Category: Climate cranks

Cranking it out: NZ papers conned by denier media strategy

My inbox in the last month has filled with emails about denier articles in leading New Zealand newspapers. It’s been a veritable crank central across the country. They include the ridiculous opinion piece by Jim Hopkins in the Herald late last year, a similar feature by Bryan Leyland  published in both the DomPost and The Press, then, last week, a piece by Chris de Freitas in the Herald, arguing that desertification in Africa isn’t caused by climate change.

Did Leyland and de Freitas, both leading lights in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, take advantage of newspapers’ lack of feature material over the holiday break and provide some copy to fill the gap?

An insight to the strategy behind our newspapers’ fairly regular publication of our local deniers can be gained from reading a document I came across recently: the Canadian-based International Climate Science [denial] Coalition’s (ICSC) media strategy, originally posted on the front page of its website last year (pdf here).

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Prat Watch #3: through the looking glass

Sunday morning laughs: over at his Climate Conversation Club, Richard “no warming in NZ” Treadgold fulminates about about the contents ((Interestingly, his horror is at the mundane reality of an author promising to put together a first draft of a summary for policymakers, which before publication will go through numerous drafts and which will be fought over line by line by the representatives of every government participating in the IPCC process, before being explicitly approved by them all.)) of a stolen email:

Appalling. It’s a free world, so even the “leaders” in climatology are entitled to express the opinion they like. But I draw attention to those who willingly follow these atrocious examples. Such people sabotage science, ransack reason and in the end destroy democracy. Though they imagine they do these things entirely for our own good, they must feel the heat of public opprobrium before they destroy us.

Change one word in that elegant little diatribe, and I would agree one hundred percent. The word? Climatology. Strike that through, and replace it with your word of choice for those would try to persuade us to do nothing.

It really is a looking-glass world on “the other side”: a world where the direction we know as up is called down, black appears to be white, and the laws of physics are puzzling Alice ((“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. Source.)).

McLean’s folly 2: the reckoning

Ten months ago, Aussie “sceptic” John McLean predicted that 2011 would be “the coolest year since 1956”. I pointed out at the time that this was nonsense, and so it has proven to be. I’ve taken the GISS global temperature figure for Jan – Nov 2011 (+0.51ºC compared to the 1951-80 average) and added it to the graph I created to illustrate the full extent of McLean’s folly:

Maclean1956outcome

Last year was warmer than 1956 by a whopping 0.68ºC — about three standard deviations, in statistical terms — making McLean’s forecast an abysmal failure. Yes, 2011 was cooler than 2010 or 2009, but still one of the top ten warm years.

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The climate terroirist – Gladstones’ new bag

Regular listeners to The Climate Show will know that I often witter on about what I’ve been up to in my little vineyard. At Limestone Hills we grow pinot noir and syrah grapes and make small quantities of wine. It’s more than drinkable. One day it may even be very good. If we get that far, it will be because our back paddock has an interesting terroir (and because we will have worked hard). It will therefore come as no surprise that I follow how the wine business approaches climate change with more than passing interest. A few days ago a local winemaker blogged about a new book. Wine, Terroir and Climate Change by Aussie scientist Dr John Gladstones, noting that Gladstones was “sceptical about the degree of climate change that will occur and thus the degree of effect on terroir“. Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects have rushed to welcome a new member to their ranks. I decided to do a little digging… Continue reading “The climate terroirist – Gladstones’ new bag”

Prat Watch #2: the 2011 Climate BS Awards

The 2011 Climate BS Awards (where BS stands for Bad Science) have just been announced by Peter Gleick and the Pacific Institute [Huff Post, Forbes]. Nominated and voted for by a crack team of climate scientists and communicators, the awards go to “particularly egregious, notorious, or well-publicized examples of bad climate science that were produced over the past 12 months and used to try to influence or confuse the public and policymakers”. Runaway winners? The Republican candidates for President of the USA. Here’s the award citation in full:

Being anti-science in general, and anti-climate science in particular, seems a requirement for nomination to lead the Republican Party. Not a single one of the Republican candidates for President has a position on climate change that is consistent with the actual science accepted by 97-98% of all climate scientists and every national academy of sciences on the planet. The choice among the current Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, distain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the individual candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award. Combined? The group wins the 2011 Award hands down. [my emphasis]

Worthy winners, and deeply depressing for the future of the planet. Here’s the rest of the award pantheon:

  • #2: Disinformation from Fox News and Murdoch’s News Corporation
  • #3: Spencer, Braswell, and Christy
  • #4: The Koch Brothers for funding the promotion of bad climate science
  • #5: Anthony Watts for his BEST hypocrisy

Read the full awards citations (including “honourable mentions”) at Peter Gleick’s blogs or at the Pacific Institute. Readers might care to nominate worthy Australian and New Zealand contenders for a southern hemisphere award. There are plenty of prime contenders…