By Andrew Bolt ~
Apparently just a few of us knuckle-draggers have now won the debate, with barely a skerrick of support as we’ve taken on politicians, warmist scientists, academics, public broadcasters, most journalists, teachers, climate commissioners, green entrepreneurs, Hollywood, the United Nations and countless billions in public funding.
So declares warmist Professor Robert Manne, Australia’s “most influential public intellectual” – whose credentials must now be questioned, given this result.
According to Manne, the victory of the “denialists” – a term he’s chosen to exploit the Holocaust – should simply not be:
What is clear, however, is that a rational citizen has little alternative but to accept the consensual core position of climate scientists. Discussion of this point should long ago have ended.
Note the assertion that discussion “should” have ended, even though Manne implies that some scientists do indeed still question what he vaguely describes as “consensual core question”. There is an antipathy here to the questioning mind that is unbecoming in an academic. Sinister.
And Manne immediately betrays the real problem in having a mind as closed and unquestioning as his own. A mind too gullible:
In 2009, two scientists from the University of Chicago published in Eos the result of a survey they conducted among a group they called “Earth scientists”. They discovered that among those who called themselves climate scientists and who had published recently in the field, 97.4% agreed with the proposition that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures”.
Define “significant”, for a start. But then look at the methology of this survey Manne cites:
The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout.
The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth – out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, paleontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer – those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor – about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn’t even have a master’s diploma.
The real result is based on the views of just 75 of 10,257 scientists. Manne thinks this is decisive. This says everything.
Now, someone of a properly sceptical disposition, as all true scientists and journalists should be, would actually question many other statements made by warmist scientists and people like Manne. And they’d find them to be even dodgier than Manne’s survey, which would naturally then make people start to doubt what else they were being told. And with further doubt came further evidence of exaggerated claims and busted predictions. And it’s this process – one involving not denialism but questioning, not claims but evidence – which is handing sceptics their “victory”.
Consider. It is sceptics who exposed the following warmist claims as false:
The Himalayan ice would melt by 2035.
The Arctic ice would vanish in 2008 or 2012.
The world would warm significantly over the past decade or more – and certainly much more than it has.
The Greenland ice sheet was melting fast.
Australia’s carbon dioxide tax would make a difference to the climate.
The Great Barrier Reef would now bleach every second year.
Reefs faced devastation from a warming world.
Australia’s drought would be “permanent” or the “new climate”
The “rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systes”
The sea level rises have accelerated.
Decreasing ice on Mt Kilimanjaro was evidence of warming.
Antarctic ice was declining.
The world was warming so fast we’d be down to just a few breeding pairs in the Arctic by the end of the century.
All these claims proved to be false. Manne would have accepted them.
This explains our victory.
TonyfromOz adds…..
This story was first Posted at the JoNova site here in Australia, and for a more in depth assessment of this story, Joanne has written about at the following link.
Victory of the Denialists! says Robert Manne in The Monthly as his Gods of Science fail
Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.
Andrew Bolt’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and hosts Channel 10’s The Bolt Report each Sunday at 10am, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.
Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog .
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
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Posted on Sun 08/05/2012 by papundits
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