Category: Climate cranks

Mother nature’s sons

homer.jpgYesterday, two of NZ’s leading newspapers — Fairfax stablemates The Press and the Dominion Post — featured an exciting story by Press science reporter Paul Gorman. The Press headlined it Climate change down to nature, while the Dom Post opted for the slightly more accurate Nature blamed for warming. Big news, obviously, as Gorman explained in the opening sentence in the DP version:

Nature, not mankind, is responsible for recent climate change, according to new peer-reviewed research likely to send ripples around the world.

The first ripples showed up at Hot Topic on Friday morning, alerting me to this apparently ground-breaking piece of research — a paper in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research titled Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature . And then I saw the author list: McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter. That’s Bob “big lie” Carter, inexpert witness Chris de Freitas, and Aussie “climate analyst” John McLean, as good a cross-section of the southern hemisphere climate crank coterie as you’re likely to find in one journal at one time. And guess what, the paper’s available free of charge from the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition web site [PDF (link now broken, see Update 4 below)], although the AGU want to charge for it. All sorts of interesting questions popped into my mind…

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Carbon the copycat

homer.jpgThe Sunday Star Times recently carried an article by Keisha Castle-Hughes about her trip to the Cook Islands and the dangers of climate change. Terry Dunleavy, one of the prime movers in New Zealand’s Climate “Science” Coalition, duly rushed to offer the paper an alternate view. But they (wisely) turned him down… Hell hath no fury like a crank scorned, so Terry has published his riposte at crank central [Word .doc here], and naturally I couldn’t resist taking a look. It begins:

Last week’s article by Keisha Castle-Hughes entitled “Pacific Poison”, following her Geenpeace-hosted visit to the Cook Islands, is so chock full of misleading and scientifically unjustifiable propaganda that it demands earliest possible rebuttal.

As is usual with crank articles, the reverse is actually true — Terry provides an object lesson in misleading and scientifically unjustifiable propaganda. But he goes one further, and reproduces a chunk of a Wikipedia article without attribution. Yes, Terry is exposed as an intellectual magpie, a thief of other people’s words, a plagiarist.

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“The irresponsibility and immorality of climate change denial”

Krugman.jpg When does opposition to action on climate change cross the line between legitimate political debate and enter the realms of irresponsible, immoral and dangerous inaction? Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton, Nobel prize winner and New York Times columnist is in no doubt: most of those who voted against the Waxman-Markey emissions reduction bill in Washington earlier this week breached all the principles of good governance.

…most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases. And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

Krugman mentions MIT’s revised projections, and the Copenhagen synthesis report analysed in recent posts by Bryan Walker conveys the same message. But it was the quality of the debate in Congress that really upset him…

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A long way from Home

homer.jpgFilm review corner: Dr Ron Smith, a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato and a regular contributor to Muriel Newman’s crank echochamber went to see Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home earlier this month (previewed here), and was moved to provide Muriel with a review. As crank effluvia go, it’s a classic…

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North to Alaska

CT090609.png Interesting times in the Arctic, as spring turns into summer and the sea ice melts towards its summer minimum. Will this year’s minimum be a new record, or will the ice bounce back towards the long term (but still downward) trend? The first scientific forecasts of the season are expected soon from the Sea Ice Outlook project coordinated by ARCUS, the first yacht has set sail for an attempt to get through the Northwest Passage, and the usual suspects are insisting that the ice is continuing to recover. So what are the odds of a new record this year, and how is the ice really doing at the moment? The picture’s mixed…

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