Watt's latest "What hump?" moment takes the form of a dull Frankenstein cartoon followed by a dumber essay that repeats what one of Watts' overcensored, but underedited, guests said last week:
This is the way the climate scare ends; not with a bang, but a whimper
A credible alternative theory today is the ‘cosmic ray flux theory’; but for every dollar in research funding that goes into that theory and for every mention in the media of that theory there must be ten thousand that go into the IPCC theory. It just cannot compete. And anyway it is too late – the IPCC theory grabbed the high ground decades ago and has never surrendered it. Furthermore skeptical scientists are not suggesting that there is any single, simple theory to supplant the IPCC’s anthropogenic climate change theory, the ‘Climate Change Orthodoxy’. Instead they offer a theory that climate change probably derives predominantly from natural ocean-atmosphere oscillations and/or by natural solar variations (irradiation and cosmic ray flux) and/or by natural cloud cover variations and/or the Milankovitch Effect, i.e. it is probably predominantly just natural. On the one hand you have something that is superficially simple, certain and easy for the public and journalists and politicians to understand (‘our carbon dioxide emissions are definitely the cause of dangerous climate change and reducing them will definitely solve the problem’) and on the other hand something that is complex, nuanced, uncertain and..."
Wrong as denying the exisitence of hoof and mouth disease- The Milankovitch effect takes literal eons to cycle, Galactic cosmic rays take even longer and experiments find they don't impact average cloud cover, and solar variabilty has been small, well-measured , and does not correlate with global warming-- temperatures have risen as solar output falls.
Of course, Aitken may be just repeating himeself to establish a misinformation availability cascade:
Climate alarmism: The mother of all availability cascades
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.
- Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation -Timur Kuran, Duke University – Department of Economics, Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School; Harvard University – Harvard Kennedy School
