Climate change denial lives – though not nearly to the extent that Swiftboater Marc Morano would have you believe in his latest overstatement about “prominent scientists” who dispute man-made global warming.
Morano’s list of “over 400” alleged climate quibblers includes the usual deniers for hire Fred Singer, Tim Ball, Christoper Monckton, PR people who have no credibility on issues scientific and who each have a handsome record of saying things widely and demonstrably at variance with the truth.
There is also a group of second-order “scientists,” who are not scientists at all.
There’s “Dr. Richard Courtney, a British coal journal editor whose PhD is rumoured to have issued from a Crackerjack box. There’s Stephen McIntyre, the one-time mining promoter and amateur statistician who has earned unending fame by constantly attacking the same, remarkably resilient climate reconstruction.
There’s the climate quibbler’s latest star, “Dr. John Mclean,” apparently another amateur who has neither a PhD nor any specific training in climate science. One might also legitimately question whether a panel of TV weather forecasters actually qualify as “prominent scientists.”
Finally, Morano includes a group of legitimate scientists who are not deniers at all, but who are often quoted out of context.
For example, Morano quotes Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen, Director of the Danish National Space Centre offering this banal statement of the obvious:
The sun is the source of the energy that causes the motion of the atmosphere and thereby controls weather and climate. Any change in the energy from the sun received at the Earth’s surface will therefore affect climate.”
Morano, however, neglects to mention that Dr. Friis-Christensen says, quite clearly, that change is solar radiation CANNOT be demonstrated to have caused the climate change of recent years.
In fact, he says:
There is no reason to neglect a contribution from man made greenhouse gases.”
Giving credit where it’s due, Morano is a tireless and creative writer of fiction.
His long screed on this occasion links liberally back to his early bouts of disinformation, making it appear as though he actually has legitimate sources for many of the points that he makes. And this list of 400 includes many names that are new to the DeSmogBlog – people whose qualifications and true positions are difficult to ascertain four days before Christmas.
But given the quality and credibility of Morano’s previous work, it seems fair to assume that this, too, is an ideologically driven document with no merit whatsoever, either as a piece of research of, even more laughably, a reliable comment on science.
