Tag: cranks

Is Garth George capable of original thought?

According to the Rotorua Daily Post, Garth George is “a veteran newspaperman living semi-retired in Rotorua”. Garth sallies forth from time to time to lend the benefit of his wisdom on climate policy to the readers of the NZ Herald, and on Thursday Oct 8th offered the following comment on reports of tax fraud in the EU emissions trading scheme:

For those of us who have known for years that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have nothing to do with global warming, and who recognise that an unnecessary international carbon trading scheme would be wide open to abuse, this comes as no surprise.

He then presented a few points “courtesy of Australia’s Carbon Sense Coalition”, beginning with:

There is no global warming crisis. The world is just emerging from the Little Ice Age, so naturally temperatures will be above those of last century.

There follow 317 words (yes, I counted them) lifted directly from this document (pdf), published in January by Viv Forbes of the aforementioned Carbon “Sense” Coalition. No quotation marks. No indication that this is a direct lift. But of the 800 words in Garth’s column, 37.5% were written by Viv Forbes. I wonder if Garth is forwarding a share of his cheque? The same column, in a slightly different form was reprinted in Rotorua the next day.

A sorry tale of lazy journalism maybe, but also the start of a little saga…

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Dewhurst’s den

Time for Roger Dewhurst to have his own thread. Roger, post only here, please. Any comments elsewhere will be deleted.

Carter, the unstoppable text machine

homer.jpgBob Carter’s writing style (logorrhea, leavened with pomposity) is on display once more at Quadrant Online, and this week’s missive from planet Bob – headlined Media Ecoevangelists — finds him fulminating about an ABC documentary on the future of coal, The Coal Nightmare. I can’t comment on the film, it not having screened over here so far as I can tell, but I can question a few of Bob’s wilder assertions… Continue reading “Carter, the unstoppable text machine”

The biased leading the blind

homer.jpgTwo of New Zealand’s most prominent climate cranks, “inexpert witness” Chris de Freitas and Bob “great communicator” Carter are no strangers to the art of misrepresenting facts in support of their peculiar political visions, but recent articles by the pair set new standards for economy with the truth. Here’s De Freitas, writing in Energy NZ:

…no one has yet found even a shred of objective scientific evidence that humans are causing damaging global climate change.

No to be outdone, in Aussie “journal of ideas” Quadrant Carter revives the oldest zombie fact of them all:

As the temperature trend for ten years now has been one of cooling, since the unusually warm El Nino year of 1998, this requires a precautionary response to cooling rather than warming.

De Freitas’ piece is — even to my jaundiced eyes — remarkable for how liberally he misleads his readers…

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Ask not for whom the Bellamy tolls…

homer.jpgTV3’s Sunrise programme featured an interview with David Bellamy this morning. You can watch it here, and read TV3’s story here. The bewhiskered botanist, in NZ to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the battle to save the Whirinaki forest, cut a rather sad figure, I thought, as the presenters gave him a chance to run his “global warming is poppycock” line. As a conservationist and TV presenter he used to be marvellous. As a climate denier he’s just laughable. This is how he got started on climate change (my transcript):

Presenter: Do you believe man-made climate change is happening?

Bellamy: Absolutely not.

Presenter: And what backs up your belief?

Bellamy: Because there’s no actual proof. There’s a whole series of computer models and you can fiddle computer models to say what you like. If you actually look at the facts, that for the last ten years, um, man-made global warming if it was working, has stopped, because the temperatures have gone down, and right at this moment we’re heading for thirty years pretty cold, thing.

Standard crank talking points, but not many go as far as predicting 30 years of “pretty cold” on the basis of one cold winter. But Bellamy pushes the crank boat out even further later in the interview:

…2,000 years ago we were growing good merlot on the border with Scotland, and that was 3 degrees to 5 degrees warmer than it is now…

He’s just making things up for the sake of a soundbite. The Romans didn’t make wine on the Scottish borders, and even if they had it wouldn’t have been merlot. Not to mention that the temperature then was not warmer than today. Sad stuff – a once influential figure reduced to spouting gibberish.