Was Cameron born an idiot or did he have to practice?

Question

Zach Goldsmith's plans for 'green taxes' have a fatal flaw, which both he and Calamity Dave Cameron would have discovered had they the wit to carry out any research.

Global warming is a lie!

In fact there is an ongoing offer of a $100,000 reward to anyone who can prove that man made activities contribute to climate change.

There have been no takers.

Polar bears, are doing very nicely, according to The World Wild Life Fund.

CO2 levels follow changes in temperature and therefore cannot cause it.

It was warmer in the middle ages when the Vikings farmed Greenland, and much colder in Victorian times when the Thames used to freeze over.

David Bellamy, Christopher Monkton are just two of the 17,000 scientists who have dismissed global warming as junk science based on computer models that are less reliable than wetting your forefinger and holding it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

The Gulf Stream is fine, there has been no abnormal fluctuations in the Earth's climate.

Answer 1

EVERYONE has the right to be stupid
it's just some excel at it.

Answer 2

I recommend that you read the IPCC reports and base your criticism of Global Warming on those reports.

It sounds to me that you have been getting most of your information about Global Warming from the popular media.

The popular media are designed to entertain and get ratings. That is "eyeballs" or readers. That is how the advertising rates are set. The more readers or "eyeballs" the higher the advertising rates.

Also the people who write for the popular media rarely have rigorous scientific backgrounds. In other words when they are writing about scientific subjects they do not know what they are talking about.

The popular media in my opinion is almost useless as a source of information about Global Warming. Yet that is where most people get their information about Global Warming.

I recommend that you find a University library. Ask the librarian if there is a way that if you were to pay a fee to the library, they would let you use their facilities.

I have found that most University libraries will let you use their facilities if you pay them a fee. This helps keep up the library.

The libraries do not advertise this , so you have to ask.

I have used many different University libraries when I paid them a fee. I have never had a University library tell me no.


They often do want to know why you want to use their facilities. I explain that I am a researcher. Most of the material that I need is in their facility and is not available publicly. Then I remind them that I realize that it costs a great deal of money to maintain a library and I am willing to pay a fee for the use of the library to help them maintain the library.

That is the speech that I use. I have never been told that I could not use their facilities.

I have done research at Universities all over the United States. Many of the Universities are considered world class Universities.

If you will follow my instructions you will be able to gain access to the scientific literature on this topic.

I recommend that you become an expert on the scientific material on this topic, ignore the popular media and then post the question that you think is appropriate on this site.

After you have mastered the scientific literature on this topic I suspect that your point of view will change.

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Answer 3

You should get your science from scientists and not one-sided media articles.

I agree that David Cameron is an idiot but then that's my opinion of most politicians.

Your source regarding the $100,000 reward is a distortion of the facts - the truth is that ExxonMobil have offered $10,000 'rewards' plus expenses plus 'additional payments' to any qualified scientist who will publicly speak out against anthropogenic global warming or will submit to them a written report to this effect.

Most polar bears are doing fine... for the time being. 2 of the 13 populations are dwindling, the remaining ones are stable. Their habitat is threatened and the Arctic ice upon which they depend is retreating faster now than previously thought. In a decade it will be a very different picture, in 40 years they could be pushed to the edge of extinction.

CO2 levels do not necessarily follow changes in temperature. Temp and CO2 levels are inextricable linked through a feedback mechanism; it's irrelevant which comes first as the other will always follow.

It wasn't warmer in the 'middle ages' - the peak temp that was reached was occurred at the height of the Medieval Warm Period in approx 1050 when temps peaks at 14°C, 0.4°C colder than it is now.

Vikings barely farmed Greenland, there were two parts where crops could be grown, both in the southwest of the country. The story that Vikings thrived in Greenland was a piece of Viking propaganda orchestrated by Eric The Red who had been exiled from Iceland to Greenland and in an attempt to lure people to his new settlement he named the land Greenland and told tales of lush green lands. It was warmer in Greenland in the past but certainly not to the extent that some people claim.

The Thames used to freeze over because it flowed a natural course. Today the width has been severely restricted and along much of its length it flows between embankments and therefore flows faster (the narrower a stretch of water the faster it flows). The amounts of effluent and chemical deposits poured into the Thames each day also ensure that the temp is kept artificially high.

The 17,000 scientists you refer to are those who have 'signed' what is known as the Oregon Petition. Nowhere are the words 'global warming' mentioned, the petition (such as it is) was set up to advise caution against implementing the Kyoto Protocol. The method employed to obtain signatures was fraudulent, there was no verification process in place and anyone could sign it (as many did - Geri Halliwell (ex Spice Girl) 4 times for example). The petition also purported to have been instigated by a respected scientific journal although it was in fact the work of Frederick Seitz, the man employed by R J Reynolds tobacco to counter claims that smoking was harmful and now an investor in the oil industry.

The Gulf Stream is fine and will probably remain so for quite some time. This is a little understood area as it's a complicated system and part of a much larger and more complicated system. For the time being all we can do is speculate as to what may or may not happen.

There have been abnormal fluctuations in the Earth's climate unless temperatures rising faster than has ever before been known and CO2 levels at there highest since humans first appeared on the planet can be considered normal.

Answer 4

I wish politicians would concentrate on important issues such as the NHS and crime - preferably in the UK. Our society is paying the price for ignoring our own problems. Global warming scare tactics is a scam to generate more taxes. For example, they target air travel when in fact sea travel is far more polluting to the environment. However, taxing air travel is far more lucrative - where does this money go - it certainly isn't on making the environment greener no, it's straight into the Government coffers.

I heard a hysterical report on BBC the other day - the environmental houses recently built need to have air conditioning units installed - why? because they generate too much heat which could damage the environment and add to global warming - what an absolute farce.

Answer 5

grow to be calling Gaza an open penal complex a gaffe.? a minimum of this guy calls a spade a spade and to hell with the outcomes. a guy after my very own heart. a guy who stands up for Britain and us Brits, some thing that has no longer occurred because of the fact the days of Churchill and Thatcher. purely an fool could think of in any different case.

Answer 6

Cameron is not intellectually an idiot, rather a 'victim' of an elitist background that makes him mentally (psychologically) inept at understanding and absorbing the 'average' UK citizen's life.

If one is a member of secret 'clubs' that he was (along with Boris Johnson), then I'm sure that in *his* mind, what he proposes in the media is not the thoughts of an over paid politically superfluous cretin but those of a genius who is just trying to help.

From ideas such as 'hug a hoodie' to his obession with being green, he is just desperately clawing at ideas to wake Britain up, except Britain cannot be woken up as it already is.

I think we are now relatively set how we are (socially) for the next 30 years, and by becoming Blair (New Labour) he has actually shot himself in the foot, because Blair is hated.

Cameron at least tries, but he is selling to the wrong audience and will get knowhere fast. He should stick to boating at Cambridge and making jam scones with aunt maud....except the oven may cause too much heat, and thus they would have to eat them 'raw'.... Yummy.

Answer 7

Making an accusation of "lies" is pretty serious. You ought to make sure that you've got your facts right first, like:

An ongoing offer of $100,000 reward from junkscience.com which is run by Steve Milloy, who isn't a scientist who might be able to assess the evidence, but is in fact an industry shill. That's right, he works indirectly for Exxon, and he used to tell lies about tobacco smoke, great source of information.

There are about 7 individual populations of polar bears, some are doing OK, and some are declining. Drowned polar bears are being found for the first time on record. Polar bears are drowning due to widening gaps between sea ice. The Northwest passage has opened its largest on record this year:

http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_index.html

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, proven so by laboratory studies. Our atmosphere would be 30oC colder were it not for the presence of CO2 in our atmosphere. If CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, how can anyone rationalise Venus or make it's very high surface temperature consistent with your hypothesis that CO2 is not a warming agent in atmospheres? Satellite observations of our atmosphere show that the greenhouse effect is increasing due to rising CO2 concentrations.

Where is your evidence that it was warmer globally in the period between 1000 and 1300? Greenland and Europe are not the whole world. The only quantitative studies of past climate show quite the opposite, that the current warming period is unprecedented on its magnitude, rate of change and its spatial scale.

Christopher Monckton is not a scientist, he is a political adviser and a journalist. His previous attempts to debunk AGW were completely flawed. He ignored basic physical processes that are occurring in the atmosphere and created a wholly unrealistic model of the world and used that to attack AGW - it was one giant straw man argument. He claimed that climate physicists were stupid enough to ignore a fundamental equation describing radiative transfer, yet this is completely false.

David Bellamy? David Bellamy who famously claimed that most glaciers were advancing? Great source.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1480279,00.html

The majority of climate scientists actually agree with you on the gulf stream cut off theory. Only a handful of scientists were putting much faith in these results. The IPCC says that gulf stream shut off is highly unlikely, and this seems sensible.

Funnily enough, politicians and policy advisors don't read internet forums and newspaper opinion columns to get information on scientific theories. This might explain why politicians are currently formulating policy to tackle climate change. Politicians have people who do lots of research (ie. reading the science from the IPCC and scientific journals, not Yahoo! answers:)) for them, and they then make decisions based on what they find. The basic reason why politicians are making these decisions is because there is no credible hypothesis published in any standard scientific journal which can explain the rising temperature trends. A bunch of fud on a message board just doesn't cut the mustard. My best advise to make politicians stop formulating climate change policy from the scientific evidence is to steal their brains and fill their heads with camel dung. By this method you might pioneer a way of stopping politicians from thinking in the normal way. Normal case: politician or adviser looks at evidence and makes policy. New fangled camel dung head politician: ignores standard means of formulating policy, ignores standard evidence based political procedure and abandons it for information in internet forums and Christopher Monckton newspaper columns. It might work.

Answer 8

1. Global warming is, in fact, not a lie. See? I can make unqualified statements just like you can!

2. The challenge will never have any takers. The requirements that must be met are decided by the challenge's creaters. And given that the whole thing is a stunt designed to try and descredit climate science, they will never be met. Also of note is that it was put forth by JunkScience.com, a site run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

I liken the challenge to the same one put forth by creationist Kent Hovind, where he offered $10,000 to any biologist who could "prove" evolution. Naturally, the challenge was never met since Hovind's requirements for someone to "prove" the theory were scientifically impossible to meet.

3. Polar bears are crappy proxies of global climate. I don't see how this is relevant to anything ever.

4. You have horrible logic. It doesn't follow that because CO2 has lagged behind temperatures during past changes. All this fact tells us is that a. temperature can change independently of CO2, which we already know, and b. that CO2 can act as a feedback as well as a forcing, which we already knew as well.

5. People still farm Greenland. In fact, they're farming in the exact same places the Vikings did during the middle ages. Also, Greenland does not represent the global climate.

6. I don't care what David Bellamy and Christopher Monkton think about the theory. I posit that they are completely wrong.

7. Define "abnormal fluctuation."

Answer 9

It takes years of practice to be an idiot. Correction a politician. David passed with flying colours.

Answer 10

"Your source regarding the $100,000 reward is a distortion of the facts - the truth is that ExxonMobil have offered $10,000 'rewards' plus expenses plus 'additional payments' to any qualified scientist who will publicly speak out against anthropogenic global warming or will submit to them a written report to this effect."

trevor

why do you knowingly continue to be intellectually dishonest?

here is where we discussed this only 6 days ago.....

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AkhaCbt62VL5kKZ7HgZiKSnty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20070907093715AAhj4we


here is a copy of the letter:

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25586,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

how do you expect anyone to take you as credible when you knowingly distort the facts?

i must insist you keep the debate honest in the future.

this sort of behavior only weaken your arguments.

i'm hoping this is an isolated incident, and not insight into the scientific community.

Answer 11

Here here, exactly. Just another money making campaign to get votes.The earth has been through many changes, some of them in my lifetime. Does everyone have short term memory loss. They will be trying to tax us on every breath we take soon.