The problem is, one side of the argument is disingenuous concerning their actual agenda and goals. "Climate change" is not about saving the earth or species of much else... it's about statism and global socialist statism at that.

Climate change and the various accommodating disasters, attributed and predicted, are simply the vehicle chosen to implement statism. It has evolved to for that purpose (global warming --> climate change) and will continue to do so as needed.

The greens are the "Party".
1) Governments must push the "truth" of the Party and nothing else. It goes without saying that government should surprises anything the Party does not acknowledge as "truth".

2) Government must implement ALL the policies the Party demands. It goes without saying that policies of others should be ignored or at least take a back seat.

3) Government must acquiesce all power to the Party; agreeing to obey it at all times and without question.

Sound like any Party or any ideology we've seen before?

In some ways, I think it's closer to fascist than socialist, Lynn. For example, their hatred of older people. (Probably because they know that older people have better bullshit meters than the young, so are far more likely to see through their ruses).

Probably because they know that older people have better bullshit meters than the young, so are far more likely to see through their ruses.

There does seem to be an exception to every rule though. :) This thread being a perfect example.

We have to protect our environment logically, not emotionally.

Right you are, Dino; we have to protect our environment. I'm sorry, I'll read that again:

We have to protect our environment. The environment for human beings. That's exactly one of the points I made in the article.

Neil - we are totally dependent on a complex ecosystem. It is resilient but is now being dramatically changed by our activities.
It is in our interests to respect and maintain the ecosystem that provides our very existence.
Nature is worthy of respect and nurturing.

This planet is our home and our garden, Opher. It is our job to make it the best possible place for civilized human beings. If that means getting rid of the weeds in order to let the flowers grow - not to mention getting rid of smallpox viruses and the like in order to improve the health of human beings - then so be it.

Who says "it is our job to make it the best possible place for civilized human beings"?! This homo-centric view of the ecosphere is a large part of the dire situation we're in. One man's flower is another species' weed; and if you think that it is only human concerns that deserve expression in the biosphere, you are merely an extremist of a different kind.

Well we all know what kind of extremist you are. Ever hear of a fella named Darwin?

Yeah, he has a city in Australia named after him! And a rather large intellectual following...

Well, TreeParty, if you think I don't have any right to sort out the flowers from the weeds, then you certainly don't have any right to force your choices on to me.

But YOU are the one "forcing your choices on ME!!
You write: "It is our job to make it the best possible place for civilized human beings."
No, it isn't!! Duly noted that you failed to answer, who says that?! Who made YOU king?!?!
We certainly have a right to survive, and a right to try to make a "nice life" for ourselves; but we don't have a "right" to defile the biosphere in an orgy of consumption, and it would be a stupid and counterproductive course anyway. Even birds don't foul their own nests....
How do we avoid defiling the biosphere? We regulate our behavior to reduce our carbon footprint, on a global scale, for starters. That's only "forcing choices" in the sense that it is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. If you desire to continue to pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, at a minimum you should be taxed heavily for the privilege...

Hey TreeParty, I really enjoyed your foot-in-mouth! Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. Eh... what? If people agree, and keep to their agreements, they won't need to coerce each other.

Those that coerce others, deserve to be coerced into compensating those they coerced. No?

So you are still clueless about the Tragedy of the Commons, I see. Another statement of the Tragedy is that what is good for one can be bad for all; and what is bad for one can be good for all. Dunno if your mind can wrap itself around the competing imperatives there.. The cumulative effects of individual behaviors can be ruinous to the ecosystem; but if we are smart enough to regulate our behavior, we can avoid the environmental damage. And so if people agree to be constrained in their behavior as regards massive emissions of greenhouse gases, for example, the coercion is agreed to and is not objectionable. Of course there will always be scofflaws, flat-earth types who refuse to act as adults. Don't be that guy!

Spoken like a true zombie...

Neil - I'm all for making life better for us humans and I sure do think of this planet as our home and garden - and I'm also quite keen on eradicating those nasty diseases, but we share this world with many other wondrous forms of life and instead of treating them with cruelty and disdain we should treat them with the respect they deserve.
We are all part of the same ecosystem and we are dependent on it.
Life only formed once on this planet. We are all descended from that one incredible event. We have all evolved for exactly the same length of time. No species is superior to any other. There is an arrogance about believing that you have the right, or deserve, to choose to kill off other species. We are interlinked and dependent on them in a highly complex web that has taken billions of years to develop.
You do not seem to either understand or appreciate this complexity or our part in it.

If a mosquito bites me, should I swat it?

A thought on this point Neil, though I know it has been raise by myself and hundreds of others many thousands of times:
“human CO2 emissions cause catastrophic climate change"
Can any of th Warmageddonist 'experts' or 'scientists' explain how nature differentites

between CO2 emitted from human activity and CO2 emitted by natural phenomena such as photosynthesis, volcanic activity, termite farts (apparently the little buggers are always farting and as there are so many of them in a colony it adds up to a significant amount of CO2,) or decaying matter?
The only answers I have seen to this question have been along the lines of, "You're not a scientist so you're not capable of understanding the science."
To which I point out that science is an indefinite object thus 'the science' is ungrammatical.

"...The only answers I have seen to this question have been along the lines of, "You're not a scientist so you're not capable of understanding the science...."

To which I inevitably reply: Show me your scientific credentials.

Be careful Owl, every one of them has an awful lot of BS!

Yes indeed, termites do account for a significant proportion of world-wide CO2 emissions.

Oh, but I'd disagree with you on one thing. There is, of course, no difference at all between CO2 emitted from human activity and CO2 emitted by natural phenomena. That's because human activity is a natural phenomenon! When greenies moan that "we" and the things we do are un-natural, a blight on the planet or some other scold du jour, I tend to reply: "Yes, you're right. You are un-natural, or a blight on the planet (or whatever)."

I'm only repeating what I've been told Neil, and I pass it on in good faith as the people who told me this said they were scientists, a breed who cannot be wrong apparently. I'll have to break off there before my tongue gets permanently stuck in my cheek.

Ian - Duh!! Photosynthesis does not produce carbon dioxide. It actually takes it out of carbon dioxide out of the air. Respiration, combustion and decay put CO2 into the air.
Nature does not differentiate between the source of the CO2. The greenhouse effect is purely on the level of such gasses (there are a number of greenhouse gasses - CO2, Methane being two).
Nature - via respiration, decay, volcanoes and natural combustion - produces a level of CO2 and methane. This has been added to by human activity. The consequence is that CO2 levels and methane has risen creating a warming effect.
This is a very small amount but sufficient to create a number of big responses - sea level rises, climate changes, extreme weather patterns.
It really doesn't take a great deal to produce profound effects.
Whereas in the past when climate change, produced by changes in solar output or volcanic activity, resulted in ice-ages or tropical ages, mankind was either not around or in our early nomadic stage and could move and adapt, nowadays our sheer numbers, cities and agricultural land make this changes catastrophic.

Yeah, sorry about that. I've had a stressful week, good news is I've finally got my wife back after three months in hospital.
But I have been told several times by people who claimed to be 'scientists' that naturally emitted CO2 does not harm the environment, it's only CO2 from human activity that is doing the damage.

Thanks, she's improving slowly but it's going to b e a long process. Still, after becoming very territorial about the kitchen about ten ot twelve years ago she's rediscovering that I'm a great cook :-)

If it is true that "scientists" told you that, what they mean is that "naturally emitted" CO2 was in balance after thousands of years of climatic evolution; the amount that nature emits, nature also removes chiefly through photosynthesis. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere had been stable at roughly 280 ppm for hundreds of thousands of years, during the entirety of human history. Then humans started emitting gigatons of CO2 even while cutting down forests that would otherwise soak up the excess CO2. The result is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere shooting up to over 400 ppm - all caused by human emissions. Not only is the excess of the greenhouse gas causing planetary warming; it is also causing the pH of the oceans to decrease precipitously. Very alarming..

Well maybe that's what they meant, or maybe not, I wouldn't know because like most scientists, they were clearly not bright enough to express their thoughts coherently in the written word.
BTW the CO2 level has not been consistent for hundreds of thousands of years, the methods use to form estimates have been shown to be flawed. What has been entirely consistent however, is the capacity of climate scientists to lie in their never ending quest for bigger research grants.

Ian R Thorpe: "But I have been told several times by people who claimed to be 'scientists'..."
Ian R Thorpe: "...I wouldn't know because like most scientists, they were clearly not bright enough to express their thoughts coherently in the written word."

I submit that it is not clear whether you "were told" [this], as you claim, or read this, as you appear to claim.
Or maybe, what is even likelier is that you are just making stuff up. It is very clear that there is virtually no disagreement among scientists about the previous long term stability of atmospheric CO2 at around 280 ppm. To try to cast doubt on that fact is dishonest, not to mention unscientific. Do you have any credible support for your claim that "the methods used to form estimates (of atmospheric CO2) have been shown to be flawed"?! Ice core samples are considered a very reliable estimate for CO2 fractions, and we have ice core samples for 800,000 years...
And the meme of climate scientists "lying in their never ending quest for bigger research grants" is just another lie

BTW making species extinct is quite hard, I have worked on engineering the extinction of slugs in my garden for 19 years and there are just as many now as when I started. Life has a knack of surviving.

That's trouble with attorneys, isn't it? You let one in and <poof> next thing you know you're polluted with them.

Your failure is because your neighbor has a breeding program for the little buggers.

Opher is the Science Advisor for the project.

😂😂👍

The language and tone sounds eerily similar to the proclamations of the early Soviets. I meant that in the political sense, but also purely in the linguistic sense. It shares the same declarative tone, the same assertion of absolutist authority and the ever present shield of the common good. I'd bet our friend Webmaster could translate and spoken in Russian this would probably very closely resemble something uttered by a pioneering commissar of the people's revolution.

I would think that with the Brit's recent experience with a plebiscite, they might have been a little more cautious.

I, too, caught the echo of "Pravda" in their use of the word "truth."

Surely, and not only the early Soviets, but the latest ones were speaking in such declarative tone. For example the last Soviet ruler Gorbachev firmly assured the whole country that by the year 2000 each Soviet family will live in its own separate aparment. Well, in 1991 he participated in the state coup against himself which was a brilliant politicall invention, and left Moscow to wait for results at the Crimean dacha. Tanks entered Moscow, but the coup failed, and Gorbachev first lost the country and then power.

That is why I always say not to believe any promise of socialists and communists including Amercian ones. They know very well what the wide masses of the population want to hear from them, and they have absolutely no idea how to make it real what they have promised.

Thanks, Webmaster. The political class are criminals, and worse.

Nor do they have any "true" desire to do so. It's all manipulation. I am constantly astounded by the number of people who seem to take great pleasure in being urinated on

This phenomenon of mass faith in unrealizable ideals deserves a separate psychological study. Strangely enough, against the background of the general decline of the economy in the former Soviet republics, faith in communism is reviving again, but now not in a "bright future", but in a "bright past". More and more rallies are held under red flags, Lenin and Stalin were pulled out of the history closet and impoverished people are shaking their portraits.

This is a kind of psychosis, because everyone of them saw recently and perfectly that the leaders of the CPSU themselves did not live according to the rules of refusal of luxury, which were implanted by propaganda throughout the country. They had special deliveries of food, they could travel abroad beyond the limits of Iron Curtain, special shops of quality clothes and goods worked for them, and they even had a network of prostitution. At the same time members of the Komsomol organization went to the BAM century building to lay a railroad in the remote taiga and sing songs by the fire with a guitar.

When everything collapsed in 1991, the leaders of CPSU made great efforts to hide the gold they had stolen. That is, they were very fond of luxury and did not even take seriously the money of the country which they ruled. Therefore, they did not save rubles, but gold bars, which disappeared after the collapse of the CPSU.

That is, the falsity of the ideologues of communism is no longer subject to doubt. But thousands of people want to return the Soviet Union, because with the then-existing poverty, that poverty was stable. Two years ago I wrote an article about it on my website.

MJ, so don`t believe promises and evaluate only real achievements. Right now pre-election debates at the stadium finished, and it seems to me that the young comedian had a great success so even strengthened his chances of becoming a president. The old one spoke mostly with slogans so nothing concretely answered the questions about the poor economic situation and his illegal enrichment. Well, I am sure that in the morning of April 22 preliminary election results will show that the young candidate wins by a wide margin.

MJ, I am glad you liked them, there were really some absorbing moments during debates and I was surprised why were they so short as usually live TV debates go here for many hours in a row so the participants even go from one TV channel to another, as around the same time there are everywhere political talk shows going.

I guess army had no need in him as in fact the army units were fully equipped, and on this occasion even the army representative spoke, who said that new recruits would not be recruited there. But at the same time Zelenskiy went to the war zone as representative of culture and spoke there, so it cannot be said that he stayed away.

To be exact, there were two podiums built at the stadium for them, but for some reason Poroshenko changed the scenario and moved to the second candidate`s podium so to speak from his scene.

MJ, many thanks, I voted for him yesterday in the morning, then I went to the library and met a friend who voted for him too. The new President is called a President of hope so I wish him all the best luck in his term of governement.

He will face some hard challenges like 12 billion USD payment of loan to IMF which should be paid this year so there are some forecasts of country`s bankruptcy coming. It means that local currency will devaluate dramatically and I already see inflation speeding up and prices growing quickly. I have heard that 1st payment to IMF is to be done in May of this year and the second one in September.

There was already a technical default here it seems in Septemder of 2015 but they managed to restructure the debt. In 2018 they were going to default again but borrowed money at 9% interest somewhere and a rate so high meant that nobody wanted to credit them so they had to borrow at tremendous 9% so to just get money for regular payment at any conditions.

It means that new President will have a hard time since the very start of ruling that is why I wish him to overcome those obstacles although I don`t know where will he borrow new money to escape a new default.

Well Neil you are wrong on this one. You do not seem to grasp the enormity of the problem at all.
All 8 billion of us on this planet are guilty of causing mass extinctions and climate change.
You eat. You use machines. You live in a house and use power.
That means you are requiring polluting energy production, transport, mining and destroying habitat.
The sheer numbers of humans on the planet is the biggest problem. You are one of them.
Individually none of us have wiped out a single species. Collectively we have wiped out many thousands.
Individually none of us are capable of saving a species. Collectively we can.
I fear you just don't get it. I am afraid that your list of questions is puerile.
Nature is wonderful. Life is incredible. It should be protected and nurtured.

And unicorns were wonderful. Their feces had remarkable medicinal properties. Pygmy tribes from sub-Saharan Africa hunted them to extinction, thereby depriving caucasians of the health benefits. I DEMAND reparations!

An interesting theory about the unicorns. I had thought they died out because they made a mutual suicide pact with the honest politicians. But I'll defer to your superior knowledge of the science of unicorniology.