Posted on by Martin Rayner

Check The Fine Print

Attention: Blogging Tories

Before the usual suspects amidst your ranks jump on the “Gotcha!” bandwagon and start launching a volley of “I told you so” posts in reaction to this, you might want to check the American Physical Society website first:

APS Position Remains Unchanged

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.” This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

Sorry to rain on your parade. Please resume your regularly scheduled moaning, whining and hysterical shrieking about something or other.

Update: The Burning Stupidity

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Kate jumped the gun over at SDA this morning. “50,000 new deniers” her post misleadingly crows. Um, not. That figure represents the total membership of The American Physical Society which, as noted below, has NOT changed its previously stated position regarding the effect of greenhouse gases on the environment.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction that’s all too typical of those eager to poke holes (or is that shoot bullets) in the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The slavish hordes will doubtless follow blindly, to wit this delusional commenter:

Science doesn’t matter to these folks. They come in two types, the shrewd and seasoned socialist political huckster that sees a big transfer of wealth opportunity and the poor little lefty empty vessels who have replaced the old God for the new Atmospheric God. Atmospheric God requires constant diligence and sacrific [sic] with a whole new set of sins to avoid. And, a big bonus point for the score settling victim whiners with new Atmospheric God, it’s a She, Mother Nature. I’m not that far off the wall, do you think?

As a matter of fact, yes, I do.

By the way, as for the Viscount’s “dazzling debunking of climate change science,” according to George Monbiot (who does have a science degree), “There is scarcely a line in Lord Monckton’s paper which is not wildly wrong.”

23 Replies to “Check The Fine Print”

  2. I was doing them a service. Lots of their idols south of the border have already made jackasses out of themselves about this and are backpedaling with updates and qualified retractions now.

  3. I was doing them a service.

    Too late. It’s “out there.” And no amount of information will cause that lie to re-surface, zombie-like for next few years.

  5. Hasn’t Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (another highly qualified “science advisor”) been flogging this line of dissent for years now anyway? As soon as I saw his name pop up in the article as the proponent of this consensus-busting position, I figured I’d better check a little bit deeper to see what was up.

  6. It is is not their interest to comprehend
    It’s their interest to pretend
    To be on top of an issue to defend
    Their partisan interests only in the end.

  7. Let’s consider Monckton’s credentials: adviser to Maggie Thatcher, diploma in journalism, read in classics at Cardiff (I think) …. no science degree whatsoever. Some expert.
    BTW, the Climate Progress website has started something of a drive to have the APS editor responsible for this travesty removed.

  8. Maybe Patrick Ross will write a long, bloviating post praising the “scientific background” of Viscount Monckton. 😉

  9. Or a dissertation on how the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway is named for two “fathers of confederation”, Sir John A. and Jacques Cartier.

  13. Yah, yah… I’ll get to that just as soon as the boys at “the politic” get theirs installed. 😉 There’s more of them — they’ve got no excuse!

  15. Hey, you guys are citing them this morning as a beacon of lucidity or some such thing. There’s the broken clock theory in action…

  18. A right-wing blogger in my neck of the woods jumped on the story, too. The blogger identifies himself as a CPoC riding president. I think the true but mainly unspoken motivation for these “skeptics” is to find ways to excuse driving Escalades and whatnot. It’s all totally self-serving.

  19. Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m not as deeply cynical about the scientific community as many of the so-called deniers appear to be. As a layman, the evidence seems quite compelling to me. Unlike a lot of the Blogging Tories, I’m not a climatologist, or even a scientist for that matter. Far from it.
    As well, I’ve got no really good reason to disbelieve it. The conspiratorial notion of it being a massive wealth transfer scheme strikes me as unconvincing and borderline absurd.

    You’re probably correct about the attitudes of some being informed by that which best serves their self-interest, whether that be allowing them to drive their Escalade without guilt, or as I suspect in the case of your local CPoC riding president, enabling them to more vigorously defend the status quo.

  20. They come in two types, the shrewd and seasoned socialist political huckster that sees a big transfer of wealth opportunity and the poor little lefty empty vessels who have replaced the old God for the new Atmospheric God.

    Can someone tell me where these wingnuts practice this verbose and grandiloquent idiocy? Is it in their fundy churches? Their paramilitary survival camps?

    Who talks like this in real life?

  22. I really do have my suspicions that there’s something rotten in Delisle. A node in the web of white supremacism, as it were.

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