Tag Archives: National Post

Freeman Dyson’s shadowy Canadian connection

Posted on June 16, 2009 | 17 comments

Eminent retired physicist Freeman Dyson is perhaps the most prominent scientist to oppose publicly the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. But the widespread controversy that peaked after Nicholas Dawidoff’s New York Times Magazine cover feature on Dyson has thus far glossed over some inconvenient facts and questions about Dyson’s participation in recent anti-AGW petition projects organized by Canada’s leading climate disinformation PR operative, Tom Harris. These include the Bali Open Letter released toward the end of the December, 2007 at the UN Climate Change conference in Bali, and the Manhattan Declaration, released in March, 2008 at the Heartland Institute’s first International Climate Change Conference.

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Posted in Climate change "skeptics", Climate science disinformation

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The Alberta oil boys network spins global warming into cooling

Posted on April 9, 2009 | 16 comments

uah-polynomial-animationClick to view animation

A new “analysis” craze has been sweeping the climate contrarian world of late. Not content with cherrypicking one relatively cool La Nina year (even though 2008 was still in the top 10 in the instrumental record), some of the usual suspects are now using higher-order polynomial fitting in an attempt to illustrate a severe downward “trend” in global temperature.

Chief among them (what a surprise) is Alberta’s very own “fact chucker”, National Post columnist Lorne Gunter (you read that right – LG will not rest until all facts are distorted or removed as seen in recent posts here and here). Roy Spencer (of UAH satellite-derived tropospheric temperature fame) has also jumped on the polynomial bandwagon, and now superimposes a polynomial curve on his monthly update of the UAH record. [Update May 15: Spencer no longer uses the fourth-order polynomial curve in his monthly update].  Can a “scientific” conference on the subject, perhaps jointly sponsored by the Heartland and Fraser institutes, be far behind?

Now it turns out that Gunter, who is mathematically challenged to say the least, has most likely been relying on the wisdom and Microsoft Excel skills of his fellow Albertan, oil industry insider and engineer Allan MacRae (or Allan M.R. MacRae, as he most often styles himself). MacRae is a minor but fast rising star in the contrarian firmament, as we shall see.

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Fact checking, National Post style: Lorne Gunter on global cooling (part 2)

Posted on March 10, 2009 | 3 comments

When we last left LG, he’d managed to cram four or five howlers into the first paragraph of his latest National Post screed. Fearing the onset of RSI, I decided to take a break. But let’s resume …

Indeed, the drop in temperatures since late-2007 has been so precipitous –nearly a full degree Celsius– that almost all of the global warming that has occurred since the late-1970s has disappeared.

In fact, late 2007 looks cooler than the last month (January, 2009).

global-surface-2006-20083

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Fact checking, National Post style: Lorne Gunter on global cooling (part 1)

Posted on March 5, 2009 | 2 comments

In the wake of the kerfuffle concerning George Will’s column on sea ice in the Washington Post, Lorne Gunter has upped the ante in the Canadian daily newspaper National Post with a particularly error-ridden and nonsensical column on a favourite theme – the supposed “intellectual dishonesty” of climate scientists who refuse to accept the “fact” of “global cooling”.

A key issue in the Will case was the apparent failure of fact checkers and editors to catch what should have been obvious errors. Like Will, Gunter appears to lean on tidbits from such reliable sources as U.S. senator James Inhofe’s climate disinformation clearing house (run by aide Marc Morano), or blogs like Stephen Mcintyre’s Climateaudit.org or Anthony Watt’s Wattsupwiththat.com. Gunter then proceeds to somehow mangle even those dubious assertions.

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