More from the Hockey Team

RealClimate

Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt

Much in the spirit of the Fraser Institute's damp squib we reported on last year, S. Fred Singer and his merry band of contrarian luminaries (financed by the notorious "Heartland Institute" we've commented on previously) served up a similarly dishonest 'assessment' of the science of climate change earlier this year in the form of what they call the NIPCC" report (the "N" presumably standing for 'not the' or 'nonsense'). This seems to be making the rounds again as Singer and Heartland are gearing up for a reprise of last year's critically…er…appraised "Conference on Climate Change" this March. Recently some have asked us for our opinion of the report and so we've decided we ought to finally go ahead and opine. Here goes.

The fact that the very title of the report summary ("Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate") itself poses–at best–a false dichotomy is not an auspicious start. The fact that the fonts and layout are identical to the real IPCC report is another indication that this isn't quite on the level (and reminiscent of the infamous fake PNAS paper that accompanied the first 'Oregon Petition').

Reading the table of contents, the report has eight chapters (in addition to an introduction and conclusions chapter). Five of these, quite remarkably, have titles which are simply untrue. The remaining three chapters pose loaded questions which are disingenuous and misleading, if not outright dishonest, with 'answers' provided by the authors. In fact this is such a massive regurgitation of standard contrarian talking points and discredited canards, it's obvious that reviewing this would be a herculean task (which is presumably the point - if you can't convince people with actual science, bludgeon them).

However, precisely because most of these points have been made before, there exists a large body of work pointing out the flaws already. So instead of regurgitating these counterpoints, we will simply link to an index of these rebuttals. As some of you may know, we have a set up a resource to do precisely this; the RealClimate Wiki.

With the emergence of the RealClimate Wiki, the story gets curiouser and curiouser. Allegedly great "real" climate scientists Schmidt and Mann allegedly don't have time to "point out the flaws" themselves, so who do they refer us to?

From the RealClimate Wiki:

For each article, the links to content are on the author page (or in the case of editorials, on the newspaper page). Links are provided to content on a number of sites, some of the most common are denoted by initials: RC = RealClimate, CB = Coby Beck's "How to talk to skeptic guide" at A Few Things Ill Considered, TL = Tim Lambert at Deltoid.

From Tim Lambert's Home Page:

What I Teach:

* Computer Graphics
* Advanced Graphics
* Engineering Design and Innovation
* Computational Geometry
* I use Java for teaching.

From Coby Beck's "About" page:

Coby is a software developer specializing in Artificial Intelligence applications. He has been blogging about climate change since January, 2006.
...
In addition to blogging and earning a living in software, Coby Beck is an avid photographer.