Sunday, April 29, 2012

"My brother, Jerry, is a genius."

That's how Andrew Mitrovica began his Ottawa Citizen column sneering at Danielle Smith's position on the global warming debate:
My brother, Jerry, is a genius. ... He’s a humble genius.
... My brother is a world-renowned geophysicist at Harvard University.
... he has examined the impact of climate change on sea levels.
... My brother is not a zealot. He is a careful, judicious scientist.
Danielle Smith on the other hand:
... The same cannot be said about Wildrose party leader Danielle Smith, a former newspaper columnist, and researcher for the notoriously partisan Fraser Institute.
... Smith assured Albertans that she “will continue to watch the debate in the scientific community.”
..Perhaps the “brilliant” Wildrose leader will now come to her senses about climate change instead of parroting and pandering to wilful ignorance.
So, for Mitrovica, there is no debate. His genius brother told him so. Apparently he hadn't heard of world-renowned James Lovelock's recent reversal:
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
Maybe Mitrovica only reads consensus media, like the Ottawa Citizen, which didn't say a peep about Lovelock.

[via Donna Laframboise: Naked Intolerance in the Media]

9 comments:

hunter said...

Funny how a present newspaper columnist doesn't believe a former one. What does that say about him? No credibility maybe?

Anonymous said...

I'm a computer programmer. I'm a genius too but I know little to nothing about sea levels and the rest of it. Neither does a geophysicist.

Anonymous said...

The comments section at the Ottawa Citizen - sorted by most popular - are extremely well written, respectful, and totally put the ignoramous who wrote the original article in his place. Nice to see !

Anonymous said...

If he is a genius maybe he can explain how the Kyoto treaty would actually reduce C02 emissions.

Chinese industry uses about 20% more energy per unit of production than our clean industry.

I've read hundreds of columns on Kyoto, but have never heard anyone explain how giving the higher emitting factories in China an even bigger competitive advantage over our clean factories will reduce emissions.

Basic economic theory suggest that more production would move to the higher C02 emitting factories in China while our clean ones here go bankrupt.
So more CO2 and more real pollution, not less.

Stan

Anonymous said...

It always amazes me that people look at the short term only -- 26,000 to 13,000 years ago the ice was 4 km thick on alot of North America -- that has been melting ever since, and thus raising sea levels all along. I somehow doubt that was all due to the influence of man. It amazes me that people use glaciers as a warning sign -- well yes, they have been melting for 13,000+ years.

I believe there is climate change occuring, in fact the earth is a dynamic system that is not static and is constantly changing. Over the entire history of the earth, climate has warmed and other times it has cooled. It appears to be part of some cyclical change of climate.

The science is not "settled" on what causes it -- many theories exist, but some how the environmentalist movement has hijacked the science and have taken a luddite position that man is to blame.

It is criminal to model human influenced climate change on 150 years of climate data and extrapolate it to a planet that is 4+ billion years old.

There are many factors such as the wobble of the earth, variations in magnetic fields, variations in sun intensity, volcanic activity, asteroids, variations in oceanic currents, even the path of the solar system thru the galaxy as contrary to popular opinion, vacuum of space is not necessarily a vacuum and do contain particles and gases and ice from various asteroid belts and expulsion of matter from the sun and we are only scratching the surface on what effect that has on earth.

Problem is too many people have tried to simplify the complex environment the earth is with very narrow parrameters instead of looking at the big picture.

Pretty sad.
Gerry

Gerald said...

I love the comment by Gerry,as it makes a whole lot of common sense.Gerald

Anonymous said...

thats the problem with the internet. when you screw up this bad on a topic you know nothing about, that mistake is there for a very long time. whats even better is that he throws his brother under the same bus at the same time. priceless.
i dont know about geophysical genius, but his column is definitely comedic genius.

brad maynard

JR said...

Great comments. Jerry maybe an academic "genius", but he certainly doesn't show much common sense.

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