Climate links

[erudito]

Easily the best presentation of the developing science of the role of CO2 in the atmosphere I have seen. If there had been more of this-open-minded, careful, engaging-and less of the sneering and shouting and premature certainty, those arguing the case for concern would be in a much better position.

Post-glacial sea-level rise. Recent sea level

Comments

[korgmeister]

The latest backpedaling, when I've pointed out the pretty obvious ethical lapses and shoddy rigor has been some variant of "Well this happens all the time in science really, it's not unusual".

Umm, yeah. You don't get to claim that out one side of your mouth and claim "THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH, SCIENCE SAYS SO WITH OVER NINE THOUSAND PERCENT CERTAINTY!" out the other.

Quite

[erudito]

There has been way too much premature certainty.

[catsidhe]

The thing is, those ‘vaguely similar things’ are only vaguely similar. The quote attributed to Houghton says basically “We have to invent disasters to force people to listen to us”.

What he actually said, when you include the second sentence, is a statement of human nature: “It doesn't matter what we say, people won't act until there has been a disaster.”

These statements sound superficially similar (both mention ‘disasters’, but they say completely different things.

Ad for someone who pretends to be a journalist, surely Piers has a duty to be able to back up slanderous misquotations with something more than (his original ‘defence’ for not being able to properly source) “I was forwarded a quote from a blog somewhere”.

As it is, he did, in his original article, very clearly source the misquote, and clearly failed to verify that the quote he was basing his slander on actually existed

Errors

[erudito]

Admit or shut up but don't bluster is good advice in these matters.