Update [2006-6-26 15:10:1 by David Roberts]: Tim Lambert has more debunking here.
I’m not really sure if stuff like this is worth mentioning any more, but climate dead-ender Richard Lindzen had an insipid op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this weekend titled "There Is No ‘Consensus’
On Global Warming." It’s sprinkled with all the bogus factoids typically deployed in these ventures. The only substantive argument for the headline is this:
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
This is … what’s the word? … bullshit. Peiser’s work is hooey, and widely regarded as such. Tim Lambert used it as a punching bag for a while — see, e.g., here — but nobody took it very seriously in the first place. Except, of course, for the dead-enders who will swallow anything as long as it props up their increasingly threadbare denialism.
The IPCC is one of the broadest, most stringent scientific undertakings of any kind, ever. Thousands and thousands of scientists were involved. They expressed a consensus. Why are we still talking about this?
Let’s see just one piece of peer-reviewed science that questions the consensus on global warming. Just one. Waiting.
Of course, we learn via ThinkProgress, Lindzen’s crap is already being smeared all over network news. Shocking, I know.
CNBC anchor Joe Kernen used Richard Lindzen’s grossly inaccurate column in today’s WSJ to repeatedly claim there is "no consensus" on whether global warming exists. Kernen suggests that "as old as the planet is" there is no way "puny, gnawing little humans" could change the climate in "70 years."
There’s no way humans could change the climate. How does a person with this level of ignorance have a job as a news anchor? How did he get there in the first place? Why is he allowed to stay?
