Hilary,

I suggest E17 starts a new thread with the same posting, as this one has become completely muddled because of BB's contributions.

Martin, you're right... but just sometimes, having had to read so many of his thread distractions, biting my tongue becomes to painful.

E17 began this thread with the proposition that PR might be used to promote the 'sceptic' case. This he suggested would require that 'sceptics' were whiter-than-white. I countered that to be whiter-than-white, 'sceptics' must be honest with their audience and with themselves. We have discussed two areas where such honesty is lacking, both of which relate to the 'sceptic' relationship with the fossil fuel (FF) industries (FFI).

'Sceptics' maintain that FF are fundamental to western and indeed world economic prosperity and resist any attempt to reduce their use. FF industries likewise have an interest in maintaining their dominant position in energy supply. These two groups therefore have a common interests and common goals. Yet 'sceptics' seem to deny that FFI aids the 'sceptic' case, for example by funding politicians and think-tanks who seek to discredit or de-legitimise climate science and scientists. This denial of what seems self-evident is of questionable veracity and the unwillingness to make common cause with an apparent ally, FFI, while all the time claiming that FF are central to western well-being, is contradictory.

'Sceptics' also maintain that renewable energies are flawed, that they are expensive and unreliable and that they threaten western economies with decay and destruction. They are full of estimates for the cost of renewables and yet they are strangely uninterested in the real costs of FF. The external costs, such as oppression and environmental destruction to name just two, are set at zero. The standards of living and health in western societies are, so they say, the result of FF; and that standard of living is a complete justification for any and all externalities, however grievous, that may occur or may have occurred.

That 'sceptic' are not prepared even to acknowledge that FF have significant physical and moral costs over and above their price per barrel is remarkable**. That there are 'sceptics' who consider themselves socialists who maintain this silence is equally surprising. That they can all maintain that renewables are ruinously costly while making these unequal comparisons is highly disingenuous.

So, in conclusion it is clear to me that any desire by 'sceptics' to be whiter-than-white falls at the first hurdle of being able to be honest with themselves and with the public.

** - Beyond the mealy-mouthed, "everything has externalities" (not a direct quote)

BB, the position you represent of the sceptics is your bogey man.

I know it is easier to pigeon hole, but really you are playing "whack-a-sceptic". Hit one you think with your rhetoric, but in reality another pops up.

Pigeon-holing will not work.

The record for a discussion topic is 600+. If I thought we could get close I might engage.

Rather than think of us as one super-bogey-man, think of us as zombies. Each requiring a different tactic to despatch. Difficult to kill-off, and very persistent, and if you are not careful you end up getting infected. ;-)

JC from zombieland

Jiminy, I see the discussion skills of an adolescent and am convinced we're dealing with one. There's no substance at all, no considered argument, and not the remotest sign that there is an understanding of the subject at hand. Just someone who wants to provoke because (like all adolescents) they think they're at the top of their game. I've always said that it is Nature's joke on humans that at the point in our lives we know absolutely nothing we believe we know everything.

I know, it's time to stop feeding the mad troll but I'm sorry I've got to ask

BB "I already said it would be a good idea to keep a stock of coal and some coal stations as an emergency backup."

Backup for what? Christmas? A royal wedding? The second coming?

Backup for what? Christmas? A royal wedding? The second coming?

Influx of 50 million climate refugees.

LOL @Big Oil

I have two visions. One of a silent, ghostly power station with coffin shaped boxes here and there. Closer inspection of one shows a label ‘shift engineer, break seal in case of emergencies DO NOT REFREEZE.’ The alternative is a gas and a coal station side by side and a big siren rings and all the staff run from the gas station to the coal one.

Ok to get back to the real subject of this discussion. Sceptics PR. What can you say?

Science or logic or cost is unimportant in the AGW debate because it’s like a hydra. Cut off one head and six more grow back in its place. Attack the cost and they say the science makes it essential we act at any price. Tackle the science head and up pops the Precautionary Principle beast. Attack that and you don’t care about children or polar bears. Talk about the solutions and they cling to the belief that renewables are fine, despite the evidence to contrary. Or alternatively they admit that the renewables are flawed but assure us that they’re like computers and the more we have the better they’ll become. Talk about power cuts and they seem to think the resultant black out would be good for us as it would take us away from our evil gadgets and out into the fresh air. As if the most important thing people do with electricity is power toys or that businesses can be turned on and off like laptops. Never mind when the wind doesn’t blow, just run the country on batteries charged by wind power.

If you haven’t measured the cost of cutting CO2 (and the cost is far more than money) then it will always be less than the worst case scenario of global warming.

Even if warmists considered the cost of dramatically reducing CO2, there’s a problem, they’re wedded to the idea that CO2 is something other people are responsible for. CO2 is not something self inflicted but something Big Oil/ Business/ Government/ USA are forcing on us. Those b@stards! Warmists play on the fundamental feeling which most people have, that they are being badly done by. Oil companies are an easy target because oil is expensive, they have genuinely polluted with oil spills, even while making obscene profits. But they didn’t emit the CO2 from the oil combusted, we did. Blasphemy! It’s an irony that by making oil so expensive those greedy drillers and retailers have forced us to use less of it.

We have always had an uncomfortable relationship with fossil fuels. We feel that they are inherently evil because they are dark, dirty, poisonous but at the same time they have allowed us to clean our lives up beyond the imaginings of even a hundred years ago. Few people have reservations about diamonds, despite a total lack of life saving qualities and the often dubious history of that type of carbon. Talk about being judged by appearances. Look at solar panels, oh how they glisten and the tall graceful lines of a wind turbine are far more elegant than a boxy grey power station and its Rubenesque cooling towers.

BB and his ilk are modern exponents of the ‘let them eat cake’ principle. On the surface their ideas seem very palatable but the reality is a route to certain hardship. It is their privileged position within a fossil fuelled society that allows them to be so cavalier with our energy supplies. In their world a little darkness is solved with a scented candle, a blackout is fixed by turning on a few emergency coal fired power stations. LOL. If you don’t understand the importance of our energy infrastructure, why would you worry about scrapping it for something new and shiny? If you can save the World at the same time, what's not to like?

TinyCO2,

"Science or logic or cost is unimportant in the AGW debate because it’s like a hydra. Cut off one head and six more grow back in its place.".

===========================

Science, logic and cost are not unimportant either. Their importance is put in the background at the height of a scare or a fad. Much of what we've seen in CAGW is a scare. There's also an aspect of religion in that a small core of true believers will stick with it no matter what.

Another effect is that people generally accept taxes and other impositions once they are in place, especially motivated by a scare and if they are introduced gradually. However, there's a limit to this, and people snap.

There are attempts to revitalise the scare and to shift the goal posts to biodiversity or energy security, but it's not working. The hydra's heads are weak and don't have many teeth.

To get back to the topic of sceptic PR, the CAGW scare was promioted by groups with good PR seeking to find a new reason to justify their existence. They got this installed as the mainstream establishment view and there was no shortage of PR, especially when governments came on board. It became the thing to latch onto and you weren't going to get far if you didn't latch onto it.

Scepticism to CAGW was a much more spontaneous and diverse. If it finds an organised, political voice in the UK it's UKIP. There are other centres, blogs such as BH and Delingpole. Newspapers are gradually coming round, publishing articles critical of CAGW. What's driving it is that people are tired of the scare, fed up with the costs and the scary predictions are not coming true.

I don't see how you systematically unite scepticism into a PR campaign. The scare didn't come about from a single PR campaign, it was a number of organisations with good PR gradually coming together in a common cause.

"Someone who is crap at argument will present a caricature of their opponent's views, ridicule the caricature and then blithely believe they have won a great victory."

An adolescent's trick... I think I'm going to check on posting times to see if they're outside school hours.

geronimo -" ....outside school hours."

What would that tell you? It's probably done at the back of the geography lesson on an iphone.

Mike, I've real problems with Bitty, just a few weeks ago he (or is it "she"?) expressed surprise at a phrase (I've forgotten which), which was common parlance, and must have been heard by anyone over 10 years old. Then on this thread during his (or is it "her"?) ridiculous statement of sceptical opinion he(or is it "she"?) used the word "externalities" instead of the more usual words of "collateral damage". Maybe it's neither he, nor she, but "bot". Whatever it is there is a complete inability to put together arguments in a coherent fashion and what appears to be only a nodding acquaintance with English as spoken by adults.

Bit's a he. He once mentioned Mrs BB if I remember right.

BitBucket said...

"Put 10KW of solar cells on 4 million roofs and suddenly you've got too much power on a sunny day and there will be the need to store it. So storage will be built. "

Except there's no exisitng technology to store it, so right now this is fantasy.

And the only reason solar is cheaper than fossil is the massive subsidy it gets. It would probably bankrupt the country to put 10KW on 4 million roofs.

And what about the 6 months in the UK when the sun doesn't shine much.

_Think_ about it.

Nial (Engineer).

Nial unless you consider the real costs of fossil fuels, as opposed to the costs when all of the externalities (or "collateral damage", as Geronimo would like it**) have been set to zero, any assertion about relative price of solar is worthless (see earlier in the thread if you didn't follow the discussion). Germany has about 30 GW of solar installed and is not obviously bankrupt). Storage technology does exist (like pumped hydro) it just needs to be built.

** although both Geronimo and Mike Jackson seem to know the meaning of externalities well enough to use it. Is it only when relates to fossil fuels that they have trouble?

Nial,

"And what about the 6 months in the UK when the sun doesn't shine much."

========================================

You just build a pumped storage facility at least half the size of Wales.

Easy see.

BB: "it just needs to be built." But where BB? Where? And for how much? (Including externalities of course)

BB

That 30 GW of solar in Germany is nameplate capacity. Given that the efficiency is only 10% all they get out of it is 3GW, approximately 4% of demand.

Cosmic wrote:

> You just build a pumped storage facility at least half the size of Wales.
> Easy see.

I know you're joking, but it's not that easy.

To be useful pumped storage you want a decent head of water, so you need an area the size of Wales that's at least a few 10's of meters higher than the power generation site.

AFAIUI the UK only has a couple of suitable sites left

We were lucky to have a week in Tenerife at Easter. It struck me how incessantly the sun beats down there, it was Easter but mid afternoon it was too hot for me to read under the direct sun. Taking off from the airport I noticed a solar panel power plant, this seemed a sensible idea given the environment.

Then we flew back to the drizzly UK at 5 deg C. :-(

Nial.

Nial