Wishart

Bear necessities

by Gareth May 23, 2009

Scientific papers are often dull, worthy screeds, difficult to read and hard to understand without considerable effort, but sometimes they are an absolute pleasure. I can heartily recommend Amstrup et al. Rebuttal of “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit”, Interfaces (2009) pp. 1-17 [PDF, Woods Hole press release] as a fine example of [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Missing the point by miles

by Gareth May 20, 2009

I have been steering clear of Wishart-related material for the last week or two (on the “wrestling with pigs” principle), but I can’t let this post at his blog pass without comment. It begins: In the climate debate, we can choose to listen to truffle fanciers like Gareth at Hot Topic, journalists like myself or [...]

22 comments Read the full article →

Heaven is a place on earth

by Gareth May 10, 2009

The Australian twin to Wishart’s Air Con is Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, published last month. According to Bob Carter (in all his oleaginous glory here) on Leighton Smith’s Newstalk ZB programme recently it’s “an excellent book”. Carter assures Smith that “the authoritative science is in Ian Plimer’s book”. [...]

18 comments Read the full article →

A very public own goal…

by Gareth May 6, 2009

It didn’t take long for my last post to draw a reply from Ian Wishart, and — no surprises — it’s another lengthy diatribe. Unfortunately for Ian, it is also a very public own goal –demonstrating very nicely one of my central contentions: he doesn’t understand the stuff he’s writing about. Here’s the relevant passage [...]

10 comments Read the full article →

Quirk, strangeness, not much charm

by Gareth May 6, 2009

Another day, another angry diatribe from Air Con author Ian Wishart — longer and more intemperate that his last, but I’m getting used to the style. It seems he believes that attack is the best form of defence, which is great if you’ve got the ammunition (like the Crusaders backs of recent seasons, if not [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

Like being savaged by a dead sheep…

by Gareth May 5, 2009

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 [...]

19 comments Read the full article →

Somethin’ stupid…

by Gareth May 3, 2009

I hardly know where to begin with this book. It appears to come from another planet; it has a view of the world so far removed from the reality that most of us operate in that it’s difficult to know whether the author is misguided, malicious, or malignant. Consider the mental space occupied by someone [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

With friends like these…

by Gareth April 23, 2009

Next week sees the publication of Ian Wishart‘s latest book, Air Con — The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming. After trying to trash Helen Clark in Absolute Power, proclaiming the end of Western civilisation in Eve’s Bite and arguing a creationist line in The Divinity Code, Wishart has latched on to global warming. And [...]

29 comments Read the full article →

Next Entries →