Thanks Perseus.

$500 million on investigating CO2 geosequestration seems terrible wastage to me. Surely technologies with multiple benefits would warrant more investigation? Biofuels are a good example. Technologies to harvest algae could offer the combined benefits of nutrient recycling, water treatment, and fuel production. Advanced pyrolysis technologies could offer the prospect of converting fire prone bushland into valuable fuel, mitigating the fire risk in the process. None can guess what might ultimately work, but with the exception of improving oil recovery, I cannot think of any other benefit from pumping CO2 into a hole in the Earth. Surely to a sceptic like yourself, the prospect of such folly can only be of greater concern.

Hello Col Rouge

Don't laugh. I once read an article on how it was the worlds cattle population that was responsible for most of the effects of global warming and GHG's. It was published by scientist who thought they could use the information to produce an alternate energy source.

Fantastic car mate. What's it run on? Umm, gas? :-)

As usual, majority of participants enjoy improving their English skills while giving a toss to others’ messages, TurnRightThenLeft.

“Scientists” support global warming because it's profitable rather than practical

I've carefully reviewed Dr Benny Peiser’s claims and the evidence on his website.

My conclusion: It’s a fraud.

I am happy to reveal how Peiser has tricked GrahamY and others so thoroughly, and why Andrew Bolt knows he is attempting the same on the Australian population.

The Oreskes hypothesis is that scientists accept the global warming "consensus". Papers which accept the consensus at least implicitly PLUS those providing a mitigation strategy, are included in the 75%. Papers not questioning the consensus are in the 25%. Oreskes claims no paper argues against the consensus. In other words, papers that refer to “climate change” without stating a cause are not against. It is a sensible approach, as being cause-neutral in an abstract is not evidence of “confusion, disagreement or discord”.

In contrast, Peiser only counts papers which support “anthropogenic” (man-made) climate change. He assumes that cause-neutral papers do not support. That is the fraudulent trick. Obviously, if you change the methodology, you change the results.

Bolt is aware of the trick. We all should be.

He writes "not one disputed" referring to Gore's film. He writes "explicitly endorsed" when discussing Peiser.

Think about it.... How many physics papers "dispute" the concept of gravity. Probably none. But how many "explicitly endorse" gravity. Due to a clear consensus: also none.

It is a very clever word-play. A very nasty fraud.

The trick is duplicated within Peiser’s original critique. The category “reject or doubt” is used for counting. Everywhere else in his critique this category is shortened as “rejection”.

Peiser invites us to look at the evidence on this website. He must assume that nobody goes to the bother.

Sorry Benny. I actually looked at your evidence!
(http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Oreskes-abstracts.htm)

I checked all abstracts from bookend years 1993 and 2003. Within this small subset, I easily found enough explicit support for anthropogenic climate change. Enough to dispute Peiser’s claims that only 13 articles did so.

Many abstracts spoke of global warming as a threat. Others focused on what we volcanos, err… I mean humans, could do to slow it. I would assume agriculture is anthropogenic.

Continued ...

Implicit support, the largest group, referenced use of climate change models and predictions. Much research was about readying us for the climate change to come – the consequences.

Of course many papers researched the existing effects of global warming without saying what caused it or assumed we already knew. A number of abstracts were about prehistoric global warming, unrelated to modern times. These would be in Oreskes’s cause-neutral 25% group.

I could not find any implying or questioning global warming was anything other than man-made. Oreskes was correct for the 190 I checked.

On the website, Peiser highlights a highly critical AAPG committee report. G is for Geology. A is for Association. A is for American. P is for Petroleum.

I have every reason to believe that Peiser’s effort was designed to get cologne out of a stone. The dispute about 905 vs 928 articles is a little distraction, in itself useless, but certainly useful to bog down debate into tangents.

Public debate is being polarised by tricks and fraud like this.

It encourages Col Rouge to forget progress, education and human achievement. And instead discredit scientists because he now thinks they just “live in pursuit of the public purse”. Where are these profit-hungry scientists who seek enough “public funded research to retire on”?

This is not scepticism. It’s a parallel universe!

I was happy to put in hours of effort for this post. I did learn a great deal just from reading these abstracts. More motivation to support CO2 reductions, carbon trading and Koyoto. It is the morally right thing to do.

My prediction for the response to my stand against fraud is that those denying anthropogenic climate change will forget the question and defend the fraud. They’ll comb through the evidence like a defence lawyer and demand “what about this?” and “what about that?” And they’ll wait a week or two to repeat the whole sorry show again (or complain about tricky defence lawyers.)

This inconvenient truth shall not weary them. For their children as much as ours, some of us will need to do double our fair-share.

GrahamY, It is disappointing to see that to avoid admitting that you were wrong, you chose to misrepresent what I wrote in my article. I stated "Even Peiser has admitted his analysis was full of errors." That's true, and he's admitted it to you as well. So what do you do? You pretend that I claimed that I said he disowned his study. But I didn't -- that's just your fabrication.

Gore said that none of the 928 articles disputed the consensus. He was right on this point. Bolt said that there were 34. He was wrong and even Peiser has admitted this. But not you. It seems that you are so passionate in your support of Bolt that cannot, will not, admit that he made a single mistake, let alone the numerous mistakes he made here.

Now, Pieser has more criticism of Oreskes, but this criticism is wrong as well. You just have to read through the abstracts. Eli Rabett do so and can see how wrong Pieser is here:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/12/benny-and-dunk-tank-like-guy-at-carney.html

and here:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/01/dunk-benny.html