Sean - That this article is about denial will probably make no difference. EVERY article related to climate change on The Conversation (apart from one I know of) has been hijacked by the deniers.

I am urging The Conversation to change this.

While The Conversation should have some articles under which the truth or otherwise of climate change can be debated, I'm urging them to declare for at least some discussions that obvious denial posts are disruptive and off topic. Thus they can be reported as abuse and deleted.

Just how disruptive a few deniers can be is demonstrated in the comments of https://theconversation.edu.au/hurricane-sandy-the-new-normal-10408 Here about 44 out of the 114 posts are either by Philip Dowling or responding to him. There are also about 26 posts either by or responding to Wade Macdonald, and about 17 posts are either by or responding to Carole Hubbard.

Any real discussion amongst those who accept the science on climate change is quickly lost amongst the endless and repetitive denier vs the science posts.

Dowling, Macdonald, and Hubbard's right to present their views has effectively prevented the majority who accept the science from being able to have a real conversation. We also have a right to have at least a few places where we can discuss climate change without their disruption.

Has anyone ever read a climate change discussion on this website, The Drum, or Crikey that has not been effectively hijacked by the deniers? If so, please post a link. I would love to read it.

Hi Michael. I'm sympathetic, but this forum is not about censorship. Sometimes the skeptics (deniers/denialists) have points to make which are useful and sometimes they are recycling discredited blathering - sometimes the rest of us, whom they label as 'alarmists' fall into a similar recycling trap, if not of discredited blathering. Arguably, the best response is not to bother engaging with their blathering, even to discredit it as it is already discredited: make a new post and start again at the left of the page rather than disappearing off the right. It is worth engaging and having the conversation when they actually make a point worth discussing, sometimes one can even agree with their point.

Here's your reply, it made no such claim. The reporter in question at the Daily Mail made it up, there was no report. He made this same claim twice and has been rebuked twice by the UK Met Office.

http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

Referencing Flannery is trying to use Gore's Law, which is completely irrelevant. Science is the only deciding point and the science is clear that climate change is happening and is being driven by humans.

Your comments on Sandy are completely incorrect, even the weather reports explained the warmer seas and blocking highs.

John Coochey is yet another obvious denier.

Note how he too is trying to divert this conversation away from the topic of the psychology behind people supporting climate change back to the endless denier vs science debate.

The claim of no warming over the last 16 years has been raised numerous times before on The Conversation, and rigorously rebutted every time. In fact John raised it just 6 days ago and it was rebutted by several posters.

And I've yet to have any denier provide a full quote of Flannery saying anything wrong (and so what if he did?).

Irrelevant links? The link to the UK Met Office? The link to the UK Met Office which directly addresses your false claim of no warming? The link to the UK Met Office that directly states that the change in global temperature, as measured by HADCRUT4 in the northern hemisphere is 0.16 degree increase in temperature per decade?

Also, stop with the cherry picking. Using a starting date in the late 90s is a cherry picking technique to try and ignore the overall data trend in favour of a select data set that is too narrow. This is deliberately obfuscating the reality of the temperature data.

That would be Robyn Williams of the Science Show.

That's a shame - given that was only the only fact in your rant that even got close to the truth, I was going to give you a 1/2 mark for getting his first name but then I noticed that you misspelt it.

Got to agree with Dennis. Besides the importance of not censoring anyone's point of view, I have to say I sometimes get a good chuckle reading the tete a tete. Also, how do you know someone is completely and utterly full of a substance I'll avoid mentioning in case it's censored unless you give their best case a thorough hearing? They should be encouraged to give us their best. Keenly encouraged. And not just for the comic value...

Mr Coochey is "still waiting for the reply to the fact that the UK Met Office data show no warming for sixteen years" err, that is not a fact, it's a furphy. It's all explained for the lay reader at "Why the Mail on Sunday was wrong to claim global warming has stopped", http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/16/daily-mail-global-warming-stopped-wrong.

Mr Coochey notes that the area of Sandy is actually cooler than normal. Well, der-err! It's a STORM; storms do tend to cool things down a bit - in my limited experience the day of a Coral Sea cyclone is, funnily enough, cooler than the day before.

Not only that, but Superstorm Sandy began as a Caribbean hurricane and became a North Atlantic hurricane. Before it crossed the New Jersey coast, it started merging with a polar cold storm, down from the Arctic; that's why they started referring to it as "Superstorm Sandy" rather than "Hurricane Sandy". And you know what? The Arctic is cold. Like, colder than Tasmania even.

Crikey, John.

Conservative belief? Try evidence, it's a great curative.

Earth is warmed by absorption of short wave sunlight. Because of this, Earth's temperature can remain unchanged by returning the same amount of energy to space. That is, solar shortwave energy is balanced by the earth re-radiating to space as a 'black body' radiator with a characteristic temperature of ~255K; that is, from space the earth's spectrum is roughly that of a radiating body with an optical surface temperature of around 255K.

Earth's surface cools by evaporation of excited water molecules, heat transfer to deeper sea and to polar ice caps and by convection and radiation back into and through the atmosphere. At higher altitudes, where the atmosphere gets less dense, the proportion of energy (heat) transfer by long wave 'thermal' (microwave) radiation increases. Observing earth's spectrum from space has big absorption bands due to greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. Prominent among these is carbon dioxide (CO2).

Greenhouse gases such as H2O, CO2, methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), CFC's, and ozone (O3) absorp, then re-emit, some longwave wavelengths. About half of the re-emitted radiation is diverted back down toward the surface, as confirmed by radiation measurements at both surface and satellite observatories. This discrepancy increases with atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Historic fossil fuel use and cement production data (Oak Ridge National (US) Laboratory Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center) shows sufficient CO2 emission from 1800 to 2007 to raise atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 430 ppm. Dissolution of CO2 in oceans has limited atmospheric CO2 to about 390 ppm, and decreased ocean pH.

Heat thus accumulates at the surface. About 90% of retained heat warms oceans, accelerating ice melting (sea level rise) and water evaporation (increasing rain and storms).

Warming feedbacks already initiated (ie tipping points already being crossed) are loss of Arctic sea ice, so that boreal summer sunlight absorption in the Arctic Ocean is increasing (less sunlight reflection), the aforementioned sublimation of offshore Siberian methane clathrates, and methane outgassing from thawing permafrost.

Deforestation limits biosequestration of atmospheric CO2 so that reversion to glacial conditions is not presently possible, even when earth's orbital precession minimises intensity of sunlight on Arctic terrestrial icecaps (ie right now).

And I stand by my comments earlier in Crikey (obviously made just after the shooting in the USA at the screening of the Batman movie).

How many people are likely to die due to climate change over the next century?

As well as the direct impact of climate change it is predicted that many wars will be fought over the reducing and changing natural resources.

So deaths due to climate change will probably be in the millions.

Of course Philip Dowling and Marc Hendrickx won't agree because they don't accept the science.

You quite clearly can't read then. It is the second point they make in the UK Met Office statement. Don't pretend otherwise.

There are several reasons why I disagree with you Dennis.

First, it is not censorship because I still support people having their say. Instead it is moderation - there are places where the truth or otherwise of the science can be debated, and there are other places where this issue is off topic. Moderation is much easier because the only decision is whether or not a post is off topic.

Secondly, the reason I'm suggesting this is that there are no places where those who accept the science can debate climate change. As even this thread proves, the regular climate change deniers are here once again changing the topic to the truth or otherwise of the science.

If you know of any article (here, on The Drum, or Crikey) which is about climate change where the comments are not dominated by the same repetitive denialist rubbish and people rebutting these false claims, please let me know. I would love to read it.

Thirdly, our regular climate change deniers are not saying anything new. They are making the same false claims again and again. Even worse, it is the same people making the same false claims.

Shooting lead into someone is obviously a crime.

What about a group of people posting on the internet in every forum that they can that parents should sprinkle lead onto their children's food because, as lead is a heavy metal it will help their children put on weight and grow? What if these people came up with lots of false reasons why the science (which says that lead is a poison) were wrong?

Our regular climate change deniers are similar to someone promoting sprinkling lead onto the food of children except that the damage to the planet will take much longer to become bad than lead poisoning and the number of deaths from climate change will be incredibly greater.

"Not as dangerous as it may intuitively appear" depends on what you first think. I was thinking of long term effects, not drop dead quickly, so I think eating lead is as dangerous as I was thinking.

Climate change is similar - it is the long term effects which are most scary. And like a poison which acts long after it was taken, climate change has lots of warming locked in by what we have already emitted.

But Philip doesn't seem too concerned about feeding children lead - very interesting.

You don't have to read, or engage them? Dennis' advice seems pretty sound. What's sometimes called for is to starve the cuckoo. But I still say I value they can continue to make their case 'til their blue in the face, and this is a fine forum thanks to the many impossibly patient people with deep knowledge of the subject who can respond and enlighten. I'm arguing that social regulation is the best response...

Michael,

A valid comparison but there's no need to use a hypothetical. Actual comparisons can be made with other areas of science that are hotly confronted by those who don't want to accept the scientific evidence.

Evolutionary science (following many decades of research by many thousands of archeologists and evolutionary scientists) arguably represents the closest comparison with the climate issue. Scientific proof that we are primates and evolved from earlier primate forms is as rock solid as climate science, yet there is still a coterie of people who earnestly believe that evolutionary science is a grand conspiracy of epic proportions. Any gap in knowledge is jumped upon as proof that the 'theory' of evolution is a hoax.

I think it is best in both circumstance to stop debating these issues on the merits of science because that has been done to death and the issue is really about a quirky mental syndrome.

In both areas of debate you find fanatical individuals, most of whom are untrained in that discipline but who nevertheless have an unshakable belief that they have hit upon a truth that defies all of rock solid scientific evidence that has been put forward by experts in the field. For the most part this is not a make believe on their part, they are deadly earnest in their conviction.

I would really love to know if this syndrome crosses boundaries. Is there a close statistical correlation between those who deny climate science and those who deny evolutionary science? Intuitively I would suggest there is because the syndrome is so stikingly identical, even down to the slogans that we see in defence of their argument.

"If humans evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys", chortle the anti-evolutionary brigade, convinced that they have trumped the scientists with a startling piece of logic.

"If global warming is real, why do we still get cold snaps", chortle the anti-AGW brigade, convinced that they have trumped the scientists with a startling piece of logic.

Another comparison is the difficulty of separating those who push the denialist argument (some church leaders and some vested corporations) and those who are pawns in the game and happily run with the circulated denialist messages simply because they feel personally threatened by the scientific message. I have a heavy disdain for the pushers but sadness and empathy for the real victims. But it's not possible to tell which is which.

Chris Harries -

The anti-science rhetoric and the false reasoning used by creationists and climate change deniers is very similar. Both creationists and deniers tend to be very politically conservative people, but in Australia I doubt that most climate change deniers also believe in creationism.

Unfortunately there is a growing trend for people to reject reason. Take, as another example, Australian politics.

Abbott saying that the carbon tax would have massive detrimental economic consequences was obviously wrong to anyone who could reason - yet these claims got endless media coverage. Unfortunately the massive compensations included with the tax also meant that the tax is not going to be very effective in cutting emissions. The media story was the tax would make life impossible OR the tax would fix climate change - neither were true.

The mining tax is a very funny story (if it were not real) - on one hand Labor was saying that this tax will give a return to the Australian people from our mineral wealth, and on the other Abbott was saying that it would destroy the mining industry.

Yet the mining industry, though not in the boom of a year ago, is doing fine and still investing - and the tax has been watered down so much that nothing was raised in the first 3 months.

I hope that at least some readers are not locked in to supporting Labor or Liberal and can see how these two political examples show that logic and reason now has little to do with current politics.

The point of using putting lead on food as my example was that this is dangerous and wrong. Promoting this will lead to dire consequences.

Believing in creationism doesn't lead to any obvious bad consequences.

The successful campaign by the deniers against climate change will lead to significant global warming and very dire consequences.

You are a professional Philip.

I'm making the point that it is morally wrong to promote climate change denial and you divert the conversation to the health consequences of lead.

Let's take a hypothetical for you. IF the science on climate change was true, and thus the consequences of humanity not taking action to prevent this are dire, would you agree that it would be immoral to promote inaction?

One possible justification for promoting inaction on climate change IF it were true is that the person promoting inaction believes, incorrectly, that climate change is false.

But I would say that people heavily promoting denial have a duty of care to know what they are talking about.

As any reading of the discussions on climate change in this forum shows, the regular deniers have been presented with the science again and again. So for these people claiming to be ignorant about the science is no longer an excuse.

If any of the deniers were genuine people I think they would be willing to enter a discussion on the ethics. The ethical issues can be debated starting from the hypothetical that climate change were true.

But, if as I suspect, the regular deniers are here to disrupt genuine conversations, I think it very unlikely that we are about to have a, potentially very interesting, ethical debate.

Also note that we could have an ethical debate starting with the hypothesis that climate change is false. But this would be a very short discussion because I think everyone would agree that it would be wrong for a scientist to fabricated his data, his conclusions, or both. It would also be wrong for those who peer review the paper to ignore her 'obvious' errors. And it would also be wrong for every other scientist who works in the area of that paper to ignore this untrue paper. And it would also be wrong for all the other climate change scientists to also publish papers which were lies.

And for climate change to be false all of the above unethical behaviour would have to have taken place in EVERY county for the last 20 or more years.

Ah, but Michael, exactly the point I'm making.

The anti-evolution brigade is a perfect mirror for those caught up in climate denial, where they can see replicas of themselves, albeit in another role. What can they do when they look in the mirror but either 1) identify with the conspiratorial case of their erstwhile colleagues in that other camp or 2) witness how ridiculous they themselves appear if they were to step out off the whirlwind of activity that has them so entranced?

John, perhaps they're not responding to you due to the abusive, threatening tone and obscenity you've used in this thread.

30 years ago I used to debate the creationists. I even went to a fundamentalist church to watch the films that presented the justification for the world only being 6,000 years old and the standard science being wrong.

I wasted HUGE amounts of time discussing the science.

But in the end I got the whole discussion down to a few minutes.

Instead of correcting the creationist on one point of science, I asked her "If, for example, Bill Gates paid for us both to tour the world and talk to every scientist we wanted to, and IF the scientists rebutted all your justifications, would you then believe the science or (your version of) what the bible says?"

"The bible" she replied.

Debating the science with a creationist is a waste of time for you both. If you just ask the question they will proudly tell you that for them belief wins over science.

But there is a huge difference between debating a creationist and our regular climate change deniers here. The creationists would genuinely engage. Many of the denialists here are expert in avoiding real discussion. Look at the way that Philip Dowling takes my ethical debate into a discussion on the safety of lead. Go back and read old discussions and it is clear that the deniers are playing with us - just like you tease a kitten with a ball of string. And when the string become boring a new toy is introduced. And then a few days later the string is bought out again.

Whilst the many creationists I debated where misguided, I think they were all genuine people. If some of the regular climate change deniers here are not organised, trained in how to disrupt, and paid for doing so, I will be very surprised.

I'm sure that it would be easy to put together a collection of quotes from the regular deniers here to show that some of them do reject science, believe in conspiracy theories, etc.

Dianna Art - Debate amongst those who accept climate change has almost been shut down entirely.

Find me just one discussion here or on The Drum or Crikey where those who accept the science are discussing the important issues for moving forward.

What I'm urging is that we get some moderation so that there are places where the science of climate change can be vigorously debated, and some places where denying or deliberately disrupting the conversation is regarded as off topic.

If you go back and analyse the discussion of past articles there are many things which make it appear likely that some of the denialists are organised and trained in techniques to disrupt. We tend to have one heavy posting denialist assigned to a post and this person ignores all the other articles about climate change around this time. In a thread that goes on for a long time when one frequent posting denialist goes away we often get another frequent posting denialist replacing them.

Of course a discussion on abortion will include people who feel strongly from both sides. Of course an article on alternative medicine will also include different views. But I doubt that these people are organised, and I doubt that these people are using the techniques of the climate change deniers to deliberately mislead and disrupt.

Yes. When you discuss climate change in social settings all those who doubt the science present and defend their views very differently from the deniers in this forum.

From analysing things over the last few days I'm now not only sure that some of the deniers are organised, but that some of them have been trained in techniques to disrupt.

I had thought that the paid disrupters were just like call centre staff - not much skill needed so cheap to employ.

But a few of the deniers here are so sophisticated in their use of the techniques that I'm starting to think that they might be earning some real money.

Overall global temperature according to HadCRUT 4's linear trend has risen by ~0.08 degrees since 1997. http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/to:2012/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/to:2012/trend
Cherry pick from August to August (the which is close to the peak of the 1997-8 El Nino) and you still get a linear trend rise of 0.05 degrees.

Nice talkin' to ya. Don't let the door hit your arse on your way out.

I would suggest Mr Henley that you do not understand what actual scepticism is,

I suggest you google Lawrence Torcello (a prominent ethicist and holder of the Ezra A Hale Chair in Applied Ethics at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York)
-----------------------------------
Torcello points out that actual skepticism is about positive inquiry and critical thinking, as well as proportioning one’s beliefs to the available evidence (not to mention being willing to alter those beliefs if and when the evidence changes significantly). Pseudoscepticism (which we often label as denialism), on the contrary, makes a virtue of doubt per se, regardless of other considerations, and is therefore irrational.

Torcello also says
(1) Ethical obligations of inquiry extend to every voting citizen insofar as citizens are bound together as a political body;
(2) It is morally condemnable to put forward unwarranted public assertions contrary to scientific consensus when such consensus is decisive for public policy and legislation;
(3) It is imperative upon educators, journalists, politicians and all those with greater access to the public forum to condemn, factually and ethically, pseudosceptical assertions without equivocation.

Thus healthy skepticism includes refusing to condemn something as false unless it can be shown to be false. Someone with healthy skepticism may doubt something if it has not been proven to be true, but he would not condemn it as false unless he obtained verifiable evidence that it is false.

Cynicism is refusing to believe anything is true that one does not already believe, regardless of evidence. A cynic assumes that everyone outside of a trusted circle of sources is a liar. Since cynics must begin with some basis of truth, they are simply unchangeable: unwilling to accept new truths or to shed old convictions. Thus, a cynic is someone who is locked into his belief set and is unwilling to believe anything else. On the other hand, a person with blind faith believes everything from his trusted set of leaders and ignores all other sources of truth and logic. So cynicism is essentially the same thing as blind faith.

----------------
So, what are you?

A genuine skeptic who refuses to condemn something as false unless it can be shown to be false?
Someone with healthy skepticism who may doubt something if it has not been proven to be true, but would not condemn it as false unless he obtained verifiable evidence that it is false?
A genuine skeptic who is about positive inquiry and critical thinking, as well as proportioning one’s beliefs to the available evidence (not to mention being willing to alter those beliefs if and when the evidence changes significantly)
OR
a cynic who refuses to believe anything is true that one does not already believe, regardless of evidence and a Pseudo-skeptic who, makes a virtue of doubt per se, regardless of other considerations, and is therefore irrational?

I suggest most if not all of the posters here who deny the reality of climate change are the latter - since they routinely fail to address the evidence (such as I have posted on another post in this thread)

Having made a case that some of the deniers are organised and are using debating tactics to disrupt the conversation without every putting up any justification for their views, John Philip calls me the troll :)

Surely if there were genuine doubt to climate change the deniers would be able to point to a good source which would convince a reasonable person that the science was wrong and explain how the scientists managed to get it so wrong for so long.

I'm cannot see how this and my other posts "belittle, mock and vilify". But I've certainly received many personal insults from the deniers on this thread.

I've just done a search for every "In reply to Michael Wilbur-Ham" and I cannot find one post where someone has asked me to provide a "quantitative link between AGW and 'Frankenstorm".

Thus I'm also unable to find even one example of me attacking them instead of answering this question.

Getting the facts right does not seem a strong point of the deniers :)

Oh yes, and for good measure - there is also a reasonable basis to suspect that melting arctic sea ice ( a fact) and a declining jet stream (also a fact) may have been in part responsible for steering Sandy into the east coast, instead of over the open ocean as late-season hurricanes usually do (another fact).

This connection cannot be stated unequivocally - although Radley Horton the climate science lead for the science policy team of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, has usggested it is a reasonable conclusion.

But hey - John Phillip - keep denying if it makes you feel better

If there is anything to discuss from this article we don't know because it is behind a pay-wall.

But it is worth making the important point of the double standard of the deniers.

Though almost everything they say is found to be wrong, they think that if anyone who supports the science says something wrong that somehow this casts doubt on the thousands of scientific papers which are summarised in the IPCC reports.

If a notable physicist says something wrong about Einstein's theories this means only means that a notable physicist has said something wrong about Einstein's theories. Personally embarrassing, but it casts no doubt on the science.

I've yet to read anything which would lead a reasonable person to doubt climate change. And a scientist saying something wrong proves nothing.

(As I have not read the article I'm not making any comment on whether or not a scientist did say something that is wrong.)

I make of it exactly what Dr Hoerling said

"So the climate change signal in Sandy is largely due to sea-level rise, the increased humidity in the world's atmosphere, and the tropical ocean temperature anomalies. The temperatures up near New York, while still a factor in the storm, are less of a factor than the above three changes"

Which part of his attributing the influence of AGW to Sandy did you not understand?

So John Philip yet again fails to notice that I've not said anything about Sandy in my posts. Yet he attacks me and The Greens because of what I've never said.

And after I've pointed out that the article he links to is behind a pay-wall he just reposts the same link.

I'm not surprised that John Philip gets his views on climate change from the Australian. He probably also believes that the carbon tax has totally destroyed our economy.

More science for John Phillip to read - and try and understand - though I sincerely doubt his motivation (let alone ability intellectually) to do so

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/10/30/did-climate-change-cause-hurricane-sandy/

"Now, as promised: If you still don’t believe scientists, then believe insurance giant Munich Re. In her October 29 post at the The New Yorker, writer Elizabeth Kolbert notes:

Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled “Severe Weather in North America.” According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” … While many factors have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.”

No John Phillip. It's not a "conspiracy" - its part of deliverate policy of obsurantist denialism practiced by news Ltd

"After neutral items were discounted, negative coverage (82%) across News Ltd
newspapers far outweighed positive (18%) articles. This indicates a very strong stance
against the carbon policy adopted by the company that controls most Australian
metropolitan newspapers, and the only general national daily. (See page 33)"

http://www.acij.uts.edu.au/pdfs/sceptical-climate-part1.pdf

Yet they espouse (officially) that thye believe in mad made climate change.

So NO, no conspiracy - just deliberately misleading. Much like the quote you tried to use from Dr Hoerling that did NOT say what you alleged it did

I'm still waiting for a 'skeptic' to post a link to some evidence which would convince a reasonable person that human induced climate change is false and/or that the predications of the IPCC etc are alarmist, and also explain how the scientists in every country have got it wrong for so long.

My evidence is summarised by the IPCC. Your evidence is ....???

The one 'do nothing about climate change' poster I've respected was on Crikey. He said something like:
"You might think that I'm evil, but I don't care what happens in the future to others, and I don't want to change my lifestyle."

I do think that this disregard for future generations is evil. But I respected this person because he was honest - no pretence that climate change wasn't happening. We at least shared a respect for honesty and truth.

For a moment I thought that Arthur James Egleton Robey was similar. But elsewhere he posts links supposedly to prove that there has been no warming for 16 years - so Arthur is just another denier.

Poll denialism, climate denialism's wacky brother.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/republican-brain-alternate-reality-polling

A quick check of Wikipedia on PEW has them looking very reputable, and has no mention of them having questionable funding nor political bias to either the left or the right.

So Wade, please provide a reference that gives justification for a reasonable person to doubt PEW.

Note how Wade is already using standard techniques to disrupt this discussion. He wants us all to waste time defending PEW. He wants to distract us from discussing the issues raised in the article.

I've already mention Philip as one of the regular deniers.

What is Philip trying to achieve with this question? He has debated climate change so many times before that nothing new will be said.

So Philip is just here to tease us. His simple question is urging us to respond. Getting us to waste our time. And avoiding any discussion of the main article.

Further to Philip's one line question ...

One big misconception is that the deniers are here to get people to doubt the science.

Achieving this is very unlikely. Firstly the readers of The Conversation are probably more critical thinkers than in more mainstream forums, so the denial slogans and lies are unlikely to convince anyone. Secondly, most of their claims are robustly rebutted. In fact so robustly rebutted that the discussion will tend to confirm that the science is correct.

But as Philips simple question above illustrates, he is not here to change our minds. There is nothing in his question to cast any doubt on climate change.

His purpose here is to disrupt those who accept the science from moving forward.

Accepting the science is only the first step.

How do we convince people to act?

How good or bad are our current actions? What are the likely consequences of continuing as we are? What targets should we aim for? What should we do next?

All these questions, and many more, are the sort of things that we need to be discussing.

Yet, thanks to Philip and his colleagues, each discussion just repeats yet again and again the endless denial vs science discussion.

All credit to Phillip, their plan is working. It's about time the rest of us woke up to this.

About one month ago Geoffrey Henley posted:
"The melting of arctic sea ice does not constitute any proof of AGW"

So Geoffrey is a proven denier. Thus it is very likely that his post is yet another distortion of the facts, and thus a waste of every bodies time.

Chris Landsea was listed as an expert for the pro tobacco, anti-climate science Hearland Institute up until May 2012 when he resigned because of their unibomber billboard campaign.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/meteorologists-chris-landsea-and-joe-bastardi-respond-to-heartland-campaign/2012/05/14/gIQAfd9yOU_blog.html

So Geoffrey Henley's claim "... is not a sceptic by the way" is BS. Who do you trust - Henley who cannot even get the facts in a simple post correct?

That is quite ironic coming from someone whose initial comment was an ad hominem attack on Dr Lewandowsky.

Yes Geoffrey. This statement is a classic "ad hominem"
"Whom do you believe? A professor of psychology with an activist bent and a well documented past of making numerous unsubstantiated statements..."

"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent, instead of against the opponent's argument..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Very recently a denier dismissed the Stern report because it was written by an economist, and now we have an article on the psychology of the acceptance of climate change slammed because it is written by a psychologist.

Three months ago Marc Hendrickx wrote:
"And yet that 15 year temperature plateau prevails!"

When asked why the Royal Society, Australian Academy of Science, CSIRO, US National Academy of Science, American geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics etc etc. disagreed with his views, he replied:
"A certain amount of funding might disappear and a few people might be asked to do research that actually matters.'

Congratulations Marc, you are a proven denier.

Have to laugh because Roger Pielke Jr has no climate science credentials, in fact his degrees were in social sciences, not the hard sciences.

Your statement about Stephen's statistics is a flat out lie. Just because you or your favourite bloggers don't understand the statistics, doesn't mean that no-one else does.

Another person raising a made up report. The Met Office never made any statement at all, never released any data at all, that shows anything other than an increasing temperature. The figure you cite was made up by a reporter and been debunked for the rubbish it is: http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

As for your claim about my statistics, I've actually studied statistics as part of my undergrad and postgrad degrees, specifically biometrics. The multivariate analysis Stephen used is similar in nature to a survey analysis I performed for a paper that I have written. Multivariate statistics are conceptually very hard to understand as you are generally dealing with n dimension space. So while I can't claim to fully understand Stephen's analysis, I did fully understand his explanations of its application. I also completely understood how flawed the counter-claims about his analysis were, as the claimant didn't even have the original dataset correctly setup in order to analyse, let alone have the original data so that he could have repeated the analysis.

What? You still haven't realised you're wrong because you're down the low end of the knowledge curve?

Don't be too hard on yourself Marc, you just have stop reading Anthony Watts and the other loonies, and start reading some real climate science.

Nice to see that I've worried the deniers enough for them to start googling me and finding out what I've said in the past.

sandy isn't the only event of course that people can remember. this year americans have had extreme forest fires & extreme cold & extreme drought & now sandy. people from all over the continent are going to converge on their ancestral homes on thanksgiving. mom & pop & right wing brother & vegan sister, an aunt & an uncle, &c. all together for the annual event. this time thanksgiving coincides with an election too so there'll be plenty of potential for fireworks over turkey. I have a feeling this accumulation of extreme weather culminating with sandy & the election will be a hot talking point at this year's thanksgiving for many families. -a.v.

If rational logic was the best way to 'educate' people then our advertising would look very different.

So for action to take place on climate change we not only need to get the science right but the 'marketing'.

That's a good point. I know several sources are already talking about the lack of climate change discussion in the debates and in the media. It may end up being a pressure point surrounding the election.

i see bookends in katrina & sandy. recurrence, intervals, resonance. -a.v.

I think the Hamster Wheel dealt with this topic very well the other day. Search for "Hamster Wheel carbon tax" on YouTube.

No - let's just see run a series of repeatable experiments with the planet - then we can settle the question for sure!

No Marc - for sheer fatuous fantasy, your stable-mate Christopher Monckton towers above all.

Robert Edwin White appears to be just another ill informed denier peddling misinformation,

Lewandowsky states

"They will deny any link between climate change and events such as the unprecedented Frankenstorm Sandy, or the unprecedented Texas drought, or the unprecedented series of Derechos, or the unprecedented flooding in Tennessee, or the unprecedented Arctic melt, or the unprecedented retreat of Alpine glaciers, or the unprecedented tripling of extreme weather events during the last 30 years."

I wonder which part of the word "unprecedented" is not understood by Eobert Edwin White??

The Sandy storm caused unprecedented levels of floffing in New York. "Hurricane Sandy will be studied for years to come. No storm of its like has been registered in the past 300 years of history in the region (at least since the first Europeans appeared on the shores of New York and New Jersey in the mid 17th century). "

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/article.html

In 2011, Texas endured the worst single-year drought in its history

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/drought/

The June 2012 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest derecho was one of the most destructive and deadly fast-moving severe thunderstorm complexes in North American history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2012_North_American_derecho

In 2012 Arctic Ice levels set a new low record

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Glacier masses at their lowest levels ever

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/glaciermasstrend1980-2010.gif

extremetemperature anomalies are at levels never before seen

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_17/shifting.gif

All of these points are readily discoverable with Google - How is it that Prof White forgot to bother?

Denier? Ignorant? or just another raindrop in the storm of stupidity on this topic?