Tag: Treadgold

A note on readership, and a challenge

What is it with so-called sceptics and dodgy statistics? Is comprehension failure a precondition for believing six impossible things before breakfast, or does wishful thinking trump all common sense? It can’t be an unwillingness to do research, because they find cherries in the most unlikely places. Recently Richard Treadgold put his finger into the world of web statistics and pulled out a plum:

Just a quick note to draw your attention to a new feature on the sidebar: scroll down one page and you should see it. There’s a little table showing the recent Alexa rankings for the Climate Conversation, SciBlogs and Hot Topic. At the moment we’re leading them by big margins.

[…] it’s humbling to see that this modest little blog is more popular and thousands more people visit it than other, brasher sites around the country that even get into the newspapers.

What should be humbling is the fact that Treadgold’s claim is almost certainly nonsense. To show this, I need to explain something about web statistics — and in particular the Alexa metric Treadgold has discovered. Apologies for this detour off the climate beat — normal service will be resumed shortly…

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The (un)principled sceptic

Over at Treadgold’s emporium, the owner is mining a rich vein of nonsense: he’s posting the letters to the editor the newspapers won’t print. One that caught my eye is from Professor Mike Kelly, a Cambridge nanotechnologist and climate sceptic who happens to hail from New Plymouth. Professor Kelly makes a good start:

It is perfectly possible to adopt a position, as I have, of ‘a principled climate science scepticism’.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But a bit later on, in attempting to adduce evidence in support of his position he writes:

She [the author of the piece he’s complaining about] might like to look at the recent analysis by Pat Franks (sic) which tightens the conclusion that the anthropogenic contribution is at most 0.3°C per century. This concludes that it is rising temperatures that are increasing the atmospheric carbon dioxide, not the other way round.

Oh dear.

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Educating Richard (or not)

If ever you wanted a demonstration of the strange version of reality occupied by those that would deny the need for action on climate change, then Richard Treadgold — he of the oddly one-sided climate conversation — provides a perfect example in his recent attempt to respond to a post of mine. You may remember that Treadgold challenged the PM’s science adviser to come up with evidence for human-caused climate change (amongst other things), and that I took the bait — delivering carefully referenced replies to each of Treadgold’s demands. And I noted in my conclusion:

When offered evidence, Treadgold adopts the Nelson defence. He can’t see it, so it doesn’t exist. But he’s been playing this game for so long that his demands and protestations cut no ice. Being blind to the evidence is not scepticism, it’s denial, and that’s an estate Treadgold has occupied for a very long time.

Treadgold’s riposte demonstrates my point nicely — and at great length. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to enumerate the many ways in which his application of the wrong end of a telescope to a blind eye serves him ill, but I will note that in the land of the Climate Clueless™ it’s apparently acceptable to get numbers wrong, fail to read references, ignore inconvenient data and misrepresent facts.

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Four years on…

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the first post at Hot Topic — four years since the blog’s birth, and as my mum would say, hasn’t time flown? This birthday post is number 1,080, and it will be read by many, many more people than those first brief paragraphs announcing the book and blog. I’m not one for tootling my own trumpet (at least, not loudly), so I won’t be making great claims about how far we’ve come and how much we’ve achieved, but I will take this opportunity to muse a little on what I’ve learned. A lot, but not perhaps enough… 😉

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Return of the Climate Clueless™: there’s none so blind…

Sir Peter Gluckman, scientific adviser to NZ prime minister John Key, recently published a discussion paper entitled Towards better use of evidence in policy formation (pdf). It’s an interesting read for anyone who has ever noted the sometimes large discrepancy between political dogma and policy outcomes. Sciblogger Peter Griffin went so far as to describe it as “possibly one of the most important [papers] he has released thus far”.

Over in the land of the Climate Clueless™ however, Richard “Climate Conversation” Treadgold has taken Gluckman’s paper as a cue to demand evidence of climate change. Treadgold appears to have forgotten that one of Sir Peter’s first acts following his appointment was to review the evidence and issue a statement on the subject, and is perhaps still smarting from Gluckman’s comments on climate denial last year. He therefore issues this stern challenge:

I would remind Sir Peter that evidence is required to establish the following key factors in the global warming debate — evidence that has not surfaced so far. We have been looking for evidence to show:

  1. The existence of a current unprecedented global warming trend.
  2. That the greenhouse effect is powerful enough to endanger the environment.
  3. A causal link between human activities and dangerously high global temperatures.
  4. That climate models have a high level of skill in predicting the climate.
  5. A causal link between atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and global temperatures.
  6. A causal link between global warming and the gentle rise in sea level.

Time to play some whack-a-mole…

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