Extracts from:

Twisted: The Distorted Mathematics of Greenhouse Denial

From introduction

Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today --- more serious even than the threat of terrorism. This was the view expressed in 2004 by Sir David King His role as chief scientific adviser to the UK government put Sir David in the rare position of having access to information to make such a comparison on a well-founded basis.

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Alongside the normal progression of science through questioning and debate, there is a "pretend debate" in which one side seeks to dispute that a human-induced warming of the earth is happening and will increase. The proponents proclaim this as alternative view of science. This book discusses this claim, revealing it as a mixture of inconsistent fragments and distorted statistics. In some cases, all that is needed is to line up the statements of the so-called greenhouse sceptics side-by-side to show the extent of the inconsistency. In other cases, the sceptics' arguments are based on misrepresenting the mathematics and statistics. The aim of this book is to show, in a non-technical way, the nature of the scams that are being foisted into public discussion.

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This book is not about saving the environment of the earth. It is about protecting the future economic well-being of Australia. Australia's future is being placed in jeopardy by a refusal to acknowledge the risks ahead. As I discuss further in section 9.2, decisions about the scope and timing of effective actions for climate mitigation will be made elsewhere, with little input from Australia. ...... The real impact for Australian is that by delaying action on the basis of a noisy disinformation campaign, Australia risks being dragged kicking and screaming into a low-carbon world. Australia is a small nation, with a heavy dependence on trade, and fossil fuel use. Consequently, we are particularly at risk from being forced to make rapid changes, rather than act in anticipation.

From section 8.3

Mrs. Thatcher's role shows that the issue is not about politics, it is about science. Mrs. Thatcher took her degree in chemistry. In The Great Global Warming Swindle, Martin Durkin proposes that global warming was promoted by Mrs. Thatcher in order to push Britain towards nuclear energy and break the power of the coal-mining unions. However, writing in The Australian prior to the ABC screening, Durkin's defence of the program characterised global warming as a theory that would appeal to the left of politics. Clearly, in political arguments consistency plays a much smaller role than in mathematics and science.

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From chaper 10

As I left CSIRO, ... almost the final words of my farewell speech were those that I commend to you now. They come from Richard Feynman in his minority appendix to the report on the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster: .. reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

About the author

Ian Enting is a professorial Fellow at the ARC Center of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems. From 1980 to 2004 he was a research scientist at CSIRO Atmospheric Research. He was one of the lead authors of the chapter CO₂ and the Carbon Cycle in the 1994 IPCC report on Radiative Forcing of Climate.

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Ian Enting: last change 23/7/07.