The comments can be found here.

Cliff

Specifically, page 6 has a few paragraphs on “What does model evaluation tell us about the reliability of climate projections?”

Can anybody help to find where this information has gone?

I have not looked hard for a connection of Sherrington names. If it exists, close relationship would not be before 1880 or so. No, it was merely the coincidence of surnames that caused me to read extensively about Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, Nobel Laureate, twice President of the Royal Society of London, Knight and mentor of 3 more Nobel laureates. At his death aged over 90 in 1953 his entry in “Who’s Who” was the longest ever. What most interests me is that his writing, extremely turgid, very hard going, was original, innovative and still quoted. He wrote extensively about “The Meaning of Life” while I, by comparison, am more like a dead parrot nailed to a perch.

To my incomplete knowledge, the Sherrington name descended from Sir Charles ended with a generation in which the only child was a daughter, not so long ago.

re # 180 Mike Hayes,

It is a confident personal forecast (and I have written several times to Kesten Green in NZ, from Australia’s Monash Uni, who has been mentioned several times in CA about forecasting) that carbon credits will not reduce the amount of fossil fuel consumption significantly. They will merely extend the number of years over which it is extracted and burned. Can you imagine a huge corporation like BHP, about the largest miner in the world, walking away from immense coal and oil deposits simply because of forecasts of CO2 buildup effects in the air? Can you imagine the Australian Governement letting this happen? No way, Nellie, the standard of living would drop too much. So I do NOT regard carbon credit trading as remediation, merely as a clever mechanism for seeking false praise, just as Al Gore does with his home electrical consumption.

Are you related?

George. Thank you for your reply.

I am concerned about mitigation and remediation and the apparent use of the “Office Space jump to conclusions mat” here. Briefly,

1. Scientists agree on “consensus” of science IPCC.
2. IPCC suggests remediation and mitigation, carbon trading etc.
3. Scientists are therefore in “consensus” with these conclusions?

Further worth noting (using the IPCC report itself to argue against the purveyers of doom) IPCC suggests numerous possible future scenarios. Notably is the A1T scenario, where the world population all rises to approximately the level of wealth of the developed countries.

We need to be saying proactively “Let’s build THAT world. It’s a good thing”.

And oddly enough, some of the politically latched on solutions suggested by the IPCC, like carbon credit trading, seem in effect to be tending toward creating some of the future scenarios of the IPCC which are bad, where there is an increasing gap in income between rich and poor countries, coupled with increasing population in the poor countries.

At the same time, we have too many myths in the popular culture. Here is a concrete example. Replace all cars in the USA with hybrid 40-60 mpg, and the greenhouse gas emissions of the USA drop by less than 2%. My admittedly crude lifecycle emissions calculations show that if you add in the emissions during the manufacturing process, these cars only start to show a positive GHG savings after they are in the fleet for 9.5 years. But by then they must be replaced with a new fleet. So basic life cycle analysis shows popular concepts – hybrids – maybe bad ideas. We need public figures saying things like this, where detailed analysis shows them to be true.

On the general issue of lowering emissions, and without even arguing the issue of what % of supposed climate change is due to man, here is a reality concerning nuclear power. Double the number of nuclear plants and the USA meets the IPCC 2050 mid level scenario requirement of a reduction in emissions by some 22%-26%. And there is no other way to meet that scenario’s required GHG reduction levels.

Summarizing – hybrids as a solution are a myth – nuclear power solves the problem, period.

Actual economic analysis of the issues and proposed solutions will not be in line with political proposed solutions. Of course those will lean toward higher taxes of one sort or another. But if in reality there is some possibility that the climate change issue is real and partly or wholely due to man, then intelligent people cannot allow the normal political process to make these simple errors.

Doubling nuclear power plants would seem to be a very good thing irregardless of whether or not in 20-30 years we are all sitting around laughing about the “mass hallucination of global warming”.