Anthony Watts has gone to ground this weekend, giving me a blessed vacation from his scattergun approach to denialism.
He claims to have a bad cold, but I think it has more to do with licking his wounds over “The Stockholm Initiative”. Anthony made a particularly aggressive claim that a false parliamentary submission by some Swedish denialists was actually the impartial opinion of a legitimate scientific organization. This was immediately shot down in flames.
So I’ll highlight a few positive developments in Climate Change instead.
Skeptical Science has been a great place to find straight-forward unravelling of regular denialist claims. Not long ago they got together with Australian software developers Shine Technologies to produce an iPhone app that gives quick access to their list of predictable “skeptic” arguments. Nice!
Joe Romm at Climate Progress talks about Merchants of Doubt, a book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway that will be released in May, 2010. It exposes the decades-long maneuvering of “a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry.” The same players, but an ever-changing game:
For half a century, the tobacco industry, defenders of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and those skeptical of acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming strove to ‘maintain the controversy’ and ‘keep the debate alive’ by fostering claims that were contrary to the mainstream of scientific evidence and expert judgment.
Climate Cover-Up, by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore has been available for a while now. It’s another good look at the political backstory of Global Warming denial. It “spotlights premeditated prevarications about the threat of greenhouse gas emissions by the oil and coal industry, in league with junk scientists, compliant conservative politicians and unsavory public relations practitioners.”
He’s also missed a call from Tamino to admit his mistake regarding the SPPI paper written with D’Aleo.
Several people (including me) have posted on the Open Thread asking for comment, but the weekend illness has prevented his response.
It seems that some of my posts are still in moderation after a couple of days, so I might as well post them here, if our host is OK with that. [relevant on-topic comments not approved on WUWT? That could never happen! :-) – Ben]
First, Smokey wrote:
I replied:
Second, justin wrote:
I replied: