What a fascinating discussion this thread has engendered. I read the first Judith Curry column and the thing that worried me was, that although she put forward very cogent reasons for killing the IPCC, she did not put forward any suggestions for an alternative drawing together of investigations into changes in climate, just a free for all.
Opting for a free for all is a very good way of destroying a group saying uncomfortable truths when you have been unable to bring forward any arguments to refute their statements. With no central organisation acting as a spokesperson for the issue involved everyone can just ignore it and pretend it isn't there.
Nevertheless the climate change discussions do seem to have been reduced to a playground battle, like two teams of 8 year old boys all shouting that their daddies are bigger stronger than their opponents daddies. Not a good way of carrying out any argument, least of all one as important as this.
The real problem is that climate change has become almost entirely a political issue with Greens and other environmentalists seeing in climate change the bandwagon unifying issue and Doomsday scenario they had been lacking to hold the many fissiparous environmental groups together and to justify their desire to turn the world back to some mythical rural idyll where we all knitted our own bread and wove our own jerkins. On the other side those who believe in developing new technologies and expanding world affluence have found climate denying a good way of hitting back at all environmentalists on all fronts all at once.
This is where the new environmentalism as discussed in the article may take us forward. The acceptance that we now live in the anthropocine , an era where it is accepted that it is man that shapes the earth. A time when, as archaeologists and anthropologist have known for years, that most of the earth's surface is a human construct and that all the wild places 'untouched by human hand' are as much man-made as any cityscape, is commonly accepted. It means looking to technology to provide solutions to environmental problems and accepting that we must look for ways for sustainably growth for those countries still in relative poverty
