THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM IS IN FREE FALL IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/opinion/world-wide-web-of-doubt/story-e6frgd0x-1225829874281
World wide web of doubt
The internet is allowing climate change sceptics to gain traction
Christopher Pearson
From: The Australian
February 13, 2010 12:00AM
PUBLIC confidence in the supposedly settled science of global warming is in free fall, especially in the English-speaking world. On Sunday a poll was published in Britain that compared the results from a new BBC phone survey with one conducted in November, the month the Climategate hacked emails were released.
Since November, the proportion of respondents who thought global warming was an established fact largely attributable to human activity fell from 41 per cent to 26 per cent.
Those who thought climate change was happening but that it wasn’t yet proven to be man-made increased from 32 per cent to 38 per cent. Those who thought climate change was real but that blaming it on mankind was environmentalist propaganda rose from 8 to 10 per cent.
Those who said climate change was not happening rose from 15 to 25 per cent.
On the home front, on Monday the Nielsen poll found that since late November, support for the emissions trading scheme had fallen from a stable reading of 66 per cent to 56 per cent. Opposition to the ETS rose from 25 per cent to 29 per cent.
Echoing the level of confusion and waning confidence in the science, 45 per cent said they preferred Tony Abbott’s emissions reduction fund, while 39 per cent preferred the government’s ETS. However 43 per cent approved of Kevin Rudd’s broad approach and 30 per cent approved of Abbott’s.
Essential Research’s latest poll tells a similar story. Asked about Abbott’s approach to climate change, a total of 34 per cent approved, a total of 29 per cent disapproved and 37 per cent said they didn’t know.
On which party had the best climate change policy, the Coalition went from 27 per cent in December to 25 per cent and Labor from 24 per cent to 19 per cent. Support for the Greens was stable on 17 per cent and the “don’t knows” increased from 32 per cent to 39 per cent.
We can be reasonably confident public opinion will follow the same trajectory in Australia as it has in Britain. (Just as an aside, it is probably the strongest argument in favour of Rudd calling an early election.) Short of compelling fresh evidence to support anthropogenic global warming, it’s highly unlikely that there will be any movement in the opposite direction.
What we are witnessing, in defiance of officialdom, government propaganda and the bulk of funded researchers in the field, is the collapse of a scientific paradigm. This is something that has never happened before. Politically speaking, it’s a game-changer with the potential to overturn the normative assumptions commentators rely on. Not least of these is the idea that Australian voters will always give newly elected federal governments a second term.
In the latest edition of The Spectator, Matt Ridley, a veteran science journalist, offers an explanation for how the consensus came unstuck. “Despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?
“In a word, the internet. The `climate consensus’ may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to camera and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm.”
Part of Ridley’s argument is that it’s distinguished scientists in retirement, who have no fear of faculty censure or funding bodies and have nothing to lose, who have led the internet revolt. In Australia, that body includes Garth Paltridge, the author of The Climate Caper, and William Kininmonth, author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard. As well as publishing books and journal articles, both have an internet presence.
Other local participants in the internet debate include Jennifer Marohasy, a doctoral fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs, and Joanne Nova at her blog JoNova. She is a freelance science presenter and author of a bestseller, The Sceptic’s Handbook. Two News Limited journalists, Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair, have been especially diligent in keeping their mass audiences informed of fresh evidence as it has emerged, via their newspaper columns and, more important, their blogs.
Ridley gives pride of place to Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant in Toronto with a genius for forensic statistical analysis. He was the one who back in 2003 first exposed the problematical data and the sleight of hand underpinning the hockey-stick graph, which purported to abolish the medieval warming period.
Ridley notes: “He has also uncovered a mistake in data that conveniently prevented 1934 being warmer than 1998 in America; the splicing together of the records of two Antarctic weather stations as if they were one; the smoothing of sea-level rise in a way that conveniently concealed its recent deceleration; the use of a Swedish lake sediment series upside down so it showed recent warming instead of cooling; and most recently the reliance of an attempt to resuscitate the hockey stick on a ludicrously small sub-sample of just 12 Siberian larch trees.”
One of my daily reads in recent years is wattsupwiththat.com, a site founded in 2006 by Anthony Watts, a former Californian television weather forecaster. As Ridley notes: “Dedicated at first to getting people to photograph weather stations to discover how poorly sited many of them are, the site has metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians.”
Providing forums for sceptically minded scientists and experts in related fields has been a very effective means of getting around the problem that most of the peer-reviewed journals were under the editorial control of committed proponents of anthropogenic global warming.
The uncontrollable nature of internet communication meant that, through time, cutting-edge argument was more likely to be found in the blogosphere than in refereed journals.
Academic climatologists such as Roy Spencer and the “luke-warmist” Roger Pielke Jr have lent depth and plausibility to online debate.
The very high hit rates on the leading sites in the wake of Climategate finally persuaded newspaper editors to unleash teams of investigative journalists in an attempt to catch up. The only media that have so far failed to respond to the public’s appetite for up-to-date news and analysis are the state-subsidised national broadcasters.
It’s widely assumed that the internet is inherently suited to furthering the causes of the left-leaning young, as evidenced by Barack Obama’s campaign and fundraising strategies. But the blogosphere’s role in the collapse of the climate consensus suggests middle-aged and elderly net users are equally capable of making their presence felt on a democratic medium.
Another widely held assumption is that, having endured 12 years of indoctrination on climate change at school, young people are en bloc firmly committed to the cause.
My guess is that young nerdy science students generally don’t buy the official line. The people who do tend to be PhD students in politics and sociology, taking it on trust.
This has been yet another week when it wasn’t easy being green, with more embarrassments for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
To cap it off, the Prius has been recalled. Is nothing sacred?
Related Coverage
IPCC ‘must investigate report bias’
It’s time for some time out
The climate starts to suit Abbott
Not so fast: why glaciers offer a lesson in caution
Boffins may be illegal
—— End of Forwarded Message
—— End of Forwarded Message
Comments are closed.
