Monbiot Propaganda

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian today that the Climate Change scientists whose emails were leaked to the media have done themselves no good by their denials of mismanagement and misinformation. He says that Professor Phil Jones will have to resign - there's nothing else for it. And this from a supporter of climate change - a very strong supporter, in fact.

Notice, however, his constant denigration of those who debate the climate change case: "Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years" - "climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support" - "climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause" - the climate scientists' "opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary" - "despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad" - "the deniers' campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists."

This would all be fine if it were only loud-mouth politicians and money-makers who were involved in the denying of climate change. But there are a large number of scientists - yes, those self-same creatures who promote climate change - denying it as well. The pro-climate change people will invariably tell you that they don't have the right credentials - they don't know enough of the 'right' science, in other words. But these people are no fools. And that's what Monbiot (who is 'only' a zoologist, incidentally) wants to make them out to be.

Deluded

I'm not sure why, but Blogger seems to have been playing up for the last couple of days.   It's worst at work, where it just crashes on Mozilla Firefox every time I try to open the posting page, but it's also playing up at home.   And even on my daughter's laptop, which I'm using at the moment, it's a bit iffy.   Seems to be better on Internet Explorer than Firefox, so perhaps the latter has added some component that's upsetting Blogger.   Or else Blogger itself has changed something, since the pages are loading differently to waht they used to.  Whatever the problem, it's a bloomin' nuisance!

What I'd been trying to add on here was a quote from George Monbiot, a stalwart defender of Global Warming.   He was writing in the Guardian, and, in talking about Clive James (who's a disbeliever in the religion of GW) he said:

Had he bothered to take a look at the quality of the evidence on either side of this media debate, and the nature of the opposing armies – climate scientists on one side, rightwing bloggers on the other – he too might have realised that the science is in.  In, at any rate, to the extent that science can ever be, which is to say that the evidence for man-made global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Regrettably George's argument lets him down twice in this short paragraph.   Firstly the two opposing sides aren't scientists versus bloggers, but scientists versus scientists and a great many other intellectually well-endowed people (whom he manages to dismiss completely early in the article).  And secondly, telling us that the evidence for man-made global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution is just like saying that the evidence for dinosaurs having bad breath is as strong as the evidence for knowing the names of the first person on the planet.  

There is no 'evidence', but there is a lot of speculation.   Unfortunately, the Darwinians are so into their own philosophical speculation that they pretend it's actually an argument with some basis in fact.   And equally unfortunately, they've taken to Global Warming like it was latest piece of evidence for everything Darwinian.  

Deluded.