The Empiricist

Stormy Sea

In the Wall Street Journal: “Climate change climate change.”

It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

The term denier or denialist has always bugged me in relation to the climate change debate. Believers want to paint sceptics as being no different from Creationists or holocaust deniers. The thing about creationism, though, is that proponents of evolution routinely and willingly engage in debate with Creationists. They don’t post lists of denialist talking points as straw men then offer their own patronising responses. This amounts to a pretend debate- an argument with imagined opponents with stereotyped opinions.

The elephant in the room, is of course, the facts. Not models, or theories, or appeal to common sense (“we’re pumping so much stuff out that it’s just got to be having an effect on the environment”), but the plain old facts about the temperature record.

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02.

Update: Boy on a bike alerted me to this very interesting article on the total corruption of the temperature record.