global warming denialism

DeSmogBlog has the details. Apparently, "cut-and-paste" Schulte didn't have anything new to say, not even enough for a journal like Energy and Environment to take it. Although, Richard Littlemore's letter discussing his loose use of other researchers contributions might have helped. Here is the email that I sent to Boehmer-Christiansen" ... Dr. Schulte's analysis has engendered both enthusiasm and controversy, but at least one arm's length "reviewer," Dr. Tim Lambert, has noted that Dr.Schulte's draft draws heavily from a document that it does not credit, an earlier letter on this topic…
This time it's Steve McIntyre representing for the anti-global warming cranks following the HIV/AIDS denialist lead and using John Ioannidis' study to suggest science is bunk. Never mind that this research is primarily focused on medical studies. Never mind that the study wouldn't even exist if replication in science didn't identify in the first place. Cranks like to latch onto anything that they think is embarrassing to science out of the mistaken belief that it makes their nonsense more believable. It's funny, I was sure they would have picked up on this stuff years ago, but the…
I think most skeptical bloggers would agree that one common tactic one sees from denialists is whole-hog cut-and-paste rebuttals without attribution. For instance, on finds when arguing with evolution denialists that they'll just cut-and-paste tired creationist arguments into comment threads. We wrote briefly about the latest attempt by global warming denialists to suggest that the scientific consensus does not support climate change. To start with, it was little more than a repeat of the previous debunked attempts, and was hardly original. Well, for more proof they can't think originally…
Oddly enough, I agree with (most) of one of them. The attack on Newsweek's article "The Truth About Deniers continues with a piece from Robert Samuelson in the WaPo. Samuelson, true to form, sees a hard problem and resorts to saying, "It's hard, we can't do anything about it!" His boring fatalism on any difficult problem seems to always end with assertions that if something requires regulation, or proactive government, it's impossible. He's also critical of Newsweek's correct assertion that the attacks on the science aren't for legitimate "dissent" but rather represent an organized…
Today is a big day for cranks in two separate areas, but the interesting thing is the similarity of the responses. First we have Casey Luskin of the "top think tank" the Discovery Institute (wow, they must be right up there with Cato and CEI!) blathering about paleontologists don't know anything because of the self-correcting nature of science. After this latest find, one researcher realized its implications and was quick to quash any doubts this may spark regarding human evolution, stating: "All the changes to human evolutionary thought should not be considered a weakness in the theory of…
Alert readers have brought to my attention two articles of interest to the study of denialism. First a big fat article in Newsweek entitled The Truth About Denial is a good overview of the anti-scientific crusade of conservative crank tanks to dispute global warming. It has a nice timeline of the development of the denialist movement in response to the unwanted science, examples of the cranks in congress that have latched onto and internalized the arguments that confirm what they want to hear, and their classic tactics of cherry-picking and confusing climate with weather. The second, and I'…
The pathetic thing is that it's the same old tripe. Emily Yoffe writes "Gloom and Doom in A Sunny Day" and rehashes the same tired old anti-GW tripe. We start with the use of an idiotic example of misunderstanding climate change to mock global warming: It was a mild January evening, and people had filled the restaurant's outdoor patio. As our group walked past the tables, one of my friends said, "This terrifies me." I don't know if she was reassured later by the chilly April, but we are all supposed to be terrified of the weather now. It's just as stupid when people who are concerned about…
George Monbiot posts his last reply to Alexander Cockburn. Wisely, Monbiot has chosen not to continue arguing with a crank. At a certain point it's always a lost cause. And considering Cockburn's evidence one would be crazy to continue. It turns out, the sole-source of his rambling diatribe against all global warming science - the papers from Martin "Guy I met on a boat" Hertzburg - turned out not to be papers at all. They were never published, never peer reviewed. The only peer-reviewed literature Cockburn managed to find to agree with him was published in Lyndon Larouche's fake…
I'm surprised it took as long as a day for denialists like Patrick Michaels to gloat over the finding that the loss of the ice caps on Kilimanjaro - an example used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth - has turned out to be from causes other than global warming (a more in depth paper). But one thing they usually won't mention when they quote these articles - how Kilimanjaro was the exception that proved the rule. In an article in the July-August edition of American Scientist, Mote and Kaser also cited decreased snowfall in the area as a driver of melt because bright, white snow reflects…
I should have known better than to trust a single quote cited by a denialist or crank. In our Case Study of Alexander Cockburn we pointed out his selective use of data but we missed a big fat cherry-pick. It's based on this quote from Cockburns article: As Richard Kerr, Science magazine's man on global warming remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's become almost respectable." Tim Lambert catches Cockburn in this dishonesty and it's a pretty bad behavior. It reminds me of the HOWTO again, in that people that become cranks really see only what they want to see in a…
Who are the global Warming Denialists? A tougher question is, in a discipline as complex as climate science, how do you tell who the legitimate skeptics (those that ignore the reporting at the Independent for instance) are versus who are the denialists? Again, it's simple, because denialism is about tactics. Which global warming critics are the ones alleging conspiracies, cherry-picking data, and incessantly moving the goalposts? Which organizations hire these hacks to denigrate legitimate science? The most obvious example of a hack anti-science global warming denialist would have to be…
Is it the 9/11 cranks saying it? Of course not. Instead it's the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page featuring Peter Hoekstra. And you wonder why we call the WSJ editorial page a denialist organization? In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, declared that environmental concerns and national security would share equal status in U.S. foreign policy. Immediately following that announcement, CIA Director John Deutch said in July 1996 that the U.S. was diverting spy satellites to photograph "ecologically sensitive" sites. ... Instead of focusing on looming…