The errors and misstatements in “Climate Denialism”
14 hours ago Andy May 81 Comments
By Andy May
The featured image is by Josh, used with permission.
There are 20 clearly false statements and three additional problematic statements in Tinus Pulles’ “Climate Denialism.” Most of them stem from disagreements on how to interpret existing data. However, some are due to his lack of understanding of what we wrote or, intentional distortion of what we wrote. What is puzzling is I was asked to peer review this paper months ago and I sent in the review in October. Nearly all the errors you will see in the list below were pointed out then, yet they remain in the paper. To nearly everyone familiar with climate science literature and our paper, these errors are obvious. I find it more than a bit alarming that even the grammatical errors I pointed out in the paper last October are still in it. Why such a flawed paper was published is a mystery. Peer review is not working as intended.
Pulles appears to believe that dangerous human-caused climate change is an undisputed fact. He also repeatedly conflates “climate change” with “dangerous man-made climate change.” Human-caused global climate change has never been observed, either directly or statistically, only modeled. The paper is critical of our paper from earlier in the year (May & Crok, 2024), but that paper makes it clear that human-caused climate change is not an existential threat and the incidence and magnitude of recent extreme weather events have not exceeded expected natural variability as shown in the recent IPCC AR6 WGI report on page 1856 and elsewhere.
Two citations in Pulles, (Hoofnagle & Hoofnagle, 2007) and (Diethelm & McKee, 2009), are editorials and not academic articles. Further both are slanderous attacks on climate skeptics and compare them directly to people who deny the Holocaust occurred and other similarly abhorrent groups. In fact, Hoofnagle mentions the World War II Holocaust five times. The Holocaust is a historical fact, I have visited Auschwitz/Birkenau personally and know its horrors, I defy anyone to take a tour of Auschwitz/Birkenau and leave without tears in their eyes, I don’t think it is possible. On the other hand, the hypothesis that climate change is mostly man-made and potentially dangerous is based entirely on theoretical considerations and model projections, these are research topics that Hoofnagle and Hoofnagle admit they do not “understand … worth a damn.” It is disingenuous in the extreme to conflate denying the Holocaust to climate skeptics who are simply challenging a popular scientific hypothesis in a time-honored traditional way.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/01/the-errors-and-misstatements-in-climate-denialism/
