Tony Thomas: Climate Science – How She is Done by Lewandowsky and Karoly

Investigative journalist Tony Thomas emailed me with a new piece he has written for Quadrant Online. It details how Stefan Lewandowsky and David Karoly along with some others have rehashed some old greencrap based on ancient dodgy climate and health models to scare Australian schoolkids with. An instructive read:

Tony Thomas

Climate Science – How She is Done

A widely touted report detailing the current death toll from rising temperatures — which aren’t rising at all, just by the way — is even more dubious than the provenance of the 14-year-old academic guesstimate on which the current alarms are based.

With the Australian Academy of Science’s climate team now re-writing its 2010 booklet on dangerous climate change, it’s time for a bit of investigation. The original, 24-page booklet went out to nearly a million users, mainly schoolkids and teachers, so the current re-writing team has a heavy responsibility to treat the climate controversies fairly.

The Academy’s then-president, Kurt Lambeck, had gone cap in hand to the Department of Climate Change for funding of the first edition, walking away with $55,000. Sorry, Kurt, not a good look.

The 2010 document, by a working group of two AAS Fellows (Dr John Church and Dr Mike Raupach, co-chair), and seven non-Fellows brought in to lend a hand, often lapsed into advocacy, as I discussed here. One of those was Professor David Karoly, one of Australia’s most frequent climate-catastrophe publicists.

The 2010 document says the draft was “reviewed” by an Oversight Committee, of six Fellows and one non-Fellow. Asked who is re-writing and reviewing the 2014 version, the academy’s PR person informed me,

“Both groups are the same as for the previous booklet, with the exception that Professor Garth Paltridge has withdrawn and his place taken by Professor Kurt Lambeck.” (Actually Paltridge, a highly-qualified sceptic, never ‘withdrew’. He wasn’t asked to participate in the 2014 re-write).

In the case of Karoly, let’s look at his handling of some internal business of the 2010 report. In mid-2011, he published an essay on the university/CSIRO-funded blog The Conversation. His essay was the 12th in a 13-part (no less) Conversation series, each an assault on climate sceptics. In the 13th essay, Karoly and other signatories endorsed the interesting claim that 140,000 people are being killed annually by climate change.

There seems a real risk that this improbable factoid could worm its way into the Academy’s re-write, terrifying the schoolkids.

Read the full story here