I now regard anyone with bucket in their moniker as a 12 year troll, I won't feed them and suggest everyone else does the same.

With regard to the question posed by Chris M, I think he has the answer in the first sentence of the question. The range of beliefs and just the fact skeptics tend to be independantly minded means we're like the Celtic tribes of Britain resisting the Romans, there is an occasional Boudicca or Calgacus but on the whole we'll never be able to unite into a cohesive organisation against an empire intent on creating a desert and calling it peace (h/t Tacitus)

LC, Amen to that! This is no time for humour! We on the right (and I hope I can count you as one of us) have to stick together and deny these foul insinuations that there is any, and I mean any, financial connection between our vital industries, the lifeblood of our country, namely the holy oily trinity, Coal, Oil and Gas, and those good folk up on the hill who by the pure hearted nature of their souls choose to support our sacred battle against the evils of climate action, to distort every and any (and I do mean any) scientific finding supporting climate change and to blacken the good name of any so called scientists with whom we disagree. Amen!

The good Lord put the holy trinity into mother earth for the American people to use and so help us Lord, we are going to use them! Every last drop! Now, I don't think you quite got the into it yet, so repeat after me, "We are sceptical of any link between political halfwits and our essential carbon based industries.". Go on, you can do it, "we are sceptical...."

This chap really is a laugh a minute. Good for us there are not more with wit to rival his.

There's a simple response to this type of poster:

"Caricature is not rebuttal."

I think the UK is closer to a sceptic revolution than the US. America is just beginning to flirt with cutting CO2, whereas us Brits are pig sick of it already. AGW hysteria is a bit like your teenage years, you have to go through them before you can grow up. We might make some progress if we got together and lobbied... somebody, but it's not really our style.

What I think is missing is a really good, tight, documentary on sceptic concerns. Or maybe several since there’s so much to cover and like the IPCC reports there’s a need to separate the attribution from the effects and from the solutions. We know what made us sceptical but it’s spread over pages and pages of blog posts and excellent but lengthy books. Where does an interested but busy person start?

Maybe as a child I was spoilt by early Brit documentaries, but I was gob smacked by AIT. It is terrible! The reason it works is because it has some kick ass graphs in it (which we know to be false), but graphs aside it was rubbish. Mostly a pity party for having lost the election. The reason Al et al have made no real progress since is because there are no new graphs except Arctic ice. However it’s still the primary source of brain washing for new warmists.

The Global Warming Swindle was good for its time but there’s masses more ammunition now and it was slightly too confrontational. Other videos are ok but none of the ones I’ve seen capture the simple quality of the early Horizon programmes. Unlike the new Horizon progs, which are media student works of art, a good documentary needs masses of well explained and illustrated facts. No dumbing down but not too much insider speak either. I didn’t watch much of Anthony’s 24 hours but what I did see was good but not punchy enough, in part because it was live, in part because it was aimed at the converted but also because it’s hard to sive out the best facts from the ok ones. Probably the most intriguing I saw was John Kehr's 45 mins – I didn’t know about the huge swings in global temperature every year for example. We really do get blinded by anomaly graphs. The ‘did you know’ slides were good but needed more crafting and many more slides.

A good documentary would work on politicians and members of the public alike. It would need to free of politics and censure of the concept of man made global warming. The overall feel should be - that although AGW is a concern, there are now enough wrinkles in the science and the establishment for us to take a step back and re-examine the facts.

How we get such a documentary would be the hard part ;-)

Each person has different favourites but there are some key bits of information that form the basis of most scepticism. Awareness of how 'normal' current temperatures are (from many sources including ice cores), is one of the best. That we have emerged from the the exceptionally cold LIA is part of that.

The warmist position is so weak because it relies very much on lying by omission. The public (and I suspect even BBC employees) are unaware of how little they know about climate science.

Hey Hey My My, Gaia Green will never die ...

(with apologies to Neil Young, probably a warmist being a hippy child of the 60s, but an impeccable musician.)

Looks like we've hit a nerve here folks, to attract such a Grade A Soylent Green toxic alarmist bucket troll to this thread. No connection to you BB, I sincerely hope. Still, the sheer nastiness of the vitriol is a real turnoff to reasonable people, so all to the good I suppose.

Excellent suggestion of yours TinyCO2. There was a very good and watchable British documentary debunking CAGW made from memory in the early 1990s, available entire on Youtube, or it was. Can't recall the title atm. Richard Lindzen was in it looking a bit awkward as he did one of those old-fashioned doco walkies across campus for a voice-over. Tom Wigley of the CRU looked like a caricature lefty academic with his Lenin-style beard, and he came across as decidedly cagey when interviewed. An updated version of that doco would be quite effective, I imagine.

It is mind-boggling that many, if not all, of the CAGW refutations remain just as valid 20 years later, yet the bandwagon trundles on.

I found the documentary again, a Channel 4 production from 1990 or 1991, 'The Greenhouse Conspiracy'. It's alarming how quickly the alarmism was ramped up in the late 80s and has continued unabated for the past 25 years. There is clearly something horribly wrong with the mindset of Western culture, like a collective madness.

Recommended viewing for the illuminating historical perspective, as well as the still relevant science.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btd6L31ZYg

Chris M,
I vaguely remember that documentary too. About the same time I listened to a phone on Global Warming as it was then known, there as a young man called in who was truly scared. not scared terrified, that the world was going to end in just a few years and something had to be done now. Hopefully he is now firmly in the sceptical camp aware that he's been lied to and cheated, but somehow I doubt it. From then on I was more than ever convinced that it was a scam (I can remember the coming iceage scare) and that it was a good way for governments to raise taxes. What's not to like for a politician raising taxes when the people think it's for saving mankind? I hadn't realised the control implications until the telecoms company I worked for started researching remote control of domestic appliances etc. It was more along the lines of closing curtains, recording TV programs and turning on the oven/cooker at that time. The ecomentalists hadn't destroyed the power generation infrastructure and there was no need to switch stuff off!

Sandy

Wow ChrisM, that was 1990, talk about dejà vue all over again.

That vid has some flaws in it but it was a very early recognition of the problems with AGW. I notice that it was known that temperature drives CO2 in the ice core records long before Al’s movie. Note also, the much greater dip in temperatures during the middle of the last century than we now see. It illustrates how much fiddling with the figures has gone on.

The style was good, though I think the comments of scientists needed more illustration. I’d include a lot more graphs. The hard part would be deciding what to leave out. It didn’t have particularly sophisticated filming elements but it was effective.

I suppose something like this could be crowd sourced. It would need something tighter than Anthony’s ‘did you know’ attempt.

@ Paul Matthews

Paul, early this year Lucy Skywalker announced on tallbloke's blog that she was developing a climate change wiki, which sounds like a good idea if protected from hijacking by the likes of RealClimate, Stoat and the misnamed Skeptical Science. Much the same as your database idea. It could be hosted by the GWPF, who are already partly organised but apparently not very, from the comments on this blog about dodgy acoustics in a lecture they hosted this year. Same old story about the skeptics finding it difficult to get their act together, I suppose. If even one of the learned geoscience societies in the UK or the US decided to 'go skeptic', that would also help a lot, but I can't see it happening any time soon.

As for Lucy I haven't noticed her posting anywhere lately, although I rarely read comments at WUWT, where to my recall she was quite active. In any event the wiki idea seems to have come to naught for now.

Dung,

Even though we may fail to reach a consensus, at least we can all have a good laugh:

REPLY: Ignore him. This denial of the greenhouse effect is just more CRAP from Doug Cotton under another one of his FAKE NAMES to get around the fact that he’s been banned from WUWT for thread bombing with Principia junk. He and the whole crowd of slayers can take a flying leap. Doug, let me be clear. You are creating fake email addresses. One more incident and I launch a complaint against your ISP. Now, for the last time GET OUT – Anthony

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/20/myths-and-facts-about-global-warming/#more-74586

But then maybe Dung doesn't find it funny. After all he doesn't believe in the greenhouse effect...

Dung, my point was that maybe you don't find the joke funny because you agree with Doug Cotton, the object of the joke.

Yes, I noticed it but didn't bother reading it. I considered it pretty cranky. There is a good Wiki page on the effect and SoD also covers it. Not to mention physics text books etc. Deny the effect if it pleases you, but be aware that such views are one good reason why the AGW community wants to have nothing to do with sceptics.

Glad you found the WUWT excerpt amusing. I always like people better when they can appreciate a joke at their own expense ;-)