Message to Rex Murphy: Cut That Out Right This Minute

Yet more evidence that having a really marvelous grasp of the English language doesn't mean you actually know anything -- or, rather, that critique is not the same as analysis: in his Globe And Mail column last week, Rex Murphy attempted to make the case that global warming isn't happening. His evidence? He stepped outside, apparently. I guess if things are chilly in Toronto then so goes the globe.

It's a loathsome position Mr Murphy is staking out for himself but fortunately it's one he should find he's rather isolated in. I have to wonder if he knows what he's getting himself into. Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, George Noory. Not exactly the class of people I expect Rex is used to palling around with. What will they talk about? He'll have to buy all his new chums pocket dictionaries.

But that's the hell he's condemned himself to.

Thing is, while having such an eloquent voice out shilling for the forces of ignorance is a VERY dangerous thing, I can't help but feel a little sorry for the cranky ol'coot from Newfoundland (my current favourite province, I should note). It seems he has fallen under the spell of one of those lengthy tomes of shoddy, conservative-pleasing, quasi-science that pop up in airport bookstores now and then: Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - the Missing Science. It's over 500 pages long, has a raft of citations throughout and has both a colon and an N-dash in the title, I can see how Rex might be tricked into thinking it's legit.

As it turns out, it's anything but.

You can find a list of rebuttals of Plimer's book here. A particularly good one is a point-by-point analysis by mathematical physicist Ian Enting. The thrust of his critique is that Plimer's work has numerous internal inconsistencies and that despite extensive referencing, his more controversial claims lack citation or the contents of his reference are mis-quoted.

In short, Plimer never actually manages to prove that humans aren't causing climate change but that fact is obfuscated by all his misleading assertions, phony references and deceptively rendered graphs.

Meanwhile, Rex Murphy calls the book "fearless" and practically dares us to read it. Which, admittedly, I won't be doing. But then, I haven't read any of the more recent works on UFO research, homeopathy or cryptozoology but still I'm confident they're crap.