With one storm after another churning through the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, to the point that we’re running out of names, and wildfires burning through not just California, where they’re somewhat expected, and Oregon and Washington, where it’s less normal, but also through the vitally important forests of Indonesia and the Amazon, and in totally unprecedented places like Siberia and the Arctic, you may be worried about climate change.
According to our dear denial-peddling friends at the UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation though, the “U.S. climate has been changing very gradually, and mostly in a benign way.”
On Friday they published a “paper” by Paul Homewood, the blogger behind “Notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com” who has a long history of producing laughably blunt denial for blogs and for GWPF that have even made for a case study in a book about misrepresenting science.
With a lack of real credentials to use as a sign of serious scholarship, even the report itself is scant on Homewood’s credentials, identifying him merely as having “had a career as an accountant in industry” and “has been writing on climate and energy issues since 2011.”
So what’s in the report? It’s basically a compilation of cherry-picked factoids and misrepresentations, wrapped up in bargain-basement denial. For example, it takes up a soft version of the “warming’s paused” meme, claiming that temperatures have been rising by 0.15°F per decade, but that “there has been no warming” since the 1990s.
Here in the real world, 9 of the 10 warmest years have been since 2005.
They also claim that “there is clearly nothing to suggest that hurricanes are becoming more frequent,” which may potentially have some scientific validity, but seeing as how this report is being released at the same time that we’ve had so many hurricanes that we’re all the way through the alphabet for the second time on record, with a month and a half remaining in the hurricane season, it probably isn’t a particularly compelling rebuttal to the fact that climate change is fueling these storms by warming ocean waters.
That’s about as close to scientifically accurate as the report gets though. On the other hand, Homewood, like Watts did recently, appears to deploy the deliberately misleading wildfire talking point that uses the old data that double or even triple-counted wildfire acreage to claim current burns aren’t as bad as the past. (Actually it’s not exactly clear what data Homewood is citing, as the URL provided doesn’t work. But the numbers match the explicitly unreliable NIFC data. Apparently he’s as adept at working the WayBack archive as he is with climate data...)
One would expect that the GWPF would think twice about publishing a report saying there’s no cause for alarm while smoke from fires 5,000 miles away in the west coast of the US are turning UK skies orange.
So while there are plenty of things to be alarmed about, GWPF’s ability to read the freaking room is apparently not one of them.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
