Sunday, March 21, 2010

Left Foot in Mouth

Will Straw's blog Left Foot Forward has posted an article (h/t Old Holborn) on the great climate-skeptic conspiracy. Apparently, some "research" conducted by a marketing agency - but not yet published - has shown that bloggers on the internet link to each other, and claims that this is part of an orchestrated plan "to have maximum impact on the Copenhagen negotiations".

Apparently this "research" was conducted for Oxfam. Anyone remember when they were a charity that cared about famine, not a political pressure group demanding Tobin Taxes and promoting global warming hysteria? How times change, eh? Ironically, Oxfam's current policies seem designed to exacerbate famine, but I doubt they care about that when there are political bandwagons to jump on - and policies which keep people starving and in poverty gives the "charity" a reason to keep existing.

The post claims that "the story was picked up by a wide range of media outlets, and went global – the culmination of a concerted effort to push it into the mainstream". That's not how I remember it. I remember the story being completely ignored by most of the media, despite UEA denials, Lord Lawson opening a global warming think-tank, and a scathing blog article from arch-climatista George Monbiot, until "climategate" became one of the biggest search terms on Google in a week and, eventually, the press felt they had to say something about the story people were already talking about. If there's a conspiracy, it looks rather more like it was amongst the BBC and Fleet Street soi-disant elite trying to ignore the story in order to push their own COP15 agendas.

He then goes on to cite some pseudoscience about the Overton Window and a linguist called Lakoff talking about "Framing" (straight out of NLP!) the debate, as if the public are simple-minded sheep who will believe everything they're told. No. People mistrust authority figures, and climate skepticism is deep-rooted in personal experience: no matter what the "global average temperature" figures claim, people over 40 can actually remember warmer and colder years and so the ever-greater catastrophes that are prophesied are in direct contradiction to experience. You've oversold it and now nobody is buying.

Then the author claims that "Oxfam’s study shows that almost no-one bothered to back [Monbiot] up in defending the integrity of the science" - which is largely because Climategate showed that there has been no actual science going on at the CRU: irreproducible "results" are nothing more than anecdote, no matter how many bent "reviews" they go through, how many times they're cited, or how pretty the graph looks.

So, co-conspirators, watch out for an organised pro-AGW propaganda campaign being directed through marketing agencies. Don't let them convince you that things didn't happen the way you remember them!

- KoW

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Don't Be a Climate Ostrich said...

"...No matter what the 'global average temperature' figures claim, people over 40 can actually remember warmer and colder years"

That's called 'weather'. Climate is by definition an average. http://tinyurl.com/2wwpxo

The global average temperature could likely reach a record high in 2010:
http://tinyurl.com/yzrw2qy

3/21/2010 10:47:00 am  
Blogger The King of Wrong said...

Climate is the average of weather. When the weather is repeatedly cold, and the "climate" is repeatedly "warming", it's "talking bollocks".

You can post as many links to BBC puffing predictions - but they have run substantially the same story for at least the last four years despite the fact (as acknowledged by Prof Phil Jones of the CRU at the select committee hearing) that there has been no warming this decade. It was bullshit in 2007, 2008 and 2009, so why should it be any more accurate in 2010?

3/21/2010 11:19:00 am  

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