One thing you can say is that it looks prettier than it used to, but then most of inland Cornwall is pretty rough.

I should have said CO2 not Carbon, too easy to use the terms interchangably and they are not, we had a discussion about that a couple of years ago.

Sunday was a 'quiet day' down here, but the place was still pretty full considering how wet it was, though it is somewhere you can go when it is wet. Shame about the choir in the Mediterranean dome, I could just about handle the pensioners dancing.

Edit:
Something I just remembered. In the 'Gents' and I assume the Ladies, they have a number of different hand dryers, each has a bit of a write up. I assume that someone is monitoring how often they are used, for how long and how much energy they use. Wonder who will come out on top.

Health warning - this isn't me fostertom talking, it's copied from elsewhere;

Here's a long piece copied from my other fave forum - petrolhead http://www.sfconline.org.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4891 . I respect the guy writing this, and wd appreciate comment on it here, if anyone can be bothered to read it:

"To start with I'll simply do a 'top ten' key issues - and skim over the topics....

We can all agree that "we" - the human race - know precious little about the "Earth Sciences".... we are near the beginning of learning - forming theories, then testing them with real world results. Its a methodology close to the social sciences, as, even if we wish to test a theory through scientific experiment, we can fail due to the scale of subject (planet, or major part of it) and because there is often no way to set up controlled conditions... any experiment is open to its environement(s) and often not exactly repeatable.
The second major approach to understanding needed will rely heavily on Sytems Theory. Our subjects in Earth Sciences are all complex, often very interconnected, open to multiple feedback and feedforward effects and have very vague boundaries - boundaries that could be as easily in the minds of the experimenters rather than in reality.
Pure scientists are often ill-equipped to operate in this sort of culture. Worse, they think they've understood and mastered so much of it because it all looks so familiar. It's not, appearances decieve. The sort of assumptions they've made all their working lives, become almost instinctive (like reductionism, isolation of factors, contancy assumptions - to cope with complexity) can be worse than useless. As a spin-off from this sort of experience, we can also see the geographic disciplines having to stretch their stats and maths to apply to a new order.
And these are the two justifications I offer on the science side as to why some of the howling errors have been made.... in the 'global warming/ climate change' debacles. For the rest of them, it never was about finding out first...... always about the politics and another way to get more funding. For to make political progress, they had to re-write, or I should say strike-through the normal innate scientific conservatism towards new theories.

Still - reduce it all to ten points..... that's what I set myself as a challenge.

Maybe a thought to begin with.... amongst the disgrace that is the UN sponsored IPCC there are still some geniune scientists doing genuine work to find more out about the planet.... and it should be to their research we turn..... some of the good apples left in the rotten barrel.

1) Good old plain-song...... call this one the Earth-song of millennia. If you want to try and understand some more of a very complex, and very ancient, system then step back, take long look at it down the ages.... what do you see?
We can now track global temperature and atmospheric gas content down the thousands of years. Earth time not people time. We see a rythmic change, cycling every 25 thousands years or so. In and out of ice ages, up and down goes the temperature then the atmospheric content of CO2.... along with most other things. Its 18 thousand years since we departed the last ice age - in another 5 or 7 thousand years our progeny will be glacier deep in the middle of another one.
But I can plot those temp. and gas content curves on a graph. And I can apply stats tests to the gradient of that line..... and ask the question, "By how much, and for how long does the line have to deviate before I can tell there's a new "player" or "factor" kicking the slope of the line away from its expected path?"
Please understand the significance of that question. Its a macro stats method of applying a test - sensitivity analysis of the gradient of that line to atmospheric man-made carbon dioxide. The answer comes back (if I take heavy hits of CO2) either an enormous hit of CO2 and forty years, a doubling of the present CO2 ppm and 80 years or the rate they were predicting in 2005 in 120 years.

You see the doom-monger problem immediatley..... this is a headline for our grand and great grand children.... or another way of looking at the stats tests.... anyone is likely to need atleast 40 years of data before they can tell if its a natural or a man-made change, unless its enormous. If your interested - go do the tests for yourself. The increase in atmospheric CO2 is very very far from enormous today.

2) "She just can't take anymore of this, Captain"..... well this is the slippery slope to catastrophe argument..... how much CO2 can the world take before complete destruction of the biosphere ensues? Just over 300 million years ago was the world's hottest hot house era. Lots of coal laid down in shallow oceans from ferns and fern trees. The atmosheric CO2 was..... 12 to 20 times the worst forecast for us in the future. It was hot. We still made it to here........ I've previously posted ref to the 25 year body of work on continental and global CO2 cycles.

3) Systems input - output analysis - also known as black and white box observations. To start to make predictions, we need to understand what drives the system, then ask "What are the observable influences that drive or cause changes of system stasis."...... the next step being to see how big and when their influence can be detected in the data.
Look for the biggest first, and ask "how are they dealt with in the current theories/ models?)
Top of this hit list - The Sun....... we know very little about its cycles, what drives them, what effect its changes have on the earth's atmosphere/ magnesphere... and resulting changes - temperature, upper atmosphere.
- Water..... mean surface sea temperature provides the best fit or predictor for global atmospheric temp.... but is this a surprise?
What may be more of a surprise is that atmospheric water vapour provides massively more greenhouse effect than atmospheric CO2. It dwarfs the greenhouse effect from CO2.
Neither of these factors (Sun changes and Water changes) has been included in the main geo based models up until three years ago. They don't fit well with the way the original meteorogical models were constructed.

4) Model Bias..... there's been a tendancy to "stick to the knitting"..... no we do not have one model of everything - as far as I know...... although from the number of forecasts and their confidence in the predictions, you'd believe otherwise

5) "Trust us, 10 thousand scientists can't be wrong".... this is one of the arguments espoused less than 2 years ago by the President of the Royal Society in his own hideously one sided television programme.... these are the same.... folks.... who once pronounced the world as flat.
There is a difference between good and bad science - and you can smell it. I hope you recognise it too. "Everybody knows that....." is not an appeal to greater understanding. Good science doesn't need it.

6) Resort to the bushy tailed and bright eyed.... when all else fails..... just this week on telly... subject: trailer for another climate conference.....
image: Polar Bear ..... voice over: extinction when the summer polar ice is gone..... approach: lament, lament the passing of the Polar Bear..... its an attempt to corner the sort of critique I'm voicing here into a "when did you stop beating your wife" moment.
Cheap propaganda...... [i]how long has genus Polar Bear existed? Atleast 300 thousand years. Oh right, in that time how many times has the summer polar ice cap melted away? On atleast 3 occasions - probably more like 5 or 6 if measured by polar bear life spans (goes for some years, comes back, then goes again).
So the polar bear is a proven survivor - how about giving it a little more help?

7) Predictions - Allow me one more technical - derived from the ones above - but a different point...... to make accurate predictions..... there are strict limits to present homo sapien maths and stats.... what we face when studying the planetary systems are three sorts of the worst systems problem possible
a) Its dominated by feedback/ controls that can both stabilise and unstabilise the system - it exists at a systemic or generic level as defined by these controls.
b) Its has more than a few possible resting states in terms of stable states,
c) Wheels within wheels - the relationships between sub-systems is complex and feedback interconnects many of them.
We have only just embarked on its understanding (no overall model). Very large amounts of data are needed to see patterns in feedback (for data read many years), which are at or beyond the limit of stochastic or mathematic technology (we don't do multi level dynamic change well at all).
Then why aren't the scientists using the phrase "We don't know" more often?

8) Bandwagons - Lordy, there are train loads of them..... mostly blaming the first world - wanting more funding, and claiming they are a special case when it comes to their own people, and their own wealth creation.
That's why it will fail - I hope - this style of tyrannical, ignorant, jack booted regulation fails, at the same time as all the self serving political stalinists get kicked back from whence they came. For at the centre of all this does lie a nugget of truth.... its our environment, our technologies, and we need to find new energies.

9) Damage part 1 - Yes, let's count the cost..... Every time someone sticks up another one of those wind turbines and calls it progress, can we just stop to count its cost for a minute. Its a technology before its time, meaning to get it going needed big govt. subsidies, it relies on the wind blowing (and at the right speed for the turbine blade)... when it doesn't we still need a stand-by powerstation that could have done the job a lot more cheaply and efficiently anyway... we still pay for it.... to get scale economies and size, the "wind farms" are off shore coz few want them near.... so they are already unreliable and now cost a lot more to maintain by location.
Despite the commodity fuel price rises, and the tilted subsidy they get when contributing to the national grid, they are about 2.4 times more expensive per unit produced... and the consumers have to pay for this. Every part of the economy is affected by this additional 'input' cost.
In 2008 the Govt. committed us to producing 20% of our power by green means by 2020 (EU agreement). We haven't a hope of meeting this... there is no other technology ready.
Then along comes the carbon tax...... and away goes all the UK smelting and refining capacity in steel and aluminium...... now the govt. are cutting a special deal..... most people are straining to meet the rises in energy costs born only of taxation, and the imperative on the energy producres to meet this lunatic 2020 target.
Then add in the fuel price escalator for transport (cars).... and more than 30% of the country are already in "fuel poverty" by the government definition. ITS LUNACY.
Its also how not to make best use of technology developments,
and the way to test them, for both environmental and fiscal/ economic impact is to use the same benefit/ cost measures as for anything else. Then the lunies don't get to set hurtful targets without atleast some transparency in their cost (when compared to other options). The cost of these measure in the UK is running into tens of billions. We can do a lot better.

10) Damage to science.... do you tell it according to what you've got, or tell it according to what your political budget holder wants to hear.... and then resign? Oh no, keep it dark, rather than transparent... and treat the public as though they don't need to, and shoudn't care less?
Where's the scientific rigour gone in all this?"

Hell, I thought I was a cynic

Hope everyone realises what I've now edited into the above: "Health warning - this isn't me fostertom talking, it's copied from elsewhere".

my own contribution was:

"AFAIC climate change is impossible to know anything certain about - but it's been a great consciousness-raiser. Because consciousnesses sure needed (still need) raising. CC is just one sample, a sub-set, of effects we're heading into, and fossil burning is just a sample, a sub-set of depleting finite resources that we're still treating as if limitless.

So I have little opinion on CC, am not focussed on 'carbon' as the be-all, but I'm involved, at work, in discovering the practicalities of
a) doing as much, or even more, of what we humans do, but with less and less depletion of finite resources (of which fossil carbon/hydrocarbon is only a small corner) - or even doing it with less-than-none of finite resources.
b) actively assisting the planet to clear up the mess we've made, in decades or centuries rather than centuries and millenia. Only the planet, more precisely its plants, can harness solar energy to reverse degraded chemical combinations, separate-out and re-concentrate their elements ready for re-use (re-cycling), even replace displaced materials where they were before being chucked all over the biosphere.

Building is a great field to be doing this, e.g. as Andy says "A far better solution is actually solar heating as even in the winter it will provide enough hot water to keep a typical household going" - for 'hot water' read 'space heating' - making that true, quite a challenge. Biomass sequestration, an example of less-than-zero nett environmental impact.

Building is included within Permaculture and Transition, which are talking much sense, extending even to early-Muslim-like robust governance forms that make so-called western democracy look primitive. All past revolutions have been captured by the usual power brokers, for want of attention to the governance angle."

I've no doubt increasing the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere would cause climate change. For me, it's just a question of how much CO2 would cause what rise in temperature. My main reasons for thinking this are:

1) The surface of Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite Venus being twice as far away from the sun and being covered in white clouds. The reason is the thick concentrations of CO2 in its atmosphere.

2) I once read a book on the Eocene period. It was a book about geology, not anthropological global warming. The main item of contention that the author concerned himself with was the correct transition date between the end of the Eocene and start of the next era. However, in his description of the start of the Eocene, he said the average temperature in Britain was about 25C, and that we were covered in tropical rainforest. I thought, well that's because we've moved north since then, but no, the northern continental land masses have stayed at the same latitude. Crocodiles were living within 100 miles of the north pole (iirc), which meant water temperatures never went below 10C. The appendix said that the balmy temperatures were most probably caused by the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which was estimated at 12x current levels.

3) Greenhouse gases keep the surface of the planet 30C warmer than it would have been, so why wouldn't adding more make it hotter? The only reason I could think of was if the CO2 that was already up there trapped all the IR light in frequencies they could intercept, similar to the way that a very thin layer of ozone effectively screens out almost all the harmful frequencies of UV light. However, as I understand it, CO2 emits IR radiation at a similar frequency to that it absorbs, which means that radiation can be re-absorbed by other GHGs. Ozone would emit radiation at a much lower frequency than it would absorb it, because UV light comes from the sun's surface, which is at about 6000C, while ozone would be at less than 0C when it re-emitted its energy, which would therefore be in the form of IR light. I asked a Church of England vicar who used to be a professor of Meteorology about this at an inter-faith discussion on climate change in Reading. I told him my hypothesis that ozone was like a screen while CO2 was like a blanket. He said GHGs were like a series of blankets. I guess that may be due to a series of temperature inversions through the four layers of the atmosphere: troposphere, stratosphere, mesophere and thermosphere. If you can't trust a Church of England vicar who used to be professor in meteorology, who can you trust?

4) I studied a module on climate change at the meteorology department at Reading Uni during my MSc, although I dropped it for something else. The notes said that without the feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 would result in a 0.9C rise in atmospheric temperature. With the feedbacks, temperatures would be expected to rise more, but the exact sensitivity of the climate to CO2 levels was very difficult to assess accurately. The main source of doubt was the overall effect of cloud cover. This all sounded very reasonable. A 0.9C rise without feedbacks does not exactly sound alarmist. It also sounds totally reasonable that feedback effects would either enhance or reduce warming.

5) I just don't believe meterologists and climate scientists are lying. I've heard their presentations and read some of their books. It's a really hard subject to understand. One of the books I am trying to read now is called Weather, Climate and Climate Change by Greg O'Hare, John Sweeney and Rob Wilby. It's a very difficult read, but they are very straight about what they think they know and what they're not sure about. In fact, they presented evidence that would seem to contradict AGW, such as the Medieval Warm Period. They were also pretty straight about the limitations of climate models. However, it is also quite obvious that their understanding of how the weather works is pretty good.

It's not a really hard subject to understand at all, Kev. It's friggin nigh impossible!

Playing for Change

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIzddbBW8n0&feature=related

Posted By: fostertomHealth warning - this isn't me fostertom talking, it's copied from elsewhere;

but what is your opinion of the piece and why did you post it here?

personally I think that although there are some bits that they've got right, taken as a whole it's a load of rubbish based on several false premises, but written in such a way as to make it sound like the author knows what they're talking about when they don't really.

Always seems strange to me that people that do not believe in the AGW disaster story often believe that scientists are actually lying (this thread seems to run through fostertoms cut&pasted links above). When faced with the thought of why...I.e. what could the motive be for scientists lying on such a grand scale?...the answer invariably is that they lie so that they get more funding.
Surely that's just not the way that things work? In fact, if scientists were coming up with reliable, demonstrable theories of how CO2 levels will NOT affect global temperature and could show that everything will actually be hunkydorey then it strikes me that truckloads of funding would be emptied on these scientists. Governments all over the world and more importantly maybe, the oil lobby, would be putting up massive resources to ensure that this 'positive science' got a fair hearing. This makes the fact that most scientific analysis has an undoubtedly 'gloomy outlook' even more depressing.

Utter twaddle.

Or similarly slanted publications?

Posted By: Gavin_A

Posted By: fostertomHealth warning - this isn't me fostertom talking, it's copied from elsewhere;

but what is your opinion of the piece and why did you post it here?

I posted it FWIW to provoke responses which might shed light, provide some answers (if any) (as you have - thanks) to the usual doubts - and perhaps help arm me to reply on http://www.sfconline.org.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4891 . My opinion is what I gave (above) immediately after the 'health warning'.

they get very little coverage in mainstream journals = publications

It's not as if there aren't huge vested interests, both economic and political, in not accepting AGW and undermining it as serious policy consideration. And it's not as if 100s of millions have been poured into lobby groups, think tanks, advertising and 'policy foundations' to do just that. And it's not as if being a 'skeptic' or vocal AGW denier isn't itself potentially lucrative. There's an eager audience, willing to pay to hear what they want to, even from clowns like Monckton et al.

Yet despite the considerable money and effort that has been exerted, and continues to be exerted, to undermine AGW, precious little is focused on refuting it scientifically. Why? Because the scientific evidence supporting AGW is broad, deep and compelling, consisting of multiple lines of research and evidence in thousands of papers across hundreds of fields. Given the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supporting AGW it would seem the 'skeptics' have largely given trying to refute it scientifically, resorting instead to conspiracy theories.

Most self-declared 'skeptics' I come across, credulously accept any twaddle that comes along purporting to be the 'final nail in the coffin of the AGW scam'.

They're not skeptical at all, they're gullible.