David Latimer,

Scientist Tim Lambert's "debunking" of Bolt's blog post is a finalist in the Best Blog Posts of 2006. As such it should be able to stand on its own, being of superior quality, and all. It doesn't because it isn't.

If you read my comments carefully you'll note that I don't so much have a problem with Gore as I do with Tim Lambert's misleading crapola -- if Bolt's such a hack and Lambert has science on his side, he should have nailed Bolt, but didn't. The hundreds of words you've written attempting to explain and justify Lambert's post proves it’s nothing special.

Tim Lambert isn't defending the indefensible; why do you bother?

David Latimer, you're a gem. I did a word count on the 1994 abstracts to check your assertions about the type of language used by scientists and in the process found a second abstract that is sceptical of the AGW hypothesis.

Your account of how science works could only have come from a non-scientist. When I learnt science E=mc2 didn't mean "Energy 'may' equal mass times the speed of light squared", in a pre-post-modernist classroom "equals" equalled "equals", no ifs or buts. If you thought your experiment "might" have been right, then you started again!

Of course every scientist knows their thesis might be negatived, but until it is they take their glory.

I picked 1994 because that is the group from which I drew my example of scepticism. It consists of 46 abstracts, so if you want to search the whole 10 years you might come to different numbers, but I suspect no different conclusion.

The results are:

"May" appears in 15 abstracts (30 times in all, but some scientists over-use the word, so it appears multiple times in some abstracts).

"Likely" appears 3 times. "Characterised" doesn't appear at all. "Could be" makes its appearance 5 times.

So the words you say scientists use because they are never sure make their appearance in only a minority of abstracts.

And abstract 45 says we need to do more work to disentangle solar sun spots and CO2 as causes of global warming. Peiser's looking better, Lambert will be starting a new thread to explain it all away, and no wonder Oreskes appears to have disappeared in this debate.

"John Hunter corroborates Bolt’s claim that the 0.07 figure comes from the Australian National Tidal Facility."

Not quite the same as saying:

"the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year."

Bolt made a correct quote from a document of the former Australian National Tidal Facility (an organisation that no longer exists and whose documents cannot easily be checked). That is not the same as saying the record for the period 1978 – 1999 does show a sea level rise of .07 mm per year, which is plainly false. Since we have now moved on to Bolt's actual statement, the issue is Bolt's objective in writing a quote whose meaning on its own is plainly false. Obviously Bolt's intention is to deceive people into believing the meaning of the quote, because if he was one-tenth of the journalist he seems to think he is, he would check that quote against other sources and at least make his readers aware of the discrepancy. Other sources than the global-warming-denialist websites where it is bandied about, that is. Bolt didn't actually tell a lie, but he wrote deceptive selective journalism.

BTW, GrahamY, I'm still waiting for you to answer my question. Peiser wrote his concession in his email to Mediawatch. Word against word doesn't come into it. Haven't you read Peiser's email to Mediawatch yet? It's time for you to stop being evasive.

A whole post just about me, gee thanks Col.

Chris O'Neill,

You will note that in his original post Lambert does not claim Bolt's 0.07 figure is incorrect, instead he gives different figures for a different period. He has made no further effort to make a case on point six, leaving you to do that for him. Why do you think he has done that?

None of the sea level figures for Tuvalu should be relied on, as both John Hunter's article and Tim Lambert's link indicate -- Lambert's link is a bit sneaky on this in that the 5 and 4.3 figures are only qualified deep in the text whereas the smaller 0.9 figure is deemed in the all important summary to be "less precise". Regardless, the short term figures (5 and 4.3) are from far too short a period to be trustworthy. The long term figure (0.9) is not to be trusted because the gauge is reagrded as unsuited to the task. If you are going to damn Bolt for citing a questionable, unqualified figure, you'll have to do the same for Lambert.

None of this alters the fact that the apparent areas of the various islands comprising Funafuti has, if anything, increased in recent years. Tuvalu would not be increasing in area if it is sinking beneath the waves. Further, Tim Lambert offers nothing better than anecdotal evidence that Tuvaluans are being forced to flee rising seas. Not good enough.

GrahamY, it's not Media Watch's word against Peiser's. Nothing in Peiser's email contradicts what Media Watch states: Peiser now says that was only one abstract that disputes the consensus. If you want to argue that Peiser says there are more than that, tell us which ones Peiser says they are.

You claim: "you don't argue you assert", and then proceed to offer a whole bunch of assertions uncontaminated by any arguments. Each of my points against Bolt was supported by an argument and one or more links to supporting evidence. While you just assert things like you claims that surveys show that most scientists dispute the consensus. Despite being pressed on this point you have failed to provide any supporting evidence or even named these alleged surveys.

I'm afraid that OLO does rather look like something that would produced by a Liberal party hack. You yourself admitted that you had only published one previous piece supporting the climate science consensus. You declare that you would have rejected my piece for stating something true. And you just published a piece by Jennifer Marohasy that says that Global Warming will be good for the GBR, but look at how she misrepresents her sources:

"The last global assessment of the coral reefs of the world"
http://www.aims.gov.au/pages/research/coral-bleaching/scr2004/

Look what it says:

"The coral bleaching in 1998 was a 1 in a 1000-year event in many regions with no past history of such damage in official government records or in the memories of traditional cultures of the affected coral reef countries. Also very old corals around 1000 years old died during 1998. Increasing sea surface temperatures and CO2 concentrations provide clear evidence of global climate change in the tropics, and current predictions are that the extreme events of 1998 will become more common in the next 50 years, i.e. massive global bleaching mortality will not be a 1/1000 year event in the future, but a regular event;"

BBGun, I don't respond to your nonsense because the others deal with you more than adequately and don't need my help. But you knew that.