Truth, Lies and In Between

The IPCC fraud case (but not the planet) hots up

Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Two weeks ago I reported the central error in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) to its secretariat. After the contributing scientists had submitted their final draft report, the bureaucrats and politicians had tampered with the HadCRUt3 graph of global instrumental temperatures since 1850 by adding four trend-lines to the anomaly curve and drawing from their relative slopes the unjustifiable and statistically indefensible conclusion, stated twice in the published report, that global warming was “accelerating” and that the “acceleration” was our fault.

 Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Environmental Research Letters ought to have known better than to publish the latest anti-scientific propaganda paper by John Cook of the dubiously-named Skeptical Science website. Here are just a few of the solecisms that should have led any competent editor or reviewer to reject the paper:

• It did not discuss, still less refute, the principle that the scientific method is not in any way informed by argument from consensus, which thinkers from Aristotle via Alhazen to Huxley and Popper have rejected as logically fallacious.
• Its definition of the “consensus” it claimed to have found was imprecise: that “human activity is very likely causing most of the current anthropogenic global warming”.
• It did not put a quantitative value on the term “very likely”, and it did not define what it meant by “current” warming. There has been none for at least 18 years.