I suppose it was inevitable that my review of Air Con would attract a response from its author, but I hadn’t expected anything quite as extraordinary as this. Apart from dubbing me “Trufflehunter” and Bryan Walker “Quasimodo” (which is very unfair — Bryan doesn’t have back problems, though he does like the sound of bells — or was it the other way round?), I am apparently now a “sock puppet” for James Hansen. Frankly, if I had Jim’s hand stuck up my posterior orifice, I think I might have noticed… I’ll ignore Wishart’s ad homs though, and merely note that he demonstrates very nicely that an ability to cite scientific papers is no substitute for understanding what they say. It’s a big and complex world out there, but sadly Wishart can only see the bits that suit his ideology.
[PS: I wish I could make a living from truffles alone… 😉 ]
What, no rebuttal war?
What was it Twain said about wrestling with pigs?
Wishart’s attacks on me and his inaccurate understanding of my background are neither here nor there — they say more about him than I would ever wish to.
i’m paranoid, apparently.
* looks round furtively, hides under desk*
Yes, but your tinfoil hat is very fetching.
Casting one’s pearls before swine? (I’m sure a good Biblical allusion would not be lost on Ian).
Some “pearls”. Some “swine”.
[/churchill]
In my ‘umble opinion, if it’s worth reading his book and doing a post on it, it’s surely worth addressing the scientific points he made on his blog (perhaps via your blog) at the very least.
Well, that’s where the wrestling with pigs thing comes in. I don’t dispute the lag (which, depending on dating accuracy, could be anything from as little as a couple of hundred years to a thousand), but his interpretation of it. To Wishart, because there was a lag in the past, there could be lag now. That’s only a “reasonable” assumption if you don’t understand how the system works. Interestingly, in his riposte, he cites a paper showing deep ocean warming in advance of surface warming — which is all very interesting, but only describes one aspect of what’s going on. Note he doesn’t address the “icons” of his case that I looked at.
This was one comment on debating with Wishart (at Poneke!):
I have in front of me a book called Senator Joe McCarthy, written by Richard H Rovere, with a foreword by Arthur M Schlesinger, Jr. It is obvious to a reasonable person that Schlesinger didn’t write the book, but he endorses its contents, which include this insight which I think aptly sums up Wishart’s technique:
“The ‘multiple untruth’ need not be a particularly large untruth but can instead be a long series of loosely related untruths, or a single untruth with many facets. In either case, the whole is composed of so many parts that anyone wishing to set the record straight will discover that it is utterly impossible to keep all the elements of the falsehood in mind at the same time. Anyone making the attempt may seize upon a few selected statements and show them to be false, but doing this may leave the impression that only the statements selected are false and that the rest are true. An even greater advantage of the ‘multiple untruth’ is that statements shown to be false can be repeated over and over again with impunity because no one will remember which statements have been disproved and which haven’t.†(page 110)
Roughly what Danyl said at comment 19…
He pulls your review apart one piece at a time until there is nothing left, not sure your why you are advertising your ineptitude on your own website by providing links to his article. Appears to me that you have no sensible answer for his book or for his article.
Well just keep calling him quoting him out of context and calling him names I guess 🙂
Funnily enough, R2, that’s exactly what he doesn’t do. I went to some lengths to deal with each of the “icons†he tries to debunk in his book, but his riposte doesn’t begin to look at those. Instead he resorts to name calling and inaccurate speculation about my degree, writing career and so on. If he wants to play in the gutter, he can stay there on his own.
“Funnily enough”..
“I went to some lengths to deal with each of the “icons†he tries to debunk in his book”
Haha that is funny, can you send me a link to these because I haven’t seen them on your website.
You could try reading the review, perhaps?
I predict AirCon will be another setback, and thanks to the success of Investigate will get quite widely read.
The issue of today is Kevin Rudd’s postponement (read cancellation) of Australia’s ETS.
Where to for NZ now ?
Sadly, Ayrdale, you may be right about Air Con being widely read, but a setback for what? Wingnut credibility? Even my friendly local PaperPlus has taken to stacking Hot Topic next to Air Con so that consumers have a fair choice between fact and fiction. And before you go for the cheap jibe, Air Con’s the fictive article…
His response was comical, desperate and sad in about even measure.
Quasimodo? Well, I do have an elderly stoop I’m told, and I am deaf, though not from the sound of bells – much more prosaically from factory noise in my youth. For the record, I have reviewed a number of climate change books for the Waikato Times over recent years, and my review of Hot Topic was done before I had any knowledge of who Gareth was. Reporting on what I read is my chief contribution to trying to draw attention to the seriousness of global warming, and about all I have to offer as a long-retired English teacher. I have, incidentally, read Wishart’s book. Al Gore a latter-day Goebbels? James Hansen a ringleader in deception? The UN bureaucracy set on world domination, a goal brought closer by the advent of Helen Clark, “climate change priestess and globalisation powerhouseâ€? Wishart may not believe in global warming, but he certainly inhabits a fevered world.
So, R2, you *still* haven’t done your homework. Lucky for you Gareth has a policy of tolerating content-free trolling, as Ayrdale’s continued presence also demonstrates. Not so lucky for the rest of us.
Ayrdale, NZ and Oz are precisely where they always were, waiting to fall into line once the U.S. and China cut a deal.
Re Wishart, I can’t imagine why he thinks that mush-mouthed Monckton impression is appealing to anyone. It looks to be an attempt to distract from his failure to make even one valid point about Gareth’s criticisms.
Gareth, probably you know this but likely the reference to Akasofu (an emeritus expert on aurorae) talking about alleged Greenland cooling refers to the Chylek paper attempting to stretch three limited station records in the southwest (not all even in the Arctic) to imply something about the whole island. Re Siberian cooling (likely based on some of the fine “scientific” work at Climate Audit), doubtless that would explain the rapidly expanding permafrost melt lakes.