Factchecking Durkin
Rob Fenwick points me in the direction of the Great Global Warming Swindle website.
I’ve got my foot out of the door and was barely looking at the website, but two inaccuracies screamed out at me, one mere exaggeration, the other a bonkers, brainless, stupid factual error that only a complete moron would commit.
Claim the first:
A DVD of the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, will be available in the next few weeks (despite the strenuous efforts of those who support the theory of global warming to prevent its release).
These ’strenuous efforts’ amounted to writing Durkin a letter and asking him not to release it. What a big baby. Next, the website has a page explaining how the sun is responsible for global warming:
It would be surprising, surely, if the sun did not have a major influence on the earth’s climate (why is summer warmer than winter?).
Read that again - why is summer warmer than winter? The answer has nothing, zero, zip, to do with the temperature of the sun. It has everything to do with the Earth spinning on an axis which is tilted relative to its orbital plane (pre-schoolers struggling with this concept may find the diagrams here useful).
Durkin and WAGtv appear to be under the misapprehension that the Sun gets warmer in the summer and colder in the winter. They appear to be wholly unaware of the fact that when it is summer in the northern hemisphere, it is colder in the souther hemisphere. Indeed, one might even be so bold that they are unaware that the Earth is a globe at all, insisting that in fact it is flat (okay, maybe not, but the ’sun gets warmer’ theory of how seasons work went out in medieval times).
Two screaming inaccuracies in 30 seconds. And people take these clowns seriously?
(I’m convinced that even Durkin might concede he’s wrong on this one, but in the interest of this little boo-boo being whitewashed out of history, I’ve included it here for posterity).
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Loading ...Tags: environment, science, swivel-eyed-loons, the-left, tv
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April 27th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
They could try to weasle out of it by saying that the sun does cause the difference between summer and winter but not because of the sun’s temperature but because the difference in the distribution of the sun’s energy over the earth in summer and winter has significant effects.
I think you’re reading too much into it by suggesting that they’re saying the sun’s temperature is the cause of summer and winter, then again, what they mean is not clear and that does not help their case.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
But they’re using this as part of their case that global warming is caused by sun spots. The clear implication is that it is variations in the sun’s temperature that causes seasons.
April 28th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
James
When you say “they”, you mean “he”.
It all becomes a bit silly if one side says “Al Gore” said this stupid thing, and the other says “Paul Durkin” said something daft too. Everyone tries to win the argument by tarring the other side with the idiocies of the others’ self-appointed spokesmen, and we end up getting nowhere.
April 28th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Hmm, some interesting punctuation in my last comment. Need coffee.
April 29th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
By ‘they’ I mean WAGtv. If you’re going to be pedantic, don’t call Mark Durkin ‘Paul’.
April 29th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
I love your withering put-downs James, but this is the one that got away. His name’s Martin.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:02 am
I did say I needed some coffee. I guess we both do.