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Thursday, March 19, 2015

David Middleton calls on denier consensus to deride scientific consensus

Sou | 11:14 AM Go to the first of 7 comments. Add a comment

While Anthony Watts is taking a break he's handed over his blog to other deniers. One of these is a bloke called David Middleton, who has written two articles in the past few days. He's all over the place with no coherency, dredging up one denier meme after another.

Today his article is as scatty as any other (archived here). I gather that he's a greenhouse effect denier because he is madly trying to reject the fact that human emissions of greenhouse gases have caused the world to warm.

One thing that you'll notice if you bother to wade through his nonsense is that he objects to the fact that all the science points to the cause of the recent global warming. He complains a lot about scientific consensus. One of his main arguments against scientific consensus is that a lot of petroleum geologists and engineers (not climate scientists) from Alberta are climate science deniers. (I've written about that study before.) For example, he wrote:
So, it should come as little surprise that geoscientists have consistently been far more likely to think that modern climate changes have been driven by overwhelmingly natural processes…

He also called on the AMS survey I've also written about before, where a lot of US meteorologists - not researchers - basically weather announcers - rejected climate science.

In other words, David calls on consensus among deniers to refute consensus among scientists.

Did I say that climate science deniers are consistently inconsistent?

Incidentally, David Middleton misrepresented both studies, which is par for the course for deniers.

7 comments:

  1. His schisty comments are all over the place. Trust a poor pun to emerge from someone who is to scared of god to truly swear! Freaken hell! Or was that frikken hell! In Australia the expression is fucking hell. It denotes frantic activity in a less than salubrious environment. Sorry for irrelevance! Bert

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  2. It is worth bookmarking this WUWT article as a late sighting of the 'no warming since 1998' meme. There weren't many comments at the time of archiving: is it really possible that not one Wutter feels discomfort at reading that one?

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    Replies
    1. Millicent - mostly the comments are nothing more than "excellent article" one-liners from the "utter nutter" 8% Dismissives. The ones who've convinced themselves that global warming isn't happening, or if it is it's not CO2 (which is plant food don'cha know). The WUWT deluded. The scientific illiterati and climate conspiracy theorists - Anthony's core audience.

      Nothing of substance - much like the article itself. Here's the latest archive:

      https://archive.today/c93Ft

      Delete
    2. "...we “go to work” in a world defined by ... halokinetic processes and, quite frankly, most of us don’t see anything anomalous in recent climate changes."

      Ha, ha. I go with the 2nd definition of halokinetic, from "Geology Word of the week":

      2. The magical (and non-existent) ability to move salt with your mind.

      Delete
  3. The more badly-written, unreferenced crap on WUWT the better. Let's see more! That should put off any fence sitter with a smattering of education. Well done, David Middleton, I say!

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  4. The answer to this question is almost certainly "No!" (Delivered in the style of Joe Flaherty on the old SCTVs -- barked in exasperation), but:

    I wonder if Anthony's very light touch on his blog of late might reflect a slow seepage of doubt into his mind, as it becomes clearer and clearer that it is in fact warming quickly, his acolytes are lunatics, and his "sciency" authors are rank amateurs? I bet he founded the OAS thinking that there was a vast, untapped well of expertise out there, disgruntled Oregon-petition signers, who would come forward and lend some Real Scientific Heft to his struggle --- but alas, only a smattering of cranks showed up.

    He's probably unaware of how his blog has slid over the last year or so. Self-awareness and self-criticism have never been his forte. I'm just asking questions, but I'm not Just Asking Questions, if you see what I mean.

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  5. I love the figure he has about Cook et al, 2013. There is a fascination pseudo-skeptics have about taking only the explicitly endorsing papers to argue that there is only 0.5% consensus. But just simply looking at the numbers of papers that endorse versus those that reject/minimize makes it very clear where the consensus is. How they can justify the inclusion of almost 8,000 "no position" papers in their calculations in totally beyond me, and reason.

    ReplyDelete

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