Youth and naiveté no match for maturity and experience

27 April, 2012 by

Anna Rose of AYCC

UPDATE: Don’t forget to vote again at ABC’s website – the results prior to the show have been disappeared…

ABC’s documentary “I Can Change Your Mind about Climate” was an interesting experiment, but ultimately unsuccessful.

Throwing together veteran of the Senate, Nick Minchin, a well-known climate sceptic, and Anna Rose, founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, each attempted to change the mind of the other by calling on their own selection of experts and commentators.

Prior to the documentary, the ABC did an excellent job of attempting to skew opinion. Catalyst, ABC’s science show immediately before the documentary, linked climate change to dying trees, and again showing excellent timing, ABC chose to begin the rehabilitation of Tim Flannery, by trailing his touchy-feely documentary alongside trailers for this show.

Furthermore, ABC Environment managed to post no less than THREE articles supporting the consensus, with not a single sceptical viewpoint for balance. Desperation, perhaps? You be the judge.

The choice of Rose as an adversary for Minchin was unfortunate for a number of reasons, primarily that as founder of AYCC, she is hardly likely to abandon her position on AGW – her entire career is based on sustaining that belief. Furthermore, she is married to Simon Sheikh of GetUp! (thanks to a comment for that little gem), which again reinforces the perception that her mind was already made up.

Perhaps another politician would have been better – someone on the Labor side who was a believer and not so entrenched in alarmist activism and advocacy would have made for a better match.

Rose’s choice of experts was patchy. Her first, a farmer offering anecdotal evidence of a changing climate, was an obvious wasted opportunity. Matthew England, a well known alarmist scientist (see here for example) was a better option, but his certainty with regard to the magnitude of climate feedbacks was unconvincing. Richard Muller, of BEST fame, did his “best” to present himself as that rarest of commodities, a heretic who became a believer, but again was to my mind unconvincing. Personally, I would trust satellite data a thousand times over land data when you see the adjustments and fudges applied to the raw records.

An expert on measuring CO2 at Mauna Loa similarly raised question marks – I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that CO2 is rising.

Minchin’s first experts were Jo Nova and David Evans, who in the very short time they were seen, acquitted themselves well. It was unfortunate that Rose made such a meal out of Nova’s “recording the recording”, in order to ensure that there was no unfair editing, but given the history of bias at the ABC one can understand Nova’s concerns.

UPDATE @ 11.10am on 27/4/12: Comment from Jo Nova at her blog here:

“I just watched the online streaming version. We did 4 hours of footage at our house, and they showed not one single point I made, not one answer to Anna Roses questions. I repeated my favourite lines about 28 million weather balloons, 3000 ocean buoys off by heart at least 4 times. Obviously everything I said was too “dangerous”. But we have the full tape of the whole event, so sooner or later the world will see the parts that the ABC deemed to be not “interesting” to the Australian public. So all in all, pretty much as we expected. They trimmed it down to the point where it’s tame, they gave the alarmists the last word (they always do), and while they were happy to grill us about where our money came from just like Wendy Carlisle, when the question backfires (because we are not shills for anyone) they won’t show it. We can’t let the public know that Jo Nova and David are volunteers.”

He then paid a visit to Richard Lindzen who believes that climate sensitivity, the essential crux of the climate debate, is low, due to various feedback acting to reduce warming from CO2. Rose then demonstrated an unfortunate tendency towards the cheap ad hominem attack, by accusing Lindzen of denying links between smoking and cancer. Such allegations were treated by Minchin and Lindzen with the contempt they deserved.

Rose’s low point was her introduction to Marc Morano. She refused to engage with someone who was “not a climate scientist”. Neither was her first “expert”, the farmer, but that didn’t stop Minchin from listening politely. Her petulant schoolyard attitude unfortunately betrayed her youth and inexperience, and harmed her cause. Morano was pretty well controlled in the circumstances.

Minchin’s choice of Bjorn Lomborg was again interesting. Lomborg, with his trademark shock of blond hair, is the warmist the warmists love to hate, being a believer in AGW but rejecting the draconian emission reductions most of them advocate. I agree with his logic, yes invest in renewable research, but it should not be foisted upon an economy until it is competitive. This provided one of the few meeting of minds in the show.

In conclusion, there was no way that Rose’s mind would EVER be changed – she is too wrapped up in the whole socio-political agenda of AGW for that. She unfortunately resorted to cheap tactics when the answers weren’t going her way, and her discourtesy to Morano was unforgivable. Furthermore, the evidence she presented was unlikely to be persuasive enough to change Minchin’s mind (or mine).

On balance, however, and putting my own views aside, it would be hard not to award a win to Minchin. Rose was outclassed – her youth and inexperience showed at every turn, and her open-mindedness compromised from the start.

I’m not going to say a great deal about the Q&A debate afterwards. It was horribly biased as would be expected: four against two (including host Tony Jones, of course). Rose continued her ad hom theme by accusing sceptics of accepting funds from Heartland, and Jones appointed Matthew England, who was astonishingly in the audience, as “official” climate scientist to the panel, the go-to person whenever Minchin or Clive Palmer made a claim about the science – an appalling lapse of judgment on Jones’ part.

Palmer and Minchin landed some good punches, however, although one must wonder why they put themselves through the ABC wringer…

LINKS TO REACTION AND COMMENT

  • Minchin has an opinion piece in The Age here, in which he reveals that his visit to a cosmic ray scientist at CERN was left on the cutting room floor…
  • Anna Rose has a piece up at Unleashed here, in which I briefly saw the word “denialist” and closed the window. Let’s face it, we know what it’s going to say.
  • Jo Nova has a reaction here entitled “The intellectual vacuum – alarmists are afraid of debate, they namecall and break laws of reason”
  • The ABC website for the show is here
  • Michael Ashley, warmist at UNSW, writes at The Conversation here. I’ll leave it up to you to deconstruct this essay, but in the first few lines he misrepresents Minchin’s position as being “sceptical of ANY human impact on climate” and it’s all downhill from there
Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

A few quick plugs

26 April, 2012 by

Nick Minchin

UPDATE 5: Catalyst, ABC’s “science” programme, blames climate change for tree deaths – right before the climate doco. You have to hand it to the ABC – they don’t let any opportunity go to waste.

UPDATE 4: Let’s not forget the ABC’s brave and singlehanded rehabilitation of Tim Flannery, with his touchy-feely show, “Two on the Great Divide”, cleverly trailed right after the teasers for the climate debate tonight. Subliminal, right?

UPDATE 3: Oops, the ABC does it again. And again. Three alarmist articles supporting the consensus on ABC Environment, and not a single sceptical one for balance. See? I said I could tell where this was going.

UPDATE 2: Because too much bias is never enough at the ABC, they’ve dragged in Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science’s John Cook to smear the realists before the show is even broadcast. Breathtaking.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt confirms the Q&A panel contains no sceptical scientist, but Megan Clark of CSIRO (alarmist with shares in carbon sequestration company – see here), Clive Palmer (who the lefties can immediately write off as a conspiracy theorist, and whose credibility is therefore compromised before we even start), Rebecca Huntley (unknown position on climate), Anna Rose (alarmist AYCC founder), chair Tony Jones (alarmist), and Nick Minchin of course (sceptic). So that’s three alarmists against one (and a half) sceptics, with one unknown. Why no Carter, Kininmonth or Plimer?

A couple of plugs for some worthwhile watching/reading this week:

  • The ABC is screening the climate doco I can change your mind (link) tonight at 8.30pm AEST, with Nick Minchin and Anna Rose (founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition). I guess the fact that the ABC even allow Nick on the telly as a filthy climate heretic is some small miracle coming from our biased national broadcaster, for which we should be duly thankful. But you can bet the Q&A audience afterwards (9.30pm) will be heavily stacked (and with lefty/alarmist Tony Jones in the chair…). You only have to look at how the ABC regarded the sceptic doco The Great Global Warming Swindle back in 2008 to see how this will pan out.
  • Also, I highly recommend this week’s Spectator magazine (out on Friday). Nick Minchin pens the Diary, and Tim Blair writes on James Delingpole’s visit down under.
Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Michael Mann's cosy chat on ABC's Lateline

16 March, 2012 by

Very cosy

UPDATE: Baldrick in the comments reminds ACM of Tony Jones’ hostile and patronising interrogation of Ian Plimer on Lateline in April 2009. What a contrast to the kid gloves employed here with Mann. Biased much, ABC?

—-

Michael “Stick” Mann has a very pleasant, cosy little chat with Emma Alberici (quelle surprise…) on Lateline last night. Mann will no doubt be regarded as a valiant hero to most of the warmist journos at the ABC, so there were no tricky questions, just an easy ride and bags of sympathy for the poor climatologists who are being “intimidated” by filthy deniers:

MICHAEL MANN: the FBI actually came in at my – when I reported to them the fact that I had received a letter, an envelope that had white powder in it. And initially I had assumed the worst, but the FBI sent it off to their lab, they checked it out, it turns out it was a false alarm. Nonetheless, as you allude to, I have been subject to all sorts of personal attacks, threats to my safety, my life, threats to my family, and it’s not just me, it’s dozens of climate scientists in the US, in Australia and many other regions of the world where our findings are finding that climate change is real and potentially poses a threat to civilisation if we don’t confront that challenge. That represents a threat to certain vested interests and they’ve tried hard to discredit the science, often by discrediting and intimidating the scientists. Unfortunately it’s not all that new a tactic. We saw the same thing back in the 1970s, 1980s with tobacco, with the tobacco industry trying to discredit research establishing adverse health impacts of their product. It’s an old tactic and it’s now being used to try to discredit climate science, mainly coming from vested interests who don’t want to see us shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels because they – understandably, they profit greatly from our current addiction to fossil fuels.

EMMA ALBERICI: Who are these vested interest groups? [See, really tough question, eh Emma? Didn’t think to pick up Mann on any of the allegations above – Ed]

MICHAEL MANN: Well I actually talk about this in some detail in the book and I refer to some other books that have been written on this topic that actually trace much of the attacks against climate science and climate scientists to various organisations and front groups that derive most of their funding from the fossil fuel industry and what they often do is issue press releases attacking mainstream science. They publish – they have folks publish op.’ eds attacking climate scientists. They sort of create what some have called an echo chamber of climate change denial that permeates the airwaves and our media and it’s been a real challenge for scientists, for the scientific community to try to communicate the very real nature of the climate change threat in the face of this fairly massive disinformation campaign.

Tobacco, Big Oil. Echo chamber of denial. Mann should find a new scriptwriter. And yet none of this is challenged.

The fact that Exxon gives millions of dollars to Green groups is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the alarmist industry funding is three or four orders of magnitude greater than for sceptics is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the Hockey Stick was bad science debunked by Steve McIntyre is irrelevant to the ABC. The fact that the Climategate emails show repeated manipulation of data, corruption of peer review, threats to journals that dare publish papers challenging the consensus, and avoiding of FOI requests is irrelevant to the ABC. They were all “taken out of context”, right?

Michael Mann is a key player in The Cause, and here was an opportunity to ask any number of very awkward questions – unfortunately the ABC avoided them all.

Read/watch here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Government's climate indoctrination exposed (again)

14 February, 2012 by

Corrupting young minds

The problem with adults is that they have mature and developed powers of reasoning and logical thought. This means that adults can easily see through the government’s deceit on the carbon tax, namely that it will be of some benefit to the climate – it won’t – or that the rest of the world is racing ahead to take action – it isn’t – or that the planet is headed for oblivion if we don’t send our economy back to the dark ages – it isn’t.

Therefore, because they have no standards of morality or decency whatsoever, they are prepared to bypass the grown-ups and go for the impressionable minds of children. This is nothing new, as ACM has reported on many such occasions (see here, for example, and the CSIRO’s Carbon Kids program, a disgraceful propaganda exercise by our national science body, on which there may be more at a later date).

So the following is simply the latest evidence of government attempts to brainwash and indoctrinate the next generation with climate alarmism before they have the capacity to question what they are being told:

SHE grows awesome tomatoes and has an orange tractor. And now dirtgirl, the lead character in the popular children’s television program dirtgirlworld, has been enlisted to the climate change fight by a Gillard government struggling to convince her viewers’ parents of the merits of the carbon tax package.

Senate estimates was told yesterday the ABC show had been awarded a $150,000 grant “to reach currently disengaged families through childhood activities focused on reducing energy use”.

The hearing was told the government had $10 million left for an advertising campaign to back the carbon tax. But no decision had been taken on the future of the campaign.

Other recipients of Climate Change Foundation grants included Green Cross Australia, which was awarded $200,000 for a primary school show-and-tell competition.

The $3m grants program was announced last June in conjunction with the government’s paid advertising campaign to promote the carbon package.

The $10m remaining in the government’s advertising allocation follows its controversial advertisement last year backing the clean energy future package, which was found to have largely failed to sway public opinion on carbon pricing.

The Climate Change Department told yesterday’s Senate estimates hearing the advertisements had sparked 7500 responses to a call centre on the Clean Energy Future package. (source)

Aided and abetted as usual by Their ABC.

H/t ABC News Watch

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Geriatric wheat caused by climate change

30 January, 2012 by

She's only 21. Damn you AGW.

Naturally, all the solar schmolar stuff discussed here earlier today is completely ignored by Your ABC, which instead picks on an alarmist research paper about premature ageing in wheat:

Extreme heat can cause wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, a US-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world warms.

Scientists and farmers have long known that high heat can hurt some crops. Now a study led by Stanford University reveals how the damage is done by tracking rates of wheat ageing, or senescence.

Depending on the sowing date, the grain losses from rapid senescence could reach up to 20 per cent, the scientists found in the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change [abstract here].

Lead author David Lobell and his colleagues studied nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth from northern India, tracking the impact of exposure to temperatures greater than 34°C to measure rates of senescence.

They detected a significant acceleration of ageing that reduced the grain-filling period. The onset of senescence imposes a limit on the time for the plant to fill the grain head.

“What’s new here is better understanding of one particular mechanism that causes heat to hurt yields,” says Lobell. He says that while there had been some experiments showing accelerated ageing above 34°C, relatively few studies considered temperatures this high.

“We decided to see if these senescence effects are actually occurring in farmers’ fields, and if so whether they are big enough to matter. On both counts, the answer is yes.”

Climate scientists say that episodes of extreme heat are becoming more frequent and more prevalent across the globe, presenting huge challenges for growing crops. (source)

Lobell has been reported frequently in the past on the same subject of decline in wheat yields arising from climate change, and not everyone is convinced by the link Lobell claims:

While the paper [an earlier paper covering similar ground in Science in May 2011] is “an interesting contribution to the discussion,” says John Reilly, an agricultural and energy economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, its conclusions are “not compelling.” Many caveats and uncontrollable factors—including the price of crops, the latitude at which they are planted, and specific advances in technology—could contribute to the changes in trend that the authors see, weakening their link between yields and warming. “It’s a careful set of work, but it’s just a hard area to work in,” Reilly says.

Reilly points out that IPCC predicts an increase, not a decrease, in global crop production, as more CO2 in the atmosphere is beneficial for plant growth. But Lobell says his analysis suggests that any advantage this CO2boost confers is already being pushed to its limit, because warming itself harms crops. (source)

More research needed, perhaps?

UPDATE: The ABC does cover a couple of climate stories today, interestingly the Wall Street Journal letter reported here. The ABC firstly smears the WSJ as “Murdoch-owned” just to set the scene, and after interviewing William Kininmonth (a meteorologist) wheels out who else but Tim Flannery (a mammalogist) to complain that the letter is signed by some who aren’t climate scientists. Oh the irony. Flannery flannels on about Republicans and fails to address any of the substantive issues. Read the transcript here.

And just in case that was a little too “sceptic-friendly” Auntie then rolls on, without pausing for breath, into a decent Green-friendly alarmist story here. The transcript fails to mention that the dominant cause of the issue in question is changes in wind patterns arising from loss of ozone, but the ABC and CSIRO pin it firmly on man-made greenhouse gases. How convenient. I have an email in to the authors of this study asking for some clarifications. I wonder if I’ll get an answer…

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

ABC: Climate change to "kill Australians"

30 November, 2011 by

We're all gonna die

That’s not the article title any more, but it is the title in the URL (see image here). Let’s scare people by saying they will die if we don’t “tackle climate change”… with a pointless carbon tax that will reduce global temperatures by seven ten thousandths of a degree.

The ABC, or Groupthink Central it it should be known, shamelessly and uncritically regurgitates an AAP/AFP article plugging a biased and one-sided report from the Climate Commission on the effects of climate change and health:

A new report is warning more Australians face dying in heatwaves and catching infectious diseases as a result of climate change.

A Climate Commission report out today, titled The Critical Decade, says climate change-related injury, disease and deaths will continue to grow in decades to come unless sustained action is taken.

The Climate Commission report says climbing temperatures will lead to more natural disasters and changing rainfall patterns, which will have an impact on people’s health as much as on the environment.

It includes a worst-case scenario where deaths from hotter temperatures in Queensland and the Northern Territory could multiply tenfold by 2100.

Alarmist tactic number 94, throw in a worst-case scenario and lo and behold, the news agency pick up on it! Brilliant.

Report co-author Professor Lesley Hughes says even a small rise in temperature can be detrimental to people’s health.

“A small rise in average temperature actually means a fairly large rise in the number of days, for example, over 35 degrees [Celsius] every year,” he said.

“So as average temperatures go up, the number of extremely hot days go up in a disproportionate way. So what we’re concerned about with climate change, amongst other impacts, is the impact on heat waves.” (source)

I seem to recall reading that the Little Ice age was pretty shit for humanity as well. Marc at ABC News Watch has more:

Despite his expertise, surprisingly no work by [Paul] Reiter was cited in the climate commission’s  report on Climate change and health. The commission has presented only one side of a complex argument.The lies of omission are the greatest lies of all. The commission’s report is another example of cargo cult science in action. It is clear that the commission has no intention of fulfilling its charter to Explain the science of climate change and the impacts on Australia. It is purely a political body. I have no doubt the ABC in its coverage of this report will once again fail in their duty to ask the hard questions.

And indeed they have. They regurgitate a press release from an alarmist news agency.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , ,

CSIRO scientist: zero emissions ain't enough

21 November, 2011 by

A synthetic tree...

Yet more climate nonsense to spoil my day. It won’t be sufficient to halt dangerous climate change “merely” to reduce CO2 emissions to zero, according to a report on ABC’s AM programme this morning. We need to go further (beyond zero, if you will excuse the pun), and start sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere (no, really):

MIKE RAUPACH: There is very little wiggle room left, perhaps none at this stage and the issue of course is that a large fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere stays there for a very long time and that means that what we do now has a long-term future shadow. 

SIMON LAUDER: Dr Raupach is part of an international team which used mathematical models to see what will happen to the climate in the long term under various scenarios. He says if emissions aren’t rapidly reduced to zero, future efforts will have to go further and remove CO2 from the atmosphere to prevent warming of more than two degrees. 

MIKE RAUPACH: If we do reduce emissions rapidly then zero emissions will do but even a small leakage in the long term like over a hundred years from now, of about 10 per cent of current emissions, is enough to keep temperatures slowly rising. (source)

“Zero emissions will do”!! Phew, that’s OK then. For as we all know, reducing emissions to zero is the easy bit. You only have to look at global energy consumption to see that we’re really, really close to a fully renewable energy budget (the renewables component of the chart is that wafer thin segment on the right, just in case you can’t quite see it):

Only 90-odd percent to go…

So once we’ve done that, and we’re all living in the cold and the dark, with no cars, buses, planes and electricity, we can then use whatever energy is left over (which won’t be much) to power synthetic trees (like those pictured above) to remove the CO2 out of the atmosphere. It will be an environmentalist’s dream – a landscape littered with useless windmills and fake trees, with no humanity and no prosperity. Just what Bob Brown wants for Australia. And the climate will continue to do exactly what the hell it wants, because that’s what the climate does.

And Lauder gets full marks for conducting, to the letter, the standard ABC interview of a climate alarmist, where the alarmist is allowed to talk as much nonsense as he/she likes completely unchallenged, and without having to account for any of the ridiculous assertions he/she makes. At no point does Lauder challenge the scientific basis of the UN’s 2 degree target, or the reliability of the “mathematical models” of which he is obviously so in awe, or whether adaptation strategies might provide better value for money than mitigation, or whether the release of this story is simply clever timing a few days before yet another pointless climate gab-fest in Durban.

But that would be asking too much of the “groupthink-infested” ABC, wouldn’t it?

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

ABC's spin on Alpine catchment report

10 October, 2011 by

Following on from the “no snow by 2050” story earlier today, the ABC gleefully reports more doom and gloom on the state of the alpine catchments. Perhaps they thought nobody would check:

SIMON SANTOW (ABC World Today): Sixty per cent of the 235 catchments are rated poor to moderate – most are declining. (source)

Here’s the reality:

Catchment condition

If the ABC (and the report) were not desperate to paint an awful picture of a wasteland ravaged by man-made climate change (which they most certainly are), you could alternatively say that over 90% of the catchment areas were in either moderate or good condition. Well done.

But what’s more obvious are the trends in condition:

Catchment trends

There is no way that anyone could possibly say that “most are declining”. In fact, over 80% are “no change” or “improving”. ABC, please explain.

Source is here (9MB PDF).

Filed Under: ABC Bias, Climate Tagged With: , ,

ABC cossets the alarmists – again

19 September, 2011 by

Journalism at its worst?

Look out for ABC’s Four Corners tonight at 8.30 Eastern. It promises to be another hatchet job on the filthy deniers, raking up all the usual nonsensical sob-stories, including the non-existent death threats story, as a way to garner sympathy for the poor old climate scientists. Sky News reports:

Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb says the climate change debate is continuing to hit new lows.

Professor Ian Chubb wants politicians to consider compelling evidence that human activity has adversely affected the climate through global warming.

He says while it’s important people have different views about climate science, there are concerns about the level of threats sent to those working in the field.

‘Every time I think it’s reached a low, we then go on and reach a new low,‘ Prof Chubb has told ABC Television’s Four Corners Program.

‘And I think that’s of very little benefits to us as we’re trying to grapple with what is a very serious problem that needs serious discussion.

‘I would urge politicians to look at all the evidence and to wonder why it might be that something like 32 national academies of science all around the world are all saying that it’s very likely that human activity has adversely affected our climate through global warming.’

One scientist told the program he and some of his colleagues have received threats of violence.

Professor Will Steffen [who else? – Ed] from the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute says some were direct threats of violence, while others were ‘simply very nasty emails with veiled threats in them that what might happen to us in a very general way’.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard says the plunge in debate should be blamed on the Opposition’s preparedness to ‘abuse scientists’.

She says some Tea Party-type tactics being used in the US have been imported to Australia.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has created ‘hyperventilating tripe’ about the impacts of carbon pricing as part of a quest to become the next prime minister.

‘I think the whole thing is really most unfortunate for our democracy, how it’s been hyped up, the call for the peoples’ revolt…’ (source)

Notice how there isn’t a single mention about keeping up standards of scientific integrity, or any criticism of the Team and the manner in which climate science has been politicised and corrupted. And notice also how Gillard and Combet blame everything on Tony Abbott! Hilarious! What about accepting responsibility for forcing through a policy with NO MANDATE which will achieve NOTHING for the climate? Geez.

I will force myself to watch it (probably tomorrow on the Foxtel IQ) although I would rather stick red hot needles in my eyeballs. If anyone would like to watch and write a review for ACM, feel free!

Filed Under: ABC Bias, Climate Tagged With: ,

Even warmists should be appalled

5 September, 2011 by

War on science

Anyone who values the integrity of science and the scientific process should be appalled at the Spencer and Braswell/Remote Sensing debacle (see here and here).

You can disagree 100% with the conclusions of Spencer and Braswell, but you should still be horrified at the abuse of process and the corruption of the proper scientific method that has allowed chit-chat on warmist blogs to claim the scalp of the editor of a peer-reviewed journal, and force him to make an apology to a warmist scientist for daring to publish the paper in the first place.

Don’t wait up. The silence is deafening. In fact, in yet another highly offensive and inflammatory piece on ABC’s left-wing echo-chamber The Drum by Stephan Lewandowsky (see here for Jo Nova’s view on Lewandowsky) we have quite the reverse. Not only does he fail to defend scientific integrity, he viciously attacks Spencer further with a string of cheap ad hominems and smears, claiming at one point, laughably (but at the same time dead seriously), that:

“every single ‘sceptic’ paper has been debunked within the scientific community.”

Wow. How blinkered can you get? It is a truly extraordinary tirade – full to the brim with insults and positively fizzing with white-hot anger, but demonstrating that his grasp of reality is highly tenuous – whereas the consensus science is squeaky clean, of course, “deniers” (a highly abusive term in itself) peddle only:

“ideology, subterfuge and propaganda.”

Unleashed? More like unhinged. You can read it for yourself here.

And where’s the defence of the scientific process? Of scientific integrity? Of the proper procedures for rebuttal? Nowhere to be seen. I wonder what Lewandowsky’s reaction would have been if a paper by Jimmy Hansen or Gavin Schmidt had been subjected to the same treatment. Would we have seen the same reluctance to condemn the abuse of process? Answers on a postcard. Obviously, it’s only an abuse when Lewandowsky himself determines the science warrants it.

The kind of hyperbole that Lewandowsky engages in his articles does nothing for the most important cause of all, the search for truth in science. His view is that scientific debate should apparently be censored and restricted to the papers that he personally considers appropriate, in other words that anyone who dares challenge the consensus is a [cue cliché] filthy denier funded by big oil. I am sure everyone else is as thoroughly sick of such stereotyping as I am.

But I guess we can take comfort from the fact that such a display of barely controlled rage betrays a deep-seated underlying weakness and fear. As I mentioned in a previous post, the CO2 hypothesis is built on such shaky foundations, all it takes is a puff of wind to shake them, and get the alarmists winding themselves up into full-blown tirades of abuse and vitriol.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,
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