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But keep discussing!

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Someone from the other side has gone through it carefully and this was all they could find. There are things Plimer could have done better. The GGWS graph for example. And some more cites would have been useful. But there is no blow here, nothing that shows Plimer is intrinsically wrong on the science. The list is useful editing help though. Perhaps Plimer should send his next book to the Melbourne Prof, because he could have made it even better than it is.

But seriously, no one would call a book “discredited” because it only has 2000 references, and it needed 2008. No one would call it discredited because he calls the hockey stick a “fraud”. Note Michel Mann does not want to test that in court? Mann knows he doesn’t stand a chance of proving it libellous. Deltoid is an apologist for corrupt science.
This list would look more convincing if it had citations of the converse. A lot of these points are just plain wrong. Polar bears have increased since 1960; There is a good correlation with solar cycles and low clouds after 1980; Name that mystery paper in Chapter 9 of AR4. (No one else has).

p11 No source given for figure 1 but is based on a graph in AR4WG1 Technical Summary. The massive drop in temperatures comes from using the temps for the first half of 2008 to represent all of 2008. It looks very different if you graph the actual 2008 temp

p14 Claims IPCC has no evidence to support its conclusion of 90% certainty that at least half of recent warming is anthropogenic. Nowhere does he even admit the existence of the evidence in Chapter 9 of AR4 WG1

p19 repeats Paul Reiter’s false claims about the IPCC authors on the health effects of global warming

p21 Repeats SEPP smear of Santer

p22 Claims hockey stick is a fraud

p25 Figure 3 is infamous graph from the Great Global Warming Swindle. Graphs ends in 1987 but horizontal scale makes it look like it goes to 2000. Even Swindlers had to fix this one.

p26 Figure 4: Start point of graph is cherry picked to mislead

p87-99 claims hockey stick is a fraud and the NRC panel that vindicated it was a cover up.

p99 False claims that GISS was forced to withdraw claims about global temperature. Plimer confuses USA temperatures with the global ones.

p131 Figure 15 Dodgy sunspot temperature graph from GGWS. Ends in 1980, if continued sunspot-temp correlation goes away.

p198 claims Arctic sea ice is expanding

p198 claims drowned polar bears were actually killed by “high winds”

p198 claims polar bear numbers are increasing

p199 claims malaria is common in cold climates. No cite!

p209 Claims undersea volcanoes can have a profound effect on surface temps

p217 Claims Pinatubo eruption released “very large quantities of chloroflourocarbons, the gases that destroy the ozone layer.” Cites Brasseur and Granier who actually say the opposite:

after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the input of chlorine to the stratosphere was probably small.

p281 Claims alpine glaciers are not retreating. Cited source actually says that glacial retreat is not accelerating.

p286 Claims the IPCC has “no evidence” to support its statement that glaciers are retreating.

p322 Cites Morner on Maldives.

p325 Says that even if we burn all fossil fuels we won’t be able to double atmospheric CO2.

p349 the hockey stick is “infamous”

p366 Claims climate sensitivity is 0.5C. No footnote!

p367 Confused about by the fact that the Earth warms the atmosphere and asks how this means GHGs can cause warming. How does he think a blanket works?

p370 Claims 98% of GH effect is H2O. No footnote!

p371 Claims climate sensitivity is 0.5C. No footnote!

p376 Claims that if temperature measurements are rounded to the nearest degree, the average of many measurements is only accurate to the nearest degree.

p377 Claims that surfacestations.org proves that temp measurements have a warming bias

p378 Implies that surface record does not include measurements in the oceans

p381 claims molten rocks significantly warm ocean. No cite!

p382 “In fact, satellites and radiosondes show that there is no global warming.[1918]” Woohoo! at last a cite. Trouble is, it says exactly the opposite of what Plimer claims

p382 claims hockey stick is a fabrication

p388 claims no such thing as an average temp, citing Essex and McKitrick nonsense

p391 claims Hadley Centre has shown that warming stopped in 1998. Hadley says:

Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand.

p391 claims IPCC ignores 2/3 of the cooling effect of evaporation citing Wentz et al, but Wentz says no such thing

p413 claims volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans. No cite! This one was in GGWS. Plimer’s a geologist. You’d think he would at least know something about volcanoes.

p420 figure 52 is Beck’s bogus CO2 graph

p421 claims only 4% of CO2 in atmosphere is from humans. No cite!

p425 claims anthropogenic CO2 produces only 0.1% of global warming. No cite!

p425 claims IPCC have exaggerated CO2 forcing 20 fold.

p437 “Chapter 5 of IPCC AR4 (Humans Responsible for Climate Change) .. is based on the opinions of just five independent scientists”. Wrong chapter number, chapter title, and it has over 50 authors.

p442 claims Lysenko parallels the global warming movement

p443 repeats Monckton’s claims about An Inconvenient Truth without mentioning that most were rejected by the court

p444 claims IPCC reports are written by just 35 scientists who are controlled by an even smaller number

p452 cites Oregon petition

p452 cites Peiser’s false claims about Oreskes

p467 claims that the 38 scientists who asked Durkin to correct the errors in GGWS did so because that deemed it to present an “incorrect moral outlook”. One of the error that they wanted Durkin to correct was the bogus graph that Plimer puts on page 25.

p474 claims hockey stick is dishonest

p477 quotes Khilyuk & Chilingar whose thesis is that humans aren’t responsible because our CO2 emissions, measured over the history of the planet, are less than that of volcanoes. Also cited on p479 and p492.

p484 claims IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM “showed cooling for 100 of the last 160 years”

p485 claims Montreal Protocol used precautionary principle to ban CFCs but we didn’t ban chlorination even though chlorine destroys ozone!!! [Not in the stratosphere it doesn't]

p486 misrepresents Revelle

p486 cites false WorldNetDaily claim that Gore buys offsets from himself

p487 cites Melanie Philips as an authority on the hockey stick, asserting it is the “most discredited study in the history of science”

p472 claims Pinatubo emitted as much CO2 as humans in a year. No cite! And obviously wrong if you glance at Mauna Loa data.

p472 termite methane emissions are 20 times potent than human CO2 emissions. No cite!

p492 false claim that DDT ban killed 40 million

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Link. Read onwards from Steven Mosher’s comment at #102

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The term you suggest, unsceptical, implies a pointed correction while being restrained, non-insulting and true. What more could a scientist want?

Sceptics (British spelling — skeptics is US) everywhere can celebrate your proposal to reclaim the excellent word “sceptic”. In the original Greek, sceptical meant to look out, or consider; in the late Latin it meant inquiring or reflective. From the Shorter Oxford, the meaning I like best is “a seeker after truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite convictions.”

I shall be using unsceptical in place of alarmist whenever possible and elevating sceptic to a place of honour.

Cheers,
Richard Treadgold,
Convenor,
Climate Conversation Group.

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In the midst of the rank stench of pseudo intellectual smugness and word play intermingled with selective references to supposed scientific errors I can’t help but feel I’ve come across just another source of opinion based journalism propped up by an enthusiastic audience of circle jerking armchair geniuses.
Firstly I’m sure i don’t need to remind any of you that should you feel the compulsion to scientifically discredit any published work the one and only method to do so and be taken seriously is to formally challenge published work by submitting responses to a journal aka “peer review”.
Just like the borderline criminal over exaggeration of Australia’s refugee problem, the media has bastardised and manipulated both sides of the climate change debate to a point where the air is so thick with bullshit that the average educated adult can’t tell his elbow from his arsehole. Thats the way the JoNova’s like it, allowing them to stroll up the familiar moral high ground and plant their flag for all to see while they cheerfully pass out sarcasm like bowel motions after a vindaloo.
While i seriously doubt there is anyone left in here even mildly willing to consider the merit of using a risk management approach to address anthropogenic climate change (which also happens to address the issues of energy security, deforestation / biodiversity loss and investment in developing nations on an increasingly crowded planet) or considering genuine responses to serious and valid skeptic arguments, i offer the following links:
Genuine Q&A on climate change issues
http://www-personal.buseco.monash.edu.au/~BParris/BPClimateChangeQ&As.html
Referenced responses to common skeptic arguments
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610

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You would think someone with a PhD in computing could see that Prof Mann’s PCA was flawed. An undergraduate course in Linear Algebra should be enough.

Maybe not the exact same course but…

http://www.timetable.unsw.edu.au/current/COMPKENS.html

Note the lack of Linear Algebra, any other type of algebra, measurement theory, signal processing, or similar disciplines. However, it is a good course for computing, and all the subjects are good subjects. We are facing increasing specialisation. Given typical human limitations if you are going to have experts in any subject, then those experts are going to need to be ignorant about a whole lot of other subjects.

I strongly suspect that the rise of the “Unskeptical Scientist” is closely related to the rise of specialisation. Modern scientists need to work as a team, not like the Victorian gentleman dabbler of a few generations back. In a team you need to trust the other team members so everyone can focus on what they are good at — an efficient structure but not robust to errors.

By the way, linear algebra with more than a small number of dimensions is not taught in Australian high schools, but matrix algebra does turn up in older textbooks, it got displaced by technology subjects. Personally, I’m a supporter of diversity in schools and I believe that standardised curriculum is a bad idea, but when it comes to making sausages supervisors tend to count the product more often than they taste the product (if you get my gist).

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