[davidppp]

I'm a New Zealander.

The source of the "facts" in this blog post is none other than Ian Wishart, who is regarded by many in New Zealand as a crackpot. He is anti-gay, anti-science, anti-evolution, and very right wing. If you cross Murray from "Flight of the Chonchords" with Glenn Beck, you'll have a pretty good idea of who the guy is. Here's a review of one of his more recent books:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/books/news/article.cfm?c_id=134&#3...

Ian Wishart will not be very well known outside New Zealand, so I just wanted to point out that he has a massive agenda, as well as a reputation for relentlessly cherry-picking facts to support his points of view. Very few in NZ take him seriously. I strongly encourage all of you to treat his writings (which were mostly just reprinted in the link posted by cwan) with an extreme level of skepticism.

Finally, the New Zealand scientist mentioned in the post, Jim Salinger, does have an excellent reputation in New Zealand and around the world. He was part of the IPCC group, for example. It is a real shame, but I have a feeling his name is about to be dragged through the mud by these crackpots. I was very, very surprised to see his name associated with science as bad as that mentioned in the original blog post, until I saw that Ian Wishart was the source of the information.

[hop]

I'm a New Zealander

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ian Wishart is nowhere in the post or the source of "facts". Why write a diatribe about him?

The source is this organization - http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_...

[davidppp]

The post on wattsupwiththat.com is essentially just a rehash of one of Ian Wishart's blog posts. The relevant post is here:

http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/br...

This was linked at the top of the blog post linked to by cwan.

EDIT: I should add that while you're right about the source of the graphs and numbers, the scare-quoted "facts" in my first paragraph referred to way in which the post simply reprinted Ian Wishart's assertions as fact.

The individual graphs obviously come from official sources, but they are arranged in a very duplicitous way. I'm not sure how you can build a case from just two graphs and a few emails when there is an absolute torrent of data available. I assume it would be quite easy for me to find two more graphs that "prove" that the world will be covered in water in only five years and that we're all doomed.

[DanielBMarkham]

What if I started my reply off with:

"I'm a HN'er. The source of the parent comment is davidppp, who is a notorious crackpot and illiterate fool..."

I just was curious if you understood an ad hominem attack when it was directed at you, because you obviously aren't noticing it when you use it against others.

Let's repeat yet again: unintelligent, mean, illiterate, crackpots with horrible political views can get science right. And wonderfully credentialed, polite, intelligent, well-renown scientists can screw up science horribly. Science is not a popularity test or a beauty contest. We're on an equal playing ground where data and reproducible experimentation is all that matters.

[ewjordan]

Let's repeat yet again: unintelligent, mean, illiterate, crackpots with horrible political views can get science right. And wonderfully credentialed, polite, intelligent, well-renown scientists can screw up science horribly. Science is not a popularity test or a beauty contest. We're on an equal playing ground where data and reproducible experimentation is all that matters.

Sure, it's always possible.

But the prior probability that the crackpot got it right and the thousands of mainstream scientists all got it wrong (or worse, actually committed perhaps the furthest reaching fraud in the history of science by falsifying dozens and dozens of data sets, which is what is being alleged here) is properly very low, and we'd have to be fools to pretend otherwise.

That doesn't mean that we should ignore the questions altogether, but it's all the more reason to be skeptical. The behavior of some of these clowns when talking about evolution indicates that they haven't a care in the world for truth or science, and while that may be an ad hominem indictment and not a proof that they are wrong, it is more than enough to tell us to treat anything they say about science with some suspicion.

[thaumaturgy]

Absolutely right.

Now that that's settled, I think we need to start giving some serious credence to the scientific theories of everyone who earnestly believes that the moon landing was a hoax.

[InclinedPlane]

Do you have any FACTS to present? Or anything other than arguments from authority and ad hominem attacks?

[simc]

The facts can speak for themselves. Most laypeople don't have the time or training to make sense of them, so depend on reputation. So who would you trust, a reputable scientist or a partisan crackpot?

[simc]

Ian Wishart also publishes a magazine called "Investigate" which instead of doing investigative journalism publishes rumors and exaggerations. On the front cover of his magazine once he claimed to have the "smoking gun" that the Prime Ministers' husband was gay. The "evidence" was a photograph of him kissing somebody who was a close relative, so no he wasn't gay.