'Case against climate change discredited by study' shrieked the Independent yesterday. That must be one hell of a study. Except that it isn't: A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the...
Ethics? What Ethics?
Ben has a review of James Garvey's The Ethics of Climate Change: right and wrong in a changing world over at Culture Wars: Few arguments in favour of action to mitigate the effects of climate change begin without claiming that ‘the science is in’. James Garvey’s The...
Environmentalism’s fig leaf
Few arguments in favour of action to mitigate the effects of climate change begin without claiming that ‘the science is in’. James Garvey’s The Ethics of Climate Change is no exception. There begins an account of the ‘science’ which forms the basis of an unassailable...
The Well Funded World Wide Fund for Fear
We reported earlier in the year how claims that a 'denial lobby' had influenced public opinion on climate change were totally at odds with reality. The UK's Royal Society, for example wrote an open letter to Exxon in 2006, accusing it of funding these sceptics. The...
Fat People are Killing the Polar Bears (Again)
Last year we mentioned Ian Roberts' theory, as reported in New Scientist, that fat people are responsible for more than their fair share of global warming, and, in order to get a snappy headline out of it, we tied it into another New Scientist article, which was...
Environmentalism: "frustrated, angry and confused"
Over at the Daily Kos, and European Tribune, blogger 'Johnnyrook' attempts to connect 'denialism' with an ideology. The piece itself is an answer to a blog post elsewhere by Joseph Romm, The denialists are winning, especially with the GOP. David Roberts tried this...
Something old, something blue, something borrowed, something green
Bernard Ingham, former press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, asks in the Yorkshire Post (H/T Benny Peiser): In the election for London's Mayor, the Greens got just over three per cent of the vote. Leaving aside such misguided places as Norwich, where the Green Party...
When a Butterfly Flaps Its Wings, Environmentalists Just Flap
We're glad to see that the BBC has removed the error we flagged up on Thursday. Where it said The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 5.4C rise in tropical temperatures expected by 2100. it now reads The scientists predicted such species...
Fat People are Killing the Butterflies
Steve Connor, science editor at the Independent newspaper warns us that Tropical insects rather than polar bears could be among the first species to become extinct as a result of global warming, a study has found. What does that even mean? Are the polar bears OK...
Global Warming… Jumping the Shark…
Wikipedia tells us, The term jumping the shark alludes to a specific scene in a 1977 episode of the TV series Happy Days when the popular character Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli literally jumps over a shark while water skiing. The scene was so preposterous that many...