Category: Climate cranks

How to believe in impossible things

Despite the huge number of mutually contradictory claims denialists make, there is something they all have in common: no matter how much green ink a they use in their writing, denialists never formally criticise each other.

The term cognitive dissonance was coined by Leon Festinger, a psychologist who (in 1954) infiltrated a UFO cult that had been promised a ride into space to avoid a great flood. The UFOs didn’t show. But instead of the cult imploding they turned instead to self justification and denial as they learned, via automatic writing from God, that their goodness had persuaded Him to call it all off.

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de Freitas: politics cloud his understanding of climate science

The southern summer silly season is here, and newspapers are desperate for copy. That’s about the only good reason I can think of for the nation’s biggest-selling newspaper, Auckland’s NZ Herald, giving Chris “unreliable witness” de Freitas yet more space to re-run some tired old climate sceptic arguments under the headline Emotion clouding underlying science of global warming. Doubt is his product, and he tries very hard to sound reasonable as he spins his tale. It’s a pity then that the Auckland University associate professor not only misrepresents the evidence, but gets it so badly wrong that he’s an embarrassment to his department.

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Easterbrook’s wrong (again)

Over the holiday period I’ve had a number of people point me at the latest “essay” by Don “Cooling-gate” Easterbrook — it was featured in full at µWatts, translated into German and Dutch, and made headline material for Morano: Geologist: 9,099 Of Last 10,500 Years Warmer Than 2010. I was a little surprised. I thought that recent temperatures were the warmest for at least hundreds, and probably thousands of years. But this is Easterbrook, and he’s up to his old tricks. He’s “hiding the incline” in temperatures by mangling the data from Greenland ice cores. Has he learned nothing since I last looked at his “work”? Apparently not.

Easterbrook’s argument is so flimsy and his presentation of data so dodgy that even the normally uncritical crowd at µWatts voiced grave doubts about his analysis. But there were a number of loose ends left over from my last look at Greenland ice core data, and so I took the opportunity to do a little more research. Playing fast and loose with the facts, and making schoolboy errors in the process, is not a good look for a professor emeritus. But that’s what Easterbrook’s been doing…

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Albert the knowledge penguin on climate

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Albert the Knowledge Penguin explains the real story of climate change, from the science to the politics, and gets it right. Read the rest of the story here. British cartoonist Darryl Cunningham has clearly done a lot of research, got a good grasp of the issues — and he eviscerates the Koch and Scaife-funded campaign to derail action. Great pay off line, too.

NZ cooling since 1909!

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New Zealand temperatures have been cooling since 1909, a penetrating analysis of NIWA’s new national temperatures series by Friends of Gin and Tonic, the self-proclaimed “#1 AGW Denial Site in Canada & Australia” has revealed. FoGT explain that in the absence of a full statistical analysis of the new series by Treadgold and the NZ C”S”C, their statistical experts have taken a look at NIWA’s data.

The data series, directly from NIWA, incorporates their new adjustments and can therefore be expected to be as ‘warm’ as they reckon they can get away with. Using techniques from Canada’s Friends of Science and leading blog climatologist the Baron von Monckhofen, we fit to this seven-station compilation seven trends which together cover the entire period 1909-2009. Despite the data adjustments each of these trends is negative, demonstrating convincingly that New Zealand has been consistently cooling throughout the 1909-2009 period. Furthermore, careful inspection of the graph reveals another important fact: the gradients of the three regression lines on the right of the figure show that cooling has accelerated since 1970. These two key observations from the New Zealand data agree with what scientists who are not members of the conspiracy have long been saying about trends globally.

My sources suggest that this shocking discovery is causing consternation in the NZ climatological community, but I haven’t been able to obtain an on-the-record comment at the moment because they’re having a New Year barbie on the beach at Island Bay and haven’t got any stats textbooks with them.