A Sordid Tale of Climate Denial

It started with David Rose in the U.K. Daily Mail, was followed by a variant from Ross Clark in the U.K. Spectator, and now another version has appeared by James Delingpole in Breitbart News. They’re textbook examples of how fact is twisted to mislead, then travels around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.


I already posted about Rose’s nonsense and Clark’s nonsense. Now it’s Delingpole’s turn. We’ll be brief.

The title of Delingpole’s piece is “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” Let me give you an analogy.

You may have noticed that when the annual “king tide” comes to Miami (which it does every year) the streets flood (which they did not used to do) — because sea level rise has made those tides higher than they used to be. Enough higher to flood the city, even when there’s no storm or wind or rain. Miami is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fend off the damage. No doubt about it, that is newsworthy.

Of course, every tidal rise is followed by a tidal fall. Any sailor worth his salt knows that. Which brings us to an analogy for James Delingpole’s headline:

Ocean Levels near Miami Plunge. Dry Silence from Sea Level Alarmists

Yes. That really is just like what James Delingpole is shouting about.


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11 responses to “A Sordid Tale of Climate Denial

  1. Great analogy!!!

  2. Just remember: Sir Paul Nurse paid Delingpole a polite (invited) visit to explain about climate change. The whole thing is on video, and there is nothing rude in Nobelist Nurse’s gentle remonstrations. The result:

    Intellectual rape!! yells Delingpole.
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/jan/24/james-delingpole-tv-interview

    He doesn’t do the work, he is a judger of results, and should anyone dare to challenge his upper class twit claims, they are out of line. “It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed papers because I simply haven’t got the time…. I am an interpreter of interpretations.””

    (In my looksee (the original is no longer easy to find), I was fascinated that Delingpole is obsessed with rape, suggesting a woman with whom he disagrees should suffer the real thing. Shame!)

    “Nurse told me that he simply presented Delingpole with a hypothetical question: if a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would he opt for the “consensus” treatment recommended by doctors, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a fringe maverick quack? In terms of the science of climate change, that fringe maverick is analogous, of course, to Delingpole’s own position.

    “Delingpole apparently found the line of questioning too much to handle and was purportedly lost for words. He at one point, according to Nurse, asked for the film crew to stop filming.” (D now claims there was no such request.)

    • Looks like someone made an effort to scrub YouTube from this embarrassing because revealing Delingpole interview. There is still a short version on Daily Motion. Make a copy.

  3. Wow. I was almost typing to complain why you bother with such extremely stupid bullshitting. And then some House Science Committee in some stupid major nation tweeted that article…
    http://usuncut.com/news/house-science-committee-just-tweeted-breitbart-article-bernie-sanders-response-hilarious/

    • Florifulgurator, we apparently live in a too rational part of the world. When I noticed the David Rose article the beginning of the week, I thought it was too nonsensical to give it more attention on my little blog. Now the New York Times and Washington Post have debunks of it.

  4. The substance to these articles is the drop in the global land temperature anomaly for October that appears on one record. Such drops have happened before and they don’t last very long at all. According to UAH TLTv6beta5 which climate denier Woy Spencer puts together (so deniers have difficulty arguing that its the product of some big conspiracy), the global land anomaly has now bounced back up, with the November 2016 global land anomaly the warmest November on record (18th warmest monthly anomaly for all months).
    Myself, I blame the English education system. These gentlemen, Rose, Clark & Delingpole, evidently were never taught to know their limitations, a dreadful failing given their limitations are so very great. Still, better late than never. When the RSS November data is posted, perhaps the true nature of the arrant bullshit they pedal could be made known to the world – repeatedly.

    • I doubt it, Al. I mean, with the claim already resting on a triple cherry-pick, it’s *already* arrantly obvious that this Rose/Clark/Delingpole is er, “highly redolent”. To a balanced mind, this hoohah should be–no, IS–immediate evidence that R/C/D–and very, very sadly indeed, the House Science & Tech Committee–are not interested in truth at all.

  5. I blame the English education system.

    Feigenbaum & McCorduck alluded to this in their ‘Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World’ where in Part 5 under the Section 2 heading ‘Well then: Why isn’t everybody doing this? Or, England’s tragedy’ (pp198,199 of my copy of the 84 Pan edition) we find this:

    ‘Two punts were being poled languidly down the river Cherwell, filled with high spirited young men….Parlett, who would later become a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, was an Englishman with an affinity for American friends, and it happened that his punt carried the college’s American contingent of Rhodes Scholars, men who were studying economics and mathematics. Among them was Alain Enthoven, later to be assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis and, still later, a professor of economics at Stanford University. Enthoven stared meditatively at the punt ahead of them which contained, by everybody’s estimate, the brainiest young men in the college, They were all “reading Greats”–studying the Greek and Latin classics. “There,” said Enthoven, fixed on the punt ahead of them, “there is England’s tragedy.”

  6. David Rose makes a big deal about a drop in global monthly temperatures of 0.6C over the course of 4 months. I don’t remember him saying anything about a similar rise in daily temperatures over the course of just 30 days between late January and late February 2016:

  7. The Moon Disappears!! Global full moonists’ claims are fraudulent!
    …approx 24 hours later…
    The Moon Disappears! Global full moonists’ claims a Big Lie!!!
    …wait for it, wait…