Once every one or two months I do a little Google search to see where I, or anything I’m associated with, is mentioned on the internet. It’s a good way to find anything you haven’t noticed or wasn’t sent to you.
When initially investigating the climate change debate I found myself extremely disappointed and unconvinced by the most touted popular work on the subject, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I felt his repeated use of emotional pleas (pathos) severely undermined his argument. Instead of sticking to the science he generally referenced it in passing between anecdotes. This blog post will be a review and analysis of the first part of the video Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckato (YouTube link) by Collin Maessen. I found it to be extremely compelling because in contrast to An Inconvenient Truth, Mr. Maessen immediately supports all his assertions with demonstrated evidence from scientific studies (and references those studies with quotations from them.) [sic]
Continue reading The Achilles’ Heel Of An Inconvenient Truth
For one of the SkepticTV shows we had the opportunity to have Dr. Michael Mann as a guest. As I’m the person who is most familiar with environmental subjects among the SkepticTV crew I had the honour of interviewing Dr. Mann during the show (no pressure there…). During this broadcast Dr. Mann and I talked about the legal attacks against…
Anthony Watts often pokes fun at campaigns, or any public messaging, about global warming. This time he did it with the video in which president Obama states he’s going to announce his climate plans:
As someone who releases most of his science content on YouTube, let me explain something about how YouTube counts views. If you see a 301+ view count it means that you went above 300 views and now YouTube is going to verify if the views you’re getting are legit. This has as a consequence that the view count isn’t updated anymore in real-time and you will have to wait several hours before they update (this can take up to a day before it’s updated).
According to their about page their “mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.” And they’ve had their fair share of successes in politics and the media on these matters.
Recently they uploaded their 25 year anniversary video – called What Is The Heartland Institute? – to YouTube (they are now 29 years old) and in it they get congratulated for their excellent work:
However, anyone familiar with me will know I do not think they have done excellent work. Far from it, a lot of their work has actually harmed people.
Today is the 6th time Earth Hour will be held to raise awareness about the need for action on global warming. Considering this event started in just one city the current number of participants is a testament to how effective this awareness campaign is:
Earth Hour is the single, largest, symbolic mass participation event in the world. Born out of a hope that we could mobilize people to take action on climate change, Earth Hour now inspires a global community of millions of people in 7,001 cities and towns across 152 countries and territories to switch lights off for an hour as a massive show of concern for the environment.
A campaign so effective that it has become the focus of a lot of the so-called sceptics, who are currently attempting to reframe the message of Earth Hour.
For the past 1.5 years there has been very little activity by me on my YouTube channel and on this website. This wasn’t because I had given up on creating content, far from it. During this time I was working, when I could, on a big project. Something I did hinttowards a couple of times.
This big project was me going through the parts of a debate Monckton took part it. This debate took place on the 19th of July in 2011 and was held by National Press Club of Australia which had as subject climate change.
Continue reading Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckton
Today I enabled the new Real Sceptic template which is a complete rewrite of the earlier version. The new template resolves issues with browsers, devices and WordPress itself. It also adds some new functionality the old template didn’t have, such as moderator comments. Please note though that this template isn’t complete, many of the new features and performance enhancements aren’t…
This sadly happens more often than I care for during discussions. I engage someone, ask for their basis/source, and they respond with a “Just google it.”
I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works.
This simple sentence can sabotage any attempt for an honest and open exchange of ideas, this is why:
Not a lot of my readers will know that I’m quite active on twitter, despite my near silence on this blog due to a project I’m working on. I often engage other users on twitter, share interesting news, and give my own perspective on events. Well, as far as that is possible within 140 characters.
I like engaging other users on twitter, it helps with getting a feel for what is being said on subjects and why some are saying it. So it’s not strange that because of this I have exchanges with more known users. As long as everyone is respectful to each other this can be an absolute joy.
And this is where James Delingpole comes into the picture.
Continue reading Blocked By James Delingpole On Twitter
So there’s been a little bit of blogging going on recently following a piece written for the New Statesman by Robin Ince and Brian Cox where they state the importance of not conflating opinion with science, it’s an interesting piece and can be read here. As you can imagine it focuses on the need not to forget why science is important, but with this being the internet someone didn’t like it and wrote a blog post ranting about it…..and it’s to that blog post, or the general nature of it, that I’ll be replying to.
To make it clear though I’m not going to do a point by point response, that’s already been done here by Martin Robbins, he responds paragraph by paragraph and really takes the writer to task and it’s definitely something worth reading. What I want to break down is the guy’s misuse of the geek label, I had a brief twitter exchange with the writer of another blog post about this and Martin in which my gut call was confirmed……they used the term geek as a catch all bucket for anything they didn’t like.
According to 
Today is the 6th time Earth Hour will be held to raise awareness about the need for action on global warming. Considering this event started in just one city the current number of participants is a testament to how 
For the past 1.5 years there has been very little activity by me on my YouTube channel and on this website. This wasn’t because I had given up on creating content, far from it. During this time I was working, when I could, on a big project. Something I did 
This sadly happens more often than I care for during discussions. I engage someone, ask for their basis/source, and they respond with a “Just google it.”