Your point on Israel draws a rather long bow, but I suppose one should never say never.

thank you very much indeed for that masterly and stylish rejoinder to Kaplan, especially the stringent logic of the last para.

It may also be cf. Clive Hamilton, that fear drives at least the following if not the leading “denialists.” Attacking the bearers of bad tidings has a long history, after all.

Another term for them, should the Kaplanesque (compare: Chaplinesque) keep on moaning, is “contrarian”, as used by James Hansen. He cross -references denialist to contrarian in the index of his recent “Storms…”

It occurs to me that given the apparent importance to the USA of the USS Israel anchored 24/7 in the Med. to ride herd on recalcitrant Arabs supplying fossil fuel, it will shortly occur to the likes of Kaplan to smear scientists in general as “anti-semitic” for devaluing (sic) the term “denier.”

This smear may play well in the Anglosphere media incl. Murdoch’s, so a fallback term would be Hansen’s “contrarian”.

You appear to be a reasonable person. Please do not use “denier” as a synonym for skeptic. It is distasteful, in its equating holocaust denial to climate change denial.

This what is known as concern trolling. You don’t believe what you are saying but are attempting to reiterate two familiar specious claims —

1. that the term denier can only refer to holocaust deniers; and related that we allude to such things. It’s actually far more common for us to compare your lot with the kinds of people who deny science more generally, asserting the Young Earth aka the creationist paradigm, opposition to the theory of natural selection etc …

The term is apt because you want not merely your own opinion about what should be done, but the right to deny observable reality.

2. That your true category name is “skeptic”. This is also specious. Skeptics are those who can demonstrate that they have grasped the corpus of knowledge of which they are skeptical well enough to offer a systematic account of its flaws with accompanying data to support the account.

By that standard, there are no true skeptics of the mainstream science on climate change amongst the denier groups. Putting on a surgeon’s outfit or a wimple doesn’t make one respectively a doctor or a nun, and simply repeating truisms about skepticism in science gravely insults the memory of those entitled to claim the title.

It is an interesting fact that if onje goes though each of the reports of the IPCC since 1990, their errors have overwhelming been to understate the speed and force of the climate anomaly we have been witnessing these last 130 years. That the people calling themselves “skeptics” include nobody asserting that the IPCC has been optimistic and overly cautious, and that each of these “skeptics” treats their cultural fellow travellers with credulity, regardless of the demonstrable nonsense they utter, shows dramatically that the “skeptic” campaign has nothing whatever to do with a search for clarity in science and precision in related public policy but is rather an instantiation of a cyncical and opportunistic battle to subvert good policy so as to serve the interests of fossil fuel asset holders.

Please don’t insult us here with your trolling discourse. We are all too aware of your misanthropic shenanigans.

The extent of human impact:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/comment-page-23/#comment-164509

I view myself as a layperson,familiar with computer modeling but no background in higher level physics. I guess objectively I am a lukewarmer,ie. man has an impact but unknown to what extent. If “warmists” wish to lose the argument for the middle ground, continue this usage.

HOWEVER this is only relevant because NPP are held to a much higher standard for radioisotope releases than coal power plants. Right now antinuclear forces are demanding the shut-down of Vermont Yankee, an NPP in the North-Western US for violating its license, over a tritium spill equivalent to the radioactivity found in one of those self-luminous key-chain fobs. Meanwhile coal plants vomit several hundred orders of magnitude more radioactive material into the environment, protected by grandfather clauses in the relevant regulations.

Nor is coal the only one. In 2008 radioactive discharges from the non-nuclear industries were estimated to contribute more than 90% of the European population’s total exposure. Oil and gas operations contributed 35% and phosphates, 55%.

As far as the health risks from ether of these goes, it is minimal simply because the absorbed dosages are far below known levels of harm. The belief that they might be is based upon a laughable error. If one person eats 200 aspirin, he will die. These people figure that if 200 people eat one aspirin each, there will be one death. If two million people are exposed to a dose rate of one aspirin per person, there will be 20,000 deaths. In fact one aspirin is beneficial, and low levels of radiation are beneficial. Geographical areas with higher background radiation have lower levels of cancer.

Legislatively however, the current accepted standard is the linear no-threshold model (LNT), which states that the damage caused by ionizing radiation presupposes that the response is linear (i.e. directly proportional to the dose) at all dose levels. Thus LNT asserts that there is no threshold of exposure below which there is no adverse impact. In practice this means that if a particular dose of radiation is found to produce one extra case of cancer in every thousand people exposed, the LNT predicts that one thousandth of this dose will produce one extra case in every million people so exposed, and that one millionth of this dose will produce one extra case in every billion people exposed, and so on with no safe limit except zero. Thus it is claimed that radiation’s carcinogenic effects should be considered to be proportional to the dose an individual receives, regardless of how small that dose is.

The evidence against the linear model and for radiation hormesis has been solid as a rock for 40 years. Yet the LNT model prevails. Why? Politics. Not political body wants to be seen as being soft on this matter, and there is now a radiation protection industry worth billions that will keep it this way regardless of the evidence agaist LNT.

http://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2009/11000/Low_Dose_Extrapolation_of_Radiation_Health_Risks_.6.aspx

Health Physics:
November 2009 – Volume 97 – Issue 5 – pp 407-415
doi: 10.1097/HP.0b013e3181b1871b
Warren K. Sinclair Keynote Address: Paper
Low-Dose Extrapolation of Radiation Health Risks: Some Implications of Uncertainty for Radiation Protection At Low Doses

“… Our estimates of radiation-related risk are uncertain, reflecting statistical variation and our imperfect understanding of crucial assumptions that must be made if we are to apply existing epidemiological data to particular situations. Fortunately, that uncertainty is also highly quantifiable, and can be presented concisely and transparently. Radiation protection is ultimately a political process that involves consent by stakeholders, a diverse group that includes people who might be expected to be risk-averse and concerned with plausible upper limits on risk (how bad could it be?), cost-averse and concerned with lower limits on risk (can you prove there is a nontrivial risk at current dose levels?), or combining both points of view. How radiation-related risk is viewed by individuals and population subgroups also depends very much on perception of related benefit, which might be (for example) medical, economic, altruistic, or nonexistent. The following presentation follows the lead of National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) Commentary 14, NCRP Report 126, and later documents in treating radiation protection from the viewpoint of quantitative uncertainty analysis.”

The claim that Monckton easily won was from the same newspaper as Brook’s partner on stage.

For those naive about how these debates work – you should give some thought to why this is the case.

These sorts of debates are a setback for any serious action to address climate change.

There is a reason why Climate Scientists Australia advised against this debate.

Neither Brook’s, nor his sycophants, understand this point. As this thread attests.

Neither have much clue about how to actually address climate change in a manner that achieves any real result.

Brook’s perfomance with Monckton is an example of this ineffectiveness.

The results speak for themselves.

No trouble. There’s no further need to comment on this now anyway, given Iain’s response.

At any rate he has a religion, and religion will never admit it is wrong