maroon of the month

[realthog]

There's a must-watch video up on YouTube at the moment, the latest in Peter Sinclair's excellent Climate Denial Crock of the Week series. At a glance you'd assume its main focus to be Christopher Monckton, who's on another tour of Australia promoting AGW denial (that being one of only two countries in the developed world where he's not likely to be laughed out of the room), but most of it comprises an interview done for the BBC's Horizon between Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, and James Delingpole, perhaps the stupidest of the Telegraph's crop of climate change-denying columnists . . . a feat that takes some doing, bearing in mind you have Christopher Booker and Richard North in the hunt.

(a) Delingpole has no scientific training, yet presumes to instruct the President of the Royal Society on the nature of the scientific enterprise -- on what science actually is.

(b) Then, when asked a perfectly straightforward question that probes the intellectual integrity of his rejection of established climate science, he finds himself flabbergasted, lost for an answer.

(c) Later, we discover, he wrote to complain of being "intellectually raped" because he was stumped for words in front of Horizon's many viewers. The real reason he was dumbfounded is because, of course, he was found dumb.

In the little Consumer Guide to Prominent AGW Denialists that I put as the conclusion to my book Denying Science, I obviously didn't have space to describe all of them. Delingpole is on the list of those I decided to omit. In a sense I now wish I'd included him after all, because his pretensions really are hilarious; on the other hand, his views are so plain daft that surely no one could possibly take them seriously: better to devote my available space to others equally foolish, but at least not so obviously so.

Comments

[chalcedony.livejournal.com]

That was magnificent! Thank you for posting it. ;)

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service!

I think the dumbest bit is his trying to tell Nurse what science is. I mean, you really have to be dumb beyond all ordinary mortal comprehension if you don't realize this is an argument you are not going to win. It is simply not possible that a distinguished frontline scientist is going to take a lesson on this from an unqualified hack.

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness (or pure badness, however you prefer it) that you're okay. I had a bit of a scare today, thought something had happened to you . . . you ornery ol' cuss . . . and I realized how horrible that would have been, and how much I'd have missed you. So there. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

thought something had happened to you

Sorry that you were worried -- what in the world made you think I was in trouble?

Whatever, lotsa love backatya, Jodester!
xx

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

"what in the world made you think I was in trouble?"

Hutch and I were talking about ancestral names, and how we share the names Campbell and McDonald in our family trees, and I mentioned I thought you and I might have some ancestral names in common; and then somehow, in our email exchanges, I misunderstood something he wrote, which ended with " . . . and we miss him." I simply reacted with the thought that something had happened to you sometime over the past few weeks and I never heard about it. Hutch assured me in the following email that you were all right, but this was after I bolted like Henny Penny and left you that comment at LJ. Honest to god, Paul, life just feels so damn fragile sometimes.

Glad it was just me, being a silly twit.