Australian scientist Andrew Glikson has a very strange article in the Conversation. He appears to believe that we sceptics are like something out of 1984.
Ideologically dominated or totalitarian societies – such as George Orwell’s famous “1984” Ingsoc – are marked by:
- attempts to alter reality (“2 + 2 = 5 if the party says so”)
- elimination of history (“He who controls the past, controls the future”)
- rewriting collective memory (“Oceania is at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”)
- The corruption of logic through aleration and elimination of language “Newspeak”
- mind control (“thought crime”).
But even science fiction writers such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Doris Lessing did not envisage a civilisation that would knowingly, against the best scientific evidence, devastate its own atmosphere and ocean system as comprehensively as has been and continues to be done through anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change.
He goes on to list some alleged sceptic transgressions, among which one of the highlights is the claim that we are engaged in
3) Negating empirical scientific measurements by misciting the literature and propagating unreferenced plots from unknown sources. An example is the exaggeration of the Medieval Warm Period, which reached less than 25% of 21st century warming.
Given that his criticism is "unreferenced plots from unknown sources", it is unfortunate that he doesn't actually give any source at all for his claim about the MWP. This is known in the trade as a "carcrash", I believe.
But what a strange claim it is - only 25% of 21st century warming? Can this be correct? Here's the graph from the Fourth Assessment Report:
Andrew Glikson is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.
Bishop Hill