Media Watch downs the Bolt whole

Sorry about the headline, but after the seminal Bulled by a Gore article by global warming skeptic dinosaur, Andrew Bolt, I became obsessed with his headline style.

So my blogs refuting each of the ten points carried the following headlines.

Gulled by a Bore? One Bolt burger coming up

Gulled by the Bore? Bolt-burger #2 coming up

Bolt burger #3 is a FUD dud

Bolt burger #4a is meat substituted

Gristle detected in Bolt burger #4b

Bolt burger #5 - snow burger

Bolt burger # 6 is undercooked and raw

I got to six and let the rest slide. These skeptics operate like scientific guerillas, and the battleground is the mind of the public. They try to keep the public from understanding that a scientific consensus exists, with roughshod but effective techniques like wheeling out known scientific contrarians, like S. Fed Singer, or Richard Lindzen, top opine that there is no concensus. This is a smoke and mirror trick for the readers of the likes of Andrew Bolt. A scientist publishing a sceptical argument in the opinion pages of a newspaper does not debunk the scientific consensus arrived out of the darwinian struggle for scientific validity that happens when research is published in a peer-reviewable forum, like scientific journals.

But the public is not to know that, and people like Bolt predate upon the greater public's understandable ignorance of scientific method. It works for the oil and coal companies that fund the thinktanks that hacks like Bolt like to get their sources from. The outcome is that the public is confused about climate change, so inaction seems reasonable.

If you are a rabbit in a spotlight.

That's why it was good to see Bolt's global warming stance so publicly disembowled on the institution he hates for it's apparent lack of bias, on the ABC, and worse, Media Watch.

I expect global warming skeptics like Andrew Bolt are quickly on their way to becoming coal and oil in a million years time. He's a dinosaur. If, in the future we are still silly enough to dig him up, hopefully by then we will have mastered the sequester of his harmful carbon dioxide byproduct.

I vote leave him in the ground and concentrate on solar, and using conservation strategies so base-line power generation is not so much of a problem.

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