Climate change religion unraveling? (Page 2 of 2)

Yesterday the pros at RealClimate went through all the complaints and basically concluded that there's only one actual error in the report: the claim that Himalayan glaciers would be mostly gone by 2035. "Fixing this error involves deleting two sentences on page 493 of the WG2 report," they say, and it was never central to the report's conclusions anyway.

To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current media discussion is in large part simply absurd and surreal. Journalists who have never even peeked into the IPCC report are now outraged that one wrong number appears on page 493 of Volume 2. We’ve met TV teams coming to film a report on the IPCC reports’ errors, who were astonished when they held one of the heavy volumes in hand, having never even seen it. They told us frankly that they had no way to make their own judgment; they could only report what they were being told about it. And there are well-organized lobby forces with proper PR skills that make sure these journalists are being told the “right” story. That explains why some media stories about what is supposedly said in the IPCC reports can easily be falsified simply by opening the report and reading. Unfortunately, as a broad-based volunteer effort with only minimal organizational structure the IPCC is not in a good position to rapidly counter misinformation.

....What apparently has happened is that interested quarters, after the Himalyan glacier story broke, have sifted through the IPCC volumes with a fine-toothed comb, hoping to find more embarrassing errors. They have actually found precious little, but the little they did find was promptly hyped into Seagate, Africagate, Amazongate and so on. This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.

Abraxas wrote:

But these are measures that are either too lienient for enviromental extremists or too strict for Big Oil and its supporters.

It makes me so angry I wanna spit!

There are many of us (including the Obama administration) who acknowlege that nuclear power has to be a part of the solution.
The only thing that makes me angry enough to spit are those who choose what they believe and don't believ based on their pre-existing ideology rather than what the informed experts are saying.

By the way, mainstream economists believe that cap and trade is one of the economically most efficient means of reducing our dependence on fossile fuels...

According to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a tax of $80 a metric ton on carbon dioxide — or a cap-and-trade system with similar charges — would stabilize temperatures by midcentury.

This figure was determined, however, before the arrival of more pessimistic estimates on the pace of global warming. So let’s assume a tax of $300 a ton, just to be safe.

Under such a tax, the prices of goods would rise in proportion to their carbon footprints — in the case of gasoline, for example, by roughly $2.60 a gallon