I had to look up Piers Corbyn and find out who he was. He is an astrophysicist turned to weather predictions based on changes in the Sun's radiation patterns. Whatever his models, they seems pretty good in predictions of weather. These models are however, private and not published, which means not peer reviewed. I think I can imagine how he makes his predictions work. He studies the major weather generating systems which come from the ocean currents and the upper atmosphere. He has made a series of correlations with Sun spot activity. He is measuring the patterns of pressure and temperature and running a statistical model system using some input from the Sun's activity to come up with these numbers and predict the likely weather such changes are likely to produce.
The trouble is that weather and climate are different. Corbyn demanded to see evidence. I guess the melting of the polar ice caps, constant draughts and unpredictable seasonal conditions in Africa, as well as milder seasonal changes in California are insufficient.
This show me stuff is a reverse or perverse engineered discourse. It's the denier or skeptic's job to produce the counter evidence and counter argument. If a peer journal paper makes observations and produces an argument for a claim, it is common practice for the other side to show the claim is false. The methods vary, but usually involve other observations, an alternative model that lead to a different, and or contradictory conclusions.
Corbyn is quite coy about his side. He claims he has contradictory evidence, but then hides the model or methods he uses. This is a no-no because there is no way to examine the connections between hypothesis, methods, and evidence. A critical piece is missing.
So basically Corbyn was just obfuscating issues and poisoning the well.
He is right about one thing. Copenhagen was all about how to make a buck neoliberal style. Trouble is that's what Corbyn does too. He owns a company and makes plenty on his predictions.
Because he dominated the show with offense tactics, the rest of the people could only defend their positions, rather than explain their positions.
I stopped watching mainstream media from the US because there are not two sides to every issue. Yet that is the standard obfuscating system. If a real public debate threatens to break out, political figures will eliminate the most liberal party by preemptive strike. So, single payer was off the table. Re-adopting Kyoto targets were off the table. Regulation of the failed finance sector and auditing where the money went is off the table and so forth. And of course investigating US war crimes is off the table. Regulating carbon emissions by direct law and enforcement is off the table.
Even the cap and trade nonsense is now apparently falling off the table. Clinton announced some vague fund plan for the global south managed by the World Bank, today. So the debate shifts to who manages the fund. Who has noticed this isn't just blackmail as Naomi Klein called it. It is a back door entry to the same neoliberal `reforms' that were in effect a similar blackmail scheme.
What this off the table tactic does is drive public discourse down predictable channels into stalemate, thus preserving the status quo. Nothing gets done.
CG