Apr/10
12:17 7
Every ash cloud has a silver lining for Cameron
With Messrs Hannan, Helmer and their friends preaching the “collective flight from reality” of climate change, the “60 year mistake” of the NHS and equivocating on gay rights, David Cameron may be praying the volcanic ash cloud remains – over Aéroport de Strasbourg and Bruxelles-National, at least:
Cameron’s MEPs are his political equivalent of the mad old lady in the attic.
Dec/09
09:05 10
Big boy bloggers must be big enough to admit when they get it wrong
On Sunday evening Iain Dale posted some extremely sloppy climate change denial ‘science’ submitted by one of his readers. Scrapbook won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that the whole effort was completely and utterly flattened by Unity (@Unity_MoT) at Liberal Conspiracy and also by the Freethinking Economist. When it eventually came, the update Dale made to his original post left a lot to be desired:
I posted this because I thought it was interesting. It was not my work, as I made clear in the opening line. I then at the end encouraged readers to test the data themselves. And yet Will Straw, for it is he, seems to think I have something to apologise for.
With sleight of hand like this Dale will not be joining the Magician’s Circle any time soon. Will Straw didn’t ask for him to apologise but to accept that the basis for the original post was unsound – just as Straw’s Left Foot Forward did with some speed when they recently misstepped. He goes on:
I regard the internet as a place for debate – where you can throw something out there and let people debate the rights and wrongs.
No sooner had the Liberal Conspiracy piece been published than the left/liberal twitterati started to probe Dale for a response. Scrapbook’s request for him to engage rather than evade the issues elicited the tweet below. Does this sound to you like someone who is interested in a debate?
On the ropes and seemingly incapable of a dignified concession and face-saving refocus on the broader issues, Dale adopts the tactic of using chaff to deflect from the debate by reverse-smearing his opponents:
Most people on the left on Twitter haven’t really bothered engaging in an argument – all they have done is hurl insults. That’s fine. I expect it from them. They’re the internet equivalent of pond life.
You can bore yourself trawling Twitter Search for evidence of this mass abuse but you won’t find it. With the exception of this rebuke from Sunny Hundal (“Poor @iaindale is sulking now that climate denialism tripe posted on his blog is exposed as shite”) there isn’t anything which would offend even Stephen Fry.
Iain Dale is a big boy blogger.
But is he big enough to admit the basis of his post was wrong?
See also: Left Foot Forward
Dec/09
09:25 4
Those conspiracy theories in full…
And for a brilliant, albeit less funny, debunking of the recent controversy surrounding emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, check out the latest Climate Denial Crock of the Week.
Sorry if blogging is light for the next couple of days…
Scrapbook is off to see the Loch Ness Monster in one of the UFOs captured at Roswell.
Nov/09
22:49 9
Star of Tory climate change conference was paid to deny effects of passive smoking
Left Foot Forward reported today that Tory MEP Roger Helmer is organising a “climate change sceptics’ conference” in Brussels. The list of speakers is a Who’s Who of climate change denial – people with an axe to grind in one hand and a distinct lack of peer-reviewed science in the other.
But one name on the list of speakers jumped out at Scrapbook – that of Fred Singer. This is a man with a track record not only of whoring himself out to the powerful vested interests that fund climate change denial – but also to tobacco companies trying to stem the tide of research linking passive smoking to cancer and other illnesses in the 1980s and 90s.
Singer may well have built his reputation as an atmospheric physicist but by the 1990s he was working for a front group run by a PR company and funded by tobacco giant Philip Morris. The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was established in 1993 to hang the label of “junk science” round research on the effects of passive smoking - including a Royal College of Physicians study showing that 17,000 under fives were hospitalised each year in the UK by second hand smoke. Other materials the tobacco industry paid Fred Singer to supress include:
A review by the World Health Organization concluded that passive smoking is a cause of bronchitis, pneumonia, coughing and wheezing, asthma attacks, middle ear infection, cot death, and possibly cardiovascular and neurobiological impairment in children. These findings were confirmed by the UK’s Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health (SCOTH) which reviewed the evidence in 2004 following its initial report on secondhand smoke in 1998 … A recent study in Hong Kong found that babies living with two or more smokers were 30 per cent more likely to need hospital treatment than those who lived in smoke-free homes – Action on Smoking and Health
As for the link between smoking and cancer, his involvement with a campaign claiming that the relationship between passive smoking and cancer was one of ”The Top Five Environmental Myths” speaks for itself.
Rather than hosting this charlatan at the European Parliament, perhaps Roger Helmer MEP should invite Fred Singer to an NHS cancer ward.
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