Climate sceptics vindicatedâŠnot
HOLD the front page! Climate change is bunk! Hold it again! It isnât! In this hyperconnected age a story can come and go before the ink has been smeared on the dead tree, let alone dried.
On 8 November many who would deny that human activity has anything to do with global warming were agog at news of a paper entitled by Daniel A. Klein of the Department of Climatology, University of Arizona and colleagues (Journal of Geoclimatic Studies, vol 23, p 273). It was just what they wanted to hear.
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Its authors concluded thus: âWe have been warned⊠that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding, but that we also jeopardise the funding of the departments for which we work⊠We deplore the aggressive responses we encountered before our findings were published, and fear the reaction this paper might provoke. But dangerous as these findings are, we feel we have no choice but to publish.â How brave! An editorial similarly praising the underdog, though less temperately, appeared alongside the paper.
âThere are times when computer users have to be patient â like when Sasha Middletonâs computer gave her a âTime remainingâ for a print job of âAbout 2023406814 hoursâ
According to bloggers, a well-known UK social anthropologist sent out an alert about the paper to a climate-sceptic email list â and withdrew it an hour or two later. Why? Because neither the authors nor their institutions nor the journal exist. A teensy clue might have been found in the inclusion of equations that are not only nonsensical but irreproducible here, due to their imaginative use of Thai and Serbian Cyrillic characters â alongside suspiciously perfect graphs. Then there was a list of other papers in the alleged journal â including, wonderfully, âSubmarine lightning strikes in the Hadean Zone: an unacknowledged cause of fish mortality?â
None of this deterred US radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who spent the best part of a show ranting against conventional climate science on the back of the spoof. He has subsequently acknowledged that he was hoaxed.
The author of the spoof wishes to remain anonymous, but Feedback tracked him down. He says the spoof exposes the âcredulity and scientific illiteracyâ of many climate sceptics, who âwill believe almost anything if it lends support to their position⊠From now on the âscepticsâ will have to do something they havenât bothered with in the past: check their facts.â
Hot waste for schools and hospitals
THE UK governmentâs Environment Agency has âhelped make our environment a safer place by managing a UK scheme to dispose of surplus radioactive sources in schools, museums and hospitalsâ, according to what we are assured is a slide from an internal briefing.
Feedback commends them on their initiative. After all, they have to put the stuff somewhere, donât they?
Curse of Feedback strikes again
TALKING of unconvincing science: following our story on 10 November, readers in New Zealand curious to try out Yoplait elivaé yogurt, featuring the digestivus culturus
bacterium, were out of luck. Andrew Harmsworth alerts us to a notice on consumer.org.nz warning customers that pots of the product with best-before dates between 10 November and 12 November were recalled, since âthere may be fragments of metal in the yoghurtâ.
Could this be the curse of Feedback striking again? Weâre not sure. But if you have any more nominations for âmost unconvincing scientific nameâ, do tell⊠and weâll see what happens.
IMPRESSED is the word for Nick Tayntonâs reaction to the UK Identity and Passport Service offering Braille stickers with the passports he was helping a family apply for, as the people concerned are all blind.
It didnât last. When the passports arrived, the family called to ask him to guess what useful information the stickers might convey. Would they helpfully give the passport-holderâs name, to help the family members tell one from another? Maybe the passport number, to help with visa applications and other identity checks? Er, no. They spell out in Braille the word âpassportâ.
Taynton is interested to hear other examples of offers of help that could have been so much more useful, and so is Feedback.
FINALLY, thanks to Roger Olsson for providing us with another example of a self-cancelling sign along the lines of âThere is no text printed on this pageâ (6 October). Visiting the Gellert Spa in Budapest, Hungary, recently he noticed a sign on a door in the entrance hall, reading (in English and German): âNo informationâ. He points out that this statement was correct â or rather, that it had been until somebody put the sign up.
For some reason, he adds, there was no information about a lack of information on any of the other surfaces of the building, such as the floor.
