Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Stupid Quote of the Day: Same nonsense, same crank, different day

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Facepalm

Falling into his usual patterns of stupid claims and mindless anti-science silliness, featuring Vox Day:

To put it bluntly, if you still believe that "scientific consensus" means anything, or that that man-made global warming is actually occurring, you're an idiot:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research....

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science".

So, telephone interviews are now science? That's cool. I have been doing a crazy amount of science since RGD came out.

I’m not sure which is the most dumbass thing Vox says, here: that a report about an incident of fudged science based on the mere speculation by one scientist – ie. an isolated incident – equates to the entire scientific consensus on man-made global warming being false, or that the medium through which an interview is conducted has any relevance at all on said interview’s validity.