On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 12:47:22 UTC+1, Brian Lawrence wrote:
On 11/02/2014 10:52, matt_sykes wrote:

On Monday, 10 February 2014 07:34:27 UTC+1, Dawlish wrote:

On Sunday, February 9, 2014 10:31:12 PM UTC, Lawrence Jenkins wrote:







Hundreds of thousands of climate scientist.







No; hundreds of thousands of climate scientists.





Hundreds of thousands? SO why did only 219 sign the Bali letter?





Idiot.



Good point.



I despair at how much money would be wasted at those sort of numbers.

How much does it cost to employ a 'climate scientist'? Well it depends

on your definition of course, and there are chiefs and indians in

varying numbers. Prof. Slingo is reportedly paid over £135k as the

MetO Chief Scientist.



Lets not go too far over the top, suppose there are 100,000 scientists

working in the field (worldwide), let's assume they are well qualified

so they are probably getting of the order of £30k per annum, so ball

park £300m p.a. That figure could be tripled by adding in costs of

ancillary staff, buildings, equipment, travel to exotic locations, etc.



So in total the planet might be spending about a billion (short scale) £

per year on climate science. In some ways that's not much - the UK

spends about £100Bn on the NHS, £40Bn on defence - but at least we get

some benefit from the NHS (and defence, though there are a lot of people

who might argue with that). The Department for Business, Innovation and

Skills (which includes the MetO) spends about £16.5Bn per year, though

only a small part would go to climate studies.



If you spend £1Bn per year on medical research you will probably get

several useful breakthroughs which could be really beneficial.



Spending a similar amount on climate science will probably tell us that

the climate is changing (which we already know), that it might be

life-threatening (which we already know), that we need to be prepared

(which we already know), that we ought to take action to slow it down or

mitigate the effects (which we already know). Does it really make much

difference if 100 climate scientists tell us it's getting warmer or that

100,000 do so. Note that by 'us' I don't really mean us the great

unwashed, but rather the people who take the decisions for us. The

politicians can't go against public opinion too much though, 'cos then

we won't elect them, so maybe we do need 100,000 people beavering

away on their laptops.





--



Brian W Lawrence

Wantage

Oxfordshire

That famous '97% of all scientists' study only questioned 10000, and of those only 40% agreed to the two questions, which themselves only asked if mans role was 'significant' and not 'dominant'. Significant at a statistical level means measurable, or relevant, so could be 5% say.

They took this 10000 and whittled it down to 79 to get their 97%. So thats it. 76 scientists, 2 of whoom thought it hadnt warmed since 1900, the other of the two questions.

Garvey is a childish fool. Hundreds of thousands indeed, its utter garbage..