Nick Palmer
On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Palmer" <[email protected]>
To: "Mark Iverson" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 1:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:The Science of Greenhouse Effect...Time for some balance?
Mark,
I don't know who the "Nick" you found commenting was, but it wasn't me. I
would never get involved in such pointless nit-picky criticism - it would
be like criticising the fine details of the mediaeval theories on how many
angels could dance on the head of a pin. Those theories may have appeared
self-consistent but they were so self-evidently wrong and time wasting as
to be laughable - same with Miskolczi's diversionary intellectual
vapourware. One should always look hypercritically at people who claim to
have found huge flaws in very long established equations and theories
http://www.friendsofscience.org/ This is a denialist website - on the
front page they have articles from denialist "scientists" referencing
Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" as somewhat inaccurate and that there should
be media balance by showing garbage such as the "Great Global warming
Swindle" which actually contains proven lies, not least of which is that a
genuine scientist who featured in it has since disavowed the programme as
deliberately dishonestly editing his comments to give an effect that
horrified him when he saw the finished programme. Yet the denialosphere
keeps quoting this programme to sucker the unwary and the uncritical as
some sort of "media balance" - figure it out - these people are lying to
you with every trick in the propaganda handbook. They are dressing up lies
in the clothing of scientific reports in a calculated effort to deceive
people.
http://www.landshape.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=introduction Another website
with denialist tendencies though mostly leads to a book on ecostatistics.
The first reference on the introduction page is from the "Heartland
Institute" - probably one of the most prominent denier organisations who,
nowadays are a major source of funds for the professional deniers now that
even the oil and coal industries no longer support them.
Miskolczi is, in any case, easy to shoot down without any specialist
knowledge, let alone the obvious "fringe mad scientist" errors of
interpretation and assumption and basic mathematical errors that were
delineated in the link I posted (did you not read or understand them? or
did you just choose to turn a blind eye because you didn't want to have
your preconceptions rattled?).
Miskolczi's basic idea is that the negative feedbacks are far stronger
than conventional climate science (all the thousands of man-years of work
and research and thinking and peer reviewed papers) has worked out. This
"lone genius" claims to have spotted flaws which mean that we could chuck
almost indefinite amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and his fortuitously
hypothesised enhanced negative feedbacks mean that it would make virtually
no difference - Earth would stabilise without significant change. What his
entire wishful thinking "theory" ignores is that from the geophysical
records it is quite plain that, in the past, Earth has had a very large
positive response to changes in atmospheric gas concentrations which have
radically altered climate and caused mass extinctions of species and
colossal disruption to climate stability. Without the accumulation of CO2
we would never even get out of ice ages fer chrissakes. The geophysical
records of reality scream out, to anyone whose mind is not closed, that
Miskolczi is wrong. Obviously, simply, stupidly, irresponsibly,
dangerously wrong.
Don't be fooled by the extreme scientific presentation of his ideas - no
matter how complex and tightly argued it looks, it is a classic example of
garbage in garbage out. That the denialosphere (like climateaudit.org)
gives this "theory" any credibility whatsoever shows them up for what they
are - a relatively small, trying to look bigger than they are, incestuous
group who just back each other up, no matter how fanciful or wrong or
mendacious the material. They appear increasingly desperate as their
originally welcome scepticism has been corrupted over the years into
pathological scepticism and Machiavellian manipulation of the gullible.
Unfortunately, they hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.
Evilly, they make this same claim, to fool the gullible, as applying to
the overwhelming majority of working scientists. Always remember that
anybody can say or claim any damn thing they want but that absolutely does
not give their ideas the right to be given the same credibility as more
tested ideas.
Nick Palmer
On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it
