Readers of Skeptic magazine should exercise skepticism themselves regarding the magazine’s biased and flawed reporting on global warming, a well-known global warming expert observes in a newly published paper by the Science and Public Policy Institute.
“Be skeptical, be very skeptical,” Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchly, advises in “Be Skeptical of Skeptic‘s Skepticism of Skeptics.”
Hate Speech Shows Magazine’s Bias
Critiquing Skeptic‘s recent front-page article “Climate Change Q&A: Climate Deniers’ Arguments & Climate Scientists’ Answers,” Monckton writes, “Anyone who starts out by using the hate-speech term ‘Climate Deniers’—laden with political overtones of Holocaust denial—cannot expect to be taken seriously as an objective scientist.”
Monckton documens dozens of flaws and misrepresentations in the Skeptic article, pointing out the Skeptic article misrepresents the fundamental issues in the global warming debate. Writes Monckton, “It is at once clear that the author is approaching the question from a political and not a scientific standpoint, for he is carefully failing to ask the right questions. A genuine ‘seeker after truth’ (al-Haytham’s beautiful phrase for the scientist) would surely have started by asking and attempting to answer the three pertinent questions that are at the core of the skeptical case he is attacking.” Instead, the Skeptic article presents an inaccurate and easily attacked straw man purporting to represent global warming skeptics.
Monckton also shows how the Skeptic article improperly relies on flawed alarmist computer models which consistently predict more warming than has occurred in the real world.
Even if the alarmists’ speculative predictions of rapid temperature increase had come true, this still would not justify the “solutions” offered by global warming alarmists, Monkton notes, writing, “It would be a whole lot cheaper to adapt later than to abate now.”
Article Presents Discredited Claims
Monckton also documents that the Skeptic article presents discredited global warming claims as if they were true, including assertions global warming is causing rapidly melting ice caps, killer heat waves, and dangerous sea-level rise.
Most of the Skeptic article’s footnotes and “scientific” references, Monckton points out, “are references are to tendentious, politicized websites such as ‘skeptical’-science, ‘real’-climate or Exxon-‘secrets’. Only four of them are to peer-reviewed papers by climate scientists.”
“The only remarkable thing about the much-recycled arguments from the far-out Left that [the article] so turgidly regurgitates is that any news medium would still be ignorant enough, uncritical enough, prejudiced enough and unashamed enough to print them,” Monckton explains in conclusion.
James M. Taylor ([email protected]) is managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
