Category: Climate cranks

Rash Brash and the potty peer’s PR pratfall

The schedule for “potty peer” Christopher Monckton’s visit to New Zealand next week has now been finalised. He’ll be visiting Auckland, Wellington and Whangarei, but there’s no sign of any of the high-profile debates his sponsors were so keen to set up. ACT party leader Don Brash is joining in the fun, accusing the Greens of being “yellow” (geddit?) for refusing to debate with the good Lord:

Apparently the Greens are prepared to cripple our economy and condemn us all to subsistence living with dopey measures designed to stop the planet warming, but they’re not prepared to debate their reasons for doing so with a reputable opponent.

Brash considers Monckton reputable? Really? That reflects very poorly on Dr Don, unless he considers that a reputation for misrepresenting scientific research and calling his opponents Nazis or Hitler Youth is somehow respectable. Perhaps that sort of thing is now de rigueur on the extreme right…

One of the stranger aspects of Monckton’s visit is that the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) is organising two of his appearances, in Auckland and Wellington. A little digging into the background of the PRINZ events reveals tantalising hints that fossil fuel interests in New Zealand could be tacitly supporting the potty peer’s short tour.

Continue reading “Rash Brash and the potty peer’s PR pratfall”

The Climate Show #17: the end of the peer show

Nano electric cars from India, 100 year old electric vehicles, the Petermann ice island floating down towards the Atlantic, heatwaves in the USA and snow in North Canterbury, and a bit of peerless chat about a larrikin Lord on his way to New Zealand. With added vegan cheese and the BFC (big fat cat). Yes Glenn and John Cook wax lyrical, while Gareth’s mind wanders off on his EU and US trip — The Climate Show is back with another rambling but perfectly essential distillation of climate and related news and commentary.

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, listen to us via Stitcher on your smartphone or listen direct/download from the link below the fold…

Follow The Climate Show at The Climate Show web site, and on Facebook and Twitter.

Continue reading “The Climate Show #17: the end of the peer show”

BBC about to bite bullet on climate BS

“I recommend that the BBC takes a less rigid view of ‘due impartiality’ as it applies to science (in practice and not just in its guidelines) and takes into account the non‐contentious nature of some material and the need to avoid giving undue attention to marginal opinion.” This is one of the recommendations of a review commissioned last year by the BBC Trust from Professor Steve Jones, emeritus professor of genetics at University College London. He was asked to assess the impartiality and accuracy of BBC science coverage across television, radio and the internet. His review and the Trust report which responds to it have now been published, along with the news that the BBC has accepted his recommendations.

Continue reading “BBC about to bite bullet on climate BS”

de Freitas feeds his students sceptic propaganda

Auckland University associate professor Chris de Freitas has been caught feeding climate denier propaganda to first year geography students. A close examination of the student workbook for de Freitas’ lectures on climate for the University’s core first year geography course reveals that it includes material from sceptic blogs and US think tanks — even a misleading graph prepared by Christopher “Garnaut’s a Nazi” Monckton.

The NZ Herald‘s Chris Barton broke the story this weekend — first year geography students have complained that their climate lectures didn’t reflect what they were learning elsewhere in the university:

…according to some students of de Freitas’s 101 course on the basics of climate you won’t hear about how climate scientists are now seeing such patterns [of extreme weather]. Or about the building evidence that human-induced climate change is changing precipitation and the hydrological cycle, especially the extremes.

And that 2010 ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998, making the first decade of the 21st century the warmest ever according to the World Meteorological Organization. […]

“No, nothing,” a student in the course told the Herald. “I learned all that in my Environmental Science class.”

The Geography 101 lecture workbook confirms the lack of such information. There seems little, if any, reference to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its landmark 2007 reports were not listed in the course reading material. Climate scientists shown the workbook were surprised at how out of date much of the material was.

A glance at the lecture workbook, however, shows that de Freitas’ misdirection of his students goes much further…

Continue reading “de Freitas feeds his students sceptic propaganda”

Ocean acidification: How much is too much?

Over at Skeptical Science we (Doug Mackie, Christina McGraw, and Keith Hunter) have started a long series (18 parts) about ocean acidification (Introduction , 1, 2). We all deride blog science. Blog science is what happens when people try to get a complex message across in 800 words or less. Real science takes time to explain. There is too much et voila in writing about climate change in general and ocean acidification in particular. Denialists have not touched ocean acidification because they don’t understand it. The chemistry is very subtle and even posts on normally reliable blogs like Skeptical Science have made errors.

A local Dunedin denier sent me ‘proof’ that ocean acidification was not real and even if it was then it wasn’t a problem. The ‘proof’ was a document published by the SPPI. The document was previously ‘published’ (cough) in Energy and Environment. Really, they very best argument the denialists have is “acid means pH less than 7 but ocean pH is greater than 7 so there is therefore no acidification”.

In this document (which I am not linking to because they don’t need the traffic) 5 of the 12 points for policy makers are variations on the pH greater than 7 argument. At first I puzzled at this: Do they really think policy makers are so dumb they won’t notice the same thing said 5 ways? Then I remembered Don Brash and had to concede the point. Yes, many policy makers are that dumb. (6 more points in the summary for policy makers are variations of ‘the gravy train’ meme and the last point says that measurements to date agree with IPCC projections – while mangling the terminology).

Continue reading “Ocean acidification: How much is too much?”