He looked up how many peer-reviewed scientific papers were published in professional journals about global warming, and compared the ones supporting the idea that we’re heating up compared to those that don’t. What did he find? This:
The thin red wedge.
Image credit: James Lawrence Powell
Oh my. Powell looked at 13,950 articles. Out of all those reams of scientific results, how many disputed the reality of climate change?
Twenty-four. Yup. Two dozen. Out of nearly 14,000.
Now I know some people will just say that this is due to mainstream scientists suppressing controversy and all that, but let me be succinct: That’s bull. Science thrives on dissenting ideas, it grows and learns from them. If there is actual evidence to support an idea, it gets published. I can point out copious examples in my own field of astronomy where papers get published about all manners of against-the-mainstream thinking, some of which come to conclusions that, in my opinion, are clearly wrong.
So let this be clear: There is no scientific controversy over this. Climate change denial is purely, 100 percent made-up political and corporate-sponsored crap. When the loudest voices are fossil-fuel funded think tanks, when they don’t publish in journals but insteadwrite error-laden op-eds in partisan venues, when they have to manipulate the data to support their point, then what they’re doing isn’t science.
It’s nonsense. And worse, it’s dangerous nonsense. Because they’re fiddling with the data while the world burns.
You think? At 5 minutes per paper (not too long to find and extract the sense of a scientific paper) it would have taken him nine working months to examine 13,950, if he did nothing else whatever. And 30 seconds search found me a list of over 1100 peer-reviewed papers supporting climate-change scepticism. How did he miss them? And do any of his 13,950 explain the 15 year standstill in global temperatures? As for the assertion that everyone maintaining a sceptic viewpoint is a paid shill of Big Oil: it is this sort of vicious McCarthyite lying that makes me suspect that what we have here is not a theory, but a quasi-religious orthodoxy defended by shrill heresy-hunting.
ReplyDeleteFurther to what Chris is saying, I am at something of a loss as to why what one might term pseudo-solutions are being so very heavily peddled by so many governments. Wind turbines provide very little power compared to the outlay on machinery and new cabling. Photovoltaic cells are useless for half the year in the temperate zones. Tidal power has more going for it, but is difficult to harness.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, nuclear systems are generally very powerful, do not disrupt the natural environment very much (except when you build them in an earthquake zone, or employ monkeys as controllers), and produce little waste. The existing nuclear waste can be further broken down in fast-neutron reactors of various sorts, and the problematic production of plutonium can be minimised if thorium is used as a base fuel instead of uranium.
In sort, we're being diddled left, right and centre by wooly-minded green numpties being led around by the nose by cynical politicians intent on milking the public of money in the name of prevention of climate change. For the money spent on wind turbines, we could have replaced several large coal-fired generators with nukes, and started a research programme on how to get rid of the two major problems with this energy source: plutonium and long halflife "sludge". Instead, a few politicians have lined their pockets, rather more nitwit greens have convinced themselves that they are oh so superior to us plebs, and the economy has been crippled by high energy costs.
This climate change obsession hasn't even reduced CO2 output. China increases its total output of CO2 year on year by as much as Britain's total output; beggaring ourselves merely exports the problem to a much nastier, less efficient nation which pollutes much more for any given level of output.
Let us cease being idiots, please.