Booker on Climate Control

Christopher Booker covers the Climate Control report in the Sunday Telegraph, recounting a story from his column a few years back that is a stunning indictment of what is going on.

In 2012, I described an A-level general studies paper set by our leading exam board, AQA, asking for comment on 11 pages of propagandist “source materials”, riddled with basic errors. A mother wrote to tell me how her intelligent son, after getting straight As on all his science papers, used his extensive knowledge of climate science to point out all their absurd distortions.

In related news, Richard Betts tweets his conclusions on the report:

...GWPF have form on distorting the science - which makes me sceptical of their school report.

Comments

[shub]

Wow. I'll play a bit of devil's advocate now, even though Betts wanted my comment deleted for questioning some censorship/moderation activities at Ed Hawkins' blog.

Betts catches flak for hanging out here from his MO buddies. Anyway, that's my conclusion. Apart from that, I agree with the criticism thrown at him, except, that he is 'dishonest'. Also, Betts has lots of science papers. I'm not sure he's trying to become a bureaucrat.

Incidentally, Betts was one of Time magazine's best twitter feeds of the year for 2012:

Check out what tweet Time chose to exemplify his best output. :)

[Richard Drake]

Thanks for that link Shub - I'd completely missed that. Exemplary tweet in every sense.

[Richard Drake]

John Shade:

It is an indication of the coarseness of the debate, and of low moral and scientific standards on the alarmist side, that none from that side have come forward to say that if the poor behaviours and materials we have referred to in the report are widespread in our schools, then that would be a disgrace that has to be dealt with. Is it that their case for alarm is so weak that they will ignore even the suffering of children in case doing otherwise might just give a boost to those who do not share their views about our impact on climate?

Absolutely nailed it.

[osseo]

John Shade, I think you should distinguish between denotation and connotation. You may believe in anthropogenic climate change in the sense that you accept that on the balance of the evidence human beings are at least partially responsible for the global increases in temperature in the last three decades of the last century: but you are not a 'climate change believer' in the popular sense unless you think civilisation is about to come to an end unless we all immediately renounce all use of fossil fuels.

[John Shade]

osseo, that is an important issue, since there is a risk of language being abused by campaigners for their own ends. Do you know of any analysis of different denotations in this area, and of who promotes them? My own fallback preference is for the dictionary, and plain speaking.

[Kevin Cave]

The Richard Betts response is this one : https://twitter.com/richardabetts/status/454545196123193344

Which was in response to my tweet : https://twitter.com/Kevin_Cave/status/454517084459139072

I was somewhat taken aback by Richard's response, so I asked further : https://twitter.com/Kevin_Cave/status/454546761747812352

He didn't reply - I don't know why that would be.

[osseo]

JS, I'm sorry I can't give you any references. I'm in favour of plain language and dictionary meanings, but context typically has greater weight than dictionary meanings. And I fear that it's inevitable that people will stretch the meanings of words to suit their arguments.