Comments on: Moulin, not rouge

By: Gareth

Gareth — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:07:30 +0000

It’s all good stuff, Sol. If you’re just coming to terms with climate issues, the top report at that site — Climate Literacy — is not a bad place to start.

By: Sol

Sol — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:25:20 +0000

Here is a link to: US CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE PROGRAM.
I am curious to see what your responses are to the data there, Gareth, Steve, and others. I got to it following links from the USGS site.

http://www.climatescience.gov/

By: samv

samv — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:31:38 +0000

Anatomy of a crank response

Make an assertion or challenge. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense or has been refuted before. Use lots of big words to make it sound clever. Use charged rhetoric to appeal to the reader’s emotions rather than their reason. Don’t ever answer counter-challenges.

Finish with some kind of attempt at ridicule, eh?

By: AndrewH

AndrewH — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:23:22 +0000

SteveB

incorrect assumptions are also mistakes

Fair call – I should have spotted that one.

But, my whinge still stands….I made the assumption that the “1m flood over germany” was correct based on a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t mentioned.

Steve W chose to take the GIGO approach and use the immediately available information to concoct a story that fits his “ideology”.

I don’t think he should have been given the opportunity

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:24:14 +0000

Well, yes, of course. Crankdom is an ideology. Steve (and many other climate deniers) like to define the issue in terms of “belief”, and call GW a religion, but the behaviour of cranks (ignoring inconvenient facts, making stuff up to suit their arguments, denying basic science) is very reminiscent of the behaviour of creationists and religious fundamentalists. They also follow a catechism that’s lovingly prepared for them by Heartland, CEI and the others. Some irony there, perhaps.

I couldn’t care less about his politics — but I would hazard a guess that he’s a run-of-the-mill anti-green libertarian in the Not PC mould, or perhaps that of Rodney Hide and Muriel Newman. It’s a loss to the real political debate — about what to do — because it means that views from that end of the spectrum get ignored.

By: Andrew W

Andrew W — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:59:55 +0000

I assume the “ideology” (I suppose it’s an ideology) you’re refering to is AGW denialism?

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:19:08 +0000

Today’s predictions will be overtaken by events, just as the IPCC’s view on sea ice retreat has been shown to be too conservative.

No faith involved. Just a respect for science, and a healthy disdain for the ideology you espouse.

By: Steve Wrathall

Steve Wrathall — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:46:24 +0000

So GW’s #1 pin-up boy Hansen’s 1988 projections are now “completely irrelevant with respect to todayâ€™s observations”??

So I guess today’s breathless predictions will be “completely irrelevant” 20 years from now.

Sounds like you’re losing the faith Gareth. Unsurprising when the rest of the planet is too.

By: cindy

cindy — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:21:18 +0000

Steve

what Gareth said.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:52:26 +0000

Steve, you were wrong about Hansen’s 1988 projections last time you brought them up, but setting that to one side they are completely irrelevant with respect to today’s observations: Arctic sea ice disappearing decades earlier than projected, rapid increases in the melt from Greenland and West Antarctica, and so on. It’s not fairies melting this stuff you know, it’s heat.