No such thing as climate change? Tell that to this guy
“Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause.”
Writing about the results of Powell’s research, the popular US science and astronomy blogger Phil Plait marvelled at his persistence in unearthing the facts and figures. “His premise was simple: if global warming isn’t real and there’s an actual scientific debate about it, that should be reflected in the scientific journals,” Plait wrote.
“Science thrives on dissenting ideas, it grows and learns from them. If there is actual evidence to support an idea, it gets published.” And referring to Powell’s findings, he said: “Let this be clear: There is no scientific controversy over this. Climate change denial is purely, 100 per cent made-up political and corporate-sponsored crap.
“When the loudest voices are fossil-fuel funded think tanks, when they don’t publish in journals but instead write error-laden op-eds in partisan venues, when they have to manipulate the data to support their point, then what they’re doing isn’t science. It’s nonsense. And worse, it’s dangerous nonsense. Because they’re fiddling with the data while the world burns.”
Bear truths
>Last September Arctic sea ice hit its lowest recorded level
>At 3.41 million sq km, it was barely half the 1979-2000 average
>The area of sea ice lost is 41 times larger than the island of Ireland
>Not only is ice cover shrinking, the surviving ice is thinning precipitously
Out of step The deniers who make climate-change solutions more difficult
One of the most bizarre sights at the UN’s recent climate conference in Doha, Qatar, was of UK Independence Party activist and climate-change denier Christopher Monckton dressed in a traditional dishdash, like Lawrence of Arabia.
Monckton was there to promote his claim that there had been “no global warming for the past 16 years” and that it would be “36 times more expensive to act now , rather than to act later by a focused adaptation”.
Asked to account for his thesis being out of step with the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and even the global accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, the viscount said: “Tell them to get in touch with me and tell me where I’m wrong.”
Craig Rucker, the director of the right-wing Washington-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which was hosting Monckton in Doha, claimed that reports on climate change produced by national science academies “don’t represent rank-and-file members”.
Rucker claimed that “the scientific case for man-made global warming disasters grows weaker by the day”. He also referred to a book by Christopher Horner, Red Hot Lies, about “how global warming alarmists use threats, fraud and deception to keep you misinformed”.
The fact that Arctic summer sea-ice fell to its lowest recorded level last September, opening up the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, doesn’t impress the likes of Monckton or Rucker. They’ll carry on as before, making solutions more difficult.
