The scientific debate regarding global warming has been over for some time, and the Australian policy debate has moved beyond the point where delusional pseudoscience has any impact. What remains of the scientific debate is a screening device in which individuals and institutions identify themselves as so lacking in intelligence, judgement or honesty as to cast doubt on their contributions on any topic. As with Euclid’s fifth proposition failure on this test distinguishes the donkeys.

The latest to self-identify as a donkey is Barry Maley of the Centre for Independent Studies whose latest piece in the Oz states, among other pieces of nonsense scooped up from teh intertubes

Beyond a relatively small concentration, the effect of additional carbon dioxide decreases logarithmically, almost to vanishing point.

As Wolfgang Pauli would have said, this is not even wrong, since “decreases logarithmically” is a contradiction in terms.

Maley identifies himself as a “former academic” and his CIS bio describes him as a former senior lecturer in Behavioural Science who has worked on family and social policy. It’s a safe bet that he wouldn’t know a logarithm if it bit him, and that the simple exercise in logarithmic differentiation required to convert the claim above into something that can be assessed and refuted (here’s a good post that covers several more of Maley’s talking points) would be utterly beyond him.

Clearly he’s scrambled together a bunch of nonsense from delusionist Internet sites, and published it along with his “research” on family issues. Since he invites us to treat the two as being equally credible, I’m happy to accept. And since the CIS invites us to treat Maley as a serious researcher, the same goes for them.

Since we’re on the CIS, a quick Google search finds Helen Hughes, in the course of defending detention camps for refugees, producing this gem:

If there is climate warming, in 50 years’ time, Northern India and Northern China will have such a favourable climate that their productivity will go up enormously and people may want to shift from Southern to Northern India and, particularly, from Southern to Northern China, where there is going to be an enormous shortage of labour, which is already emerging.

I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe

Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods

To promote global warming delusionism on the pretence defending authoritarian xenophobia is a similarly impressive feat.