Climate Alarmist Paper Retracted Due To Fake Peer Review

A favourite taunt of climate alarmists is that The Science has spoken and it's spoken in a decidedly alarmed and warmist fashion. But as we saw in the Climategate emails, subverting the process of peer review has been a key tactic of the warmists. Sometimes this subversion is through the process of pal review, sometimes it's through applying pressure to keep stray editors in line and sometimes, as in this case, it's outright dishonesty.

Pakistani economist Khalid Zaman has just has a tranche of publications retracted by Elsevier because of faked peer review. In all 16 papers have been withdrawn according to Retraction Watch, due to irregularities in the peer review process. In this case Zaman had set up fake email accounts which he then used to create fake peer reviewers. These fake peer reviewers, were surprisingly open to Zaman's work for some inexplicable reason.

Of the 16 papers retracted, one stands out in particular: Causal links between greenhouse gas emissions, economic growth and energy consumption in Pakistan: A fatal disorder of society. In this paper Zaman and co-authors set out to show that carbon emissions are destroying Pakistani society. The abstract concludes:

 ...emissions caused by consuming the energy [sic] is causing harm to the society by enlarge, and it reaches to the conclusion where we are heading toward a systematic fatal disorder of our society.

So, just to get the story right, according to the good Professor, it's not poverty, rampant corruption, military interference in politics, the Taliban, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism or proxy war with India that is destroying Pakistan, it's too much CO2. No wonder he had to make up his own peer reviewers. No sane person would have let that one go...

Vegetarian Sperm Counts

So, research is confirming what we've long suspected - vegetarians have significantly lower sperm counts than men who follow an omnivorous diet. Not only does the research, reported here in the Telegraph, show lower sperm counts, it also shows that the sperm have lower motility - in other words they're not that good at swimming. What does this mean? It means it's evolution's way of removing vegans from the gene pool.

Now, if only someone can do the research to correlate sperm count and motility with climate alarmism we might have something really positive to report...

Greens hate 'chemicals' shock horror

The BBC leads its science pages today with a shock horror on neonicotinoids killing off bees. We should be very worried. After all, as Matt McGrath breathlessly reports:

The scientists say the threat to nature is the same as that once posed by the notorious chemical DDT

This must be the same DDT that saved millions of lives and which Rachel Carson demonised in 'Silent Spring'. The same DDT which became a cause celebre for greens all over the world until it was banned. This is the ban that is estimated to have caused 20 million deaths in children. What a great victory for green misanthropy that was.

That neonicotinoids are being compared to DDT says more about the greens than it does about any science. And in case you're wondering, the source of the BBC story is not some new piece of evidence, it's come from the green transnational corporation the  International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Gaia: Industry-funded Denialist

Professor Naomi Oreskes today revealed that Gaia is actually an industry-funded global warming denier. 'It's clear,' Professor Oreskes said, 'that Gaia is deliberately sowing the seeds of doubt and manipulating the weather in order to deny the science.'

George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and leading environmentalist agreed. 'How else do we explain the so-called pause in warming? It's out and out manipulation of weather patterns by Gaia. The science predicts a hockey stick, so what does Gaia do? It slices off the slope to flat-line the temperature rise, even in the face of continued increased in atmospheric carbon dioxide.'

These claims have been backed up by a number of leading scientists. Dr Kevin Trenbeth points out that all of the proposed drivers of the pause: volcanic activity, deep ocean heating, changes in the trade winds and more are all connected to Gaia. 'It's clear that Gaia is a flat earther in denial of the truths revealed by climate science.'

Dr Oreskes is demanding that Gaia be arrested and tried by the United Nations or the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. 'How much longer can Gaia get away with changing the weather just to make climate scientists look stupid. Gaia needs to get with the consensus or face the consequences.'

A number of climate change sceptics have disputed this new claim, adding to their list of denialist activities. Some have even suggested that Gaia is not actually a person but is just an abstract construct.

Dr Oreskes was visibly shocked when told of this allegation. 'These people are incorrigible,' she stated. 'Now, Gaia just needs to turn up the temperature again because it's freezing out here at the moment...'

Polar Ice All Gone - Just Like Gore Predicted It Would

Five years ago the Goracle himself predicted that the Arctic would be gone in five years. Yep. Five years. So on the day that even the BBC publishes a story on the spectacular rebound in Arctic ice extent and volume, here's a view of Gore in action...

 

Is anyone in the real world even listening to Gore these days?

Einstein At The Office

The scene: the office of the Chancellor of the University of Zurich. A diminutive Albert Einstein is sitting in front of the imposing oak desk of the Chancellor.

Chancellor: My dear Einstein, I am afraid that your head of department has expressed some unhappiness with the current situation.

Einstein: I'm sorry, Herr Chancellor, I don't quite follow...

Chancellor (Sighs expressively): Let me be to the point, Einstein, there's some concern in the department about some of your recent work.

Einstein (alarmed): An error in my work? I am presently revising my work on the Avogadro constant and believe I have made excellent progress on a new estimate...

Chancellor (interrupts): You misunderstand once again, Herr Professor, and alas it does make me wonder whether you are truly of the right cloth for a career in the academy.

Einstein: I apologise once again, Herr Chancellor, but perhaps you can enlighten me as I am clearly not following your line of thought.

Chancellor: The department are concerned that your recent funding applications are insufficiently compelling and that they cast the department in a poor light.

Einstein: But my work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect have been well received, Herr Chancellor. Very well received in fact.

Chancellor (looking distinctly unimpressed): I agree that your refinement of Helga von Thurinberg's theory on the photoelectric effect has some technical interest.

Einstein (shocked): Refinement?? Sir, I beg to disagree. Thurinberg's assertion that the photoelectric effect is caused by the sun smiling benevolently on grateful solids or liquids is not physics. It's not science of any description at all. It's pure metaphysical nonsense...

The BBC, Wine and Climate Change

Alarming headlines in the last couple of days have highlighted a projected a global wine shortage that is likely to raise prices as demands outstrips supply. Much of this is driven of course by changing patterns of demand, particularly relating to increased demand from China. The other side of the equation is also subject to changing patterns. Buried in the story on the BBC is this little snippet:

They say this could be partly explained by "plummeting production" in Europe due to "ongoing vine pull and poor weather".

Poor weather? But surely the BBC has been warning us for years that wine production was a risk because of rising temperatures, not because of cooling or wetter summers. For example on 20 October 2010 the BBC were warning that 'Best loved wines at risk from climate change'  - and here they meant increased warming.

Or perhaps we can go back a couple of years further and find that warming was the key concern on the story from 6 September 2008: 'Spanish wine makers fight climate change'

Go back to July 2007 and we have 'Winemakers keep weather eye on climate' . Again the story was that global warming was going to negatively impact wine production.

And so here we are in 2013 looking at what's really happening rather than on model projections and the story is very different. The climate is changing, but not how the models told it should. Rather than hotter, drier weather causing shrivelled vines, it's colder, wetter weather reducing the crop. For those of us who view a glass of wine (or two) as one of our five a day, this is worrying news, and as sceptics have been saying for a long time, it's global cooling that is the real danger to humanity, not the little bit of warming that we experienced nearly 20 years ago... But don't expect to read that on the BBC any time soon.

Apocalypse Soon(ish)

Just when you thought things couldn't sink any lower in the weird world of climate 'science', someone comes along to prove you wrong. According to a widely publicised paper from the University of Hawaii we are facing global climate catastrophe within a few decades. The study, headlined as 'Apocalypse Now: Unstoppable man-made climate change will become reality by the end of the decade and could make New York, London and Paris uninhabitable within 45 years' in the Daily Mail, will be published in one of the world's leading science journals, Nature.

According to lead author, Camilo Mora: "The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon. Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past."

Scary stuff of course. And there are lots of frightening graphics and scenarios that make The Day After Tomorrow look like a walk in the park. Not only is it worse than we thought, the paper suggests that we've gone past the tipping point and that there's nothing we can do to avert this looming disaster.

So, well, if there's nothing we can then can't we just scrap the IPCC and enjoy what little time we've got left as a species? Er, nope. According to the Mora:

Scientists have repeatedly warned about climate change and its likely effects on biodiversity and people. Our study shows that such changes are already upon us. These results should not be reason to give up. Rather, they should encourage us to reduce emissions and slow the rate of climate change. This can buy time for species, ecosystems, and ourselves to adapt to the coming changes.

Get that. We should have listened more, now we need to take note and let these guys buy us time. Of course the evidence for all of these is remarkably solid. How can anyone doubt it when it's based on model outputs. Lots of models in fact:

The data came from 39 Earth System Models developed independently by 21 climate centers in 12 different countries.

So, that all clear then. This is just another one of those classic alarmist scares. Model outputs, dire prognosticacians, it's worse than we thought - and of course it grabs headlines world wide and fuels the alarmists who have been feeling like they've been losing the battle recently.

The IPCC Has Delivered

The IPCC has delivered something of a crowd pleaser in its latest assessment. There really is something for everybody in this latest report. For the true believers we get the "95% confidence" that humans are the dominant driver of climate change. Forget the models diverging ever more from reality, forget the 15-17 years flat-lined temperature increase despite record CO2 levels, forget the lowered estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2. Just focus on that 95% figure and everything else pales into insignificance. There's little doubt that it's a crowd-pleaser and the true believers will take that number and batter the sceptics with it repeatedly.

For the political classes who pay for the IPCC gravy-train, this is just what they wanted. Here's the justification for the continued green policies and the subsidies for grandiose and futile schemes to reduce CO2 emissions and stop us boiling the oceans. For those in power in the Westsern countries, they've bought themselves permission to carry on as before with failed policies that we citizens are paying dearly for. Obama, Cameron and the rest will quote the IPCC ad infinitum and continue with the refrain that the evidence is incontrovertible and that it's worse than we thought.

And, let's be honest, the IPCC has done a great service to the sceptic cause too. There was a chance that it could have taken a more honourable course and admitted that it's models were wrong, that there was less cause for alarm, that we know less than we pretend to. It could have admitted that the 'science' is far less settled than it has previously claimed. But it hasn't. The IPCC is like a super-tanker set on a course and is unable to nimbly change direction in the face of the obstinate reality in its path. So it continues with statistically incoherent pronouncements and politically acceptable sound bites. For us sceptics this is confirmation that the IPCC is irredemable, and the voices that are being raised against it are growing more vociferous and increasing in number. Witness Judith Curry saying:

We need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible – not to protect the patient who seems to be thriving in its own little cocoon, but for the sake of the rest of us whom it is trying to infect with its disease.

For the moment though, the IPCC have bolstered the confidence of the diminishing band of true believers who are immune to evidence. For them, the 95% number, along with the fake 97% 'consensus' number from Cook and his band of crooks, is all they need to fight off the mounting evidence (much of it in peer-reviewed journals) that climate alarmism is not warranted. In fact it wouldn't suprise me if another 90+ number appeared soon. Having three 9s to quote will feel so much better than just two - as if that's enough to close off reality.

Carrier Bag Scepticism

Cut to the haunting image of a sea turtle, thousands of miles away, struggling through the deep ocean waters as discarded plastic bags wrap themselves around its flippers and body.

These majestic animals are dying in alarming numbers because they mistake the flimsy translucent bags - which could in theory come from British supermarkets - for jellyfish, a key element of their diet.

The endangered Green Turtle provides a potent symbol of the deadly threat to wildlife and the blight on the natural world caused by throwaway plastic bags handed out free in their billions to shoppers. [Daily Mail, 27 February 2008]

Who can fail to be moved by the image conjured so vividly in those few sentences? Scourge of the oceans, destroyer of marine life and polluter of the eco-system, the carrier bag is everything that is wrong with our throwaway life styles. Only the most hard-hearted and selfish could say otherwise. Except that, as with many environmental scares and controversies, the reality is considerably more complex than these often simplistic narratives would indicate. Perhaps the case for the prosecution is not as strong, or as straightforward, as would first appear…

At first glance the case against the carrier bag seems self-evident. It is wasteful – the bags are throwaway by design. They use up resources – plastic carrier bags are made from oil and obviously use up energy in their manufacture. They pollute the environment – famously being a key ingredient of the ‘great Pacific garbage patch’, (or the Pacific Trash Vortex if your language tends to the dramatic) or the similarly described patch in the Atlantic. And finally, the great and the good have come out firmly against them – from hardened environmentalists to the BBC to the Daily Mail and Marks and Spencers. In fact, in some more environmentally conscious parts of the world, Wales for example, the carrier bag already incurs a surcharge – a guilt tax to nudge us towards greener alternatives.

David Attenborough Should STFU

David Attenborough should just STFU. The misanthropic old git has been much in the news again spouting off his usual doom-laden drivel about over-population. Just as an exercise he should just take a look out of the window at the real world around him. In the 87 years that he's been around the planet the population has shut up from 2 billion to around 7 billion. A huge jump, we're all agreed. But at the same time global life expectancy at birth have doubled according to some statistics - and while I'll admit the actual numbers may be dubious the trend is there in every set of numbers you look at. Poverty levels have been dropping in percentage and absolute terms. Wealth has increased massively. Pollution has decreased in the developed world and is starting to drop in other parts of the world too.

By any conceivable metric the human race has prospered even as the population has increased. What about the 'natural' world (as though somehow humans are not part of the natural world)? Well, deforestation is no longer seen as the problem it once was - though it's clear that some of the policies inflicted on us by greens like David Attenborough are making things worse as forests are cleared for bio-fuel crops. Global warming never was a problem and it's becoming clearer by the day that this scare is dying on its feet.

Of course we're not living in utopia and there are real economic, political and environmental problems in the world. But by any objective measure the doom and gloom propagated by Attenborough, and those who have preceded him (Paul Ehrlich being the most obvious example) is not warranted.

National treasure? Possibly. But he'd be more of a treasure if he just STFU or else dared to look beyond his fixed ideological position and see how the real world has changed in his life-time.

Dirty and Unnecessary

Commenting on news that the one of the companies with a licence to explore shale gas deposits in the UK has reported that they think the fields are even bigger than first imagined (reported on the BBC here) - we get this comment from Friends of the Earth:

Environmental group Friends of the Earth has described fracking as "dirty and unnecessary", arguing that the UK should instead focus on investing in renewable energy.

They, and the rest of the green fraternity, must be having fits as the pressure builds for us to fully exploit fracking. The prospect of cheap and abundant fuels is the anti-thesis of what the environmental movement wants. Forget the stuff about climate change - it's not the real issue. If it were then the greens would be cheer-leading the move to fracking as it leads to lower CO2 emissions, as the experience of the US has shown. No, the real cause is de-industrialisation. Cheap, clean and abundant energy means we can carry on with manufacturing and consuming and raising living standards. The greens want expensive, intermittent and unreliable energy so that we cut back on development and regress rather than progress...

Thorium Power - In The News Again

I've written about the prospects for thorium power a few times in the past, here for example: http://progcontra.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/thorium-powered-nuclear-reactors.html.

Periodically the subject rears it's head in the mainstream press, the latest example being a piece by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph. He finishes his article thus:

If the Chinese can crack thorium, the world will need less oil, coal, and gas than feared. Wind turbines will vanish from our landscape. There will less risk of a global energy crunch, less risk of resource wars, and less risk of a climate tipping point.

Well, forget the nonsense about climate tipping points, the real good news is that cheap power is essential for global economic development. And, as he rightly points out, a cheap source of power - like shale, as well as thorium - could finally tip the balance away from wind farms once and for all. And that's precisely why the greens will do all they can to fight thorium power in the same way they're fighting shale. Some of the more far-sighted environmentalists will even concede the point about wind farms but will advocate we go for fusion power instead - precisely because that's so far from reality.

Still, if does look as though the prospects for commercial thorium power are improving. However, it would be a shame if the cheapness and relative abundance of shale actually ended up stifling thorium research...

No correlation between global temperatures and CO2

For a good start to the New Year how about taking a look at a recent paper published in the journal Earth System Dynamics? Entitled 'Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming' the paper, which is published as open access and can be downloaded for free, the paper uses robust statistical methods to test for spurious correlations between global temperature and the main drivers of the greenhouse effect (eg CO2, aerosols, total solar irradiance).

To quote from the abstract:

We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcing might have had a temporary effect on global temperature.

Or from the paper itself:

We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polynomially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period.

and:

Given the complexity of Earth’s climate, and our incomplete understanding of it, it is difficult to attribute to carbon emissions and other anthropogenic phenomena the main cause for global warming in the 20th century.

Also worth reading are the reviewers comments, which are very positive, a point to keep in mind when the paper is attacked by the climate faithful. And, as always in these situations, we can only speculate on the orgy of publicity (not least from the BBC) the paper would have generated had the results shown a true correlation between CO2 and global temperatures...

Organic Food - No Surprise There Then

It's a good few years since I asked the question, on this blog, as to whether organic food had any real nutritional advantages over non-organic: Organic Food - Where's the Evidence?

That was back in April 2006, and at the time my conclusion was plain enough - there was plenty of bluster and dissembling but no hard evidence in the peer reviewed literature that I could find. So it's no surprise to see the headlines today after Stanford University researchers published a review that came to pretty much the same conclusion - there's no evidence of health benefit.

The usual suspects will mutter darkly about vested interests, the agro-industrial complex and all the rest, but like CO2 causing climate catastrophe, the science just doesn't stack up.

Green Partyism

Tim Worstall, who seems to be much vexed by the Scandanavian Paradox (successful economies with high levels of welfare statism) these days, has a snippet on the Green Party seeking a new leader who is more 'working class'. In this case more working class equates a university educated college lecturer.

Whatever next for the Greens? Not content with wanting to make the party less 'white and middle class', they'll be wanting to make themselves 'relevant' next. It's the slippery slope to LibDemism, so I suppose it makes sense in the great scheme of things. To all intents and purposes is there any difference between the Simon Hughes wing of the LibDems and the Green Party?

Save The Carrier Bag

Of all the lost causes that this blog supports, the campaign to defend the carrier bag seems the most Quixotic. After all, who can love the humble supermarket carrier bag? They're cheap, ugly and functional items that manage to unite forces as disparate as the BBC, the Daily Mail and legions of right-thinking people everywhere. But not here.

Firstly, let's note that the terminology around these bags has shifted. The bags are now referred to as 'single-use carrier' bags, to emphasise the wastefulness of the whole enterprise. Single-use is bad by definition, however, who decided that supermarket carrier bags are single use? Most people I know generally re-use the bags. A lot of people have a pile of them at home for storing and carrying all kinds of stuff, including taking them back to the shops to use again.

Next we have to look at why 'single-use' has such negative connotations, and it's all to do with using up the Earth's scarce resources. Except that supermarket carrier bags are made from polyethelene, which comes from ethelene which is a waste product from natural gas production. If it wasn't used as a feedstock, then the ethelene would have to be burned off - which is both wasting energy and also produces more CO2 emissions (if you care about such things). So, far from wasting valuable resources, making carrier backs finds a use for an existing by-product.

But surely bags from renewables - like paper - would be better for the environment? Nope. Think again. Carrier bags are light, and take less energy to produce and transport than paper bags. According a story from the Independent (hardly a bastion of contrarian thinking), a study sponsored by the Enviornment Agency, showed that polyethelene carrier bags have about less than a third of the carbon emissions of paper bags.

Ah, but what about the pollution? What about the plastic 'garbage patch' twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific? We've all seen the pictures in the Daily Mail... Sorry, overdone. Not only is the size of the problem exagerrated, there's also not much evidence that carrier bags are a key component of the pollution.

So, in all, the plastic carrier bag is yet another example of environmentalism wanting to solve non-existent problems. The solutions proposed end up being worse for the environment, and in the process make life just that little bit more expensive and a little less convenient. So, par for the course really.

Faster than light neutrinos - not proven

So it looks like the faster than light neutrino experiment may have been wrong after all - just as most people suspected. Now what's interesting is that if ever there's an example of someone going against the scientific consensus then this has to be it - big time. And yet not once did I see anyone insisting that there was 'consensus' on the speed of light. Nobody called the team responsible for the experiment 'Einstein deniers'. The scientific societies didn't issue statements insisting that it was irresponsible to speculate that Einstein might be wrong. No papers were denied publication and no journal editors were pushed out of their jobs. Hell, from what I can see nobody was even ostracised for daring to suggest that neutrinos could break the light barrier.

Isn't this how science is supposed to work?
Isn't this precisely what we don't see when it comes to 'climate science'?

Russian Heatwave Due To CO2?

Having covered the Heartland affair early on, Richard Black of the BBC has been notcieably silent on the follow up. No news of the Gleick confession or the fact that Gleick's career is imploding - for example he's been dropped from the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) task Force on Scientific Integrity. Black is resolutely looking the other way, even when he's been directly challenged on it on his Twitter feed.

It was while checking on Black's Twitter feed that I saw mention of a story that says the Russian heatwave can be explained as part natural and part global warming. Or in Black's Tweet:

Latest on Russian heatwave - natural or human-driven? New AGU paper says a bit of both http://t.co/rIicn4Fu - extreme temp risk x3 from AGW

Follow the link and you get a story on the AGU website:

Russian heat wave had both manmade and natural causes

Now that's a fairly definite headline - and it's in contrast to previous studies that explained the heatwave as being due to natural weather phenomena and not AGW. Attribution - assigning causes to specific weather events - is a big deal. If scientists can pin the blame on climate disasters to CO2 then that's a major step forward in convincing the unconvinced masses that the AGW hyopthesis is not just a massive scam.

So how have they untangled the complex mix of factors that can partially pin the blame for the heatwave on human CO2 emissions?

Well, the short answer is that they haven't. What they've done is run a series of simulations and compared results. In one set of simulations they used data said to represent the 1990s, in the other they ran data said to represent the 2000s. The results showed that the chances of a comparable heatwave occuring were three times greater in the later set of simulations.

Yes, that's all there is to it. You run a model one way, tweak the inputs and run it again and then compare the results. You don't actually look in detail at the specifics of the real heatwave that happened. You don't look at the weather patterns or anything like that. You run two sets of simulations and just note that in the second set you can get some of the characteristics of a heat wave occuring more often.

I don't need to labour the obvious inadequacies of this. I don't need to point out the inherent uncertainties involved in such a process.

But where is the hint of this uncertainty in that headline or in Richard Black's Tweet? Where is there anything to indicate that this is all based on software and models?

Sceptic Blogosphere Devours Gleick

Peter Gleick's confession that he lied to obtain the Heartland documents - though at present he's insisting that he didn't fake the key document that has the warmists ablaze with righteous anger - is welcome. It would have carried a bit more weight had he not already been fingered as the most likely candidate by Steven Mosher, Roger Pielke and innumerable sceptic bloggers. Now that he's confessed, he'll be wanting to clear his name of the forgery charge by allowing some IT forensic analysis to be done on his computers and servers. It should be fairly straightforward to establish that the forged document arrived unbidden and wasn't just rustled up on his machine...

The whole affair casts an interesting light on the whole climate wars front, particularly on the asymmetry of forces.

While the warmists were over the moon about the Heartland documents because it shed a light on the perceived nefarious forces fighting 'climate science', what they revealed instead was the petty cash available to the sceptic side. When cast next to the millions of dollars available to the climate orthodox from governments, transnational bodies (the UN and the EU, for example), from chairtable foundations and big-dollar environmentalists (Greenpeace, WWF etc), the money available to sceptics is tiny. I mean really, really, really tiny.

And it's not just the money, it's also the media. The climate orthodox have at their disposal most of the world's mass media - from the bastions of climate alarmism at the BBC and the Guardian, to well-funded web sites such as RealClimate, DeSmogBlog and others.

And yet, despite the money and the media, the climate alarmists know they are losing support. Despite everything that they have done to subvert peer review - and the Climategate emails showed us what was going on, warts and all, without the need to resort to forgeries - more and  more papers are being published which cast doubt on the alarmism. The public perceives the lack of warming and the message that there is still so much doubt about what we do know is getting across. The only way for the alarmists to explain this process, despite the clear disparity of forces, is by an appeal to conspiracy theory. As the Guradian puts it, in its story about Gleick's confession, there is...

a network of fossil fuel interests, rightwing think tanks and politicians have been working to block action on climate change