No wonder they hate debate

No wonder they hate debate

From the Andrew Bolt Blog, January 26, 2009

Allow a debate on global warming, and it’s astonishing how many people will become sceptical in an instant. As iq2-US discovered:

The results of last night’s debate are in:

Before the debate:

For the motion: 16%
Against the motion: 49%
Undecided: 35 per cent%

After the debate:

For the motion: 42%
Against the motion: 48%
Undecided: 10 per cent%

No wonder we’re told so often by politicians and journalists that the debate is over, finished, settled, so shut up. Sure, Huber, Lomborg and Stott lost this time, despite shifting so many votes, but imagine what the result would be if the audience was exposed more often to their like.

Incidentally, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and I had an argument in front of the cameras of the ABC’s Australian Story. Much will depend on the editing, of course, but I did make a few points along these lines. You may enjoy the exchange once (or if) it goes to air, presumably next month.

(Thanks to reader Sinclair.)

UPDATE

Study after study has confirmed that Antarctica has been cooling, not warming. Never mind, cried global warming believers on RealClimate:

…we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.

So global warming theory demands that Antarctica cools. But, as Roger Pielke Jr notes, when a new study comes out showing it’s warmed instead, hallelujah:

Challenging warming skeptics who note that parts of Antarctica have gotten colder, researchers on Wednesday reported that overall the continent has gotten warmer since the 1950s, and that even those colder spots would be warmer were it not for the ozone hole.

“Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,” said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. ”Now we can say: No, it’s not true … It is not bucking the trend.”

Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that the same Michael Mann whose infamous “hockey stick” – allegedly proving the world hasn’t been this warm in human history – has since been discredited, despite having been “peer reviewed”?  Why, yes, and it’s not surprising that his latest work – tweaking observations that show Antarctica cooling so hard that they now show a tiny warming – have come under immediate fire from many quarters, not just for ignoring a possible volcanic influence, but for statistical gymnastics:

According to the release of the study, “The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends. [.] The scientists found temperature measurements from weather stations corresponded closely with satellite data for overlapping time periods. That allowed them to use the satellite data as a guide to deduce temperatures in areas of the continent without weather stations.”…

UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, who is not in any way a climate change skeptic, said of the study, “I remain somewhat skeptical. It is hard to make data where none exist.” Echoing Trenberth’s analysis were several other scientists.

A good roundup of reactions at that last link.

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