Category: Climate cranks

John saw that number

homer.jpg My normal policy when supping with the devil is to use a very long spoon, but on this occasion I heartily recommend you nip down to the crossroads and have a look at the current number one item – Welcome To The World Of The Zealots. I’m not sure who’s running the NZ C”S”C site these days, but if it’s still Terry Dunleavy, he gives this piece high praise:

Brilliant! A must-read!

And indeed it is, but not for the reasons that Terry assumes. Quite had me spluttering into my morning tea – with laughter. The author, a retired British professor of something or other called John Brignell (who pretty much defines “crank” for most purposes), deploys all his pet peeves – second-hand smoking, shonky epidemiology, climate change, left wing conspiracies, and employs his most purple prose to expose this madness to the world. Here’s a sample:

When the world thought that the New Right was in the ascendancy during the Reagan-Thatcher years, it was the New Left that was quietly gathering momentum. Like a snowball rolling down a hill it picked up mass as it went along. The membership was many and various (followers of Rachel Carson, Marxist academics, draft-dodgers, sputniks left homeless by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, idealistic youth etc.) They were characterised by the things that they hated (industry, capitalism, free markets, bourgeois complacency, open science etc.)

There’s more. Much more. The man has a fertile imagination. And the NZ C”S”C apparently espouses this world view. Oh dear.

The Small Faces (and Stanley Unwin) say it all much better than I ever could:

Bus stop (wet day)

homer.jpg A few commenters have wondered recently why I tolerate knee-jerk dissenters like HarryTheHat on Hot Topic. The answer is both easy and complex. I got started on all this climate stuff as a result of a naive belief that if climate cranks could be shown where they were getting the science wrong that they would thank me, amend their views, and move on. From the early days of the NZ C”S”C when their site allowed comments, I enjoyed jousting with cranks, but I was sadly mistaken about their ability to recognise reason when it was presented to them. In that sense, giving Harry (and batnv, et al) room to play is a part of what HT is about. Perhaps one day they’ll remove their rose-tinted spectacles and see the real problem. Perhaps HT will have helped.

It’s also about my dislike of censorship. This is something I share with a blogger called Poneke, who rather bombastically announced back in January:

I believe in freedom of expression, no exceptions. No point of view on any subject should be suppressed.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I find that my two most recent attempts to post at his blog have been censored. And that shortly after it became apparent that neither was going to appear, a new “comments policy” page turned up.

A few months ago a commenter here asked me to pop over to Poneke’s Weblog to offer some support in a debate over climate change. I did so, and ended up with another sea ice bet. Since then, I’ve kept an eye on his blog, and commented occasionally on posts related to climate change. The posts seem to have developed a pattern. Poneke discovers the latest bit of crank effluvia (probably by regularly checking the “dissenting voices” side of Denis Dutton’s deliberately misleading Climate Debate Daily site), duly posts about it (often at great length), and then appears to become upset when his readers point out the errors in the original.

Most recently, he posted about noted “dissenter” Roy Spencer’s recent testimony to Congress about negative feedbacks in the climate system. My first comment duly appeared (after a long time “in moderation”), with in-line response from Poneke. Later, George Darroch posted links to Open Mind‘s excellent three-part deconstruction of Spencer’s thinking. I picked up on that, and attempted to post the last paragraph of Tamino’s piece (here), to demonstrate why Spencer doesn’t get much traction in the climate science mainstream. It disappeared. Then a comment from malcolm appeared below, referring to peer-review. I then attempted to post a link to Spencer’s well-documented belief in creationism. Neither post appeared. But Poneke’s new comments policy did. And look at rule one:

No personal abuse of people mentioned in articles or of other commenters, especially abusive remarks about someone’s ethnicity, religious or political beliefs or sexual orientation.

In other words, if Poneke writes about you, you are above criticism on Poneke’s blog. And that seems to apply to all the crank pantheon, from Lindzen and Spencer on down.

Also telling is the final paragraph:

The comments section is not under any direct moderation, but WordPress and Akismet moderate comments with multiple links (a sign of spam), and some names and issues are marked for moderation in an attempt to prevent potentially defamatory comments. As a result, your comment may not appear immediately, though most do.

My name was clearly marked for moderation very early on, but I don’t believe that it had anything to do with defamation. I’m not going to post comments on a site which so transparently stacks the odds against a fair debate. And that’s why Harry and his friends remain “welcome” at Hot Topic. In the last 18 months I’ve only deleted one non-spam comment, and that was at the commenter’s request. I’ve edited one or two for rudeness – and reserve the right to do the same in future.

Poneke’s blog is an interesting place, his posts always well written and often challenging, as you might expect from an established journalist with a long track record. I can’t share his enthusiasm for the minutiae of Wellington’s public transport system, but then I dare say he’d be bored rigid by talk of truffles. And he is at least very sound on Ken Ring. But if he walks like a crank, if he quacks like a crank, then he must be…

When Gray turns to blue/Flung a dummy

gray.jpg In a dramatic announcement today, Vincent R Gray, the retired coal researcher and diligent proof-reader of IPPC Working Group Reports (he’s inordinately proud of the fact that he submitted over 1,800 comments to the fourth report) has resigned from the Royal Society of New Zealand because of its recent statement on climate change. Given that Gray has been criticising the IPCC view of climate science for 18 years and is a vocal member of the NZ C”S”C, this is perhaps no surprise, but the statement he has issued as a riposte to the Royal Society is a minor classic of its genre. Vincent doesn’t so much spit the dummy as hurl it into low earth orbit, and uses pretty forthright language as he does so.

[Hat tip: Sam Vilain in a recent comment]

Continue reading “When Gray turns to blue/Flung a dummy”

Long shot kick de bucket (no warming since 1958)

homer.jpg At last, the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition publish their response to the Royal Society of New Zealand’s recent statement on climate change. As I predicted, they’ve made my day. Let’s consider the circumstances. We have the nation’s leading science organisation, and a panel of the nation’s leading climate scientists – including a few Nobel prizewinners – presenting the evidence for climate change. And then we have the Climate “Science” Coalition:

It beggars the imagination that an expert committee can launch a public statement about climate change that is so partial in its arguments and so out of date in its science.

Yeah, right. It “beggars the imagination” that a bunch that seriously believes it has a chance of influencing public policy can issue a statement so seriously factually incorrect and so deliberately misleading.

Continue reading “Long shot kick de bucket (no warming since 1958)”

Is there life after breakfast?

homer.jpg Morning Report is a breakfast fixture chez HT. As a way of keeping in touch with the news, it has no equal. By some strange whim of editorial decision-making(*), this morning they decided to give Bob “The Great Communicator” Carter a chance to trot out his “I am the balanced middle of this debate” line, and rubbish mainstream climate science (stream, podcast). Perhaps it was intended as some sort of balance to items on the G8 and carbon targets. Sean Plunket does his best to skewer Carter on his framing of the issue, but Bob smoothly denies what he’s just said (describing the IPCC as “extremist”), and then goes on to misrepresent the real science. Plunket doesn’t call him on that – which is not surprising, given that he’s a radio journalist rather than a climate specialist – and so Carter achieves his main aim: sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of the radio audience, creating the illusion of substantive scientific debate, and thus providing cover for those who want to do nothing.

But Morning Report’s biggest mistake was to fail to identify Carter as a leading member of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition. He’s not in the balanced middle, he’s way out in crankdom, and that should have been pointed out.

[* I find that Bob gave a talk in Christchurch last night.]