The Stand- By demon

[Peter Parry]

It is the "Never mind the quality - feel the width" argument beloved of greenwashers. Sadly they believe a lie, repeated often enough, becomes the truth.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Surely it's the same argument? Persuasion never works so you tax instead.

But you have my sympathy. Resident's parking charges are the biggest con ever. In some ways they encourage driving to work from places like Richmond.

[Huge]

And even more sadly; they're right.

[Mary Fisher]

Most of the houses in this street have a drive. Most drivers leave their cars not only in the street but on the footpath.

Mary

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:25:34 +0100 someone who may be Frank Lee Speke-King wrote this:-

There is little more to add to the point I made. I have seen that question being posed and answered (in a variety of ways). You can undoubtedly use a search engine as well as I can should you wish to enquire further, but note that the discussion is not in the form of sound bites.

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

Oh, I take it you mean things like this:

"This extreme result is surprising because it lies far outside the

1.4°C to 4.5°C range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the same CO2-level increase - a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre-industrial times. But it is possible the IPCC range was wrong because its estimate is based on just a handful of different computer models.

"We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to be similar to other people's," says David Stainforth, from the University of Oxford, UK. "Nobody wants to have a model that's terribly different, particularly when there are only 8 or 10 in the world," he explains. "

Wow. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Fashion Models".

More from that page:

"Some iterations of the models showed the climate cooling after an injection of CO2, but these were discarded after close examination because the temperature fall resulted from an unrealistic physical mechanism, says Stainforth. In these scenarios, cold water welling up in the tropics could not be carried away by ocean currents because these were missing from the models."

So, the models that everyone tweaks to be the same as everyone else's models merely all happen to ignore a major phenomenon, perhaps because it doesn't give the fashionable answer.

And we are supposed to spend £billions based on this sort of claptrap?

[David Hansen]

On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:58:51 +0000 someone who may be Frank Lee Speke-King wrote this:-

That is one possibility, but there are others which are more likely.

Ditto.

Note in particular the long history of US oil and coal company funded "scientists" who claimed that global warming is just a great conspiracy and the "journalists" who gave these cranks equal time, claiming that this was for "balance".

[Mary Fisher]

What I can't understand is why so many people are so antagonistic to being 'green', why they argue about it so much and ALWAYS know better than anyone else.

You'd think that they might want to do something just in case they were wrong ...

Mary

>

[Peter Parry]

Why is it that the greenwashers, with organisations like Greenpeace who have a long history of proven outright dishonesty, always find it necessary to invent conspiracy theories rather than be objective?

[David Hansen]

On Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:33:51 +0000 someone who may be Peter Parry wrote this:-

Feel free to give some concrete examples.

As for the funding of these "scientists" by US oil and coal companies, the evidence of this is easy to look up.

[John Rumm]

Perhaps they are the ones who like to think through the subject, rather than swallowing everything they are told by those "who know"?

You might... however in a world where some of the "somethings" suggested will do more harm than good it pays to exercise caution. Fancy a dinky windmil on your roof?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Because they're usually like dribble and tell lies claimed to be statistics.

[Mary Fisher]

I do (on our garage rood, where it would do no harm - we're not daft), but we've been told by suppliers that because of surrounding buildings it would be ineffective.

I suppose you'll have some clever dick reply to that.

[John Rumm]

How much faith do you have that all suppliers are as scrupulous?

"The UK is an ideal location for wind energy. We get 40% of Europe?s total wind energy"

Hmm, plausable huh?

"but did you know that you can now save up to 30%* off your electricity bill"

Perhaps madam would like to buy a Prius?

"You can also take advantage of Government grants, covering up to 30% of the installed cost"

Remember the Individual Learning Account fiasco?

Clever I can't help, and Richard is a middle name.

[Peter Parry]

Certainly, many moons ago British Rail carried out a crash test of a nuclear waste container. The test was properly designed and properly carried out under the control of a skilled and respected engineer. After it was done Greenpeace mounted a huge and completely dishonest publicity campaign claiming the flask had had its retaining bolts loosened before the test run, that the impact had been calculated to minimise damage, that it was all fraud and that the supervising engineer was corrupt. They had no evidence to support any of these fatuous claims, quite simply - they lied.

Eventually they had to recant - which they did by announcing they had made "a slight error". They made this announcement as I recall in Glasgow on a Saturday night just in time for it to miss the Sunday papers. The engineer concerned never recovered from the attack on his life and reputation and died shortly afterwards.

More recently they lied about contaminants in Brent Spar, having carried out an "analysis" in a gloriously inept way and then misrepresented the results for weeks, long after they knew they had got it completely wrong. They have a unique combination of incompetence and dishonesty which has even led other greenwashers to distance themselves from their activities.

So scientists funded by FoE or Greenscreach are corrupt? Research sponsored by environmental groups is dishonest? Do not judge everyone by the dire standards of the greenwashers.

[Ian Stirling]

There is a seperate benefit. Decreasing reliance on foreign imports of energy (and the UK is going to be importing more and more over time) helps the UK economies balance of trade. Making it easier for us to sell goods overseas, to pay for other shiny things.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am all for policies that will ersult in genbuine energy reduction.

Sadly te government has not priduced any.,

They have amde a lot of noise about it, and done lots of things that make it look as though they care, but actually just cost me more money

Its precisely the same with rad safety. In the end its all just

'hey, a political issue: Right, we do two things:-

- tax it

- make out like we are doing something so we get re-elected

Now lets go to the bar and spend some more taxpayers mmoney, we CAN organise a piss up in the house of commons bar, as long as WE don't have to pay.'

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

Could you expand on this?

What do you mean by 'others'? Models? Assumptions? Warming mechanisms?

Ditto.

It was always thus; no surprises there.

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

Well yesterday's TV Spectacular about the Stern report made no menton of the mechanisms or models; it was merely about economics. Even Blair qualified it all with a phrase like "...if the science is correct..."

It's like spending between £5.6bn to £18b on ID cards that it is admitted will do very little to abate the very demons it is supposed to address. Or concreting over the South-East at enormous cost in order to provide "cheap labour" - the costs being borne by us, not the employers of said labour.

[Andy Hall]

Even that's marginal, from what I've seen.