Meetup – With or Without God

Here’s a Meetup that I’m gonna try to attend, With or Without God, featuring Gretta Vosper, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.

More Lawrence Solomon fabrications…

In his piece, Wikipedia’s zealots, Lawrence Solomon says,

The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position,” Oreskes concluded.

Oreskes’s paper — which claimed to comprehensively examine all articles in a scientific database with the keywords “climate change” — is nonsense. As FP readers know, for the last 18 months I have been profiling scientists who disagree with the UN panel’s position. My Deniers series, which now runs to some 40 columns, describes many of the world’s most prominent scientists. They include authors or reviewers for the UN panel (before they quit in disgust). They even include the scientist known as the father of scientific climatology, who is recognized as being the most cited climatologist in the world. Yet somehow Oreskes missed every last one of these exceptions to the presumed consensus, and somehow so did the peer reviewers that Science chose to evaluate Oreskes’s work.

Ok, so the Oreskes paper is “nonsense” because she didn’t include any of the scientists that he’s featured.

Solomon continues, explaining how Oreskes’ paper was challenged by Benny Peiser of CCNet.

When Oreskes’s paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.

(In all cases, above and below the emphasis is mine, illustrating Solomon’s habit of creating “credibility” with words). Let’s continue,

For this reason, when visiting Oreskes’s page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes’s correctness.

Here’s some sources for the Peiser v. Oreskes issue:

Gristmill

DeSmogBlog

MediaWatch

Wikipedia on Bebby Peiser

I think Peiser’s position can fairly be summarized by this quote from his October 2006 email to Media Watch:

“I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact. However, this majority consensus is far from unanimous.”

The rest of Solomon’s article detail his attempts to update the Wikipedia entry on Oreskes, only to be continually thwarted by someone named “TableTop”,

By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident.

and concluding,

Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.

Okay, Solomon says  (see above) “… no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.” Let’s see, his Wikipedia entry says,

Benny Peiser is a member of the Faculty of Science at Liverpool’s John Moores University. He was born in Israel and educated in West Germany and previously was an historian of ancient sport at the University of Frankfort/M. He is a social anthropologist with particular research interest in human and cultural evolution. His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution.

Peiser is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of Spaceguard UK. He has written extensively on neo-catastrophism and the potential risk posed by near-Earth objects. He is the editor of CCNet, an electronic science and science policy network with more than 3,000 subscribers from around the world. It is in this capacity that a 10km-wide asteroid, Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, was named in his honour by the International Astronomical Union.

Peiser is a member of the editorial board of Energy and Environment and a scientific advisor to the Lifeboat Foundation.

all of which gives him zero credibility for addressing climate change. What else can we find?

DeSmogBlog says he is

an advising member of the “Scientific Alliance,” an organization formed by a UK businessman who was fed up with “all this environmental stuff.”

and surprise, surprise:

In December 2004, the Scientific Alliance teamed up with ExxonMobil funded George C. Marshall Institute to produce a paper titled “Climate Issues and Questions.”

In January 2005, the Scientific Alliance held a half-day seminar on the “alarmism” around the issue of climate change. Speakers included Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen.

So, Peiser is a social anthropologist in a “denier” organization, who in short, believes in anthropogenic global warming.

The fact that Lawrence Solomon can’t get his version of the truth into Wikipedia speaks more for the credibility of Wikipedia than it being controlled by zealots.

The fact that the National Post continues to allow Solomon to spout his crap speaks volumes for the credibility of that newspaper.

Lawrence Solomon is at it again…

First, here’s a science story from June 2003 that seems to conclude that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are allowing plants to grow faster. I’m not a scientist, I haven’t read the full study, I don’t know where the authors stand on global warming, but I do know that it’s only one study and it certainly doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that global warming is a good thing. That’s all I’m going to say about this study.

Except to point out that Lawrence Solomon, noted climate skeptic and liar, uses it “and other more recent ones” to conclude that higher levels of CO2 are beneficial to the Earth, in his column “In Praise Of CO2″.

But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to reference a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2. Easy enough to find his original story, where he poses the question

How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?

then mentioning the original Oregon Petition’s 17,800 signatures

Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.

The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because “increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

(the emphasis is mine, showing how he confers credibility just by his use of words)

What he didn’t mention is that Frederick Seitz, “as reputable as they come”,

has admitted to helping tobacco giant RJ Reynolds spread out million of dollars in health research grants during the 1970’s and 80’s. Seitz’s role was to assist Big Tobacco in creating the illusion that there was still some debate over whether tobacco was a proven danger to health.

(from DeSmogBlog). According to Wikipedia, Seitz has also published reports for the George C. Marshall Institute, and was chair of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, founded by none other than Fred Singer.

Solomon then mentions a renewed Oregon Petition, whose 32,000 signatories were “outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends.” and concludes with,

At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn’t be done by poll, he explains. “The numbers shouldn’t matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them.”

Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992. Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.

Apparently, the debate is over because, even if science shouldn’t be done by poll, the deniers got more signatures… I also find it interesting that Solomon is reporting on this before the press conference even occurred, is it possible that there’s some sort of network of these people?

The new Oregon petition has been thoroughly discredited. In short, it’s based on an article published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (what credibility do physicians and surgeons have in issues of climatology?), which is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, who among lots of other things, claims that HIV does not cause AIDS. Quackwatch lists the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons as “fundamentally flawed”.

Another attempt to distort the picture tries to compare celebrities with the 32,000 scientists, but leads to an entire website of disinformation, typical of this type of site.

American Thinker Blog, overtly Republican, praises Solomon’s “great piece”, then sums it all up quite revealingly:

Will today’s official announcement of 32,000 men and women of science who, by their physical signature, reject mankind’s guilt capture any media attention at all?

Or, for that matter, that of climate experts Gore, Boxer, Lieberman, Warner, Clinton, Obama, or, most despicably — McCain?

As the science no longer appears to concern any of them — don’t hold your CO2 polluted breath.

Yet their denials change nothing – the wheels continue to fall off the warmist dungwagon.

This is about old-style politics, Republican v. Democrat, and McCain is the most despicable of all, because he’s a Republican who claims to be concerned, but I’m not fooled.

Two time-travelling lesbians find a baby… and everything changes

Congratulations to the climate delayers, for 16 years of inaction

Here’s a video from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, June 3-14 1992. It’s David Suzuki’s daughter, Severn, pleading for urgent action.

It’s now 16 years since that conference, and nothing much has really changed…