ANDREW BOLT LAMBERTED BY PROFESSOR QUIGGIN


Economist John Quiggin reckons journalist Andrew Bolt's writing on global warming is complete crap and provides the links to prove it:

I know Bolt mainly from his writing about global warming and (to a lesser extent the Iraq war) where he is about as wrong as it is possible to be, in every possible way. He gets basic facts wrong, recycles long-exploded propaganda exercises like the Oregon Petition and commits just about every kind of logical fallacy known, all in an attempt to push a position that has literally no credible scientific defenders left*.

* There are a few credible scientists who dissent from some aspects of the mainstream consensus, but none who back the wholly delusional position espoused by Bolt.

Golly, six links in one paragraph, it looks like Bolt has been busted big time. The thing is, if you look at the links closely, there's precious little substance to them, with none of them authored by anyone with climate science qualifications. Here's a quick overview. The first link is to this Lamberting of Bolt by computer scientist Tim Lambert. Lambert makes a couple of valid points but Bolt's original article is, on balance, more accurate than Lambert's Lamberting -- that is, after all, why it's called a Lamberting.

The second link is to an earlier Quiggin post on stratospheric cooling. As far as I can tell the only fact mentioned is that the stratosphere is cooling. Bolt might have misinterpreted the causes and implications of this cooling but, then again, maybe not.

The third link reveals a Bolt mistake in reading the date of a graph -- he mistakes a 2006 graph to be for 2007. Oh my God!, the guy's an idiot.

The fourth link is to more crap from Lambert, with Lambert confusing the situation by littering his post with internal links rather than linking directly to sources.

The Oregon Petition link goes to the Oregon Petition page at Wikipedia. Yep, it's a petition alright.

The logical fallacy known link -- to a blog grandly named The Thinker's Podium (by Bruce) -- has nothing to do with any logical fallacies supposedly committed by Bolt but stratospheric cooling does get a third mention.

Gee, I would have thought after claiming Bolt is "as wrong as it is possible to be, in every possible way" Quiggin the academic might have backed up his claim. Regardless, both of these guys are denialists: Bolt doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming; Quiggin reckons DDT was never banned and that no-one died as a consequence. Compared to Quiggin, Bolt is a minor league denialist.