The Climate Wars could be entering the ‘end-game’ here if a new strategy deployed by the ‘denier’ lobby is successful. Denier is a term often used here to denote an individual who denies the science behind climate change. That will all change now.
Professor Richard A. Muller, head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project and physics professor at the University of Berkeley, has just written an article in the New York Times declaring his “conversion” to what has been mainstream science for a long, long time. Professor Muller has even gone one step further and declared that “Humans are almost entirely the cause” of global warming as opposed to IPCC reports which suggest that human industrial activity may only be one cause, in combination with natural cycles. (Check out the article here)
Excellent news, no? The war between sceptics and believers is over. All are agreed that climate change is caused by human activity. Natural sciences departments in universities across the world have rejoiced. UNEP offices will witness many a sunrise and dark moon as cleaners put them back in working order. Professor Michael Mann, vilified by the engine of denial and its boot-lickers, magnanimous in victory has congratulated Professor Muller for behaving like a “good scientist”. Blogs of poison can cease. Quite terrible name-calling is needed no more. Finding the solutions for a bright new world with a planetary temperature of no more than a two extra degrees can begin.
Sadly not. What we are witnessing instead is a very cunning shift in denier strategy. That game is up. No longer could they deny the science brought together by the IPCC and nor could they come up with a better theory as to why the planet was warming. They could not even keep on pretending that the planet was not indeed warming. They have, however, shifted the goal posts. Rather than deny that the basic science is accurate, they will now deny that climate change poses any threat to human well-being. This is nothing new but merely a shift in emphasis. Professor Muller’s article is the perfect Trojan Horse and could be the final tactic that makes sure this war is really over.
Muller’s article is uncontroversial except for the part where he predicts warming to increase to a level above IPCC predictions. That was worrying, but not as worrying as the paragraph where he essentially states that the threat of climate change is overblown, unsubstantiated or just plain false. He then goes on to list several examples to support his point. I’ll deal with those, courtesy of Skeptical Science, at the bottom of this page. For now though let’s focus on the New York Times article.
It’s written in a very clever way to achieve what the main objective of the denier lobby has always been – to delay meaningful action on climate change for as long as possible. Muller points out that the BEST methodology is indeed the best; better than the IPCC’s. He argues that his data is superior and therefore gives better results. It is important to link this to what I’ve written above. By framing the article in this way Muller seeks to position himself as the true scientist, the one with integrity who didn’t go leaping to conclusions just like those inferior scientists from the IPCC did. Now that Professor Muller and his team have truly, scientifically established that humans are warming the planet, he can now go on to find out what the negative effects from this warming will be. Do not trust what the IPCC has to say, for their methodology is weak and inferior. Wait for us to provide the real answers. It’s the waiting, as the sea ice caps melt and the deserts expand, that Muller wants. It’s the waiting which is what the oil industry needs, more and more time to extract that oil before those bothersome scientists obstruct their work.
If this is the case then it could signal a slight shift in the debate from one that argues over what was fairly established science, and thank God for that at least, to one that is certainly less established – predicting the future. We cannot know what the future is, but good science can help us to make good predictions. The war will now rage over what is good science in this department and what makes a good prediction. But before these new battles commence we have to beware this Trojan Horse sent to us by Professor Muller. It would be a disaster for progress if climate scientists were to come out en masse and congratulate Professor Muller, or not to challenge the inevitable news coverage, because it would give him legitimacy, therefore making it easier for the “sceptical” lobby to employ the argument I outlined above. Muller has been the closest thing to legitimate that the denial industry, filled with crackpots, has. For the scientific community to ignore what is blatantly a new way to further delay investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency and wholesale system change is to allow it to succeed.
And how does this all fit together? Oil money. It’s no secret that the Koch brothers have funded this project and it’s no secret that big oil has funded the denial machine, just as the tobacco industry did for lung cancer. People were shocked, and many environmentalists satisfied with the delicious irony, when the Koch-funded BEST project results came in and confirmed what was already known for a very long time. If big oil could fund a project that confirmed the scientific consensus then clearly we can now trust oil-funded research. Now it’s all very clear why this was done. It began the implementation of a long term strategy of delay. It is still not yet time to party – or it really will be game, set and match to the oil industry.
What Muller is probably wrong about in the article
Skeptical Science provides the rebuttal.
1) Polar bear populations are decreasing http://www.skepticalscience.com/polar-bears-global-warming.htm
2) The Himalayan Glaciers will not be gone by 2035, but most are retreating. An excellent deployment of the cherry picking tactic. http://www.skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing-intermediate.htm
3) Hurricanes. Even if they are decreasing in frequency in the US, it is certainly not possible to claim with much certainty that they are decreasing globally. http://www.skepticalscience.com/hurricanes-global-warming-intermediate.htm
4) The warming in the US is offset by cooling elsewhere in the world. It seems contradictory to ‘discover’ that global temperatures are increasing but then somehow imply that the warming witnessed in the US cannot be attributed to global climate change? Perhaps the BEST results are only for the US?
5) Medieval warm period. http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm
RealisticBeingGreen 
I’m afraid you’re right, it’s only ever been about delaying. I never believed the right could be so just plain stupid. However, when it comes to arguing about how much suffering is going on, this is neither something to be left to ‘experts’, not is it apolitical. Unfortunately I believe Big Oil will begin to invest in adaptation infrastructure for the rich, resulting in a gated world Margaret Atwood depicts in her novel, The Year of the Flood.
Yes, I agree that the debate is likely to shift after Muller’s high profile announcement. I see four lines of defence among deniers. When the moat is breached most deniers fall back to the next line of defence, however a few remain stuck in No Mans Land. I blog here… http://bit.ly/QA6oq8
It’s good to see the mainstream media picking up the main story as Peter Sinclair notes… http://climatecrocks.com/2012/07/29/best-results-no-news-here-its-all-about-the-framing/
Thank you for seeing through this slippery prof’s weasel words and the sneaky ploy behind them. Your article is a brilliant analysis of a Koch-paid scam artist’s slyly concocted “change of heart”! I nearly gagged when I read his text this morning in RSN and SciAm.
He may be a lousy scientist and he’s definitely an on-the-take Koch addict, but he has one supreme talent. He knows how to write a neat sophistry that ultimately adds up to nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. And that’s how much attention should be paid to his apologies and whines.
Every once in a while science makes a claim that blows their credibility. Specifically in this case about the hurricanes occurring in fewer numbers. Move to Galveston or some other place in hurricane territory and tell me that after you’ve gone through the alphabet once already and are half way through the second sequence. That never used to happen. So why the lies? Science it seems is not above bending or even altering facts to support their cause and that is terribly sad to me.
Sorry, Jim, do you mean that hurricans are increasing or decreasing in your opinion?
Having interacted with Muller while working on two books for young readers, To the Young Scientist (Franklin Watts, 1997) and Physics: Decade by Decade (Twentieth-Century Science series, Facts on File, 2007), I don’t think the Trojan Horse analogy is a correct one.
He is the kind of person who holds other people’s feet to the fire, often providing the kind of challenge that strengthens their conclusions and sometimes leading them to other conclusions. Now that he has accepted the IPCC consensus view, he is challenging the various scenarios that people are positing about what changes to expect.
We should welcome those challenges rather than treating him as an adversary who is trying to topple our ideas. If his further research supports those scenarios, he will say so. If not, he will propose scientifically sound alternative scenarios.
His NYT Op-Ed points out that we now need to address political solutions. In my view, finding a good political solution will depend on having a set of scenarios based on sound scientific analysis. Let’s strengthen those scenarios by challenging them ourselves and welcoming the challenges of others.
I have a short blog entry about this. If readers of this topic want to argue my points there, they are welcome to do so.
Dear Fred,
Skepticism is of course an essential part of the process. But if we were all to employ the same philosophy as Dr. Muller which amounts to “It’s not true unless I do the research myself” the human race would a) agree on very little and b) achieve progress at a snail’s pace. The ultimate skeptical position may, perhaps, be one for the philosophical purist but for those of us of a more practical nature it will not suffice.
I also think that it’s no bad thing when he challenges the future predictions. This is how science improves. However, as documented by skeptical science his challenges are based on distortions or falsities. Until he can generate some objections based on science these cannot be taken credibly.
I agree with your last point though. Trying to establish which scenarios are the most likely and to work out a cost-benefit analysis for each one would be fruitful, although sadly this course will not adopted due to the obfuscationists and pedlars of misinformation.
He thought the science was bunk until he got around to(and got paid) yo find out he was wrong. Now he admits AGW is happening and it’s us, but he’s moved the goalposts to “The threat is overblown.” How many droughts, floods, fires, and deaths, (plus grants to Muller) will it take before he moves the goalposts once more to “it looks bad, but all we have to do is increase profits for the kleptocracy and they’ll figure out how we must adapt, and how much profit they must make for that to happen.”
The oatmeal face of evil.
Ah, the cartoon world of the feverishly paranoid environmentalist. I laughed out loud so often at this conspiratorial nonsense that I just had to forward it to friends so that they could have a good old chuckle too. So any increase in traffic you notice on your blog is down to me. And, you know, a kick-back would be welcome – this oil money won’t last me forever, you know.
Where to begin with this childish, hypocritical, swivel-eyed gibberish? (What, you don’t like name-calling? Then stop doing it). To begin with, Muller’s supposed Damascene conversion is nothing of the sort, as this selection of quotes demonstrates:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html
Your big conspiracy is foundering already. Or is he just an enemy for having once found fault with your beloved ‘magnanimous’ Michael Mann (who’s so magnanimous he recently compared his intellectual critics to ‘beetle larvae’ and who is notorious for squirming away from perfectly reasonable calls for his data in the most astonishingly querulous and dismissive fashion)? Oh, now I figure out the Cameron Dron logic: insults are ok – just as long as you agree with the insulter, or you’re the one insulting people you don’t agree with.
It is now reasonable to assume that if you were ever going to get over the infantile fantasy of a ‘denial machine’, you would have done so already. You just cannot relinquish that comfort blanket, can you? Fine, but can you please just tell me one thing: Who are these people? Where in the mainstream media are they published, quoted; where is their influence on educational policy, on government policy, on the public sphere, compared to the lavishly-funded behemoths of Big Green? I’ve been following this debate for years and I’ve yet to see any bona fide ‘denier’ worth listening to. I see a great deal of vicious calumny of people decried as such, and I see the mudslingers who attempt to caricature perfectly reasonable critical voices as deniers get an easy ride in the pages of the Guardian, but disregarding the usual Tea Party/Fox troglodytes and the Republican senator for Oklahoma (whose influence people like you have to exaggerate massively), I just don’t see any actual deniers involved in any of the worthwhile conversations. So out with it. Your argument consists of nothing else, so you must be able to give a name to these people. And no bottom-feeders or lurkers, please, nor the above-mentioned; let’s have some names of people who actually have global influence on a par with the IPCC – God knows they exercise you enough, so they must be all-powerful. I just wonder where they’re hiding.
And while you’re doing that, tell me what it is these mythical deniers are denying. That you’re so sure about I mean. You write from a position of adamantine certainty – everybody who doesn’t think we’re going to hell in a handcart is a Big Bad Denier – but of what? And do you pause to think how anti-science such declarations of certainty are? You’d be absolutely delighted if we WERE all going to hell in a handcart – that’d teach us hubristic humans, wouldn’t it? You’re blog entry drips with doom-lust, a worshipful fervency in the face of worst-case scenarios. The only problem is that your science-worship is just pious pabulum, a fig leaf – your article crystallises every anti-scientific impulse going: for you, it’s not a disinterested form of inquiry and falsifiable observation, it’s a personalised pitched battle between moral right and wrong, and thankfully you’re on the side of right. Phew. And the desperately sad thing is that you cannot even see how ludicrous and how dangerous such a politicised prostitution of science is. This quote was a particular facepalm moment:
“Finding the solutions for a bright new world with a planetary temperature of no more than a two extra degrees can begin.”
Ah ok, it’s that simple. God, what evil morons anybody who questions this are.
But let’s turn our attention to your conspiracy theory itself. So, correct me where I go wrong: Muller’s recantation-that-isn’t is in fact just a means of obscuring further the unblemished and unquestionable IPCC message, (and presumably you’re absolutely fine with the idea that science communicates in these neatly-packaged messages) and this will play into the hands of deniers and the policy-makers in their thrall (hold on – which planet are you concerned about again?) because… BEST is funded by ‘big oil’. It’s so absurd that typing it is actually quite difficult. So is funding by big oil automatically a condition of being untrustworthy then? Ok, let’s try to parse your painful paranoid twaddle and assume that it is: I look immensely forward to your angry paranoid rantings about the WWF, Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club, all of whom have lightened the coffers of BP, Shell and others. When will you be writing your one-eyed follow-the-money rants about them Cameron? You’re obviously so troubled by this issue – will it be your next post? “Why Greenpeace are dodgy hypocrites” by Cameron Dron, who let’s not forget, is Realistic About Being Green.
Well by your logic somebody’s going to be asking for their money back, because Muller’s piece of course got the usual uncritical fair wind from Trybuna Ludu, sorry, The Guardian, the BBC, the usual suspects worldwide, prompting a rash of ‘why-don’t-sceptics-get-it’ commentary from the usual mediocrities. In the rush to praise this chancer, news about a really important paper which found serious flaws in the way surface stations are sited got lost in the shuffle:
Click to access watts-et-al_2012_discussion_paper_webrelease.pdf
It raises a far more interesting raft of questions than a would-be returned prodigal who anybody with opposable digits and a computer could establish was never any kind of sceptic – anybody that is, except environmental journalists, it seems.
But the most depressing, inane and actually quite sinister part of this entry is this:
“They have, however, shifted the goal posts. Rather than deny that the basic science is accurate, they will now deny that climate change poses any threat to human well-being.”
Leaving aside your unsubstantiated ‘theys’ and claims of denial (I have already asked you who you’re talking about and I’m dying to find out) what you’re saying here seems to be – and one has to be careful with such warmed-over, vague and clichéd mutterings – that the idea of discussing the possible effects of climate change rather than just swallowing the orthodoxy’s prescribed approach to dealing with it is itself worthy of vilification and the sign of dangerous oil-money inspired madness? I trust then that you can answer these two questions with complete certainty:
“What is the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 increases?”
and
“What is human’s society’s sensitivity to climate?”
Do tell, because this is far too important to keep to yourself. You’re prepared, by very clear implication, to dismiss any attempt to discuss these issues – so I can only assume you have all the answers. Let’s have them.
The reason this piece of yours was worth sending on to people is because the shallow, quasi-religious intolerance that is the beating heart of contemporary environmentalism is all there. The uncritical belief in political dogma while passing it off as a faith in science; the vilification of anyone who dares disagree; the free but unqualified use of that vile slur ‘denier’ with all its associations; the squealing hypocrisy of decrying funding only when you don’t agree with the donors/recipients and being totally unable to apply those standards universally; the belief that all the right is on one side and all the wrong on the other; the crawling hero-worship of proven dissemblers; the over-reliance on a notoriously one-sided website (by the way, I just love your prim little pronouncement “I’ll deal with those, courtesy of Skeptical Science” – it’s so easy isn’t? Now why can’t those pesky deniers just get it?); the total, willful failure to identify where power really lies and to challenge it; the inability to countenance shade and nuance of any description.
A good example of the latter is the polar bears. I’m prepared to say that climate change is still an issue whether polar bear numbers are declining or not. You can’t do that. For you they simply have to be declining or your worldview is shot to bits. The irony is that this terror of disagreement of any stripe is redolent of brittleness and weakness, not strength. Also you rewrite history. Suddenly the dodgy lie that was the 2035 glaciers is washed clean with a spot of goalpost moving, but you don’t reproach the people who promulgated that deranged little fiction in the first place – they of course remain unimpeachable heroes who are to be utterly unquestioningly trusted – on pain of being labelled a denier. And only the very credulous could think that your link about the Medieval Warm Period tells anybody anything about how that was misused in the Hockey Stick farrago. For you the religious fervour and the policies the world needs to adopt are one simplistic, holistic whole – dissenters be damned. It’s a narrow and impoverished intellectual world you inhabit, and I notice in recent posts and responses it’s taken on a smug, condescending nastiness: more unreflective in its retrenchments, more gleeful in its crowing and name-calling (even while reproaching others for the same – which is why you’ve forfeited any claim to being politely dealt with).
I keep rereading your babyish tosh and every time I do another morsel of comedy gold leaps off the page:
“Blogs of poison can cease.”
That’ll be the end of Realclimate and ScepticalScience then, the most vicious and intolerant blogs out there. I can’t wait. But something tells me you didn’t mean them. Which ones did you mean?
“That was worrying, but not as worrying as the paragraph where he essentially states that the threat of climate change is overblown, unsubstantiated or just plain false.”
A simply crystalline example of your doom-lust You WANT catastrophe, don’t you? Your dismal little religion is fucked without it.
“No longer could they deny the science brought together by the IPCC and nor could they come up with a better theory as to why the planet was warming.”
The fact that it needs to be pointed out to you that methodology can be found wanting without an alternative theory needing to be advanced is, to judge from the abysmal quality of your reflections, clearly far too sophisticated a point for you to grasp. And that the IPCC’s claim that all their material is peer-reviewed has been comprehensively annihilated (not even going to ask have you read The Delinquent Teenager; know you haven’t, can’t, won’t) would, for any normal person, at least be reason to put severe questions to this immensely powerful organization. But funnily enough you’re equally incoherent about the IPCC’s recommendations themselves. From the recent SREX report, about what is becoming known as extreme weather:
“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”
An observation, incidentally, that Christopher Field lied by exaggeration and distortion to Congress about last week. Can we expect an outraged piece from you about that? I won’t hold my breath.
I don’t know why I’ve wasted so much time on this drivel. There’s even more I could say (like that your attack of the vapours, and subsequent Mystic Meg crystal ball gazing has in fact been brought on by an opinion piece – you clearly haven’t even read the BEST paper itself). Perhaps I’m the chump. Perhaps this is a deliberate exercise in overwrought, light-minded propaganda that’s so rubbish the reaction to it will bring on a flowering of really good environmental writing, when greens see what a deranged caricature of reason their views have become. Very clever.
Trojan Horse, indeed.
Do you get paid by the word, Justin?
Justin, I’m fine with insults, I just like to give as good as I get. You cast the first stone here, Sir, after you gave a rather insulting reply to my definition of what my definition sustainable development is. And my definition was in response to a question you posed. As you said yourself on that page, you can be grouchy sometimes (and I did appreciate the gesture), just don’t complain when I am too.
This piece was also a work of paranoia, I won’t deny it. It’s unlikely Muller sat down with the Koch brothers and agreed to this strategy of delay. Given the amount of global warming denial that the Koch brothers have funded however, for Muller to come out and say “Climate Change is happening, but here’s the good news: don’t worry”, is just a little too convenient for my liking. I nonetheless admit that without a shred of evidence it’s effectively conspiracy mongering. Conscious conspiracy or just unwitting lunacy, it doesn’t matter. To completely deny the threats posed by climate change without evidence is just wrong, as sceptical science has shown of Muller’s errors from that New York Times piece. You don’t need to believe the world is going to end, but to insist that everything will be peaches and cream has no basis in the scientific literature. The difference between me and you is that you won’t admit to any of your paranoia.
Full marks for classiness, Justin. That cut deep.
This was also exceptionally classy. Have I said anywhere that I want catastrophe? I told you in one of our very first exchanges that I was pro-growth and pro-environment. Is it so difficult to imagine someone that thinks wealth is good but that wrecking the environment is bad? I really don’t want catastrophe. My life would be much more enjoyable if climate change didn’t exist. For a start I could be doing some work for a friend right now instead of replying to this, but I’ve put this off for long enough already.
I don’t know what to make of these exchanges any more. At first I thought that perhaps through reasonable discussion we might be able to find some sort of compromises, but perhaps this is the problem when two laymen discuss science. Without any sort of qualified knowledge to filter fact from bullshit we end up stuck in our little world of weblinks and PDFs, each nurturing their own world views. Someone has something to say? We consult our trusted websites and assure ourselves that really we’re right. We try in vain to convince the other with our trusted sources and thus the cycle continues. I do regret that we weren’t able to disagree without being disagreeable, especially when our first discussion in Berlin was very pleasant.
Nevertheless the rubbish you’ve written, although it’s very flowery, entertaining rubbish, needs refuting.
First of, the denial machine. It exists, Justin and it didn’t just start with Climate Change. As one tobacco lobbyist said, “doubt is our product”. They paid doctors to insist that smoking was fine. They made the public confused. They delayed legislation because of this. How many people died because of their actions? The great John Wayne was one unfortunate, ultimately betrayed by the industry whose product he had once so loved.
The same was so with CFCs and the ozone layer. I’ve mentioned this already. The trend is the same nonetheless. Cast doubt, delay, whinge; “It’ll ruin the economy!”, “We can’t be sure what exactly the cause is”. Well science called them out and eventually won. The ozone hole would undoubtedly be in a much worse state today if it were not for the efforts of scientists that would not bow to industry pressure.
And it’s happening with climate change. Environmental legislation poses a threat to their profits and they will do all they can to protect those profits. Why can’t you see that? “Corporation tries to maximize profits”, is hardly breaking news. Anyhow, it’s all been documented here. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1408824663/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350051353&sr=1-2
For something without having to buy a book: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/10/974842/-Climate-Denial-Wholly-Owned-Subsidiary-of-Exxon
Why is it that so few studies exist where the organizations don’t have some sort of link to the oil industry? Why is it that studies supporting the science of climate change receive their funding from governments? Of course! The government wants more power; they need to show that the climate is changing to justify a move to grab more of industry’s profits in the form of taxes. Industry has to fund these studies to combat the government menace. Except that, wait, fossil fuels receive billions in subsidies and even in the US efforts to cut these subsidies have met without progress. http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/. Meanwhile the IPCC with all their untold wealth, moral wealth undoubtedly since the authors aren’t paid, can sit back and watch ‘The Plan’ come to fruition. What ‘The Plan’ is however, I’m not too sure since there is barely a GOVERNMENT on this earth that is actually abating carbon to the degree that the IPCC recommends. Perhaps someone should start paying IPCC authors…
Now it would be far too tedious in what is already a tedious conversation to go through your points one by one. I’ll just try to answer your most important points.
My worldview will be shot to bits when the science changes, Justin. Polar bears can live or die, but until the scientific community says that climate change is probably not man-made/happening/a threat I will not change my mind. No amount of cherry picking from you, or attempts to sully the name of scientific institutions or climate scientists will change that.
So all the temperature recording stations are wrong? Satellite data too? Measurements of how the climate changing is changing are comprehensive and well-established. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2009-time-series/. If the methodology is so bad, Justin, then why has no one been able to show how inaccurate it is? Of course many have tried, Watts included, but they’re consistently wrong. If they were right, there would be more debate about climate change. It’s how the science has always operated as I’ve said before, climate change didn’t just appear out of thin air, this is a theory that has taken decades to develop and proved its way into the consensus. Until enough evidence is accumulated to show that the consensus is wrong my world view will not change.
The IPCC’s work is peer-reviewed. It was IPCC author that pointed out the glacier mistake for example. http://www.skepticalscience.com/Peer-review-process.htm . Yes, it is easy thanks to Skeptical Science – they link to science written by real scientists so that I don’t have to. How about you show me a link from say, NASA, or The Ameican Physical Society. Just one respectable organization that actually employs climate scientists to say that climate change modelling is faulty, despite the accurate results it’s produced. http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction.htm (yes, reposted from the other thread just in case some other bored soul is reading). Interesting too, that you then quoted the IPCC SREX report to back a point of yours. Since I see that you’re now using the IPCC to support your arguments then you’ll no doubt agree with their overall conclusion that climate change is a threat to human well-being. Or, you could just carry on cherry picking.
I did not read the Delinquent Teenager. I did read the free section on Amazon though and I noticed that La Framboise couldn’t even be bothered to learn the basic science that any high school physics student could have taught her about. On page 7 under climate models (of the Kindle version) she complains that human made Co2 makes up a very small percentage of total Co2 in the atmosphere therefore doubling it should be no problem at all. I’m curious, Justin, do you know why this is so obviously wrong? I’m wondering how much you really do know about the science here. Anyhow, after reading such a gross mistake a few pages into the book I was left feeling very reluctant to spend money on an author that was so obviously not prepared to approach her chosen topic with an open enough mind that she was too lazy to even do some reading about elementary science. Perhaps such sloppiness is why the book didn’t quite make such a large impact? As for the rest of it, I’ll leave it to this reviewer http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3CSVFIVPLNDF9/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005UEVB8Q&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=#wasThisHelpful.
By the way, I can’t believe you actually quoted wattsupwiththat. Was it proven yet if he took money from Heartland? Did he address his backtrack of “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they [BEST] produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”? You’re going to have to do better than quote this odious truth distorter if you want to convince anyone of your opinions.
As a final thought, consider the form of energy production which I assume you think is so harmless. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2011/02/19/500-billion-true-cost-of-coal-new-harvard-study/
Anyhow, Justin, please have the last word. As you said, why do we waste so much time on this? I’m not prepared to waste any more. Should the science ever change in the way I said then I shall issue a full apology for having been so wrong. Should that not happen though, I’ll be expecting one from you.
p.s. some links about why climate scientists do not receive loads of money and why it’s rubbish that AGW opponents cannot get funding.
p.p.s. after looking for our old debate on your facebook page I found the one between you and Mr. Garvey by accident. I must congratulate you on a fine debate but also say that I support most of Mr. Garvey’s opinions which are expressed with an eloquence and intelligence that I will sadly never attain.
I’ve just seen this response now. It’s full of your customary distortions of my position. I’m genuinely embarrassed for you that you have to cut and paste a scathing review for a book you’ve never read – it’s just pitiful. But I notice the two really tough and important questions you were asked, you simply avoided. You can’t hide behind environmentalists’ pimping of Science, capital S , as a surrogate for argument to engage with those questions, so you don’t bother addressing them at all. It’s the perfect metaphor for pinched and retrograde politics of environmentalism as a whole.
Dunning-Kruger effect in full flow here, I see.