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Friday, January 24, 2014

Anthony Watts "heading for a mini-ice age" and quote mining from a denier!

Sou | 5:23 AM Feel free to comment!

Anthony Watts has just posted an article which is a cut and paste job of different bits and pieces he obviously thinks worth passing on to his readers. He makes much of the latest report of 2013 global temperature reports and the "pause".  I've already covered that lots of times so I'll just touch on a couple of the others. (Archived here.)


No, there's no mini-ice age cometh-ing!


The first and silliest one I'll mention is one I've already covered.  Anthony's decided it's worth repeating this bit of idiocy:
The Sun’s activity has plummeted to a century low, baffling scientists and possibly heralding a new mini-Ice Age.
The first part is correct but there is no chance of a mini-ice age, no matter what the tabloids or WUWT-ers say!


Quote mining deniers' own quotes!


The next bit relates to one aspect of the proposed EU plan which I've also just written about, though I didn't mention that "member states will have an "indicative" target - that is, not legally binding – of improving energy efficiency by 25% by 2030" (see the Guardian report). It's that aspect that this relates to.

What Anthony has done is distort something Benny Peiser of the GWPF is quoted as saying, changing it's meaning quite a lot.  I've copied the text and highlighted in bold the bit that Anthony left out.  Quote-mining is something deniers do all the time, but usually they cherry pick from quotes made by scientists or climate hawks.  This time Anthony has left out two crucial sentences of a quote from another denier.  Well, it's symptomatic of all the in-fighting that's been going on in denier-land this week.
The European Commission has finally begun rolling back the EU’s ruinous climate and green energy policies. But its modest climbdown does not signal the end of the climate hysteria that has dominated Brussels for nearly 20 years. The proposed targets have triggered protests from energy-intensive industries across Europe. Eurofer, an umbrella group for Europe’s steel producers, has called on leaders to weaken the targets much further. The roll-back is in part an acknowledgement that Europe’s green agenda has been an unmitigated fiasco, causing skyrocketing energy prices across Europe and harming competitiveness. But the old guard of commissioners are trying to salvage a green legacy before they are replaced in the autumn by a set of commissioners more concerned about Europe’s economic future. A more significant retreat from unilateral climate policies is likely to gather speed, and the proposed targets may not survive. Dr Benny Peiser is the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Deniers cherry-picking from deniers.  Is that a first?

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