Friday, February 26, 2010

A Bolt on the landscape

In this blog, Bolt bags Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, for making people unnecessarily scared. He also calls for him to be stripped of his Nobel.

Fair enough: Pachari knowingly inserted a false item into the IPCC report - the glacier claim - and presumably should be disciplined for it. Climate science needs to be as scrupulous as possible, and the evidence is so overwhelming that exaggeration's not required.

Bolt's mano-a-mano attack, though, refers to a minute number of claims in a massive report. He is very good at the personal, not so good on the big stuff. This is a good example of Bolt's frequently-used 'part for the whole' tactic: that is, he pretends that a small part of one report stands in for the entire discipline of climate science research. Focusing on a single scientist in this manner is equivalent to using the practices of a single evolutionary biologist to claim that Darwin made the whole thing up.

It takes a bit more than that to crush every single line of evidence for AGW.

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