I did - read the OP

quote:

if you give people the choices that they say they want they don't take them. Instead they expect to be told what to do.

I don't see how this hypothesis is explained through your original post which said this

"give them a choice (such as we have now) and the vast majority will buy the cheapest supermarket stuff they can find, even knowing full well that it was probably made by some poor kid working for pence.

Tell people that they must make sacrifices to reduce CO2 and I think they might grumble a bit but will accept it. Give them a choice and they'll fight like anything to resist it."

I see it as a post that is full of cliches but that does not clarify your assertion that people are normally stupid beyond belief, that they will ask for choices, but when the choices are provided to them, they will not know what do with these choices and like infants would expect someone (government?) to tell them what to do.

I really hope you can clarify what you are asserting because I can see a research stream emerging to analyse this weird yet till now unknown behaviour of people

WIYM, I try to be as patient with you as I can but you're descending into trolling.

Where did I go wrong?

quote:

What I do want to discuss is why people, and this is definitely not just scientists, position themselves so intractably into a pro- or anti-AGW camp? I've been involved in a number of discussions online now and it seems that no matter how good the argument is from either side of the debate there is always an opportunity for someone to leap upon an aspect of the argument and turn it upon its head. An example recently from the this forum revolved around a good discussion as to why the global temperature dropped between 1940 and 1970.

To get back on topic, here's where I come from. As a former scientist, now working in software engineering closely associated with environmental modelling, I was sceptical (in the true sense of the word, in that I didn't know enough about the pro and anti evidence and had doubts that the pro evidence was sufficiently strong). Over time I became more and more familiar with the scientific understanding and more comfortable with the theory (though by no means an "intractable advocate"). Then in January I became aware of an anti-AGW pamphlet published by the Telegraph which prompted me to look more deeply into the argument. I got into discussion with an anti-green-tax guy on another forum which further prompted me to look into the anti-AGW argument. It was pretty clear that 90% of the anti-AGW arguments were a) easily disprovable, b) continually promoted against all the evidence by a few heavily funded lobby groups, and c) picked up and promulgated by people who were more concerned about "green taxes" and who made an immediate assumption that I hate cars, want to control people's lives, and worship Al Gore (who he?). On the other hand the pro argument is chockablock with reasoned science (I ignored all the hype from the green groups).

So by the time this programme aired, I knew enough to debunk a lot of it, and felt it was my duty to do so. I also tried to give reasoned responses to people innocently repeating views that they'd inadvertently picked up from the anti-AGW lobby.

Of course, I am also interested in improving my understanding further, and enjoy the testing questions that are posed by the likes of Cloud Man, Jerel (RIP), WIYM and others, as well as the more philosophical musings of the likes of Seskinreay.

(As an aside, I don't think the sulphur emissions discussion was inconclusive. It had been running for a few days in other threads, but till then, noone had found sufficient information to, at least partially, conclude it.)

There isn't a day of this debate where I haven't thought "could the science really be wrong?", but up to now I've been convinced that many of the people I've argued with have been more ideologically attached to their stance than I am to mine. As far as I can see, the basic science on CO2 is right. Even if the current CO2 warming is exactly balanced by aerosol/cloud cooling, and if the current warming is a coincidental blip with as yet unknown cause, CO2 is going up and up and its warming will get us sooner or later. I'm too much of a physicist not to believe that.

The reason online opinion is divide is simple. If your only source of opinion is the main stream media, you've only been exposed to one side of the global warming argument.