Category: Climate cranks

With friends like these…

Airconcover.jpg 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 just in case there’s any doubt about his position, here are some quotes from the blurb on the back cover:

The UN, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jacques Chirac, and other world-government wannabes are plotting to establish nothing less than a global, bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship under the pretext that it is necessary to ‘Save The Planet’. Ian Wishart’s book demonstrates that there is not the slightest scientific reason for the new, quasi-religious belief that The Planet needs Saving. The new religion is merely an excuse for world government. World government will not, repeat not, be democratic government. […]

I commend this timely book, which makes the scientific arguments comprehensible to the layman. Those who read it will help to forestall the new Fascists and so to keep us free. – Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, former adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

Wishart clearly believes that a recommendation from the potty peer is going to help him sell copies. It may (in certain limited circles) — but it does nothing for his credibility (nor does his mangling of Monckton’s title). And who’s this?

The book is brilliant. The best I have seen which deals with the news item side of it as well as the science. He has done a very thorough job and I have no hesitation in unreserved commendation. It has come along at the time we most need it and I hope it is published and publicized widely.

Back in March, Wishart was touting Air Con in comments to one of Bomber Bradbury’s posts at Tumeke!, and trotted out the above quote to show how esteemed his book was amongst experts — but was coy about identifying the author. And now we know why: the purple prose was penned by none other than Vincent Gray, diligent proofreader of so many IPCC reports. Someone guessed correctly at the time… I wonder who that was? 😉

I will be reviewing Air Con in coming weeks. Something to look forward to, perhaps…

Hows about telling a story

NZETS.jpgPeter Dunne’s assurance that the ETS Review process won’t turn into a re-examination of climate science is set to run into a few problems. Looking through the full list of submitters who will make oral presentations to the committee (below the fold), I count no fewer than eleven (plus one “possible”) who will or have already argued the crank position — and remarkably, that includes two Hungarian scientists (Miklos Zagoni and Ferenc Miskolczi) who assert that the greenhouse effect doesn’t work the way we think it does, and that global warming is therefore not a problem — even though their views, and “calculations” have been extensively debunked. M&Z are effectively on the furthest reaches of the climate crank fringe, and yet they’ve been invited to give “evidence” to the ETS Review. I wonder who wangled that little feat, and if the chairman realises what he’s got in store?

You can watch Miskolczi and Zagoni in action in Heartland’s 2008 crankfest “proceedings“. Rabett Run and others comprehensively rebutted the Miskolczi paper last year, and even the ever-welcoming Heartland didn’t ask M&Z for a repeat performance this year. So why are they turning up in New Zealand? It appears that Zagoni is in Australia visiting relatives, so perhaps he’s just arranged a holiday for himself and his friend Ferenc to coincide with his submission date (set for May 4th). What a lucky coincidence! I wonder if they have had any help with their airfares? That would seem like a fair question for someone on the committee to ask, if they want to get to the Heart of why their valuable time is being so egregiously wasted.

The ETS Review crank list in full:
Bryan Leyland, Carbon Sense Coalition (Australia), Centre for Resource Management Studies (aka Owen McShane), Dr Ferenc Miskolczi, Dr Kesten Green, McCabe Environmental Consultants(*), Miklos Zagoni, NZ Centre for Political Research, NZ Climate Science Coalition, Dr R M Carter, Vincent Gray.

NZ attendees at Heartland conferences (2008 and/or 2009) underlined. Muriel Newman’s NZ CPR was one of this year’s “sponsors”, but she didn’t have to fork out any money for that privilege, just proselytize. (*) Not known. To see full list of submitters making oral presentations click on “now read on…”.

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Bob’s big lie

homer.jpgTime to revisit events at crank central. In the course of researching the NIPCC (at the behest of Peter Dunne), I popped over to the International Climate Science Coalition site, and then on to their Australian spin-off. The Aussie crank collective is greatly enriched by the presence of Prof Bob Carter, known here as “the great communicator” because of his accomplished presentation skills and ability to make outrageous nonsense sound almost plausible. The ACSC points to Prof Bob’s latest article for Aussie magazine Quadrant, and so — noting that one R M Carter is due to give evidence to the ETS Review committee at some point — I thought I ought to catch up on the great man’s current thinking. Prepare yourself for a jaw/desk interface event:

Get this. First, there has been no recent global warming in the common meaning of the term, for world average temperature has cooled for the last ten years. Furthermore, since 1940 the earth has warmed for nineteen years and cooled for forty-nine, the overall result being that global average temperature is now about the same as it was in 1940.

Global average temperature is now “about the same” as it was 69 years ago? Obviously, the “cooling since 1998” lie no longer cuts the mustard. Bob has to bend the facts beyond breaking point to bolster his case. Here’s the NASA GISS graph:

GISS409.gif

And here’s the Hadley Centre version:

Hadley409.gif

It is quite clear that global temperature is only “about the same as 1940” for definitions of “about the same” that consider variations ±0.5ºC to be inconsequential. You might as well say that because the world hasn’t warmed by 10ºC then it hasn’t warmed at all. But if you do that, then you can’t also insist that the world has cooled since 1998…

And how on Earth (or off it), did Research Professor Robert Carter of the James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide work out that the world has warmed for 19 years but cooled for 49 since 1940? He must have a sophisticated statistical analysis to bring to bear on the topic. Or perhaps he has been counting all the little ups and downs in the GISS graph… Great science, by a great… something or other.

We can run, but we can’t hide…

earthhour.jpg This article appeared in the Perspectives section of The Press yesterday, as part of the paper’s build up up to Earth Hour this weekend. I haven’t seen the letters page today, but I expect the usual suspects will be out in force… 😉

The news isn’t good. Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advised two years ago that the evidence for global warming was unequivocal, the pace of change has speeded up. Summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has seen a dramatic decline, and in a worrying foretaste of what may be to come, methane — a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — has been found bubbling out of the ocean floor off Siberia. Down south, analysis of a core drilled into the seabed under the Ross Ice Shelf by a team including scientists from New Zealand (using Kiwi drilling expertise), demonstrates that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is unstable and likely to collapse if warming continues as we expect over the coming century. Experts are revising their projections of sea level rise upwards with each piece of bad news. A metre or more by the 2090s is now a real possibility.

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Telling porkies to Parliament

NZETS.jpgThe Emissions Trading Scheme Review committee has released the first batch of submissions it has received — those made by organisations and individuals who have already made their presentations to the committee. There are some heavy hitters in there: from New Zealand’s science and policy community there’s the Climate Change Centre (a joint venture between the University of Canterbury and Victoria University of Wellington, plus all the Crown Research Institutes – from NIWA to AgResearch), VUW’s Climate Change Research Institute, and GNS Science, and from the world of commerce, we have the Business Roundtable‘s “evidence”. Why the quote marks? Because the Roundtable’s submission is a fact-free farrago of nonsense.

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