Denialist vs Warmist: Warmist Wins by TKO

You've seen the 'Rumble in the Jungle', now it's the 'Smashing in Sydney'. Roll up, roll up for what should be been an easy denialist win. In the blue corner was Lord 'Fuckwittington' Monkton and in the red corner was computer scientist Tim 'Deltoid' Lambert. Both were pitted against each other in a major debate. Prior to the debate the odds were against Deltoid; the referee host is very bias towards denial plus sympathetic towards Monkton, the crowd was organised by the said bias host, so, on the whole against Deltoid. In addition, for all his faults (and they are legion when it comes to science), Monkton was a very experienced political player and accomplished public speaker - whereas Deltoid had never done such a debate before.

However the three things Deltoid had on his side were key in this battle:

1. He was right.
2. He is very smart.
3. He was right.

Did I also mention that he was right? That helps. So What was the outcome? In summary, in the second round of the fight Deltoid landed a severe blow against Monkton that can only be described as a Technical Knock-Out (TKO).... and how he did it was very clever;

You know that famous scene in Annie Hall where a bore is going on and on about Marshall McLuhan's work and Allen produces McLuhan who tells the bore that he got McLuhan all wrong? Well, that's kind of what happened in my debate with Monckton. Based on what he had identified as his most important argument in previous talks I was pretty sure he would argue that climate sensitivity was low based on his misunderstanding of Pinker et al Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation?. And sure enough, he did.

If you read the title of Pinker's paper, you'll see that it's about changes in surface solar radiation, not climate forcing as Monckton would have it. In ideal world I could have had Rachel Pinker appear from behind the curtain to tell Monckton that he was wrong about her paper, but I was able to do the next best thing. I first played a recording of Monckton's building up Pinker as good scientist who was not interested in the global warming debate, and where he got her gender wrong again and again. Then I played a recording of a female colleague with an American accent reading out Pinker's message to me on how Monckton had misunderstood her work. It was as if she was there.

I finished off by correcting his climate sensitivity calculation by comparing the current climate with the last Ice Age. The fun bit here was that I got all the information about the Ice Age from "Heaven and Earth" [a denialist book]. Plimer's book + Monckton's calculation proves climate sensitivity is about 3.

Boom! From there on, the rest was noise.



Congratulations to Tim 'Deltiod' Lambert. Full debate can be found here; part 1, 2 and 3.

Denialists Not Sceptics

I read two letters printed in the newspapers recently - one in the Guardian and one in the Observer by people objecting to the use of the term 'denialist' to describe global warming denialists sceptics. I use the term denialist (as well a climate creationist) and I am happy to explain why...

A recent exchange between Benny 'Hill' Peiser and Robin McKie in the Observer shows why; Benny used an invented quote by Sir John Houghton to make his point - quotes, like any form of evidence need to be reliable. A sceptic would approach all sources of information with a sceptical mindset and demand authentication. What Benny did is took a talking point from the denialosphere and simply recycled it for use without confirming it's truth. That is not a sceptical mindset - it is the mindset of a propagandist. Propagandists exists to make a point whatever the data. People who have made their mind up about the conclusion before considering the data can never be sceptics. The denialists point to the errors in the IPCC as proof of their claims - yet they were making the claims event before the errors were uncovered. The are still making claims about conspiracies and lizard-men new-world-order shit now;

In the heat of the debate, the representative Mike Noel said environmentalists were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life and control world population through forced sterilisation and abortion.

Put simply the IPCC and the scientists behind it are accountable and are part of a process - errors made (and I am surprised there are not more) are both inevitable and part of the science. They are expected as part of the process of learning and understanding a complex system. By contrast the denialosphere is able to make the craziest and wildest claims; make shit up, cherry-pick results and lie, lie and lie - without any accountability. Now I am sure there are the odd one or two genuine sceptics in the ranks of the denialosphere, but they are undoubtedly a tiny, tiny minority. If the denialist movement was stuffed with scepticism they'd be asking for evidence of such nutty shit-loon claims and holding the authors of them to account. They don't because they are not sceptics, but denialists.

...and it the cap fits...

Museum of Irony

I read this and was stunned by the irony of it all...

A group of Palestinians descended from 15 of Jerusalem's oldest Arab families lodged a protest with the UN today in a fresh effort to prevent the construction of a "Museum of Tolerance" on the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery...

Jamal Nusseibeh said one of his ancestors, the former governor of Jerusalem Burhan al-Din al-Khazraji ibn Nusseibeh, was buried in the cemetery in 1432. "It is part of the rich fabric of Jerusalem which always has been a symbol of tolerance," he said. "The fact that anybody could wish to wipe out such a structural part of this fabric in order somehow to promote tolerance is very hard to understand."

Last month Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's founder, said the project was on a "fantastic site in the heart of Jerusalem" and would bring "to Jerusalem and the people of Israel, a project of crucial significance to its future"...

Snow Shortage and Climate Change

Parts of the US have been deluged by snow while further north in Canada - where it is supposed to snow, has seen very little. This is what you'd expect to see as predicted by the theory of climate change - as there is more energy in the system (global warming) then there is more chaos in the system at a local level (climate change). You'd think this was simple to understand, but no - denialists crow over the snowfalls and shuffle quietly over the droughts (of snow in Canada, of water in Australia).

Honestly, the way the denial-machine goes on about it, you'd think there were billions of petrodollas at stake or something?

A prediction for the future from the past

Check this out...

The hope of the future does not rest, as commonly believed, in winning the people of the "buffer fringe" to one superpower or the other, but rather in the invention of new weapons and tactics that will be so cheap to obtain and so easy to use that they will increase the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare so greatly that the employment of our present weapons of mass destruction will become futile, and on this basis there can be a revival of democracy and of political decentralization in all three parts of our present world. This possible development in political and military matters, would, of course, require the development of decentralized economic techniques such as would arise if sunlight became the chief energy source for production and the advancement of science made it possible to manufacture any desired substance by molecular rearrangement....

Now this was written in 1961!!! It seems to be that it argues that big weapon systems will becomes pointless - which is happening as proliferation grows and the scenario of mutually assured destruction arises. But also the use of non-state forces - i.e. terrorism - to wave war means that such weapons are useless because how can you nuke a tiny cell of people that might only number 10 hiding within your own city? Answer - you can't. It's also prescient because it envisions the decentralization of power (economic/energy) that seems to be about to happen. Very interesting...