Postcards from La La Land #132: time warps and twaddle

I don’t wander over to the dark side¹ very often – NZ’s climate cranks are an unedifying bunch at the best of times – but I was somewhat surprised to find myself featuring in their current top story — National Geographic ignores the need for evidence. Not that they know it’s me – the level of scholarship on display is even worse than that in their sole contribution to the scientific literature.

The author, blog owner Richard Treadgold, allows himself a little rant about a paragraph he says comes from a recent National Geographic newsletter, illustrated with a picture he claims comes from NIWA. The words he rails against seemed strangely familiar to me, and also rather dated. Then the penny dropped: it was a paragraph I had written a decade ago, in a feature for the New Zealand Geographic magazine. You can read the whole thing here, and you’ll note that the header photograph is the one Treadgold claims comes from the National Institute for Weather & Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

Let me sum this up. Treadgold’s little homily on the need for evidence is not just complete twaddle, it’s shoddy scholarship at its worst: citing the wrong magazine, an article from the wrong decade, and blaming NIWA for something they didn’t do. Sadly, it’s par for the course.

I shall leave the last word to one of the little band of scientifically literate commenters who bravely point out the errors inherent in almost everything Treadgold publishes. Underneath a press release from the climate cranks, complaining that the Royal Society of NZ had failed to provide evidence of the reality of climate change², Simon wrote:

Your complaint appears to be that the Royal Society provided you with lots of information which you couldn’t understand. That is not the fault of the Royal Society.

Twas ever thus, Simon.

1. Richard Treadgold’s inaptly titled “Climate Conversation“ blog. [↩]
2. What was that about bees and bonnets? [↩]