Today, the Washington Times ran an op-ed by science-denier-for-hire Steve Milloy titled “2012 GOP guide to the climate debate.” Based on the number of errors and irrelevancies masquerading as serious concerns I discovered while reading it, the Washington Times should have titled the op-ed “How to lie to voters about climate disruption.”

Here’s a brief rundown of all the problems I found. I’ll be dealing with a few of the worse errors in greater depth in a follow-up post.

Errors

Irrelevancies

“science doesn’t work on a consensus basis” – This is true, but when 97% of expert in anything say the same thing, it’s best to listen closely. Furthermore, a scientist’s fame would be assured if he or she could prove a dominant theory wrong, so to have 97% of climate scientists agreeing on the human-caused nature of climate disruption is a huge deal. “science is driven by data, not groupthink.” – It’s not “groupthink” when the data is at the level of being nearly incontrovertible. Even Anthony Watts’ own paper confirms this point, although he appears to be playing this down to his readership. “we recognize that climate is changing continually, albeit slowly.” – there’s nothing slow about climate change these days. Slow on a human timescale is lightning-fast on geologic timescales, and previous changes in climate (due to ice ages and the like) have been measured on the order of hundreds to thousands of years, not decades like the changes humans are driving. Furthermore, while wildlife has in many cases adapted to prior changes in climate, the pace of prior changes provided enough time for species to adapt – the rate of climate change due to human factors is expected to be too fast for many species to adapt, causing extinctions that might be avoided. “Candidates should not fall for bogus distractions like melting polar ice…” – Melting polar ice is not a distraction, but rather support for the idea that climate models projections are accurate. Models projected that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the globe, and this warming is being observed. As a result, permafrost is melting and atmospheric methane is on the rise as it is released from permafrost and submarine deposits. A mass methane release is one of the possible tipping points for the global climate, and as such is hardly a “distraction.” Furthermore, observed melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is also going to be a major issue for the US to address as the melting drives sea level rise and dramatically increases the risks of flooding to low-lying coastal areas such as major port facilities. “Alarmists call it [CO2] ‘carbon pollution’; the rest of us call it ‘life.'” – This is a “CO 2 is plant food” argument, but it neglects the fact that CO 2 is only a fertilizer if there is enough water and nutrients to support growth. Scientists have tested this claim and found that it’s not clear-cut – sometimes plants do better, but sometimes they do worse. And with climate models projecting increasing temperatures and major changes to precipitation patterns, more plants are likely to do worse than better.

Given Milloy’s history of creating misleading polls, being caught lying on behalf of Philip Morris and working with people caught trying to bribe scientists, it’s hardly a surprise that he’d write an op-ed so filled with lies, errors, and irrelevancies as this one. Still, it takes great skill to jam so many into an op-ed only 20 paragraphs long.