Verbal

You! Back to your dark room! Now!

No I'm really not.

Okay God. Sorry.

Phil, I know I've been hard on you - but put down the bottle! This is all over the place. I'm trying to sort out your 'one line of code' stuff (unspecified) from your claim that the UK has the highest per capita carbon footprint (actually it's Qatar, with - guess what? - UAE in third place!).

Was I talking to you? Was I?

Oh, Im sorry. When you said 'engineer' I didn't realise you meant 'The Great Engineer', aka God. So my humblest apologies. But I don't need to give them do, I, because you are all-seeing. And I only thought 'dumbass' - such impure thoughts - when I read your earlier posts; I didn't actually write it - so will you forgive me?

Well, you took your sweet time. Slow google connection? First things first, I think we can both agree that the WSJ article is about as authoritative as anything written on here...or maybe a bit less. The author, according to his own blurb accompanying that piece, won a prize, you know! (For creative writing). Freeman Dyson is another kettle of fish - being as he is the eminence gris (really, I thought he was dead) of modern 'out there' scientific thinking. He is probably best-known for his musings about our imminent lives on other colonised, 'terrafirmed' planets. And such. What he says is interesting and challenging - he is, after all, good at that; it's what he does and has done all his life. He lambasts Al Gore (not a scientist but a politician) and James Hansen for said 'lousy' science. Hansen, unlike Gore, is one of the big gorillas of climate change science. He was among the first to warn of the onset of global warming in 1988 (Whitey Grandad was probably there but sleeping at the time because as he just said, he 'didn't notice'). Steven Weinberg - actually a more eminent scientist, in the sense that he is famous for actually discovering something and getting, unlike Dyson, a Nobel for it (and someone, to namedrop, I've met) - has an interesting comment: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.” In other words, any consensus is like a red rag to a bull with FD. It doesn't mean the consensus is wrong. Contrarians like Dyson have their place, certainly. But his charges are asked and answered, even within the confines of that oh-so-long NYT piece. So humble apologies not accepted Phil. Try or grovel harder. Happy Christmas!

Being an engineer.

Third post, eh? In which case... Not another 'where there's muck there's brass', 'I'll ave-a-go' entrepreneur whose self-pulled bootstraps are strained to breaking point! There are so many on here! And I believe every word. The point I was making about the private health system is that it's a one-way street. They **** up - the NHS fixes it. The NHS ****s up, the privates do not fix it.

I'm hurt. Now go away and try to THINK. Then we can have a sensible debate.

Stop doing a Phil and answer the question, grandad. I want to know how you're qualified to determine the 'simplistic' sciences you've complaining about. Being an engineer doesn't cut it. Quote an informed, peer-reviewed critique, then your claim might be a bit more credible.

Not a proper one, no. Pretend, wannabe - you get the drift. Engineering, like,say, architecture, is dependent obviously on a number of sciences, like physics. But you're not a physicist - nor a climate scientist. So about that methodology problem...

I suppose I should give up trying to make sense of your posts. How can you both 'leave him alone' and get him 'more exposure'. Here's a suggestion: go away and sit in a dark room for a while. When you feel some synapses reconnecting (you'll hear the echo) come back and post something sensible. I wait in anticipation (or is that in vain?)

Not that old chestnut. Global cooling was a decidedly minority view among scientists at the time, but was amped up by Newsweek and others as the scare of the week. Global warming, on the other hand, has been around for donkey's years. I remember going to a research station in Spitzbergen, in the Norwegian Arctic, where long range temperature fluctuations were being measured by an international consortium of arctic research institutions (including the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge) This was in the late 1980s, and the global warming thesis was certainly taking hold then.

Like you, I don't have any. That's rather my point. Unless you quote actual scientists, publishing in respected journals, it's all a bit too easy and really quite crap to say that climate science is 'bad science'. So to repeat my question: what is it about the methodology of climate science that renders it 'bad'? Phil won't answer, so maybe you will. As you see, I am ever hopeful.

Exactly. The signs of a stitch up here, in favour yet again of the Murdoch mafia, are painfully obvious.

And it's terrible when that happens. But how did the private system help?

And your scientific qualifications for such a pronouncement on high are? Please give examples from reputable journals

Again, this avoids addressing the issue. You were claiming that 'bad science' was intrinsic to the methods themselves - because scientists didn't look at the overall, or take into account 'all the variables'. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works that I really want to know how you can define it as 'bad'.

And so much more besides. The NHS is often treated like a dumping ground by the private health 'system' when they commit yet another **** up. Of course the NHS is hardly invulnerable to botching things sometimes, but when did you last see a local hospital palming off its mistakes on BUPA?

I'm asking because I think Phil will eventually get around to a direct answer rather than tiptoeing round the fringes. If he were you (which no one should be, heaven forbid; you're 'unique'), I wouldn't bother.

Xbox. Easier to spell.

Phil. Science. Bad. Why?

What a dreadful thought. I think we're all agreed that that's what no one wants.

Answer the question!! Tell us how the methodology in climate science is 'bad'