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It’s a start. Paul Bain regrets the offense caused by the term denier.
But there’s no mention of the term failing basic English or it’s unscientific nature. The term has been used by professors, M.P.’s, Prime Ministers and national broadcasters, and none of them have expressed even a hint of regret, but we can nonetheless call this a small win. Notch up one for skeptics, but ten for the fog.
Credit to Paul Bain for being one of the only people drawn into that unscientific milieu who has the strength of character to back out, ever so slightly. He has promised to reply to my last email. I look forward to it. Few who claim to be concerned about the planet have the intellectual honesty to even try to defend their work.
The small win here is not so much the correction attached below (though that is useful), but it’s that the internet fray and the questions will have been noticed by other editors and researchers. In the future, a few of those people will be more careful with their terms.
Promoting pro-environmental action in climate change deniers
Paul G. Bain | Matthew J. Hornsey, | Renata Bongiorno […]
You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.
Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt — it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Oreskes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Oreskes who specializes in … attacking the messengers.
Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.
What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.
Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes. The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has […]
Ray Evans writes a review below of Robert Manne’s essay in The Monthly entitled A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science. (Forgive me Ray for slipping in one or two thoughts of my own below). Ray Evans is the secretary of The Lavoisier Group one of the first original skeptical groups in Australia (I’ve put a few notes on that at the base of the article). It was Graham Readfearns review (ABC Drum) that apparently brought the Manne article to Ray’s attention.
Dear All,
Readfearn’s review was a lamentation of defeat and disappointment. So I immediately bought a copy of The Monthly and with eager anticipation began to read Robert Manne’s account of the tragedy which he claims has befallen him and his fellow warmists. It was a disappointing read.
There was nothing new in Manne’s arguments seeking to legitimize his passionate belief in imminent climate catastrophe. His palpable anger, bordering on hatred, of the global warming sceptics, or to use his loaded term, denialists, all of whom were Americans, was unsettling.
“While climate change denial . . . exists almost exclusively in the English speaking democracies . . and although it has spread […]
The Australians must have said something awful.
In the never ending quest to hide information that the taxpayer paid for, the New Zealand trial of skeptics vs alarmists is rising to new heights.
This is a legal case asking for discovery of documents, which is much harder to dodge than a simple FOI. Yet NIWA are putting in an Olympic effort to hide what the Australian BOM (their allies?) have said about their work.
The bottom line is that the NIWA team peer reviewed Australia’s new ACORN temperature set and endorsed it as being “worlds best practice” which (judging by what we’ve seen) it clearly is. What a damning review. The NIWA practice is so bad, that even the Australian BOM can’t return the favor and pretend to say something good about it.
NIWA (New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research) is the official New Zealand organization responsible for climate pronouncements. They pronounced that the country had warmed almost 1°C during the twentieth century, but, oh dear, when skeptics looked, the raw data showed a rise of only 0.23°C in the same time period. And in the full record, the trend was only a 0.06°C per century since […]
Well well. It is confirmed, this site was hacked at about 11am EST Australia this morning (9pm NY Time). We do not know what the motive was. It appears to be an XSS (Cross Site Script) type hack — for those who are interested. There are many log files to go through. News was posted on WUWT also.
Thanks to the expert help of my Webmaster, it’s been mostly restored within only 3 hours.He was onto it immediately and worked non-stop to unravel the mess. (Some comments are still missing from the weekend threads, we hope we can restore them too.)
UPDATE from my webmaster:
“The attack was undertaken over a 9 hour period using proxy servers from around the world including universities, schools and broadband providers. Unfortunately, hackers believe themselves to be smarter than they are. In this instance they have used the web01.defence.gov.au web server as a proxy which is located at the Woomera Air Force Base. No doubt the Department of Defence will be interested in all the data collected by the jonannenova.com.au web server pertaining to its machines. Additional confirmation will be sought from private broadband suppliers who keep detailed logs […]
For all those thoughts that don’t fit somewhere else… –
7.9 out of 10 based on 32 ratings
Firstly — No one wins anything while the people who slag off at scientists get their denigrating name-calling on the front cover of magazines. That said, I’m smiling. Beaming. The man who doesn’t know what science is, admits his team is failing. That has to be good. Real scientists everywhere, smile!
Manne’s argument appears to rest entirely on his mistaken belief that “science” is What The Gods Declare it To Be. For Manne, the Gods are “official climate scientists”. Apparently, only those who are anointed by Government funding have access to The Truth — and their declarations must be obeyed. Manne is so completely under their spell, he is incapable of figuring out how anyone could think anything else.
“For reasonable citizens there ought to be no question easier to answer than whether or not human-caused global warming is real and is threatening the future of the Earth.”
For Manne, planetary atmospheric dynamics are so blindingly clear that only unreasonable citizens could question it. And if there is “no easier question”, then it follows that those who get this question wrong are not just unreasonable but quite possibly, brain dead. Manne’s writing is thick with insults, but […]
UPDATE: Richard Muller, the man running BEST (Berkley Earth Surface Temperatures) pretends to have been a skeptic who “converted” to believing in man-made global warming. But this was a fake narrative, easily shown by his past quotes. Many major newspapers ran with his propaganda, but now are trying to cover up their failure as “fact checkers”. They did not even do the most basic of investigations. And let’s not forgot that virtually none of them (or Muller either) point out his daughter profits from consulting on “Green” projects.
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It appears skeptics are getting to the Fairfax press (finally!)
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age both ran with Muller’s claims of being a converted skeptic who found the world was warming (and the preposterous leap that “therefore” we were to blame).
“I saw past the Hot Air on Climate“ is gone (The SMH and The Age return a 404 error).
The SMH even arranged triumphant artwork, the article was given a big splash. But hello, hello, those articles are disappearing down the memory hole. Presumably neither newspaper is proud of having been fooled by Muller — the articles were so quickly blown away when skeptics pointed out that […]
Today in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, for the first time, David Evans has been published in the Op-Ed section. Something is going on in those newsrooms…? This article, below, simply makes the point that the models amplify the direct effect of CO2 by a factor of three and that is where the most important uncertainties lie. This key factor in the debate — which we cover repeatedly on this blog– has virtually never been made before in these newspapers which are the major dailies for Australia’s two largest cities. Any debate about the effects of CO2 needs to start with the fact that most of the warming in the models comes from amplification of humidity and clouds. If the models were right about water vapor, we would have found that missing hot spot. — Jo PS: The SMH and The AGE have both closed comments already! Have they run out of electrons? Oh my? Or were they afraid the comments looked like a debate?
UPDATE: I’ve just posted that these major dailies have “disappeared” the Muller conversion article too!
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Dr David M.W. Evans
31 Jul 2012
Climate scientists’ theories, flawed as they are, ignore […]
How independent is this project?
Would BEST have ever seriously published a study showing anything other than a scary warming trend?
This is emblematic of how fans of Climate Change Scares present their efforts with half-truths — lines that are technically “correct” but leave an impression that may be the opposite of the real situation.
Elizabeth Muller is listed as “Founder and Executive Director” of the Berkeley Earth Team along with her father Richard Muller. But since 2008 it appears she’s been earning money as a consultant telling governments how to implement green policies, how to reduce their carbon footprint and how to pick “the right technologies” – presumably meaning the right “Green” technologies.
Mullers Daughter Elizabeth registered “GreenGov” in 2008
Richard and Elizabeth Muller. Image: Paul Sakuma/AP
She registered their website and tried to register the trademark herself.
“GreenGov™ is a service offered by Muller & Associates for Governments, International Organizations, non profits, and other organizations that work with Government. The aim is to provide politically-neutral counsel that is broad in scope while rooted in the hard facts of state-of-the-art science and engineering. The key is to make the right patch between the best technologies and […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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