There have been a lot of denier debunkings published lately, so getting back to our roots, here’s a roundup. Saddle up, because we have a lot of ground to cover!
Most amusing is Ed King’s coverage of a recent GWPF event, in which the main speaker was called out for basing his attack on the Paris agreement on an out-of-date draft of the December 2015 agreement. Since changes were made between the draft and final version, his presentation was completely inaccurate. Not that it was likely that it would have been accurate if he had used the actual agreement, but still, sounds like it was pretty embarrassing. He had six months to figure out how to download the final .pdf of the agreement, but even that wasn’t sufficient time.
Then there’s Bob Ward’s rebuttal of Bjorn Lomborg’s latest WSJ op-ed, marking Bjorn’s two dozenth appearance on the Journal’s opinion pages. Ward had no trouble debunking this one, since it’s just a retread of Lomborg’s discredited study on the impact of climate policies. Like the GWPF, Lomborg could have used the months since Paris to come up with a new, less debunked argument. And, like the GWPF, he fails to do so.
[More after the jump!]
Continuing with the WSJ debunkings, at DeSmogBlog, Graham Readfearn has a takedown of Holman Jenkins Jr.’s recent column. Readfearn used the column to talk about the analysis of WSJ’s opinion pages, and how Jenkins exemplifies that section’s blatantly misleading coverage of climate change.
Speaking of blatantly misleading, an April WSJ piece leveling the usual talking point attacks about Germany’s clean energy transition is energytransition.de, albeit a few months after the original attacks. GWPF and Lomborg should take this as a lesson- if you’re going to wait months to publish on a topic, you should take that time to make sure you’re factually accurate. Or at a minimum, working from a final copy...
Over at Media Matters, it took no time for Andrew Seifter to point out that the Washington Post appears to have violated its policy against printing factually incorrect denial when it published a letter from someone at Heritage Foundation that denied the basic science of climate change.
A somewhat longstanding denier talking point has been the issue of climate sensitivity, with folks like Judith Curry and Peabody Coal arguing that based on the last decade of slower warming, the climate system won’t warm up as much as mainstream climate science and models suggest. Dana Nuccitelli reports on a new study that provides yet another reason not to believe the low sensitivity camp.
Even older than that issue is one that predates climate deniers, and is used as part of an intentional effort to rewrite history to erase the fact that international policy has successfully addressed environmental problems (like climate change.) A new study covered by Henry Fountain documents how the ozone hole has been shrinking, now that we’re no longer emitting the chemicals that caused the hole in the first place. This phase out is courtesy of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement embraced by GOP hero and not-exactly-environmental-icon Ronald Reagan.
In summary, the WSJ opinion page is habitually wrong, the climate is still more sensitive to CO2 than we would like, and international efforts to reduce emissions can work, even if folks like Lomborg try and say otherwise. Also, for climate denial’s aging demographic, downloading a .pdf is apparently more difficult than arriving at faulty, preordained conclusions.
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