hell’s handmaiden

A lot has been made about R.M. Carter’s paper, published by the Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and presented at several conferences, titled “The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change“.

I read Carter’s paper.

While it isn’t central to the point, it is interesting to note that Carter choose to kick off his paper with a segment rich in words and phrases like ‘alarmist’ and ‘costly exercise of utter futility’. He is also careful to define, or redefine, ‘climate skeptic’ as ‘climate rationalist’. “The latter term,’ he writes, “reflect[s] the primacy that such persons give to empirical data and thinking”. In other words, Carter chooses his language like a propagandist. He chooses his words, at least in the introduction, for their emotional appeal. Contrast his language with that in the famous, or infamous depending upon your perspective, Jones and Mann paper, “Climate Over Past Millennia“.