Jan
And the 2009 global warming denier prize goes to…
Is this award intended to illustrate the the high-end products the greens would create if they could control manufacturing?
Damn! It’s too bad we’d only been publishing for a month last year, because we obviously weren’t even considered worthy contenders for the first annual Christopher Booker prize. If you haven’t heard, George Monbiot, who writes a blog at the Guardian, just awarded the 2009 prize to John Tomlinson, “the Michigan Mauler,” for his supposed vast lies about climate change. The criteria was to give the prize “to whoever in my opinion and assisted by climate scientists and specialists manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change.”
What’s the prize?
“The winner will receive this stylish trophy, lovingly fashioned by master craftsmen in mid-Wales, which, believe it or not, is made entirely of recycled materials!
Even more exciting is the super soaraway holiday of a lifetime (possibly the final holiday of a lifetime) which the winner will be encouraged to take, and which the Guardian is assisting with a fabulous THREE bars of Kendal mint cake. The intention is to help persuade the lucky recipient to take a one-way solo kayak trip to the north pole, to see for him or herself the full extent of the Arctic ice melt.”
And what was Tomlinson’s offending piece that earned him this recognition? An article he wrote “with a cracking 38 howlers in one short column for the Flint Journal.” You can read Monbiot’s “fact-checking” of each and every one of these 38 points. Read it and please feel free to debunk Monbiot’s debunking here in the comments.
Question for the 2010 contest: is George Monbiot’s allowed to be a contender as well?
Possibly related posts:
Poor Montbiot,he believes the Met office data,Well someone has to believe in them
Well, its the Guardian newspaper, the home of spin and extention of the UK Labour government…. George Monbiot is sticking to the Labour policy line no matter what. And being an accomplished scientist himself (not) knows how to support the CRU in its hour of need. Just give him a ham sandwich someone, and tell him to calm down.
I think his real name must be George Moonbat!
I have left argumentative comments on Monbiot’s blog challenging him to a debate. He doesn’t answer. I don’t see what he’s afraid of – I’m no more qualified in science than he is and we are both just journalistic commentators on these issues. Surely if he has all the answers right he ought to wipe the floor with a ‘denier’ like me. Perhaps he has more than his reputation to lose?
Just had my last comment deleted from Monbiot’s site. The man is an absolute weazel – all talk, no walk! I’ve tried another go. Here’s what I posted- let’ see if it’s deleted, too…
“Please bear in mind, people, that Lord Monckton, a man with a lot to lose if he is successfully sued for defamation, isn’t pulling any punches in calling alarmist junk scientists, ‘liars, frauds, crooks, snake oil salesman’ etc . In fact for a polite aristocrat the viscount is being exceedingly bullish in his taunts.
How much more proof do the non-scientific alarmist supporters need that the side with the greatest confidence are the sceptics and the side running cissy scared are Monbiot’s ilk.
So come on you lying fraudsters start suing us climate ‘deniers’ as we’d dearly love to have you all in court!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jan/21/christopher-booker-prize-climate-change-scepticism?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments
You shouldn’t tangle with Monbiot, John.
He has direct access to The Almighty who is more than happy to take advice from He Who Knows All the Answers to All the Questions All of the Time!
After spewing all that invective to his willing sheep, do you really think that “Napolean-Monbiot” is going to allow a meer commoner to challenge his rule? He has already dispatched SnowBall. He is not going to let anyone else challenge his supreme ingnorance.
When the oppositions’ only recourse is invective they have lost what little credibility they have left.
Shooting the messenger leaves them only to start turning on each other, that has started too.
Interesting times.
I started to look at his ‘fact checking’, but couldn’t be bothered once I saw that for:
Claim 2. Even 1,000 years ago it was much warmer;
he uses the ‘hockey stick’ to show that temperatures were not warmer 1000 years ago. When someone wheels out the hockey stick it tells you all you need to know.
All good points well made. Debunking the climate ‘Establishment’ was never going to be an easy task. But we just have to keep chipping away and not throttle back on the momentum we got from climategate.
The problem with Monbiot is that he takes what is said by the IPCC as gospel, usually making the point that it is peer reviewed. As we know from climategate, there are alternative views that are sidelined before they can get to that stage.
In my last comment I mention that he uses the hockey stick graph to refute claim 2 (actually it is not the original hockey stick, but a later version which still has the actual temperature data spliced onto the end to ‘hide the decline’ – yes I believe it is the graph referred to in the climategate emails).
How then do you argue with this? In many of his other rebuttals he refers to GISS and HadCRU temperature series. These are what we are trying to dispute. I could easily make the claims that Monbiot makes if I believed in the data. The problem is I don’t.
It’s a bit like arguing with a creationist.
Ceri Phipps January 22, 2010 at 6:22 am
Creationists are not making policy.
The Royal Society use the same argument in their ‘Facts and fictions about climate change’
http://royalsociety.org/Facts-and-fictions-about-climate-change/
The so called fictions they are trying to refute are the very reasonable alternative views put forward by sceptics of AGW. All they do is say ‘The IPCC says…’ well sorry, but not everything the IPCC says is true. Himalayan Glaciers disappearing by 2035 for example
@Ceri. I’ve just written an article about the Royal Society – they seem to be stuck in a time warp referring back to the IPCC’s Third Report of 2001 rather than the Fourth Report of 2007 – not showing a lot of faith in their in the recent work of their warmist confederates at all!