Prat Watch #1: columnated ruins domino

Being the first in an occasional series in which we monitor the wilder excesses of climate denial. Warning: reading and/or viewing the original material referenced herein may cause uncontrollable mirth. Hot Topic accepts no responsibility for any adverse effects that may result, but recommends a good micro fibre cleaning cloth for removing coffee/tea/wine from computer screens…

However gloomy I may be about the prospects for serious international action to reduce carbon emissions, I did find a few things to enjoy amongst the events in Durban, not the least of them being the fact that the only way Mark Morano and potty peer Christopher Monckton could draw attention to their CFACT-sponsored trip was by jumping out of an aeroplane in an attempt to attract the attention of the world’s press.

From the CFACT web site:

Multiple media outlets showed up to record the event, including the AP, BBC, and South Africa’s national news network. It was a huge success! Climategate 2.0 can not be ignored!

Shows, I suppose, just how desperate the denial campaign is to make mileage out of yesterday’s emails. But Monckton and Morano weren’t finished…

The vituperative viscount is well-known for his ability to misread and misrepresent UN negotiating drafts, but he outdid himself in an “analysis” that was met with glee at µWatts and Treadgold’s place. Here’s a sample of his wisdom, culled from Durban – the insanities the mainstream media conspire not to report:

Here – and, as always, you heard it here first, for the mainstream media have conspired to keep secret the Madness of King Rajendra and his entire coterie of governmental and bureaucratic lunatics worldwide – is what the dribbling, twitching thrones and dominions, principalities and powers of the world will be asked to agree to.

For the full gory details you’ll have to go and read it at the above link, but if you do, note how Monckton claims that the Central England Temperature record is “quite a good proxy for global temperatures”, and rediscovers an attempt at world government — all leavened with much Moncktonian rudery: “the mentally-challenged Durban droolers”, “the staring-eyed global-village idiots”¹, and much, much more. Swallowed whole by the twitocracy he serves, of course.

[It seems unfair, at this point, to refer to (yet another) excellent Monckton debunk by potholer54 — but I’ll do it anyway.]

Meanwhile, CFACT communications director Mark Morano was issuing his own A-Z of climate denial Climate Reality Check², which rather disappointingly turns out to be little more than an index to the many and various fevered distortions already featured at his Climate Depot blog.

Far more worthy of attention is a post-Durban press release from the International Climate Science Coalition, featuring the work of three New Zealanders — Bob Carter, Bryan Leyland and Terry Dunleavy. According to the ICSC:

International Climate Science Coalition Rejects Durban Agreement to set New Greenhouse Gas Emission Targets — No “Climate Debt” is owed to developing countries

Nobody is much interested in what the ICSC has to say, except perhaps Treadgold and the reader of the Rock River Times³, but you have to give them credit for trying. Here’s Carter, dissembling heroically as usual:

Science has yet to provide unambiguous evidence that problematic, or even measurable, human-caused global warming is occurring. Consequently, any agreements—Durban, Cancun, Copenhagen or Kyoto—to reduce humanity’s greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions are utterly futile.

And here’s Bryan Leyland getting things ass backwards, as usual:

Expensive and ineffective alternative energy projects such as wind turbines and solar cells are receiving massive government support, in the belief that they will reduce GHG emissions which are wrongly blamed as a cause of dangerous global warming. Meanwhile, the conventional power sources that we rely on for our very survival, let alone the economic progress we need to create a better world, are deliberately starved of support. This is a very dangerous situation.

Fossil fuels deliberately starved of support! Sorry Bryan, the International Energy Agency‘s latest report (press release) puts subsidies for fossil fuel consumption at $409 billion, and subsidies to renewable energy (all forms) at $66 billion. A positively Moncktonian effort at spin, I will admit⁴…

And finally⁵, it will come as no surprise to aficionados of the denial choir that Christopher Booker is still bonkers. Complaining about the global warming episode in the latest BBC/Attenborough nature documentary⁶, he states:

Sir David’s dramatic shots of Greenland may have tried to convey that its huge ice cap is rapidly melting. But a detailed study five years ago estimated the proportion of its ice lost by melting around its periphery at only seven thousandths of 1 per cent of the total, suggesting that it could make little significant difference to sea levels for thousands of years.

Do try and keep up Chris. The latest Arctic Report Card puts last year’s Greenland melt at a loss of 430 Gigatonnes of ice mass, sufficient to increase global sea level by 1.1mm. But I suppose a five year old paper is more to your liking.

[Columnated ruins = falling peers/piers. Delphic, moi?]

1. Which some might think involved pots being rude about kettles. [↩]
2. Exec summary here, full pdf if you really must, but I’ve done it so you don’t have to. [↩]
3. In which Bob Carter — in all seriousness — says the world would be better served by dropping the IPCC and instead using the NIPCC as the fount of all wisdom. [↩]
4. Though it was trivially easy to prove you wrong. Please try harder next time. [↩]
5. As Trevor McDonald used to say. [↩]
6. Anybody know when it will be broadcast in NZ? [↩]