Yes, people are just people, regardless of wealth. My use of the sheep and wolf quote was not intended to claim that the wealthy were morally worse, but to highlight the fact that, in the presented scenario of the wealthy wanting to knock down the houses of slum residents and send the inhabitants elsewhere, they never seem to consider why the inhabitants are living in the slums, or where they could go instead, and are then surprised when the slum reappears overnight. Getting people out of the slums is a worthwhile goal if it betters their lives, but destroying people's homes because you don't want to live near them, and at the same time offering no solution to those people that makes their situation better, is not only morally questionable, but also ultimately doomed to fail.
You can't extrapolate a data point from a single racially segregated and politically isolated country to the rest of the world. Did you read the second article from the summary? It makes the point that every major economic center in the world was once a slum, and expanded over time, pushing the slums away from the center, until they became the cities that we now know.
Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally... These people aren't comfortable
And yet, they are more comfortable than they would be given the other lifestyle options that are available to them.
the draw-in into the cities is causing the rural india to collapse, the two-bit farmer who grew his own grain & sold his veggies during the rains is gone
Because subsistence farming is not that great, and his sons wanted a better life and moved to the city?
Don't compare the slums to a western standard of living. Compare them to the other options that these people have available to them. The slum prostitute choosing to service ten men a day doesn't do it because she likes the job, she does it because the alternative is worse.
Why do all people living in the slum leave it at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it?
Of course they do, nobody is arguing that is not the case. But the opposite question also points out a truth - why do countryside dwellers move into the city slums at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it? From TFA:
"Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."
Cities encourage growth. The slums are a hive of economic activity, providing jobs, income, and increased standard of living. Not for you or I, but for the tens of millions of people in the third world who made the choice to move from the countryside to the city.
Why do all people living outside the slum vote to demolish these settlements as soon as a political opportunity opens up?
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch". Middle and upper class residents don't want to live next to the lower classes. So where should the lower classes live?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do they have no sewage system, not even septic tanks? If it is ecological wonderland, why do people die of disease, crime and poverty there?
TFA is discussing slums in third world nations and contrasting them with the countryside in those nations. Villages in the countryside in India and China generally do not have sewage systems. People also die of disease, crime and poverty in the countryside. Cities "promote new forms of income generation" - i.e. people move to cities because there are jobs and an opportunity to earn more than living in the countryside. In the third world (and even sometimes in the first), people do die of disease, crime and poverty, regardless of whether they live in a city slum or countryside. The comparison point here is not Vienna to a Mumbai slum - it is the Mumbai slum to the Maharashtra countryside that surrounds it.
"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."
does it tell us something about the slum, - or does it rather tell us something about The Greens that rave and dream about living in a human-made hellhole?
You are talking about Dark Greens and trying to ascribe their views to the rest of society. The Green Party takes about 10% of the vote in German, but I can assure you that they do not aim to turn Germany into a "hellhole".
I always suspected the Ecological Stalinists want us to go back into the caves.
Again you project your fears about Dark Greens onto anyone who shows any concern for the environment.
Maybe you should consider some Libertarian benefits of the slums:
Dynamic and growing economy with practically no oversight, regulation or taxation by government
Entrepreneurs generally use private security in preference to the (somewhat corrupt) police
Correction: It does not mean "nonpeer-reviewed science". Science, by definition, is peer-reviewed. There is no such thing as "nonpeer-reviewed science".
so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports.
The summary is incorrect. Gray literature refers to "a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels". It does mean "nonpeer-reviewed science". As the poster I quoted said "WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do."
Checking your writeup against your sources and verifying those sources is something even Wikipedia enforces.
The standards of inclusion in the IPCC reports are much higher than Wikipedia. There are no non-peer reviewed articles quoted in the IPCC science report. However, the other reports are not limited to peer reviewed journals, but can instead use "Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
I'm doubly suspicious when it takes the people derided as 'deniers' to find the errors
you must realize that 10 years doesn't mean anything in this debate
Then you don't understand statistics. 10 years can mean something in this debate, if the data showed statistically significant changes over that period.
the AGW side wants non-peer-reviewed science to be counted on their side
No they don't. The best response to this meme I've read to this is here:
Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.
In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
(I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.
WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).
Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.
Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.
Phil Jones has admitted that there has been no global warming since 1995.
No, he didn't. What he said was that the data since 1995, taken over only that period, showed no warming at some given significance level. The "no warming since 1995" meme is the same as the already discredited global warming stopped in 1998 meme.
The CRU was massaging the data to show warming that wasn't there. NASA was cherry picking data from urban heat islands to show warming that wasn't there.
A lot of skeptics are not denying we're seeing a long time warming
Quantify "a lot" - one of the main sceptic arguments is that there is no warming - the supposed evidence being that the instrumental temperature record is wrong (ie. SurfaceStations.org) and that the CRU dataset has been faked to show an increase when the mean temperature has either not changed or is falling. Given the prevalence of these beliefs in the sceptic community, the ones who accept that the world is warming are probably in a minority.
calling those of us who have some skepticism "deniers" doesn't do you any favours.
And yet, calling people global warming alarmists and warmists is fine...... regardless, what would you prefer to be called? Calling someone who denies global warming theory a "global warming denier" seems to be somewhat logical - rather more intellectually honest than those who would then immediately "Godwin" any further discussion by pretending that they have been called a Nazi. Does denying that the world is flat make you a Nazi? No. Does denying that the moon landings have occurred make you a Nazi? No. So why is it that only global warming deniers immediately leap to the conclusion that they are being likened to those who deny the Holocaust? This is not the behaviour of reasonable debaters.
Scientists see results in their studies that they are looking for.... This study is pretty bad
Interesting. You came to this article with a preconceived belief that scientists are idiots and/or self-deceiving, and then you applied that belief to the scientists in question without properly evaluating their research - I assume you haven't bothered to read any of the peer-reviewed journal published papers from this research group, and are just relying on a few quotes from the media and a Slashdot summary to confirm your predetermined bias?
The main modus of debate of AGW proponents from day one has been moralistic, not empirical.
Really? Svante Arrhenius was just being moralistic when, in 1896, he predicted that the release of CO2 into the atmosphere by human activities would cause warming? The experiments and measurements of CO2 by Langley and Högbom in the 1800s were not empirical, but driven by morality?
The problem is that over the past 20 years the understanding has evolved that there is a "correct" result
Like evolution?
By contrast, there are respected scientists in every other field attempting to disprove established theories
Like evolution?
Some people will believe whatever they want to believe. There is no serious scientific movement attempting to discredit evolution. Likewise, there is no serious scientific movement attempting to discredit global warming. However, there are plenty of unscientific movements seeking to discredit both evolution and global warming.
Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change".
The shift was a result of people not understanding that the term "global warming" referred to the mean global termperature. The media, and Joe Sixpack, did not understand that this meant some regions could still cool, and hence the meme that any cooling disproves global warming was born.
It's interesting to note that none of what you said is true. In fact, the "No Warming" believers have more in common with creationists:
Believe that there is a vast scientific conspiracy against them
Believe that there is a vast political conspiracy against them
Are led by a small number of disciples (Watts, McIntyre etc.) who proclaim that they know the truth and the rest of the world is wrong
Refuse to accept any alternative to their position regardless of how rational it is
Dismiss evidence (ice cores, shortened winters, instrumental temperature data etc.) out of hand if it doesn't fit their view of the world
Repeat confused and illogical ideas that have been repeatedly debunked ("but it's cold outside", "but they can't predict the weather!", "it's the sun, dummy!", "mars and pluto are warming too!", "there is no warming", "there is warming but we have no idea why", "it's Milankovitch cycles", "the co2 molecule has never been shown to trap heat", "the ice cores data is faked", "they don't account for badly sited temperature measuring stations", "they fix the numbers by accounting for poor temperature measuring stations", etc.)
Scenario 1: The owner and landlord of the market invites all traders to come and sell goods in his market. However, he also owns a fish store. When a trader selling fish turns up, he refuses to let this trader into the market place. The other traders become worried that, someday, the owner and landlord of the market may stop them from trading on the market, too.
Scenario 2: A trader on the market sells a new type of hot dog. This hot dog is particularly tasty and quickly becomes popular. The owner and landlord of a different market notices this, buys the hot dog trader's business, and relocates it over to his market place.
These two scenarios are not the same. In scenario 1, the owner of the market has a conflict of interest between his landlord activities, and his other business activities. He is imposing a statist solution on the customers to his market, where competitors to his other business interests are refused access to the market. As a result, there is less competition, and customers lose out. In scenario 2, a company bought another company (which is okay), and then chose to sell the products of that company in its own market place. The actions of the market owner in this scenario have not reduced choice or imposed restrictions on the customers or traders of the market place, because the other food vendors are still free to make yummy hot dogs. Free and equal competition has been maintained, which is a good thing for capitalism and freedom (note that this would be different if the market owner were in a monopoly position - in which case, acquiring other companies and restricting their products to one particular market would reduce customer choice, as the customer of a monopolist has no realistic option of buying in an alternative market place).
Freeman Dyson makes some interesting points against climate change
Freeman Dyson is not the sceptic you think he is. He actually accepts AGW, and once wrote in an essay on the topic: "One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas"
the climatologist nonsense you link stating that solar output is constant and has been since the 1970s is laughable.
The data on solar output comes from solar physicists, not climatologists. Are solar physicists not "real scientists" now that their data disagrees with your opinion?
CO2 is a minor contributor to atmospheric greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor.
Water vapour! I wonder why the scientists didn't think of that? Oh - they already did - "A simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder."
"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.
Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that, which is why they actually say things like:
The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).
Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.
The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".
More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians...
True
devout?
The Christian God is a being of terrific character- cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust
-Thomas Jefferson
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone upon man
-Thomas Jefferson
During fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been it its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolences in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution
-James Madison
Lighthouses are more useful than churches
-Benjamin Franklin
This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it
-John Adams
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how it has happened that millions of fables, tales, legends have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, people are just people, regardless of wealth. My use of the sheep and wolf quote was not intended to claim that the wealthy were morally worse, but to highlight the fact that, in the presented scenario of the wealthy wanting to knock down the houses of slum residents and send the inhabitants elsewhere, they never seem to consider why the inhabitants are living in the slums, or where they could go instead, and are then surprised when the slum reappears overnight. Getting people out of the slums is a worthwhile goal if it betters their lives, but destroying people's homes because you don't want to live near them, and at the same time offering no solution to those people that makes their situation better, is not only morally questionable, but also ultimately doomed to fail.
You can't extrapolate a data point from a single racially segregated and politically isolated country to the rest of the world. Did you read the second article from the summary? It makes the point that every major economic center in the world was once a slum, and expanded over time, pushing the slums away from the center, until they became the cities that we now know.
Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally... These people aren't comfortable
And yet, they are more comfortable than they would be given the other lifestyle options that are available to them.
the draw-in into the cities is causing the rural india to collapse, the two-bit farmer who grew his own grain & sold his veggies during the rains is gone
Because subsistence farming is not that great, and his sons wanted a better life and moved to the city?
Don't compare the slums to a western standard of living. Compare them to the other options that these people have available to them. The slum prostitute choosing to service ten men a day doesn't do it because she likes the job, she does it because the alternative is worse.
You are missing the point.
Why do all people living in the slum leave it at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it?
Of course they do, nobody is arguing that is not the case. But the opposite question also points out a truth - why do countryside dwellers move into the city slums at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it? From TFA:
"Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."
Cities encourage growth. The slums are a hive of economic activity, providing jobs, income, and increased standard of living. Not for you or I, but for the tens of millions of people in the third world who made the choice to move from the countryside to the city.
Why do all people living outside the slum vote to demolish these settlements as soon as a political opportunity opens up?
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch". Middle and upper class residents don't want to live next to the lower classes. So where should the lower classes live?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do they have no sewage system, not even septic tanks?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do people die of disease, crime and poverty there?
TFA is discussing slums in third world nations and contrasting them with the countryside in those nations. Villages in the countryside in India and China generally do not have sewage systems. People also die of disease, crime and poverty in the countryside. Cities "promote new forms of income generation" - i.e. people move to cities because there are jobs and an opportunity to earn more than living in the countryside. In the third world (and even sometimes in the first), people do die of disease, crime and poverty, regardless of whether they live in a city slum or countryside. The comparison point here is not Vienna to a Mumbai slum - it is the Mumbai slum to the Maharashtra countryside that surrounds it.
Crime - Is the crime actually bad in comparison to, say, an American city? Here's a re-print of a newspaper editorial from The Harvard Crimson - Urban Poverty and Crime: Contrasting Boston and Mumbai, India:
"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."
does it tell us something about the slum, - or does it rather tell us something about The Greens that rave and dream about living in a human-made hellhole?
You are talking about Dark Greens and trying to ascribe their views to the rest of society. The Green Party takes about 10% of the vote in German, but I can assure you that they do not aim to turn Germany into a "hellhole".
I always suspected the Ecological Stalinists want us to go back into the caves.
Again you project your fears about Dark Greens onto anyone who shows any concern for the environment.
Maybe you should consider some Libertarian benefits of the slums:
Correction: It does not mean "nonpeer-reviewed science". Science, by definition, is peer-reviewed. There is no such thing as "nonpeer-reviewed science".
so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports.
The summary is incorrect. Gray literature refers to "a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels". It does mean "nonpeer-reviewed science". As the poster I quoted said "WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do."
Checking your writeup against your sources and verifying those sources is something even Wikipedia enforces.
The standards of inclusion in the IPCC reports are much higher than Wikipedia. There are no non-peer reviewed articles quoted in the IPCC science report. However, the other reports are not limited to peer reviewed journals, but can instead use "Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
I'm doubly suspicious when it takes the people derided as 'deniers' to find the errors
Not true. The Himalayas mistake was mainly discovered by J. Graham Cogley, professor of geography at Trent University, who has said "I don't think it ought to affect the credibility of the edifice as a whole".
Um, so those are the only two errors or just a couple that were really obvious?
If the errors were really so obvious, then why did it take two years for anyone to notice them?
you must realize that 10 years doesn't mean anything in this debate
Then you don't understand statistics. 10 years can mean something in this debate, if the data showed statistically significant changes over that period.
the AGW side wants non-peer-reviewed science to be counted on their side
No they don't. The best response to this meme I've read to this is here:
Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.
In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
(I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.
WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).
Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.
Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.
Phil Jones has admitted that there has been no global warming since 1995.
No, he didn't. What he said was that the data since 1995, taken over only that period, showed no warming at some given significance level. The "no warming since 1995" meme is the same as the already discredited global warming stopped in 1998 meme.
The CRU was massaging the data to show warming that wasn't there. NASA was cherry picking data from urban heat islands to show warming that wasn't there.
Yes, yes, It's all a conspiracy.
A lot of skeptics are not denying we're seeing a long time warming
Quantify "a lot" - one of the main sceptic arguments is that there is no warming - the supposed evidence being that the instrumental temperature record is wrong (ie. SurfaceStations.org) and that the CRU dataset has been faked to show an increase when the mean temperature has either not changed or is falling. Given the prevalence of these beliefs in the sceptic community, the ones who accept that the world is warming are probably in a minority.
The sun is the primary source of the far strongest greenhouse gas.. water vapor.
The sun does not emit water vapour. You probably meant to repeat Climate myths: CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas and Climate myths: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans.
calling those of us who have some skepticism "deniers" doesn't do you any favours.
And yet, calling people global warming alarmists and warmists is fine... ... regardless, what would you prefer to be called? Calling someone who denies global warming theory a "global warming denier" seems to be somewhat logical - rather more intellectually honest than those who would then immediately "Godwin" any further discussion by pretending that they have been called a Nazi. Does denying that the world is flat make you a Nazi? No. Does denying that the moon landings have occurred make you a Nazi? No. So why is it that only global warming deniers immediately leap to the conclusion that they are being likened to those who deny the Holocaust? This is not the behaviour of reasonable debaters.
Scientists see results in their studies that they are looking for.... This study is pretty bad
Interesting. You came to this article with a preconceived belief that scientists are idiots and/or self-deceiving, and then you applied that belief to the scientists in question without properly evaluating their research - I assume you haven't bothered to read any of the peer-reviewed journal published papers from this research group, and are just relying on a few quotes from the media and a Slashdot summary to confirm your predetermined bias?
The main modus of debate of AGW proponents from day one has been moralistic, not empirical.
Really? Svante Arrhenius was just being moralistic when, in 1896, he predicted that the release of CO2 into the atmosphere by human activities would cause warming? The experiments and measurements of CO2 by Langley and Högbom in the 1800s were not empirical, but driven by morality?
"can Friel read"? Perhaps we can set up a literacy fund to help the good man get some remedial ed?
If he is as illiterate as you suggest, why would Yale University be publishing his book? Are they part of the conspiracy too?
The problem is that over the past 20 years the understanding has evolved that there is a "correct" result
Like evolution?
By contrast, there are respected scientists in every other field attempting to disprove established theories
Like evolution?
Some people will believe whatever they want to believe. There is no serious scientific movement attempting to discredit evolution. Likewise, there is no serious scientific movement attempting to discredit global warming. However, there are plenty of unscientific movements seeking to discredit both evolution and global warming.
Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change".
The shift was a result of people not understanding that the term "global warming" referred to the mean global termperature. The media, and Joe Sixpack, did not understand that this meant some regions could still cool, and hence the meme that any cooling disproves global warming was born.
The recent cooling is just weather.
By recent cooling, do you mean Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998? Or is this another "they can't predict the weather so how can they predict the climate" post? Regardless, these arguments have already been debunked: What's the Difference Between Weather and Climate? and Climate myths: Chaotic systems are not predictable.
It's interesting to note that none of what you said is true. In fact, the "No Warming" believers have more in common with creationists:
Imagine a small town market place.
Scenario 1: The owner and landlord of the market invites all traders to come and sell goods in his market. However, he also owns a fish store. When a trader selling fish turns up, he refuses to let this trader into the market place. The other traders become worried that, someday, the owner and landlord of the market may stop them from trading on the market, too.
Scenario 2: A trader on the market sells a new type of hot dog. This hot dog is particularly tasty and quickly becomes popular. The owner and landlord of a different market notices this, buys the hot dog trader's business, and relocates it over to his market place.
These two scenarios are not the same. In scenario 1, the owner of the market has a conflict of interest between his landlord activities, and his other business activities. He is imposing a statist solution on the customers to his market, where competitors to his other business interests are refused access to the market. As a result, there is less competition, and customers lose out. In scenario 2, a company bought another company (which is okay), and then chose to sell the products of that company in its own market place. The actions of the market owner in this scenario have not reduced choice or imposed restrictions on the customers or traders of the market place, because the other food vendors are still free to make yummy hot dogs. Free and equal competition has been maintained, which is a good thing for capitalism and freedom (note that this would be different if the market owner were in a monopoly position - in which case, acquiring other companies and restricting their products to one particular market would reduce customer choice, as the customer of a monopolist has no realistic option of buying in an alternative market place).
The price is comparable with similar home broadband+laptop deals.
Freeman Dyson makes some interesting points against climate change
Freeman Dyson is not the sceptic you think he is. He actually accepts AGW, and once wrote in an essay on the topic: "One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas"
the climatologist nonsense you link stating that solar output is constant and has been since the 1970s is laughable.
The data on solar output comes from solar physicists, not climatologists. Are solar physicists not "real scientists" now that their data disagrees with your opinion?
CO2 is a minor contributor to atmospheric greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor.
Water vapour! I wonder why the scientists didn't think of that? Oh - they already did - "A simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder."
"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.
Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that, which is why they actually say things like:
The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).
Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
Scientists are also smart enough to understand that there will be regional differences in climate change effects ("Prediction of the detailed regional distribution of climatic anomalies, where and when it will be wetter and drier, how many more floods might occur in the spring in California or forest fires in Siberia in August, is simply highly speculative."), which is why regional cooling does not disprove global warming.
Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.
The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".
More elementally, they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians ...
True
devout?
The Christian God is a being of terrific character- cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust
-Thomas Jefferson
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone upon man
-Thomas Jefferson
During fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been it its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolences in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution
-James Madison
Lighthouses are more useful than churches
-Benjamin Franklin
This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it
-John Adams
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how it has happened that millions of fables, tales, legends have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed
-John Adams