I’ve Joined The WaPost’s Hall Of Deniers!

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

By Paul Homewood

It appears I’ve joined the Washington Post’s Hall of Deniers!

Amanda Erickson is a reporter for The Washington Post’s Worldviews blog.

Truths are all alike, but every lie is dishonest in its own way.

That could be the mantra of “Not a Scientist,” by journalist Dave Levitan. Levitan has scoured the public record for politicians’ most egregious misstatements, misrepresentations and manglings of scientific fact. He fact-checks and classifies these “alternative facts,” many about climate change, and creates a taxonomy of untruths that may, he writes, help his readers suss out what’s right for themselves.

Among his categories: the “oversimplification” (when a politician says, for example, that 2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record, obscuring the complicated science of assessing global temperature); the “cherry-pick” (Sen. James Inhofe gave a master class on this when he brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in 2015 to prove that climate change is a myth); and the “demonizer” (when, for instance, a public official blames a disease outbreak on illegal immigrants).

In each case, Levitan traces the lies back to the source. He points out that when Rep. Gary Palmer (Ala.) went on the radio in 2015 to say that the government was manipulating climate-change data, the argument in fact came from climate denier (and retired accountant) Paul Homewood. On his blog, Homewood offered no evidence to back up his incendiary claim of massive temperature tampering. Even so, that piece was picked up by Christopher Booker of the British newspaper the Telegraph and then shared hundreds of thousands of times. (Levitan calls this type of fib “blame the blogger.” )

The book offers a common-sense approach for catching misrepresentations. “When a politician makes what sounds like a very specific point — no warming for seventeen years, not sixteen or eighteen — be wary.” And: “Every measurement . . . [has] some margin for error. Pointing that out when it suits a political agenda isn’t an argument; it’s just a smokescreen.”

Levitan’s analysis is accurate and often interesting. But the book feels terribly light on the “why” — why are politicians so willing to mangle science? How do corporations and other special interests back them up? How did we become a country of scientific know-nothings?

While the author spends a lot of time debunking myths around climate change, I wish he’d talked about how companies like ExxonMobil spent millions on phony science and research to create the confusion about global warming that so many people now feel, even in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus.

Instead, though, Levitan sticks to the facts. By doing so, he might miss the bigger picture.

http://ift.tt/2qU7UQ4

Apparently I deny that the climate exists! As for the “accountant” bit, I cannot think of anybody better suited to check the numbers coming out of GISS and co.

The idea that you have to be a paid up climate scientist to read a thermometer is pure conceit and arrogance.

But for the record, my posts on the topic of temperature adjustments all carefully included very detailed evidence, although I never claimed how widespread they were or that they represented massive tampering.

Indeed the GISS website itself actually shows the adjustments made by themselves and GHCN, as for instance at Reykjavik:

http://ift.tt/2rpmtwM

GHCN have persistently failed to explain or justify any of the adjustments, which I have identified to them, despite frequent requests.

It seems that the book itself is woefully inaccurate, if this paragraph is anything to go by:

When a politician makes what sounds like a very specific point — no warming for seventeen years, not sixteen or eighteen — be wary.

Anybody who has been following the climate debate, which apparently does not include the author, Levitan, or the Washington Post’s reporter, can tell you that dozens of papers have been written over the years to explain away the pause.

In fact, the sixteen or eighteen years con is actually a warmist trick, as the Met Office eloquently explained in July 2013 report, “The Recent Pause in Global Warming: What Are The Potential Causes?”:

In other words, the pause is not dependent on using 1998 as a start date.

Since 2013, we have had two years of the strongest El Nino on record. It is therefore perfectly correct to compare trends from 1998 to 2016.

Using a non El Nino year as a startpoint would have no more scientific validity than working out temperature trends from winter to summer.

For some reason, fake news stories, like this one from the Post, are always reluctant to show their readers any graphs that contradict their disinformation.

They could, for instance, have included the satellite temperature trends from UAH, that show the pause in all its glory:

http://ift.tt/1063SCX

Erickson talks of ExxonMobil spending millions on phony science and research, but I am still waiting for my cheque. Perhaps she might have a look at the billions going into climate science.

As for the article’s title, I think it describes Amanda’s little piece very well!