“Get Carter” campaign grows on Australia’s ABC radio & TV. Poor benighted Professor Bob Carter gets ardent supporter Bob Fernley-Jones to pass on to Ric Werme an article for Anthony Watts’ blog pointing out how badly he is being treated by (some of) the Australian media. Love those social networks.
Marine geologist Professor Carter has been “long vilified on radio in the Science Show“, where they talk to lots of real scientists but rarely to Bob. This is apparently the source of much resentment as he craves attention.
That was bad enough but now ABC TV’s Media Watch is, you know, watching the media and has taken brief note of Carter’s scientifically foolish book Climate: the Counter Consensus. It’s just too much. I mean, they’re almost communists, we shouldn’t have to listen to them! The program dealt primarily with commercial talk radio’s nurturing of denialist personalities and willful ignoring of more knowledgeable “mainstream” scientists. Poor Bob Carter was just a walk-on, but he’s certainly been cut to the quick.
Media Watch expressed their opinion of Professor Carter’s talk-radio credentials in part based on this villainous general observation about Climate: the Counter Consensus (“despite that it has had high acclaim”) by professional climatologist Dr. David Karoly:
“it has fewer gross errors than Ian Plimer’s book Heaven+Earth, it is a mixture of scientific facts with misinformation and misinterpretation, as well as outright errors, spun around a framework of personal opinion. Its conclusions are inconsistent with any scientific assessment of climate change prepared by any major national or international scientific body”
– e-mail excerpt from the March 21st 2011 Media Watch transcript.
But other cranks loved his book! Isn’t that proof that it’s sound? I guess not. Why are Dr. Karoly’s observations fairly general? It seems that neither he nor any other qualified scientists can work up the energy to catalog all the bunk Carter has packed into it.
Climate: the Counter Consensus was printed by Stacey International Publishers who brought us the “Independent Minds” series of publications including such titles as The Wind Farm Scam, The Hockey Stick Illusion – Climategate and the Corruption of Science, and Climate: the Great Delusion. Detect a theme?
Wott's Up With That? 
A great entry, Ben! Keep up the good work.
Holy moly, the resurrection. I thought he’d…..well you know. In which mine shaft was he hiding out this time? Olympic Dam?
And one professional review of his story book should suffice. He’s very sensitive and gets upset you see, especially when he’s gone and used all that putty to cover the cracks. Tsk tsk. Poor old codger.
Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony went on at length about the ‘honourable’ men who slew Julius Caesar. I now can see better the conspirator’s own personal tragedies, in that all their past good works were wiped out, by this one heinous act.
We must ourselves condemn the climate denierdom of Bob Carter (marine geologist), Ian Plimer (mining geologist), and even Tim Ball (historical geographer). And must continue to do so, because of the extreme nature of the consequences.
We don’t know (and don’t really want to know) their contributions in their original fields, because we are busy countering what they are doing now in climate science.
And yet we wonder whether among such cross-over AGW climate deniers, there might be (in time) similar personal tragedies, of lost ‘honourable’ status, otherwise deserved from their original careers.
[Their pride goeth before their fall. Sad really. – Ben]
Given the location of James Cook University in Townsville, QLD and his field of expertise one would have to be totally deaf, dumb, blind and stupid not to notice the effects of climate change on Queensland’s primary tourist trap icon of the ever declining in area of “The Great Barrier Reef“.
(epic face palm)
I refuse to believe that any book by an Australian University professor, Carter or Plimer, can be s bad that it can be dismissed out of hand with the sort of rude ad hominem epithets in all these comments. It is my experience that it is only when people are at a loss for dffinite constructive comment that they resort to such language CaseyJ.
[The “climate science” claims of Bob Carter and Ian Plimer have been repeatedly shown to be incorrect or deceptive. That’s why they are now “dismissed out of hand”. Since you seem reluctant to examine your faith in books by Australian professors, try these two links: Professor Kurt Lambeck, president of the Australian Academy of Science, discusses Professor Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth and Dr. Barry Pittock’s Climate Change: The Science, Impacts and Solutions. – Ben]