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As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it's suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends.
Tactic: sneering. This is a common Climate Creationist tactic: the idea that because something is popular or fashionable, it is therefore valid. This isn't true, for obvious reasons: otherwise Everybody Loves Raymond would be one of the greatest comedies of all time.
Facts used: none.
But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the "Big Polluters", bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.
Tactic: hyperbole/overstatement/sympathy vote.
Facts used: none. (I honestly thought Devine would be a fan of McCarthy's: he hated Commies. Apologies for being judgemental).
But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls.
Tactics: Unverifiable anecdotes and generalisations: prime Devine.
Comments: Climate scientists have 'softened their rhetoric' because they realise that it can alienate people, not because they've suddenly realised that the planet's getting cooler. An 'alarmist' is someone who cries wolf, not someone who points to entirely possible future events. The fact that 'fence sitters' who didn't know about the issue now suddenly think they do, again, doesn't prove anything.
They still think it's acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton's protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an
effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms.
Tactic: generalisation/straw man/sympathy vote
Comment: the vast majority of Monckton's critics simply pointed out that he was a nut. The eyes are irrelevant. Devine knows this perfectly well.
But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in "sexing up" climate change science, it's clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.
Tactic: name-calling
Comment: By belittling the Guardian - a Commie bugbear - Devine ignores the fact that the newspaper's vigilance in pursuing the IPCC case is proof of its impartiality. The two thoughts simply don't fit together.
We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance.
Tactic: overstatement/unverifiable generalisation
Comment: Really, we're not. AGW took so long to be scientifically accepted precisely because of the nuances that surrounded the issue. Once the human-induced warming pattern became overwhelmingly obvious to the vast majority of the scientific community, they acted.
The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism." Hallelujah.
Tactic: Distortion/lack of context
Comment: Beddington has rightfully expressed concern about the IPCC's tactics of late. However, Devine neglects to mention that he believes in AGW. Beddington actually said in the same speech:
"It's unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change."
Beddington is worried that the IPCC is not open enough to discussion re: the speed with which warming is occurring. Fair enough. He's not disagreeing with the AGW theory, though. Not that you'd know that from Devine.
Australia's Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days.
On ABC television's 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about "a confusion" between the science and the politics of climate change.
"I think that we're seeing more and more a confusion between a political debate, a political debate that needs to happen, it's important to happen, and the discussion of the science. I feel that these two things are being confused and it worries me, actually."
Tactic: As above.
Comments: Like Beddington, Sackett expresses concern about the IPCC's manner. In January 2010, Sackett also said this about the science itself:
I have made clear that now is time for action on climate change. This is because the science of the Earth’s climate has a high degree of certainty in key aspects and because the results of inaction are enormously risky.
We know with a high degree of scientific certainty that the earth’s climate is warming at a fast rate; that the bulk of this is due to additional greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by humans, and the effects of deforestation; and that carbon dioxide is the most important of the greenhouse gases due to the amount in which it is emitted, its ability to prevent some of earth’s heat from being discarded back into space, and the amount of time it remains in the atmosphere.
Couldn't get much clearer than that: not that you'd know from Devine's article. Leaving out the fact that Sackett supports AGW so firmly borders on outright deception.
Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the "confusion", aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way.
Tactic: sarcasm
Comment: probably true, but irrelevant.
Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.
Comment: while the 2035 glacier claim was shown to be exaggerated, it is well-documented that 95% of all glaciers on earth are shrinking. The Amazon claim was found to be from the WWF, and the jury is still out on that one: I'll leave that one for now. The Holland flooding story: I found it here after some searching...
(A digression here: I'm noticing that none of Devine's references are sourced, which is convenient for her and a pain for anyone trying to check her facts. Doubtless intentional. Oh well.)
Anyway, as far as I'm aware, the projected sea level rise of 0.75m-1.9m in the next century still stands. Devine is pulling the 'two for one' trick here: i.e. by pointing to things that have been criticised (i.e. the 2035 glacier date) she's implying that other things are also in doubt without using any evidence or sources. Neat.
The latest, most serious, blow was the revelation this week that an influential paper discounting the so-called urban heat island effect was based on vanished and perhaps fraudulent data from remote Chinese weather stations.
The 1990 paper was co-authored by the besieged director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones and a US colleague, who are now accused of a "cover-up".
Devine is referring to this, which has been answered here, although I don't think the issue's been sorted out definitively yet. I'll keep you posted.
Jones, of course, and other leading scientists, have been exposed by their leaked "Climategate" emails, as political partisans who tried to suppress data, subvert freedom of information laws, and blackball journals and scientists who didn't toe the alarmist line.
Tactic: smear.
Comment: Devine's banking on giving any IPCC-related research a bad 'vibe', without using sources or evidence.
Meanwhile, revelations pile up about shoddy references used to sex up the IPCC's Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of 2007.
Among them is the bogus claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a speculative interview in a popular science magazine.
The IPCC lead author of the chapter that contained the reference, Murari Lal, told Britain's Mail on Sunday last week that he knew the glacier claim was wrong but included it to put political pressure on world leaders to cut emissions.
"We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."
Tactic: sarcasm/emotive language
Comment: The Nobel is always a dependable punching bag because it's Scandinavian/Commie, hence the sneering. However, the 2035 claim - as discussed earlier - was indeed shown to be false or highly speculative. So, no major quibbles there.
Because it was in a good cause it was somehow OK for the United Nations' lead climate change body to slant science, cherry-pick data, and base claims on such flimsy references as Greenpeace and WWF propaganda, a student's master's thesis and anecdotes in Climber magazine.
Tactic: sarcasm/hyperbole
Comment: the above accusations are remarkable, given the sceptical movement’s addiction to dishonesty. The false impression is given of a report riddled with errors.
This sort of ''noble cause'' corruption appears to have permeated climate change science, and set back the legitimate cause of fighting pollution. The dishonesty will have only ensured a generation of people will no longer trust environmental warnings.
Tactic: special pleading/bleeding heart
Comment: Devine claims two things here: firstly, that she believes fighting pollution is a legitimate cause; secondly, that her heart bleeds for the generations of the future. Evidence for either, based on her blatant disregard for future generations’ welfare: MIA.
One of the most significant recent revelations is how influential and embedded were environmental activists such as WWF and Greenpeace. Not only were their publications cited in the 2007 report in at last 24 instances as if they were proper peer-reviewed science, but their staffers were in familiar communication with East Anglia climate researchers, and were regarded apparently as "honest brokers" rather than political lobbyists.
Tactic: inflation/generalisation/conspiracy theory
Comment: Devine has a legitimate point about the WWF and Greenpeace’s interaction with the IPCC, which is currently being examined in a fashion that would be unimaginable coming from the other side. No mention, mind you, of the fact that the coal and oil lobbies have bribed their way to acceptance wherever possible. None at all.
In one email, Alan Markham from WWF writes to climate scientists urging a paper on climate change in Australia be "beefed up".
WWF "would like to see the section on a variability and extreme events beefed up, if possible," Markham wrote in 1999. "I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists."
In another email to East Anglia scientists, WWF's Stephan Singer offers "a few thousand euros" to write a paper about the economic cost of Europe's 2003 heatwave.
They got away with it for a very long time.
Tactic: slander
Comment: Devine suggests that bribery has taken place, without being brave enough to say it.
Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. ''Boycott [America] to save yourselves … and your children from climate change", he said in an audiotape released last week.
Tactic: Desperation.
Comment: Devine is claiming that because a really bad man believes something, it must be really bad. Thought experiment: does bin Laden also believe in gravity?
Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that "carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas" and "these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on''.
Tactic: non-sequitur.
Comment: It’s not a “former heresy”, it’s a current stupidity. The fact that CO2 feeds plants is irrelevant: it still traps heat in the atmosphere. One gas can do two things – gases are clever like that. Abbott’s point about the lights is also irrelevant: environmentalists aren’t arguing that coal-fired power plants don’t make electricity.
But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.
Tactic: Dud metaphor.
Comment: you have to end an article somehow, I suppose. But that made a pretty loud clunk.
