Reply to the comments on "Reasons for grave concern listed"

Hi all,
Sorry all for reacting so late. Our internet access has been extremely wobbly since Sunday morning.
This comment is bigger than my average post so far, so it seemed a good idea to make it a post in its own right.

Anne-Marie
I wish I knew a way to achieve the things you mention in your comment. I agree 100% with you.

Erik-Jan
Below a set of links that will work for you. I tried to get the films to play with Internet Explorer, but one has to wait until the whole (part of the) film is in.
Better alternative: get yourself the Firefox browser and you'll wonder why you've ever put up with that quirky IE.
Dale,
I forgot 1984 but had I thought of it I wouldn't have mentioned it as a passing fashion. Big Brother is my personal main concern (here I agree with angela@desmogblog), followed on its heels by nuclear disasters (see http://www.elenafilatova.com who lives relatively close to Chernobyl). These are the only two things that could send me shivering into the bilges, not muslim terrorism, not bird flu, and not climate change, caused by human behaviour or not.
I missed you too, Dale... Sorry, this was not 3 weeks, more like 6.

NB Elena Filatova states that the UN now downplays the risks of nuclear energy (and the number of Chernobyl casualties to a few dozen instead of several thousands).
This seems to hang together with the UN opinion on fossil fuels.

Dan L
Thank you for your message of support, and the mail with the interesting link
My message to you without becoming too specific (I'll loosely quote your great leader Thomas Jefferson): If you sacrifice your liberty for security, you'll end up losing both. As you've seen above, I agree with Angela on that subject. I sincerely hope that's the bigger fish you mean.

Quoting Desmogblog, my comments in brackets:
..."serves as a great example of the fantasy world [bad] the FOS promotes"
..."notorious climate change skeptic [bad] Sallie Baliunas"
..."Hansen et al. that were published in the highly regarded [good] Proceedings of the National Academy of Science"
..."controversial [bad] paper by New Zealand academic Chris de Freitas, published in the Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology at a time when his brother, Talisman Energy geologist Tim de Freitas, was the editor [very bad]"
..."only nine appear in a peer-reviewed journals. And numerous of these [how many out of nine is numerous?] do not support the FOS contention that climate change remains unproven."
..."pieces by the Hockey-stick obsessed [bad] Ross McKitrick, appearing in the right-wing [very very very bad I suppose?] Fraser Institute Forum newsletter"

Maybe I am allowed to paraphrase a quote on Desmogblog :
When you can't stand people agreeing with your opponents in a fight on principle, the next best thing is producing facts about them that you know people won't like. That's what Desmogblog is doing.
Angela, your comment shows the same tendency of discrediting the messenger instead of refuting the message: "the "Friends of Science" are now a discredited [bad](and re-organized and re-named) source, noted for their public relations slant." [bad]

Do you really think the average scientist now gets funding for research that aims to refute the current wave of believers' reports? That's the meaning of my remark about the financial side.

I have very little time for your level of debate, that now introduces 'extreme' climate change.

I prefer people who present their case without attacking messengers. And that is why - again - I recommend viewing the 5 film parts that are brought to us in a calm and - dare I say? - more academically dignified way.
BTW the makers of that film believe in global warming like you and I, and in global cooling too, for that matter. We just seem to disagree about the causes.

Below the 5 parts of the movie Climate Catastrphe Cancelled.

Quicktime
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Windows Media
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

They're all parts of one movie.

Reasons for grave concern listed

Just recently I tried to list the reasons for grave concern that I had seen in my lifetime - and which I now look upon as just as many fashionable doom scenarios. That list was all but exhaustive.

How about this?

The post-war years of bad weather: nuclear tests.
Already mentioned: 1972 the limits of growth. The worst of which was expected was to emerge in... 2000, thank you very much.
70s and 80s panic, we're heading for a new ice age. Forgotten.
Followed by acid rain and forests dying. Forests look better than ever.
The hole in the ozone layer. Still there at the end of every summer, like it may have always been, before we started measuring.

And now that terrible CO2. Studies have shown that in the atmospere there is 0,04 volume percent of CO2. It is argued that a fraction of this fraction has to do with human activity.

Go see the fascinating films about climate change at the Friends Of Science site, and see if we need to be concerned about climate change.