Reading Comprehension 101
By I’ve asked this before, but do certain A-List wingnuts actually take the time to read on articles to which they link, or do they just find endorsement for the views they already–
OK, this is shaping up to be another installment of “Simple Answers to Simple Questions.” That being said, here’s the article that gave Rubble Boy his morning wood. An astronomer by the name of Habibullo Abdussamatov, who heads the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, believes — contra the established consensus among actual climate scientists — that the Sun bears most of the responsibility for climate change. And here’s the critical section that Reynolds and others appear to have missed:
“His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University.
“And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.”
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that “the idea just isn’t supported by the theory or by the observations.”
. . . Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov’s theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet’s surface.
He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth’s climate and virtually no influence on Mars.
But “without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice,” said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.
So National Geographic found someone willing to make grand, contrarian pronouncements on a subject outside his actual field of research. Moreover, they found a number of sources who, by using simple tool like, say, science, were able to point out how full of shit he is. And Reynolds — applying the rule that only contrariantism counts as non-partisan — links to it in his typically breezy way, releasing an Army of Davids upon the world like a plague of toads.
. . .Media Matters has more . .