(Above: more Nicholson here).Is there any fun to be had as the world hurtles towards hell in a handbasket?
Well you take your pleasures where you find them, and today there's another leak in the Bolter's climate denialist wall. Quick, all fingers to the hole!
But first a little pre-history. The Bolter was once inordinately fond of quoting Richard A. Muller.
Here for example he is, providing a link to Muller on YouTube:
They’re not allowed to do this in science.
Indeed. That was in March 2011, but by October 2011, the scales had fallen from the Bolter's eyes.
Muller was a mere trickster (First, exclude the coolers), a warmist cad who ... gasp ... drove a Prius, and used compact fluorescent light bulbs, when everyone knows only tungsten delivers the pure cool light necessary for true believers, and who'd pretended to be a sceptic, but everyone knew he was a warmist all along (an ability to fling around abusive terms like warmist and denialist is an essential part of any discussion of objective science with the Bolter).
And even after all that, what Muller actually says is what few sceptics would argue with:
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.
And a few other missing pieces:
First, the reports have not yet been peer reviewed. Also, the BEST project conclusions were based solely on land data and did not include ocean data.
Don’t warmists usually scream “peer reviewed”? (Not a "denier" and nothing denied).
Oh dear, and now the treacherous Muller has completely jumped the denialist shark and nuked the rapidly warming ice fridge, because he's now talking about the warming being due to humans.
Egad, the cad is now way worse than a UN conspiracy to establish a world government by this Friday at 5 pm.
As for 'warmists' screaming for peer review, what to make of this?
Perhaps even stranger is that Muller managed to collar US$150,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, with the Koch brothers key players in climate denialism, and now find themselves in the business of funding a "convert" (use of religious concepts is an essential part of Bolter science):
He said he considered himself a ''converted sceptic'' and his views had received a ''total turnaround'' in a short space of time.
''Our results show that the average temperature of the Earth's land has risen by 2½ degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1½ degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases,'' Professor Muller wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
And here it is, at the NYT under the header Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.
Will any of this change the Bolter tilting at scientific windmills in best Don Quixote style? Is he up for conversion in the manner of a born again scientist?
Steady, let's not get too ambitious. Let's just ask some basic scientific questions.
Is there any possibility of humility from the Bolter, who dropped out of an Arts degree after a year, and then got his basic training in science by doing a cadetship at The Age, and scribbling about sports (and possibly the shipping news)?
Go on, wiki his screamingly peer reviewed science credentials here.
Is a love of opera and red wine a way to master the intricacies of climate science?
Can the Bolter match the extensive analysis of data allowed by a grant from Koch and Gates and sundry others which turns up a result most scientists had already accepted as the most likely explanation of world climate trends?
Variously, of course opera is a sound guide. La bohème could have turned out grandly with a bit of central heating.
And it's the unique genius of the Bolter that allows him to sample any handy, convenient, convincing data set to hand (leaving the other hand free for a tasty red).
That's the beauty of the Bolter, and the beauty of fanaticism in general.
It's part of the sublime human comedy.
Of course there's a downside.
The world is hurtling towards hell in a handbasket.
But thanks to the Bolter, there's always a chance of a laugh as we head on down the slide.
Thanks News Ltd. What an inspiration you are ....
(Below: an oldie but a goldie from First Dog. You need to be a subscriber to see his latest, Methane, youthane, we all scream for perfmafrost).
The point about Bolt & his benefactors is that we, the punters, have to learn where to spend our time. Like, is it better to watch anyone explain why Oz failed to get another gold, or tune in to the NASA workroom as they land the next Mars explorer?
ReplyDeleteWhy on earth would we want to turn our kids towards scientific enquiry, when there are so many angry, rich people willing to tell us what & how to think. Actual facts are just an encumbrance on the march to uniformity.
I always think of David Penberthy fondly when I think of the Bolter:
ReplyDeleteI am not inclined to defend Andrew Bolt to the death. Not even close. His columns make me laugh in disbelief or fold up the paper in anger. I am sick of seeing Bolt being held up as if he were a company spokesman.
He is no such thing. He is just one of many journalists who work at this company, albeit one who, through what can be fairly described as a decade-long commitment to writing inflammatory copy, has landed himself in a scrape which has ramifications for us all.
In my personal view journalists should examine tensions in society, not amplify those tensions. Bolt is a one-man amplifier. He has somehow got it into his head that with significant column inches and online space at Australia’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, not to mention his own TV show, he is the victim of a conspiracy of silence, and has been ganged up on by the elites.
If you wield that kind of power you’re not a victim of the elites. You are the elites.
You can only dip into the Bolter before you reel away - so much anger, so little intelligence. Time spent at NASA is time well spent, and time with Bolt doing climate rage is a reminder that NASA does climate science ...
http://climate.nasa.gov/
with excellent images of the Greenland melt and a grasp of the complexity of the issues discussed
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-217
On Greenland, it must have been a challenge for subbies to jam the complexity of the story into one line. It didn't do honest scepticism any good to read "Greenland melted!" Maybe the dailies should have coloured flags alongside their big stories. Like, Green for one that requires actual reading of the source & no sub-title will do it justice, through to Puce for 'this is largely built on fatuous alarmist gossip'. Or, since we are in the digital cosmos, a little icon, like Gillard in a hessian bag.
ReplyDeleteMy worry at the moment is not that China is buying our soil, but that a Chinese troll in my computer is reading what I type. There's no end of fear.