Character assassination…

Anna Rose is a co-founder of the hopelessly naive Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and also featured in the recent ABC documentary “I can change your mind” (see ACM’s post on it here) during which it became painfully obvious that no amount of logic, facts, persuasion or argument would ever change her mind.

Not content with that, she has now produced a book entitled: “Madlands: A journey into the climate fight” detailing her experiences on the “dark side”. However, rather than expose the evil motivations of sceptics, she has succeeded only in throwing into sharp relief her own zealotry.

Over at Jo Nova’s site, there is a fascinating review of the book, which you must read in full, but there are some excellent quotes which I will share here.

A constantly recurring theme of the climate debate is the manner in which the alarmists, rather than address the arguments, seek to impugn the reputations of sceptics (think Lewandowsky, for example). Rose is an expert at this:

Anna carefully character assassinates all the sceptical people she is about to introduce. She then gives them a fairly cursory hearing, ignores their arguments, and responds with personal attack and ridicule, appealing to the twin arguments of authority and consensus all the way.

The adjectives Anna assigns to adherents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are; eminent, highly respected, thorough, forward thinking, moderate and polite, intellectual, diplomatic, world-renowned, progressives and mainstream. Sceptics are described with derogatory words and terms like; attack dogs, more than a touch arrogant, fringe, wackiest, plays dirty, bizarre, contrarian, nutty, abrasive, notorious, bullying, dishonourable tactics, gang, cyber bullying, sexist, curious (in a derogatory context), petulant, bitter, web of denial, ideological warriors, generating hate towards climate scientists, and warped world vision. This sets the scene for the tone of her work.

Internal inconsistency is another hallmark of any quasi-religious belief system, which is revealed in her attitude to some fundamental climate issues:

She concedes on several occasions that the degree to which feedbacks occur, the climate sensitivity, is not known with certainty. And yet, when sceptics point out the same fact, she labels them as deniers of science. It’s a contradiction I find hard to fathom. There is another contradictory element in which Anna shows that she does not have a consistent line. When discussing aerosols, she virtually admits that the current climate models upon which the IPCC relies, do not include all the potential variables, specifically the effect of aerosols. How then can she point the finger at sceptics who decry the failures of the models and call them deniers of science? It’s just a contradiction I find glaring and mystifying. Anna can apparently point out a deficiency in a model and still believe in ‘the science’ but woe betide any sceptic who does the same thing.

And the review highlights the obvious point that has been made on this blog many times, namely, if the sceptics are so insignificant and their arguments so weak, why the need to devote such attention and effort to eliminating them?

Early on, Anna describes Nick Minchin as one of the ‘remaining few high profile climate-sceptics in Australia’. In other parts of the book she uses terms like ‘tiny’ to describe the group of people who are still sceptical. Based on this I ask myself a hypothetical question. If it is true that there are only a ‘remaining few’ and that the group is ‘tiny’, why is it then so necessary for her, and others, to go out with such zeal to convert every last disbeliever into a believer?  If these sceptics are in such a small minority, then surely their argument must be lost already. Why can’t they just be left to wither on the vine? Why can’t they just be by-passed and ignored?

The conclusion follows straightforwardly:

Could it be that Anna’s zeal to track down and convert even the ‘few remaining’ doubters and heretics could actually be a marker of her own insecurity about the veracity and resilience of her own belief.

Read it all.

Madlands is available on Amazon on 1 October 2012.

Great read

It’s a while now since I finished reading this great little book on the global warming scare, and other non-climate demands have subsequently prevented me from reading it again, so unfortunately this is more of a recommendation than a full review.

However, if you want a clear, very readable and straightforward exposé of the alarmism of climate science and the media, the myth of the green economy, the ostracising of dissenters and the myriad other distorted facets to this key issue for the 21st century, ‘Don’t sell your coat’ ticks all the boxes. It’s available on Kindle as well, for just US$9, so you can start reading it today.

Highly recommended.

Harold also blogs at Talking About the Weather here – one for your bookmarks.

‘Don’t sell your coat’ is available from Amazon here.

Essential reading

Donna Laframboise’s new book “The Delinquent Teenager who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert” blows the lid clean off the biased and politicised organisation otherwise known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

We have always known that the IPCC was a political construct. Senior figures at the World Meteorological Office and the United Nations had already formed the view back in the mid-1980s (based on virtually no evidence at all) that man-made carbon dioxide was damaging the climate, and all that was required was to find some science to back it up. Enter the IPCC. Established to find the evidence that was at the time so sorely lacking, the IPCC is manacled to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – a political agreement between nations signed in 1992 – which has been described by Rajendra Pachauri as the IPCC’s “main customer”.

Even from that short introduction, it is utterly baffling how anyone (including our deluded government) could possibly still believe that the IPCC is an impartial scientific body. And yet the majority of the world’s climate policies are based on this organisation’s pronouncements.

However, the story is far more complex and shocking than that. The Delinquent Teenager describes numerous examples of the scientific message being massaged and manipulated to fit the preordained outcome. Grey literature is welcomed when it fits the agenda (despite Rajendra Pachauri’s protestations that the IPCC is nothing but peer-reviewed literature) – but oddly that peer-reviewed literature is excluded or played down when it doesn’t. Lead authors in IPCC reports write articles in journals which are then cited in the report – even when those journals were published after the official cut-off date. But who cares if it helps bolster the case? The lack of scientific integrity would shame a senior school physics student.

A classic example from the book is the much-touted link between natural disasters and “global warming”. The 2001 IPCC report claimed such a link, but the conclusion was based on a report prepared by an insurance company (Munich Re, an organisation which is well known for peddling climate alarmism, see here for example) which, naturally, would benefit financially from the greater demand for insurance that such a link may generate. The fact that this presents a clear conflict of interest seems to have escaped everyone down at IPCC Towers (funny how conflicts of interest with sceptics and oil companies seem to be pounced on rather more eagerly – as Daily Bayonet puts it, even accepting a free mug from a gas station is enough!).

If that wasn’t enough, one of the Munich Re report’s authors was also a lead author on the IPCC report. But the story doesn’t end there.

In 2005, the journal Science published a commentary on the subject by Evan Mills, citing the Munich Re report and the IPCC report as separate, independent sources. A few years later, Barack Obama’s scientific adviser John Holdren later prepared a report on the impacts of climate change, which cited the Mills paper as the definitive source on disaster costs and climate change. In a pithy summary of this incestuous series of events, Donna concludes:

So a dubious finding that originated in a document written by an insurance company was included in the Climate Bible in 2001. It then made its way into the peer-reviewed scientific literature in 2005. By 2009 it was being treated as gospel by a US government report. Welcome to the confidence-inspiring world of climate science.

There is much, much more. Every MP and Senator in Australia (and every attendee at the Durban Climate Summit) should be forced to read this book from cover to cover. Then maybe they would think twice about accepting without any critical thought the partisan conclusions of the IPCC.

This is a must-read book, and it’s a bargain at only $4.99 on Kindle. It expertly and thoroughly exposes the IPCC for the compromised and corrupt organisation we always suspected it to be.

Buy it here.

Donna’s excellent blog, No Frakking Consensus, is here.