Stumble it!Climate chaos? Don’t believe it
posted in Global Warming by themaiden |Why? The 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley– known, rumor among his fellow ’skeptics’ has it, “to his wider family as ‘Mr Knowledge’”– says so, of course, and he’s made up the science to prove it. Isn’t that enough?
Not really. Monckton’s article is junk. He relies heavily upon the “medieval warm period”, which didn’t happen, he blames the sun, and he more or less attributes all of the science in favor of man made global warming to a kind of vast conspiracy. I especially love this last tactic.
Monckton does, rather ironically, report that “Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn’t make them right.” Indeed.
There is nothing really new or surprising to Monckton’s article. He’s printed a string of pretty common, and well debunked, claims. My posts on the subject at tagged Global Warming, but don’t just take my word for it.
RealClimate, written by real climate scientists, writes:
This would not be of much concern if the WSJ wasn’t such an influential paper in the US. However, the extent of its isolation on this issue is evident from the amusing reliance on the error-prone Christopher Monckton. They quote him saying that the sea level rise predictions were much smaller than in IPCC TAR (no they weren’t), that the human contribution to recent changes has been ‘cut by a third’ (no it hasn’t), and that the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) was written by politicians (no it wasn’t - the clue is in the name).
And in another place:
Sometimes on Realclimate we discuss important scientific uncertainties, and sometimes we try and clarify some subtle point or context, but at other times, we have a little fun in pointing out some of the absurdities that occasionally pass for serious ’science’ on the web and in the media. These pieces look scientific to the layperson (they have equations! references to 19th Century physicists!), but like cuckoo eggs in a nest, they are only designed to look real enough to fool onlookers and crowd out the real science. A cursory glance from anyone knowledgeable is usually enough to see that concepts are being mangled, logic is being thrown to the winds, and completetly unjustified conclusions are being drawn - but the tricks being used are sometimes a little subtle.
Two pieces that have recently drawn some attention fit this mould exactly. One by Christopher Monckton (a viscount, no less, with obviously too much time on his hands) which comes complete with supplematary ‘calculations’ using his own ‘M’ model of climate, and one on JunkScience.com (’What Watt is what’). Junk Science is a front end for Steve Milloy, long time tobacco, drug and oil industry lobbyist, and who has been a reliable source for these ‘cuckoo science’ pieces for years. Curiously enough, both pieces use some of the same sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary (coincidence?).
Cuckoo Science
William Connolley– strangely enough, a real climate scientist– takes Monckton to task in Moncktons curious take on the SPM, which is a short and dense but good read in which Monckton’s claims are more or less reduced to nonsense.
Dr Stephan Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter and Senior Research Associate at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, addresses Monckton on the Bluffer’s Corner at TurnUpTheHeat, an article to which Monckton replied– apparently missing that the blog’s owner, George Monbiot, is not the man who wrote the article.
Hat-tip to Political Pariah- for pointing me to Mockton’s asinine article.
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