Bishop Hill What is the Gaelic for "integrity"?
Mar 17, 2014 Climate: Sceptics GWPF Benny Peiser emails to tell me that there is a bit of a kerfuffle over the Irish Sea. Benny has been invited to appear on a TV show called 'Prime Time', opposite Professor John Sweeney, a geographer at the National University of Ireland who doubles as the President of An Taisce, the Irish National Trust.
However, it seems that Professor Sweeney is not sufficiently confident in the strength of his case to want to argue it in public, and An Taisce has issued the following press release.
Prime Time invited John Sweeney, Ireland’s leading Climate Scientist, onto the Panel and some members of An Taisce into the audience for next Tuesday’s show on ‘Climate Change’. We looked forward to contributing to the debate on how we should deal with the serious problems that ‘Climate Change’ will present to our children and grandchildren.
However, we have since learnt that Prime Time will be flying a ‘Climate Denier’ in from the UK for the night. We suppose that they have the idea that a ‘Punch and Judy’ show between opposing members of the panel will make ‘Good Television’, one which will certainly generate much heat but very little light.
John Sweeney has decided not to participate and An Taisce has decided to boycott this Prime Time show.
An Taisce is asking the Director General and the Programme’s Producers to explain if they understand ‘Climate Science’ and the difference between scientific balance and journalistic balance. Is Prime Time fulfilling its ‘Public Service Broadcasting’ remit? We are sure that it would be possible to find some expert that does not agree that smoking causes cancer but would RTE put them on a panel to discuss lung cancer?
The scientific debate on the validity of climate change has ended with the realisation that for the sake of future generations global warming must be restricted to 2oC.
Public deserves a debate that discusses how to achieve this and:
- Enables an honest discussion of Climate Change policy choices within the accepted bounds of peer-reviewed science.
- Encourages a national discussion on fair and independent annual Green House Gas (GHG) budgets and binding National and International targets
- Emphasises that Ireland must play its part in actually achieving real change.
The general public is largely unaware of the threats to their future and their children’s futures. For the public to have an honest picture of the nature of the climate change risks they face and an involvement in how they are tackled, the debate must move on to problem solving.
As to Benny's credentials as a "climate denier", readers might care to peruse this paper authored by Benny ahead of the meeting of sceptic scientists with Royal Society fellows last year. Item 1 reads:
The greenhouse effect is real and CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Another day, another scientivist called out. Having thus established that Professor Sweeney and An Taisce are happy to release scurrilous and false press releases readers can draw their conclusions accordingly.
Is An Taisce, by any chance, the Gaelic for "No Integrity"?
Reader Comments (110)
Here in the Green land of greens we have an amazing ability to close our eyes, look the other way and whistle when ever anyone tries to point out that our " authorities" cannot be trusted around a corner..
We deluded ourselves ithat errant girls who had got pregnant, or were just plain provocative were not squirrelled away to labour for nothing in Gulags run by the lower branches of the Catholic Church with the State being complicit.
We deluded ourselves that there were no were paedophile priests abusing children in their care ( most schools in Ireland were run by the Church) or that complaints to the church about this were met with " denial" or that demands for whiste blowers to swear to secrecy never happened . We rejected the possibility that complaints to the police about priests were met with hostility and " denial". we closed our eyes to the activities that politicians and local government officials were busily engaged in in the subversion of the planning laws for the purposes of private enrichment. Although we knew it was happening we might have a need or an opportunity to emulate them some day.
Now we believe that the illegal laws that allow our state to subsidise wind power "carpetbaggers" are justify\iable because the "authorities" now tell us that this is needed to save the planet.
We allow people like Prof Sweeney , whose generous salary we pay, to tell us that we must repent and mend our ways so as to save the world from a hypothesis which predicts mild degree of warming and that we must not question the possibility that the hypothesis is wrong or that the projected consequences of it being correct may be exaggerated or miscast .
Where was he when we were told that all is well with the Church, that there were no sexually errant priests, that all our politicians and property developers were incorruptible saints, and that our banks were well capitalised and sound?
In Ireland are we tolerate an astonishing degree of Cognitive Dissonance have an amazing propensity to fall in line with dangerous, damaging rubbish that we know to be untrue but when the truth come out to we simply get a retired judge or politician to admit to the facts long after anyone can be held accountable for their actions.
Prof Sweeney is merely the Climate Change version of the Holy Church, the saintly Priest, the local hero politician, the well informed financial regulator, the " cute hoor" property or wind farm developer .
Happy St Patrick's Day.
Glebekinvara
Regrettably the Irish are not unique. The English, Scots, and Welsh have fallen for the same con-tricks all the way along the line though the relatively minor influence of the Catholic Church this side of the water has kept that particular aspect at a slightly less traumatic level than it might have been.
Looking round the world I find that the disease appears in its most virulent form in the Anglosphere which led me to comment on the Kickoff at Airth thread that it might all have some link to post-Imperial guilt or the White Man's Burden, hence the need to "set an example" to the rest of the world.
It is amazing how the climate charlatans are shown up what they are nothing but a bunch of maverick tossers who know as much about climate as my rear end knows about duck shooting
And we sure have our own climate change chancers such as the one in Maynooth Univ who is wheeled out by RTE to pontificate CC bulls shit to a gullible public
I challenged Sweeney once at a public meeting a few years ago. He just accepts IPCC temperature predictions and constructs models to examine likely local effects if global increase occurs. He claims to have no idea of overall global warming science. Ray Bates, a meterologist, is much better but at the same public meeting he lambasted the hockey stick and it's defenders and I have not heard him publicly on topic since. I am not sure of his current views.
Not sure about the Prime Time programme. This posting is the first I have heard of it so I suspect they are not looking very hard for sceptic voices. There are plenty of green mob rent-a-crowd who are more likely to get an airing on public broadcaster, RTE. While An Taisce may not be officially represented I am sure enough of their members or fellow travelers will show up. An Taisce usually concentrates its efforts on trying to prevent house building in the countryside. Surprisingly quiet about windmills, though.
Benny Peiser made a good showing tonight depsite the wind weasel interrupting him.
Some interesting facts on China here
http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=CH
EU is completely dependent on China , if the EU made its own products rather than importing them from China and India, then EU would have as high or higher emissions.
That's up now, I think it's available globally, GW segment starts at 13:30 Prime Time 18/3/14.
Individual segments of the programme (two segments for the climate change item) can also be found at Prime Time segments. Saves effort skipping to the item if these are also available globally, as I believe the full programme is via the RTE Player.
In an introductory interview to the panel discussion a "Climate Scientist" said that CO2 remained in the atmosphere for "thousands of years" - he did not mention half life or anything like that. If he is right it suggests that reducing growth of emissions ( never mind absolute emission amounts) has no chance whatsoever of containing modelled temperature rises in less than several centuries. Can anyone elaborate on this?
A chap from the Irish Met Service said atmospheric water vapour content had gone up 3% as a result of a 1 deg C rise in temperature in the 20th Century and admitted this could not be blamed for rainfall in ( parts of) Ireland being 200% of the average for the relevant months. This did not stop other panellists from blaming REDUCED rainfall on "Climate Change". I saw a graph on the Climate 4U website of NOAA data for specific humidity ( 300 mb only) which showed that from 1995 up to and including 2010 that it had fallen from 0.205 to 0.175 ie 15%.
Several panellists connected to flooding on the west coast with "climate change" without any mention of the unusually high tides in January not to mention low atmospheric pressure and high waves - which actually caused the coastal flooding and some of the river flooding( eg in tidal reaches of the Corrib and Lee). Of course there has been a lot of inland flooding - where I live in south Galway it is comparable but somewhat less than what we happened in 1995 and 2009.
Benny Peiser tried to inject some sense of reality about how unlikely CO2 emissions being reduced on a global basis was, so some program of adaptation would be the best approach but he was more or less shouted down by the "Faithful"
As a Paleontologist who has a good working knowledge of Paleoclimatology I am amazed that so many apparently intelligent people seem to believe that mankind is in control of the Ocean/Atmosphere/biosphere systyem and think the global atmospheric temperature can be manipulated by building wind turbines and installing solar panels ( most of which are in places that have not much sunshine!)
@ Glebekinvara,
The AGW faithful cannot debate, they seem to only be able to shout down the opposition. And since our political class is getting enriched so nicely by the spreading of juicy tidbits of tax money to build up the AGW policy industry of 'studies', windmills, ethanol and endless conferences, there is no incenitive beyond ethical hopes for them to stop the AGW madness. And relying on the modern era's political class to do anything based on arm's length ethics is a slim to none hope.
Have there been public debates between Holocaust deniers and supporters of the concensus? Did such debates hurt the cause of histirical accuracy?