George Monbiot
sastyk | July 3, 2012I can't really blame George Monbiot or anyone else for buying the narrative hype. Right now the overwhelming narrative is that we have no energy constraints at all. Folks wonder aloud whether the US should join OPEC. Increasingly ridiculous projections are made about the potential of shale oil and new drilling techniques. Slight upticks are assumed to be headed to their logical extremes, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government issues a report saying we've got all the oil we could ever want. So is it really surprising that Monbiot, who has been focused on climate change, not peak oil…
tlambert | November 6, 2010Following in the footsteps of The Great Global Warming Swindle Channel 4 has produced a new documentary that also appears to favour being controversial over being accurate or fair: What the Green Movement Got Wrong.
Adam Werbach who was in the documentary protested that his views were misrepresented and tried to have his contribution removed. He writes:
In one scene they interspersed heart-wrenching photos of starving children in Zambia, their emaciated mouths crying out for help, with a story of how the environmental movement blocked the delivery of food aid to Zambia from the United States…
tlambert | August 26, 2010Hey, remember how the Sunday Times retracted that bogus Jonathan Leake story which was based on "Research by Richard North"? Now the Sunday Telegraph has retracted and apologized for a bogus story by Christopher Booker and Richard North alleging that Rajenda Pachauri was making millions from his links with carbon trading companies. George Monbiot has the details.
Anyone noticing a pattern here?
tlambert | September 19, 2009After Ian Plimer reneged on his agreement to answer Monbiot's questions, the folks at the Spectator have reacted just like Plimer does to criticism -- with name calling and nothing to address the criticism.
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle
Moonbat ... You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. ... reminds me a little of the hardline creationists you find jabbering in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains
Novelist James Delingpole, the man that the Spectator decided was best qualified to review Plimer's book:
ineffable barkingness of George Moonbat .... if anyone ever chooses to take any of the…
tlambert | September 15, 2009Just as I thought, Ian Plimer's questions for Monbiot were a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions. Monbiot writes:
Creationists and climate change deniers have this in common: they don't answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply switch to another line of attack. They never retract, never apologise, never explain, just raise the volume, keep moving and hope that people won't notice the trail of broken claims in their wake. ...
Having put up…
tlambert | September 2, 2009George Monbiot has the details on Plimer's latest attempts to evade answering Monbiot's questions. Plimer wrote to him:
There are seven versions of Heaven and Earth and only my Australian publisher and I know the differences in diagrams, references and text between the seven. It has taken some time to look at your questions and determine which version was used for compilation of the questions. Can you please confirm that you have actually read Heaven and Earth and that your questions derive from that reading.
As Monbiot notes:
This was odd because, judging by the notes made from Heaven and…
tlambert | August 25, 2009I think the purpose of Plimer's strange questions was to give himself a pretext to avoid answering Monbiot's questions, but Gavin Schmidt has countered this ploy by addressing Plimer's questions at RealClimate.
tlambert | August 12, 2009Instead of answering Monbiot's questions, Plimer has responded with his own set of questions. I suspect that this is a tactic so he can weasel out of answering Monbiot's questions. My favourite question from Plimer is this one (which isn't even a question):
6 From ocean current velocity, palaeotemperature and atmosphere measurements of ice cores and stable and radiogenic isotopes of seawater, atmospheric CO2 and fluid inclusions in ice and using atmospheric CO2 residence times of 4, 12, 50 and 400 years, numerically demonstrate that the modern increase in atmospheric CO2 could not derive…
tlambert | August 3, 2009After George Monbiot panned Plimer's book for his grotesque scientific errors, Plimer challenged Monbiot to a face-to-face debate. Of course, Plimer would do his usual Gish gallop with such a format, so Monbiot agreed with just one condition:
Last week I wrote to Professor Plimer accepting his challenge, on the condition that he accepts mine. I would take part in a face-to-face debate with him as long as he agreed to write precise and specific responses to his critics' points -- in the form of numbered questions that I would send him -- for publication on the Guardian's website. I also…
tlambert | July 9, 2009Ian Plimer is well aware that numerous serious errors of fact and interpretation have been exposed in his book but has yet to mount any kind of substantive response -- all he has done is call his critics names. As a result James Delingpole leaves himself wide open when he writes an excessively credulous review of Heaven and Earth:
My tribe doesn't believe in global warming! ... Plimer has a sciency-looking book saying it's all a big hoax! ... the Australian government will collapse ... Al Gore is fat!
OK, that was a paraphrase. Except for the bit about the Australian government collapsing.…
tlambert | March 25, 2009George Monbiot has the latest on David Belllamy's descent into crankdom:
Among other gems, Bellamy's interview contained the following marvellous assertion of independence: "peer-reviewed journals - it's the last thing I would use now."