Another cretin on the BBC payroll

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/02/bbc-presenter-says-calling-animals-english-names-jarring/

Robert: I'm content with an approach that's (a) true and (b) works.

Robin Guenier,
I have no great beef with the "I am not a scientist" part. It's the "so I don't know" that I'd avoid. It implies that scientists *do* know (or at least *can* know). Judith Curry is a scientist who says that the "complexity monster" turns a lot of the certainties into maybes.

Sufficient, I think, to get straight to the point, not refer to scientists at all and start with a confident "I don't know".

Robert: the advantages of the 'I'm not a scientist' approach are that it's true and that it works. See
this .

Robin Guenier,
That's a pretty good response. One reservation: I'm not keen on the inverted appeal to authority — I'm not a scientist so I don't know — it rings of the Trust The Science mantra. Scientists don't *know* either. Religion deals in certainties, science is nullius in verba.

My predictions of "friendly fire" were from my own attempts at reductio ad absurdum arguments against climate alarm. The moment they'd see the words "Assume x is true", the ardent believers: "of course it's true, why do you doubt it?", and the ardent unbelievers: "but it's NOT true!", and the later logical implications part of the argument was ignored by both.

Again, I wish you well with your efforts to derail the Net Zero madness. As you say, maybe it's far enough from the central articles of climate faith that you won't be dismissed as a blasphemer. Your more diplomatic manner might help too. As is often the case, my expectations are a good deal lower than my hopes.

Another possible line of attack on Net Zero is the trial run. Today Jo Nova has an article on Alice Springs and its 50% renewables by 2030 ambitions. Pretty modest compared to national rhetoric, but underpinned by lessons from experience.

The problem with learning from small scale experiments is how people scale them up. It's so easy to imagine economies of scale, the magic of Moore's Law, the wind is always blowing somewhere, etc., so of course the small prototype is far *too* small.

tomo,
Your link was mangled. Googling turned up this article which was a good yarn. I remember reading an article many years ago on the Honda S600 saying what fun it was: that you got to drive at 12,000 rpm like an F1, but on ordinary streets and at legal speeds. That engine upgrade no doubt changed that.