On The Muddy

A couple months back Myron Ebell appeared on an NBC TV program called "On The Money". Whatever it is, it certainly isn't On The Truth. In it he reported on the work of Professor Patterson whose name appears -- predictably -- on the List of Climate Change Deniers. Ebell had read Patterson's article in the 2007-06-20 edition of the Financial Post where it was published, instead of, say, in a peer-reviewed journal where there is somewhat of an attempt to get things accurate. Newspapers, on the whole, are not responsible for the never-ending stream of visceral lies which they publish. Apparently it's up to the readers who do not know it's all lies to stop buying them.

By examining his mud cores from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords and using "sophisticated technology", Patterson and his team found a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators. From this he was able to prove that the CO2 composition of the atmosphere has nothing to do with the temperature of the globe. He thus over-turned large bodies of science based on ice cores, known -- unlike mud that's probably been through numerous worm stomachs before settling for good -- for trapping bubbles of clean air as the snowflakes settle into ice.

Patterson then explains the old sun-spots-cosmic rays-white cloud formation nonsense which would only matter if the effect was strong enough to outweigh the known effects of doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Which it isn't. It's not going to stabilize the climate, and it's certainly not going to reverse it.

Prepare for an era of global cooling, Myron Ebell, whose bent logic allows him to doubt all scientific predictions made since one member of the field said something in 1848 which turned out to be wrong, says.

This is very silly.

Mistakes are made and improved upon on the basis of ever-growing understanding of science. The accuracy of past predictions is likely to be a lower bound for the accuracy of future predictions, not an upper bound. Myron Ebell, however, is paid to be wrong. A functioning news system would never ever put him on air.