mainstream media
illconsidered | May 16, 2010Lord Viscount Monckton of Benchley, it turns out, really is a "swivel-eyed maniac". Or at least it is a fair thing to say.
Some month's ago, George Monbiot wrote a bog post about our good friend Monckton that said Monckton has claimed, among other things:
⢠he has read the treaty that will be signed at Copenhagen next week. That's quite a feat of clairvoyance.
⢠The treaty says that "a world government is going to be created".
⢠Greenpeace is "about to impose a communist world government on the world" and President Obama, who sympathises with that aim, will sign up to it.
Monckton made a…
illconsidered | May 14, 2010Okay, that's sarcasm. Wille Soon is featured in an interview on the Examiner.com website, but grilling is hardy how to describe the pathetic softballs Kir Meyers throws, rather rolls, his way.
Here are a few of the questions he asked:
Many of the scientists promoting the global warming theory appear to be driven by politics rather than hard scientific data. What are your thoughts?
What needs to be done to combat the strong-arm tactics being used against scientists who disagree with the AGW theory?
What is your opinion of Al Gore?
Really not much more to say about that...
illconsidered | May 13, 2010Offered without comment:
(Thanks Morten Morland for the laugh, and h/t to Jeffrey Hill)
illconsidered | April 24, 2010Richard Lindzen has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal for Earth Day and exhibits the best of climate denialism's ability to flip reality on its head. I was considering going through it and highlighting its many falsehoods and logical holes but Arthur Smith has done a fine job of it already.
The WSJ op-ed is behind a paywall, but if you click the first result in this google search, you can read it in full. Arthur's take down is here.
illconsidered | April 22, 2010Via DeSmogBlog comes the news that Andrew Weaver is suing Canada's National Post for libel and defamation.
You can read the press release here and the Statement of Claim is here [PDF].
While I think the basic aspect of holdinng a newspaper accountable for outright lies or reporting so irresponsible it is virtually indistinguishable from a lie is a Godd Thing, this particular action brings up some much less cut and dried issues such as holding the paper accountable for anonymous commenters and the paper accountable for article reposts.
Given the escalation of personal attacks and irresponsible…
illconsidered | April 8, 2010Here is a fascinating exchange between George Monbiot and Steve Easterbrook exploring the larger issues behind the recent Swifthacking of CRU email (aka ClimateGate).
Steve makes an excellent presentation of the case for what happens to be my personal view on this mess, namely that the media has failed in a major and tragic way and that this is a tale of a successful propaganda campaign not scientific corruption. In my opinion, Monbiot seems to understand Steve's points but still does not get the real story.
Have a read:
The computer scientist Steve Easterbrook wrote an interesting critique…
illconsidered | March 4, 2010This is interesting. I have mixed feelings about it but it is probably a necessary step in forcing the reality of this issue into the correct legal and political context. Actions have consequences and actors have responsibilities.
The only question I have is that the respnsibility is really shared by all of us as consumers of fossil fuels, in some sense it is not fair to place all the respnsibility on the fossil fuel companies.
Of course when they intentionally create misinformation to avoid addressing the problem, the face a corresponding increase in culpability.
Read it below:
Katrina…
illconsidered | March 1, 2010So Tim Lambert has been a busy blogger this last month with some really first rate investigative work on the truly abysmal rash of shoddy climate journalism in the UK. Check out his Leakgate category for a multitude of "must read" postings.
Also see Eli on Leakeng Ships. for another run down of Tim's work.
Real Climate did a good roundup of the phony spate of IPCC scandals as well, here and here (if you only click one of those links, click the first because it has some excellent background on the IPCC to add some reality perspective to the whole mess).
I don't understand how reporters can…
illconsidered | February 16, 2010I know this is old news, but I just found the youtubes of this debate. You will recall how Plimer declined to answer some very straightforward requests for evidence of a handful of his most egregious fabrications that George Monbiot put to him as a precondition of a debate. Well, not because Plimer decided to be forthcoming, the debate went ahead in December with no preconditions.
It can be viewed in three parts below.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
If you don't have time for it all (~24 minutes) I would recommend starting at part 2.
Is anyone impressed with Plimer's evasivness. He might as…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
The panelists made a point of stepping away from the scientists vs. bloggers frame (as well as the question of whether bloggers are or are not properly considered journalists). They said some interesting things about what defines a journalist -- perhaps a set of distinctive values (like a commitment to truth and accuracy, possibly also to the importance of telling an engaging story). This, rather than having a particular paying gig as a…
illconsidered | February 2, 2010As ridiculous as that headline is, it is the theme du jour in the denialosphere....
The chair of the UN's panel on climate change Dr Rajendra Pachauri was written a "racy" romance novel and therefore the IPCC AR4 is unreliable propaganda. Um...okay.
If I wanted the denialists to win the PR battle, I would quietly but urgently try to warn them about going a bit too far in the mud slinging ad hominems.
(see ClimateAudit and WUWT piling on this Telegraph "news" item.)
I mean, really, isn't that a truly laughable thing to get worked up about? Can't just about anyone with the minimal…
illconsidered | January 14, 2010Apropos the recent spate of commenting about the hacked CRU emails, Kevin Trenberth has an article at The Daily Camera.
He makes this remark about his constantly mischaracterized "travesty" quote ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."):
The quote has been taken out of context. It relates to our ability to track energy flow through the climate system. We can do this very well from 1992 to 2003, when large warming occurred, but not from 2004 to 2008. The quote refers to our observation system which is inadequate to observe…
illconsidered | December 9, 2009The Guardian has run a front page editorial on the Copenhagen summit along with 56 papers in 20 languages.
I read it at Real Climate who "takes no formal position" on its statements. I suppose it is to avoid the acusation of being political...
Well, I have rarely read an editorial I agree with more. And I say that with the utmost formality!
It was released under Creative Commons license, so I will reproduce it here in its entirety:
Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step…
illconsidered | December 7, 2009The Globe and Mail has an article by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Andrew Weaver on "responding to the sceptics" that can be read here. It is rather shorter than How to talk to a climate sceptic, having only 4 points.
This is the overview of their Q&A:
"GLOBAL WARMING HAS STOPPED."
Nonsense.
"RECENT WARMING IS MOSTLY DUE TO AN INCREASE IN THE AMOUNT OF RADIATION COMING FROM THE SUN."
Rubbish.
"THE CLIMATE IS ALWAYS CHANGING."
Yes, but so what?
"SCIENTIFIC UNCERTAINTY IS SO GREAT THAT WE CAN'T MAKE FIRM POLICY DECISIONS."
Wrong.
Of course they offer a lot more detail, which you can read here.
illconsidered | August 23, 2009A commenter here brought up the controversy du jour for the denialosphere, how Greenpeace alledgedly admitted lying in a press release. Of course that stretch, (well, it's a stretch to call it a stretch), was further stretched to "Greenpeace just admitted that much of the human-caused global warming hype is also a fraud." Talk about extrapolation!
Anyway, as usual it is not what they would have us believe it is. Michael Tobis has all the details, worth reading. The whole thing rests on the imprecision of the phrase "arctic ice", very commonly used to really mean "arctic sea ice".
The…
illconsidered | August 21, 2009I had an open thread a couple of weeks ago about Ian Plimer's recent novel supposedly exposing the lie that is Anthropogenic Global Warming.
I have not read it. A few commenter's defending the book asked how anyone can judge it if they have not read it.
Well, no one can read every book that is out there, not even every book about global warming. We all have to choose. This of course introduces the possibility of bias confirmation. If I feel it in my gut that this particular book will be crap, I won't read it and I will assume I am right about it.
But here's the thing, it is possible to…
illconsidered | August 10, 2009I have mentioned it frequently before, there is another serious problem with pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, ocean acidification.
Geoengineering should never be discussed without mentioning it. The Way Things Break tells Nature as much.
illconsidered | June 29, 2009(The following is offered as an amusing example of how reality sometimes seems to have a sense of homour:)
My wife is from the Czech Republic and was mentioning to me her family's worries about the recent flooding (they are not in immediate danger). I google-news'ed it and went to the first hit, an AP article, that mentioned among the rest of it that there have been several major floods in the last 10 or fifteen years.
She mentioned that Czech never had these kids of events when she was growing up. I mentioned that increased flooding is an expected consequence of climate change in many…
illconsidered | April 25, 2009Okay, so this is way off the general climate topic, but I really got a kick out of this article from Bill Maher published in the LA Times.
If Al Franken can be a senator, why can`t Bill Maher be an LA Times columnist?
Here are a few notable quotables:
The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is not afraid to say publicly that thinking out loud about Texas seceding from the Union is appropriate considering that ... Obama wants to raise taxes 3% on 5% of the people? I'm not sure exactly what Perry's independent nation would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would be free of taxes and Planned…
illconsidered | April 23, 2009Things Break does a nice job documenting the way Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire to disseminate misinformation.
A recent commenter pointed me to one of the articles in that chain, but I really did not give it much thought, it seemed like such a shrug of a story. Nothing new happening and it still doesn't disprove global warming.
Anyway, it is worth a look at the way these things are actively spread, truth be damned!