Non-climatologist Lord Stern on people who don't believe in unspecified "evidence" that CO2 is dangerous: They're unscientific/irrational/intellectually dishonest

Dogged lord of climate change [fraud] - Environment - NZ Herald News

Probably more than any other, it's [Nicholas] Stern we have to thank that terms like "offsets", "carbon tax" and "emission trading scheme" are now in common usage.
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"Those who choose to ignore evidence, I think, are reasonably described as unscientific or irrational."

So far, in the series of Sir Douglas Robb lectures he's given at Auckland University, he hasn't encountered New Zealand's vocal climate change deniers. But he's no stranger to people who disagree with with his point of view, sometimes in extreme ways.
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How? "You deal rationally with the issue. You say: 'Look here's the evidence [like what, specifically?]. Here is how it's accumulated'. You can challenge the evidence - that's good science and good discussion. But chanting and slogans and making up facts and misinterpreting evidence isn't."

What bothers him most is the way deniers seize on "oscillations" or fluctuations in temperature and try to argue there is no trend. "If you've got an undergraduate student, trying to estimate the growth of the economy by joining a line between the peak of the last boom to the bottom of the last recession and think they are estimating the growth rate you would throw them out of class."

The same poor logic is used by deniers who try to argue temperature stopped rising 10 years ago - completely false when you look at the trend, ask about the overall average and apply knowledge about why decadal oscillations occur.

"Ordinary sensible people looking at evidence will know that you have to take an average over time and if you do that you see every decade over the last five to six decades has been hotter than the previous ones."

Stern's steadfast response to the deliberate sowing of doubt and spreading of confusion is rationality - patiently setting out the case in a balanced, clear way. [Where, specifically, has Stern ever done this?] "So many people who think they are Galileo are not."

A large measure of why the story isn't properly told he puts down to a failure of media and journalism. Yes, says Stern, the onslaught against the story is strong and organised, but it's irrational, unscientific and badly based. It says because you can't identify relationships with certainty, the best assumption is they don't exist. "That's a schoolboy error."

Stern says the media fails to look at the wider context - something that should have happened regarding the hacked "Climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia. "What journalists should have asked is that if everything that the university had done was obliterated, what difference would it make? The answer to that question would be hardly any difference at all."

Similarly, the IPCC paper incorrectly predicting Himalayan glaciers retreating should be seen in a wider view: "This idea that if you find a few papers that are wrong among a few thousand papers you've somehow undermined all the evidence is so intellectually dishonest, it's very important to expose that intellectual dishonesty for what it is."