Today's Sunday Rimes runs pseudo-science as if it were real science - their "scientists", however, have links to the Exxon-funded "Heartland Inst." lobby group.
The Sunday Times today run pseudo-science as if it were real science with a story titled:
“World may not be warming, say scientists”
So just who are these ‘scientists’ making the claim at the heart of The Sunday Times’s story?
According to the lobbying transparency organisation SourceWatch, the so-called “Science and Public Policy Institute” (SPPI) – who are named in The Sunday Times as the organisation behind the “research” – are none other than a spin off of the Exxon-funded group “The Frontiers of Freedom”.
The SPPI website shows that they are also linked to the Exxon-funded lobby group, the Heartland Institute. Indeed, the first press release of the SPPI listed a Heartland Institute staffer as its press contact.
The Royal Society has attacked Exxon for its funding of such front groups, which have been described as “the climate denial industry”.
The ‘research paper’ was not ‘peer reviewed,’ which isn’t surprising given that the ‘scientist’ who authored the paper is Anthony Watts, known to the rest of us as one of the world’s leading climate denial bloggers and somebody without any climate science credentials.
The SPPI draws heavily on the papers of Lord Monckton, who the SPPI list among their “personnel”. Viscount Monckton is a UKIP peer who claims to have a Nobel Prize when he doesn’t.
He also claims to have a cure for HIV! Of course he doesn’t. He described the Copenhagen conference as “a sort of Nuremburg rally,” and recently attacked a young Jewish climate campaigner as “Nazi”.
Also today, The Mail on Sunday reports the astonishing claim that “there has been no global warming since 1995”.
In reality, according to both the World Meteorological Society (WMO) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 2000s were the warmest decade on record.
The Mail’s claim is particularly ironic given that the website of the climate denial lobby group, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, promotes a graph of temperatures beginning in 2001, presumably precisely to conceal the marked warming recorded through the 20th Century and the fact that nine of the ten warmest years occurred this decade.
In related news, it has been reported how a quote held up by sceptics as a ‘smoking gun’, as it was purported to have come from former IPCC and Met Office climate scientist Sir John Houghton, was fabricated.
Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation quoted Houghton as saying “unless we announce disasters no one will listen” – but on the letters page of today’s Observer, Houghton demands a public retraction from Peiser.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, whilst demanding transparency from the scientific community, refuses to reveal who fund them. As Left Foot Forward has already reported, however, many of their key people have ties to the fossil fuel industry.
61 Responses to “Sunday Times publish pseudo-science as it were fact – their “scientists” have links to big oil”
Anon E Mouse
Bob – Glad to provide the entertainment and I stand by everything I said about Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
Regarding Phil Jones he should have been sacked. Now he has said:
1. The world may have been warmer in pre-CO2 days – he’s right. We used to grow grapes in Vine Street in Cardiff…
2. The temperature between 1920-1940 and 1975-1998 experienced similar temperature increases…
3. There has been no significant warming in the last 15 years – again we know that since 1998 was “The hottest year on record”…
That’s just Phil Jones the man who destroyed data that didn’t belong to him.
The problem with this subject is that people who advocate the incorrect position of Climate Change being man made will not engage with any science – they just produce flawed graphs made from unreliable data and then state computer models show blah blah or peer reviews opine blah blah.
Then they get on their high horses and refuse to engage in debate. Good. Especially from those who are paid to spout off their opinions…
Luckily the world seems to have woken up since that life wasting farce in Copenhagen and finally something can be done to help address the energy needs of poor people in Africa and China who just want to advance their societies as we have…
Oxford Kevin
Mr Mouse,
Your point 3. Have you looked at the graphs I’d suggested because if you did, you would see that the temperature since 2000 has been exactly where the climate modellers would have expected it to be.
Your point 1. So are you saying that because grapes where once grown in Cardiff that, that proves that temperatures where higher globally?
Your point 2. Note how that the periods between the temperature rises did not decline anything like as much as they rose. Natural variations are quite large, global warming sits on top of that and it is clear that with climate features like the multi decadal oscillation their are natural variations that can last over 20 years and even 30 years. So this rise in temperatures followed by shallow declines, and then another rise in temperature can easily be seen as global warming overlaying the natural variation. Just because we have AGW doesn’t mean that the natural cycles disappear, they might change in frequency or pattern because of AGW factors but many of them remain.
Kevin
Oxford Kevin
Mr Mouse,
In reference to your 8:02 am comment on the 15th.
You should read up about the impact of the temperature record of weather stations near air conditioning units. See this discussion: http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/28/watts-not-to-love-new-study-finds-the-poor-u-s-weather-stations-tend-to-have-a-slight-cool-bias-not-a-warm-one/
You can download the original published peer reviewed paper here: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2010.pdf
Unfortunately the reason for their poor locations is that they are part of the automated temperature measurement network, which means they need to be fairly close to a building with a phone line so that the results can be automatically sent to the met offices headquarters. The analysis by the paper mentioned compared the automated stations to the manual stations set far away from buildings and categorized by Watts as good quality location and found that the automated stations were recording lower temperatures than the nearby manual stations. Read the discussion and paper linked to find out why.
Kevin
Anon E Mouse
Kevin – What’s your profession fella?
Oxford Kevin
Why do you ask when you are only known as Mr Mouse?