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| Delingpole (center) gets his science advice from the horse's mouth. (at right) |
26 Oct 2017
As I predicted, my piece “400 Scientific Papers in 2017 say ‘Global Warming’ is a Myth”, is causing greenie heads to explode like watermelons
struck by hollow-point bullets.
Here is an email I got shortly afterwards from ... Snopes.
Hello James, I’m a science writer for the fact checking website Snopes.com reporting on your ‘400 studies say climate change is a myth’ exposé. I had a couple of questions about your process:
- Did you read all (or a fraction) of the 400 studies listed in that post personally or talk to any of the scientists involved?
- How long did it take to research this piece?
- Were you able to get an early look at the No Tricks Zone post from 23 October before it was published Best, Alex
This Alex is an impertinent pup, isn’t he? Since I make it my business not to respond to snarky little tics asking irrelevant questions designed to smear and belittle rather than enlighten, I thought I’d instead deal with the issues he raises here at Breitbart.
[ INSTEAD OF PROVIDING A LINK TO THE FACT CHECK :
Do Hundreds of Papers Published in 2017 'Prove' That Global Warming is a Myth?
RATINGFALSE
ORIGIN On 24 October 2017, Breitbart.com’s James Delingpole published a story appearing to report that hundreds of scientific papers published in 2017 “prove” that global warming is a myth. This post followed Delingpole’s June 2017 clickbait success falsely alleging that 58 published papers proved the same thing.
Both stories primarily consisted of regurgitated material from a blog called the “No Tricks Zone” (NTZ), which highlights out-of-context sentences from (in most cases) legitimate scientific studies that the author of the blog incorrectly thinks dispute the tenets of anthropogenic global warming. The 400 studies in this latest piece cover topics wholly irrelevant to the question of anthropogenic global warming, including, for example, a study on the effect of wind turbines upon the viability of migratory bat populations.
The first time that Breitbart ran a NTZ based-story, numerous scientists listed in the report pointed out their their graphs had been digitally altered by NTZ to omit data, and that NTZ had either misinterpreted their papers or read them so superficially that the author of the post did not realize he was sometimes quoting from general background material and not the actual findings of the papers themselves.
I do this for two reasons.
First because publicly humiliating one’s enemies is always fun.
Second, because these climate alarmists use the same old tricks again and again to prop up their junk science scam. It’s always a good idea to expose these tricks,..
That’s how I became one of the world’s most notorious and widely-read climate skeptics: not because I have a science degree – which I don’t – but because I am able to explain this dogs breakfast of a shambles of a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer in language that normal people can understand.
Snopes’s question:
- Were you able to get an early look at the No Tricks Zone post from 23 October before it was published?
My answer:
No.
Snopes’s question:
- How long did it take to research this piece?
My answer:
As little time as I possibly could... it’s a necessary chore – like pouring RoundUp on your weeds, putting out the trash, shooting rats, that kind of thing –
Snopes’s question:
- Did you read all (or a fraction) of the 400 studies listed in that post personally or talk to any of the scientists involved?
My answer:...I suppose I could have done the scholarly thing and spent... days (weeks?) reading all the papers myself, then many more weeks ringing up all the scientists responsible to see whether they still stood by the words they wrote in those papers.
But I didn’t – Kenneth Richard at ... No Tricks Zone... had taken upon himself the achingly tedious task of wading through these 400 science papers, assessing their skeptical position on “climate change”, and then highlighting the key passages that supported his argument.
In other words, he’d done all my homework for me.
Obviously, if it turns out that Kenneth Richard has misrepresented these papers, then yes, I can be criticized for having lazily helped promulgate a lie...
And no, it doesn’t at all undermine my case some of the scientists who wrote these papers object to the context in which I have framed their research.
Happy, now, my little Snopes pupster?
