that scientists say will happen in future. No, it’s happening now as well, as has been for about 100 years.

“Greenism is now mainstream- all the parties subscribe to it, as does the UN, EU etc, and it is endemic in the academic community.”

Maybe there’s a reason for that? Like, I don’t know, that the science is correct? You say you argue that you use science against creationists, but why don’t you believe in AGW? To you oppose all science that has policy implications? So none of economics is right? And we shouldn’t listen to doctors or physiologists studying different diseases, because since their work has policy implications, it must be biased and wrong and leftist.

If you’re not a climate scientist, you don’t get to accuse climate scientists of being biased and committing mass fraud like a conspiratorial nut. Otherwise why should creationists believe in evolution?

With APD, if you look at it, the people flying are overwhelming AB in social class, i.e. the same people are flying as 10 years ago, but they are flying 6x a year, rather than 2x a year. This idea that the poor are flying more isn’t true. We have options, whether it’s an overnight ferry to Holland or trains to Brussels and Paris. We can invest further in those options. We can look at air travel as a once a year thing. The idea that we have the inalienable right to fly 4x a year to stag nights in Estonia is interesting, but not quite true. We just have to get in the rhythm of taking two weeks of holidays, and if we want to spend it in Brasov, we allot 10 days, and 1 1/2 days by train out, and 1 1/2 days back.

It’s a frame, one that it sets up objective reality as being that man-made climate change leading to extinction of human race as inarguable fact and that you have ‘people’, and ‘people that deny it’. Linguistically it says, “this person is in denial”

The corollary would be to refer to people on the opposite side as ‘climate believers’ which, again, linguistically stresses the faith element. There’s people, and ‘people who believe in climate change’ which obviously sounds very different.

It’s cheap labelling for the purpose of framing opponents and I think, Joe, it’s actually beneath you.

Why is ‘climate denialist’ insulting? What would be an accurate term for you from my point of view?

What has become mainstream is not “Greenism”, deep or shallow, but a genuine concern for the environment, and that is a good thing. Mostly it is expressed in largely irrelevant or tokenistic ways – recycling, carrier bags, etc – and that is a bit pointless. But there are some moves to low carbon energy, which are to be welcomed. If our leaders were as earnest on the issue as the hype suggests, there would be much bigger moves thant there are. France was able to switch to mostly nuclear electricity years ago, which shows what is possible.

More statisticians, yes, by all means. But the soundness of the statistics is only one link in the chain. Independent replication of results is still the gold standard.