Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:19:07 +1000WeeblyFri, 09 Mar 2018 05:28:32 GMThttp://www.stevebishop.net/exposed-andrew-bolt-hoist-on-his-own-climate-change-petards/exposed-andrew-bolt-hoist-on-his-own-climate-change-petardsON THE basis of his own methodology Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt is hopelessly wrong when making his assertions that the scientific consensus on man-made climate change is a fraud.
                      
Bolt seizes on what he depicts as failed predictions and contradictions to denounce the consensus as nonsensical and as a “mad global warming scare.”
 
What wonderful schadenfreude, then, to find that Bolt can be discredited in the same way – and many times over, thus on his methodology destroying not only his own credibility on climate change but demonstrating his claims are nonsensical and a mad anti-scientific scare.
 
Before exposing 10 of his many failed claims it’s worth asking why we should be bothered by the allegations of a person with no scientific qualifications who blithely dismisses the findings of millions of instrumental readings and thousands of scientists contributing to the International Panel on Climate Change, NASA, the Royal Society and nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations which state that climate change is a real and massive threat and is being caused by human action.
 
It’s because the fossil fuel industry is waging a guerrilla propaganda war against the world’s climate scientists who are battling to persuade governments that urgent, decisive action is needed now to prevent a global disaster.
 
In November 2017 more than 15,000 scientists warned in a doomsday paper published in Bioscience of “potentially catastrophic climate change.”
 
They urged: “As most political leaders respond to pressure, scientists, media influencers, and lay citizens must insist that their governments take immediate action as a moral imperative to current and future generations of human and other life.”
 
But while the Climate Institute found that 77% of Australians accept the reality of climate change, the annual Lowy Institute Poll found that only 54 per cent of them agreed that: “Global warming is a serious and pressing problem [and] we should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs.”
 
Bolt and other prominent right-wing commentators adopt the arguments fomented by agents of the fossil fuel industry to delay and minimise action – agents such as the USA’s Heartland Institute, the British Global Warming Policy Foundation and Australia’s Institute for Public Affairs.
 
The Heartland Institute’s web page carries quotes that it is ‘the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change’ and that ‘it has always been public about its ultimate goals — to keep global warming alarmists from winning the public debate’.
 
For ‘global warming alarmists’ read ‘97% of climate scientists’.
 
Andrew Bolt and his ilk repeat the propaganda originating from such lobbyists. Bolt has been given enormous power to influence people by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids which carry his columns.
 
He is a sniper for the fossil fuel lobby, holding back the advance of electoral pressure on governments and hurling petards of misinformation to cause doubt and mistrust.
 
So his fake claims need to be exposed.
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 1 (29-4-09)
 
He dismisses the fact that the world is warming as a myth and in a word: ‘Wrong’!

He asked in one of his columns: “What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted?
 
Here’s an answer by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “2017 marks the 41st consecutive year (since 1977) with global land and ocean temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average. The six warmest years on record for the planet have all occurred since 2010.”
 
And here’s a graph produced by former climate change sceptic Professor Richard Muller of the steadily increasing temperatures in Melbourne. There’s one for just about every major city in the world.
 
No, we can’t “see” that this warming is man-made but the Royal Society has a very detailed explanation of how “…scientists know that recent climate change is largely caused by human activities”.
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 2 (29-4-09)
 
He dismisses the fact that the seas are heating as a myth and uses the emphatic comment: ‘Wrong’!
 
To compound his error he adds: “If anything, the seas are getting colder.”
 
If he had checked with the CSIRO he would have discovered a headline on its website from the previous year: ‘Ocean warming on the rise’.
 
The report said: “The team of Australian and US climate researchers found the world’s oceans warmed and rose at a rate 50 per cent faster in the last four decades of the 20th century than documented in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report (IPCC AR4).”
 
The clearest demonstration of how wrong Bolt is can be found on the website of the USA Environmental Protection Agency where a graph shows a sharp rise in ocean temperatures since 2000.
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 3 (29-4-09)
 
He says rising sea levels are a myth and that “…there is little sign of any accelerated rises,…Venice is still above water”.
 
NASA’s website has a graph showing the sea has risen 8 centimetres since 1993 and confirms that the signs of accelerated rises are plainly visible on satellite altimeter measurements since 1992.
 
It says: “The rate of sea level rise in the satellite era has risen from about 0.1 inch (2.5 millimeters) per year in the 1990s to about 0.13 inches (3.4 millimeters) per year today.”
 
And Venice?
 
“Venice subsided about 120 mm in the 20th century due to natural processes and groundwater extraction, in addition to a sea level rise of about 110 mm at the same time,” said Pietro Teatini, a researcher with the University of Padova in Italy.
 
Venice For Visitors says a larger problem than the subsidence “is the rising sea level, which will become an even bigger threat as global warming melts the arctic ice caps. Already, the frequency of acqua alta (high tides) has increased from fewer than 10 times a year to more than 60 times a year in the last century.”
 
This can result in flooding of 40 centimetres or more in Piazza San Marco
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 4 (29-4-09)
 
He says it’s a myth that the polar ice caps are melting. ‘Wrong’ he says.
 
He said: “The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered.”
 
But NASA’s National Sea and Ice Data Center says: “Arctic sea ice extent for December 2017 averaged 11.75 million square kilometers (4.54 million square miles), the second lowest in the 1979 to 2017 satellite record. This was 1.09 million square kilometers (420,900 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average.”
 
The loss of ice is an area bigger than Egypt.
 
And NASA itself says: “Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum each September. September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13.2 percent per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.”
 
Scientists discovered last year  that the vast Greenland ice sheet has lost 269 billion tons of ice since 2002 and a large section is melting 80% faster between 2003 and 2014.
 
On the other side of the world the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre reports: “The ice shelves surrounding Antarctica have been thinning in response to climate change for at least two decades…”
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 5 (29-4-09)
 
He says it’s a myth that snow seasons are shorter.
 
But once again it’s Bolt who’s wrong.
 
“Global warming has shortened the snow season in the Swiss Alps by 37 days, as maximum snow depths have dropped by 25 percent since 1970,” the Pacific Standard reported last year.
 
The New England Climate Change Review reports: “A study out of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, showed that the average ski season in northeastern U.S. is shortening. Mountains are opening up later in the winter and closing earlier in the spring…”
 
Bolt might have some difficulty in dealing with what happened to the skiing season at the world’s highest resort in Bolivia. It’s been closed since 2005 because there’s no snow and the Chacaltaya Glacier on which it was based has melted.
 
The Andes Lidered website reports: “Bernard Francou, a glaciologist from Grenoble who has been travelling in South America for more than twenty years, knows the Chacaltaya glacier well: ‘This glacier was under observation as from 1991. It was still about 15 metres thick in 1997. It disappeared much more quickly than expected, but it was inevitable. Precipitations have been in deficit since 1976’.”
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 6 (29-4-09)
 
He claims: “…not one of the world's seven continents has set a record high temperature since 1974.”
 
But Wikipedia has a list of countries on all continents which have set record high temperatures – a total of 89 records since 1974.
 
Bolt says: “Europe's high remains the 50 degrees measured in Spain 128 years ago, before the invention of the first true car.”
 
Wrong again! This temperature has been discounted. In July last year The Spain Report said: “A new record high temperature was set in Spain on Thursday—46.9ºC—at the Córdoba airport measuring station in Andalusia, according to the Spanish Met Office AEMET.”
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 7 (19-11-14)
 
Those opposed to climate change action often say the world’s major emitters are doing nothing. Here’s Bolt: “China, the world’s biggest emitter, won’t even consider cutting its emissions before 2030 while it’s trying to make its people richer.”
 
But ScienceDirect found that: “China planned to reduce its CO2 emissions per unit GDP by 17% by 2015 on the basis of 2010. According to statistics, China reduced its CO2 emission per unit GDP by 15.8% when compared with 2010, thus achieving 92.3% of carbon reduction target set in 12th Five Year Plan.”
 
Climateaction.org reported: “China is implementing significant policies to address climate change. China’s CO2 emissions may have peaked more than a decade ahead of its Paris Agreement commitment to peak its CO2 emissions before 2030…. The ongoing reduction in coal use for the third year in a row has had a major impact.”
 
According to the Los Angeles Times: “China is banning traditional auto engines. Its aim: electric car domination.”
 
And News.com.au reported last year that coal fired power stations were in decline: “In China and India, 68 per cent of construction is now frozen at over 100 project sites.”
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 8 (20-9-17)
 
On September 20 last year he wrote in a column which I can no longer find in the Herald Sun archives but which shows up as an archived  headline on Google: “A landmark paper by warmist scientists in Nature Geoscience now concedes the world has indeed not warmed as predicted, thanks to a slowdown in the first 15 years of this century.”
 
The scientists who wrote the paper released a statement which says: “A number of media reports have asserted that our recent study in Nature Geoscience indicates that global temperatures are not rising as fast as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and hence that action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is no longer urgent. Both assertions are false. Our results are entirely in line with the IPCC’s 2013 prediction that temperatures in the 2020s would be 0.9-1.3 degrees above pre-industrial [levels].”
 
But a day later Bolt repeated his claim, saying on Macquarie Radio: “Some scientists now are saying we have got it wrong. There are a few. Two in Nature Geoscience have admitted that predictions which are based on mathematical models on how the climate works ran too hot.”
 
The fact that temperatures rose between 1998 and 2012 was underlined in a joint American and Chinese investigation last year which also showed the Arctic warmed more than six times the global average in that period.
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 9 (18-2-17)
 
Al Gore helped alert the world to the dangers of climate change in his film An Inconvenient Truth and so has become a particular target for Bolt who tries to denigrate him and his campaigning.
 
A typical Bolt claim is that: “Gore's hysterical and error-riddled film was even presented as the truth to countless school students here and overseas.”
 
In fact, when a judge of the English High Court examined the film he certainly did not find it was error-riddled.
 
The case was bought by people objecting to the film being shown in state schools.
 
Climate denier Lord Monckton claimed he had ‘identified three dozen scientific errors in it’ but Justice Burton merely identified “nine statements by Gore as departures from the scientific mainstream”.
 
He ruled that when the film was shown in schools it would have to include guidance notes about the nine statements.
 
Justice Burton's judgment found it was clear that the film “…is substantially founded upon scientific research and fact… I have no doubt that Dr Stott, the Defendant's expert, is right when he says that: 'Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.'”
 
The Observer reported: “…the case was supported by a powerful network of business interests with close links to the fuel and mining lobbies.”
 
In summary: An Inconvenient Truth was not error-riddled. A judge decided it was substantially founded upon scientific fact and did not contain three dozen scientific errors but nine statements which departed from the mainstream.
 
BOLT’S FAKE CLAIMS 10 (24-11-09)
 
A favourite argument by deniers is that somehow the world’s climate scientists are collaborating in a criminal conspiracy by lying when they provide evidence of man-made climate change.
 
Here’s one example by Andrew Bolt: “…there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world,,, This conspiracy comprises a group of warming scientists who have been central in spreading the false claim that the world has never been hotter and man's gases are to blame.”
 
For this to be true, two US Government agencies, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, together with the UK’s Meteorological Office would have to convince all their scientists to lie about figures.
 
Each takes readings from instruments around the world, publishes its own figures and feeds them into the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
 
But the argument was settled conclusively by Professor Richard Muller, an outspoken climate change sceptic, who decided to conduct his own massive examination of global temperatures over the ages.
 
A foundation established by billionaire arch denier Charles Koch was the second largest donor to Muller’s initial research with $150,000.
 
To many people’s astonishment Muller discovered that the findings  from his team’s 14.4 million monthly temperature observations from 44,455 sites throughout the world were actually “stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
 
“Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years.”
 
As a further blow to deniers he confessed: “Much to my surprise, by far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.”
 
He emphasizes that the match between the data and the theory doesn’t prove that carbon dioxide is responsible for the warming, but the good fit makes it the strongest contender, saying: “To be considered seriously, any alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does carbon dioxide.”
 
A statement from the study said: “Some of the scientists on the Berkeley Earth team admit surprise that the new analysis has shown such clear agreement between global land-temperature rise and human-caused greenhouse gases. ‘I was not expecting this,’ says Richard Muller, but as a scientist, I feel it is my duty to let the evidence change my mind.’”
 
THE ILLUSORY TRUTH EFFECT
 
Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect - if you say something often enough people will start believing it.
 
March 1 2007 – Bolt wrote: “Any day now global warming will change from the world’s biggest scare to the world’s biggest joke.”
 
October 6 2009 - Bolt wrote: “THIS mad global warming scare could at last be over.”
 
October 7/8, 2009 – under a headline reading “Save the planet! Pee before you fly” Bolt wrote an article which I can no longer find in the Herald Sun archives: “Belief in man-made global warming will soon be laughed out of existence.”
 
December 7 2014 – Bolt wrote: “…climate science. This is the science where one plus one can equal three one day and six the next — yet never may we question the expert. This must change and I believe, finally, that it is.
 
December 10 2016 - Bolt Headline: “McCrann on the end of the great climate madness.”
 
And back on December 22, 2008 Bolt wrote: “Scepticism grows. There is a boom in interest in the blog of Anthony Watts, man-made global warming sceptic, Rightly so.”
 
Has the site boomed? In October 2013 Watts boasted his site was ranked at 9,808th  in the list of the world’s most visited websites according to the Amazon ranking company Alexa.
 
Since then the site’s popularity has plummeted. In early March this year it was down to the 38,547th most visited site.
 
So Bolt is once again wrong, wrong, wrong!
 
For more than 10 years Bolt has urged readers to believe that the global scientific consensus on climate change is about to collapse. Not so much illusory as delusory wishful thinking.
 
As mentioned earlier, a poll last year found that 77% of Australians accept the reality of climate change,
 
Time for Bolt to read How a Professional Climate Change Denier Discovered the Lies and Decided to Fight for Science.
 
And time for him to do what he has frequently demanded his targets to do when he alleges they have misled people – apologise, as in these examples: Waleed Aly and Tom Whitty, several global warming “evangelists and carpetbaggers”, Craig Emerson and Michael Mann.
 
ENDS

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