James Dellingpole is a complete hack

[Lillymon]

In case you don't know who James Dellingpole is, lucky you. He writes opinion pieces for The Daily Telegraph here in Britain, has his own website, and has written Welcome to Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future, and it Doesn't Work. I really don't like him.

But what got me today was the worst piece I've seen from him yet, an opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph entitled How come we now have to go to the Chinese for the truth about global warming?. I'll start with his conclusions:

What this Chinese-led team has done, in other words, has confirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). This is the balmy period between about 950 and 1250 when Greenland was green and grapes grew in Northern England which Michael Mann tried to erase in his discredited Hockey Stick chart because it didn’t suit his conviction that late 20th century global warming was dramatic and unprecedented.

He seems quite certain here. But what does his new Chinese source actually say?

The analysis also indicates that the warming during the 10–14th centuries in some regions might be comparable in magnitude to the warming of the last few decades of the 20th century.

...

For the regions of NE [North-East China] and CE [Central-East China], the warming peaks during 900s–1300s are higher than that of the late 20th century, though connected with relatively large uncertainties.

Allow me to break down the specific bullshit Dellingpole is coming out with here.

#1: "confirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period"? When a scientific paper says stuff like 'might' and 'large uncertainties', it hasn't confirmed jackshit. These are very clearly preliminary results and the writers of this paper have gone to pains to emphasize this, something Dellingpole blithely ignores.

#2: Why the hell is he talking about Northern England? These results are based on tree-ring data from fucking CHINA! Again, the paper says 'some regions' and is clearly only speaking of Chinese temperature records as that's all that is within the study's scope! It's like he's using temperature data from New York to confirm that there's a heatwave in Tokyo. Climate data from one area cannot possibly tell you anything about what's going on at the same time in an area thousands of miles away!

My final comment is that I see Dellingpole getting increasingly desperate here. He simply cannot find any further support in Britain or in just about any other western nation, so he's forced into the third world to try and find data to support his increasingly untenable position on an issue that's becoming more and more certain. He blames it on conspiracies, I'm more inclined to just think he's a crackpot.

 

[jdev]

It's kinda sad that he's at least five years behind on the global warming conspiracy theories. It reminds me of this Creationism book from the '50s I was reading awhile back. Hardly anybody in the public denies Global Warming in America anymore, mostly they just say stuff like "Maybe global warming will be good for us! I know I'd like it a little warmer where I live!"

But, yeah, he does sound desperate.

Besides which, at a basic level, all you need to know is this: Mars has almost no atmosphere and is freezing, Venus has an atmosphere jampacked with greenhouse gases and is boiling (to further dig in, Venus is hotter than Mercury, due to the level of greenhouse gases).

Now, granted, there are things we don't know about global warming, just as there are things we don't know about evolution or gravity, but we do know that CO2 is bad and we need less of it. Even if global warming was a good thing, air pollution is bad. Which is one of the things that annoys me most about the whole global warming thing, no one ever stops to say "Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say global warming doesn't exist: isn't air pollution still dangerous and bad for other reasons, and since the causes are the same, shouldn't we work to reduce pollution?"