Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming Debunker Debunked
Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton's attempt to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, "Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?" George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong... In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist... As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000." And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.
At least the cases quoted in the /. writeup are correct: The original presentation did specify a range of outcomes with probabilities attached to each, and suddenly the anti-environmental groups latched onto the wildest, lowest probability outcome like bulldogs. When you point out that that's the lowest probability outcome out of a particular range, they go off on their standard non sequitor "zomg! so the guy went and lied before congress presenting all this stuff that wasn't going to happen and he knew it wasn't going to happen blah blah blah blah blah".
Whether it's carbon dioxide or mercury, there will always be corporate warlords who have decreed that killing people is the price of progress, as long as they're not the ones to pay it. It's terrible and sad if some peon gets cancer from living in the wrong place at the wrong time, but suggest that it's the company that should pay for the treatment and suddenly you're a barbaric anti-progress socialist that wants everyone to live in the stone age.