Andrew Bolt is still touting the Oregon Petition. Is he too lazy to spend the five minutes’ with Wikipedia and Google that would tell him this was a fraudulent exercise put together by professional shills, and that its main claims about satellite data have long since been abandoned even by hardcore denialists, or does he just not care?
Of course, with the denialist political position collapsing around him, Bolt is pretty much irrelevant. It’s startling to reflect that it’s only six weeks since he published this attempted hit piece on Al Gore duly demolished by Tim Lambert. At that time, it looked as if this kind of whack-a-mole game had a long time left to run.
Now the government in whose interests he wrote it is scrambling to pretend they’ve never doubted the need to do something big about climate change. But Bolt is still stuck in the parallel universe, and finding it hard to make his way back.
John Quiggin 
One of the main problems is that we have influential commentators who look out of the window before commenting and as the air conditioning is quite comfortable they fail to understand the interconnectedness of nature or the fact that various pieces of evidence mean that the world is on an unsustainable course.
Whilst there are alarmist reports on how many years until….. etc the facts do not change. There is increasing desertification, pollution has impacts on immediate and long term health and we are part of nature and therefore cannot live without food and water. The increasing strength of storms may be part of evolution which is a convenient way to ignore it however the impact of our own activities is the more likely explanation.
There are many previous examples of people damaging their patch so badly that it cannot recover. The creation and increasing size of the Sahara desert is an example that many can understand.
That there are people with vested interests who are keen to support denialists is not surprising. After all religious faith takes many forms and the denialists are exhibiting just another version of faith over experience. However it is encouraging to see that some previous believers are now thinking again – it would be nice however if they thought beyond the short term profit to long term sustainability. The Stern report is having such an impact as it has provided a way forward that is in terms that many of the powerful can understand.
“Should be, but the former won’t take the bet.”
Sorry, there is a case of the former taking the bet. A couple of Russian solar physicists have made a bet with James Annan, based on the change in five-year global average temperature between 1998 and 2012. i.e., the global average of 1998 to 2003 will be compared with the global average from 2012 to 2017. All credit to the Russians for their scientific honesty. The article points out that this “comes after a string of climate change sceptics have refused challenges to back their controversial ideas with cash.” It also pointed out that in a previous offer, “Richard Lindzen wanted odds of 50-1 against falling temperatures”. So the market for global warming insurance between denialists and believers is pretty inefficient so far.
Less traction? Pigs, proust – it’s always max alarum from minimal meaningful econometrix for Blomberg and his all hits eco squad. Boy’s old news, no new tricks:
http://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/13/copenhagen-conned-again#comment-54122 and
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/08/manipulating-choices/
and lots more good, deeply appreciative stuff on him from JQ over the past few years. Lad makes a tremendous contribution to the corpus of scientistic knowledgy stuff, worldwide, I believe Blomberg says of himself.
Speaking of shills and the like … Bjorn Lomborg keeps getting hauled out as some sort of authority. As far a as I can tell, he’s an obvious academic fraud. He claims to be a “statistician” when all his higher degrees are in political science, and even his own web site only claims one publication besides his over-hyped book, and not in anything remotely connected with environment science (or in statistics for that matter). The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty found his book methodologically flawed and biased, but that he couldn’t be accused of scientific fraud because he is not qualified in the relevant scientific disciplines. On review, the committee refused to overturn their findings but on his web site he has a press release claiming they did overturn their previous finding on review (then only available in Danish). They have since published their final finding in English and it does not overturn their previous finding.
Read the final finding press release yourself and see. See his spin titled Scientific Dishonesty Committee Withdraws Lomborg Case.
So: am I missing something? I’d hate to accuse someone of being a crook falsely.