Men's Memes: Climate change is more about belief than science

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Climate change is more about belief than science

Peter Cochrane (ex head of research at British Telecom): Over the past decade I have watched 'global warming' mutate into a belief system bigger than Christianity and Islam combined. Considered debate appears to have stopped a long time ago and only dogma and belief seem to remain.

"my complaint of the climatologists modelling of the planet rests at several levels.

Their models appear to be partial, incomplete if you will, and do not accurately reflect the actual planet-wide system. This is not good news given that weather and sea systems are not only non-linear, they are chaotic too. Any minor omissions from a non-linear model are likely to have a very big impact - e.g. the 'butterfly wings' effect. But the models have very big omissions - and so we might expect some big errors!
As far as I can see there has been no effective raw material or model sharing or corroboration at the base level of model design, construction and testing. In fact, this has been resisted and there has not been a process of mutually 'looking under the hood'. As far as I am aware, and I could be wrong, nothing meaningful has been published in this regard.
Most communication between the various teams and groups has been focused on achieving corroboration and agreement in the conclusions. This is a dangerous ethos that can often lead to a collective myopia that produces the results you wanted in the first place.
The long-term source data comes from ice cores, tree rings and sedimentary layers - all of which are notoriously difficult to interpret. Add to this a very short period (250 years or so) of instrumented, and more accurate data, plus the lack of comprehensive global coverage, and it is clear that the opportunity for error is very high!
Modelling to date assumes some linear, or linear-ish, relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases. So, reduce the gases and the temperature will also reduce is an obvious conclusion. However, the reality is that the system is non-linear and it could well be bi-stable. That is, it could have flipped into a new state, or at least exhibit hysteresis. In which case greenhouse gas production could continue no matter what - after all the planet generates far more greenhouse gas than we do, and warming runaway could be real."

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."