Rush To Judgment

A Throwback To The Plasticine Era?

Shoddy targets invite cheap shots. This week, a non-existent article in a non-existent learned journal was dangled as blogosphere bait to lure pundits onto the scientific rocks.
It succeeded.

The pseudo-study,complete with bogus equations, suggested man-made CO2 does not cause global warming, and sure enough, within 48 hours Rush Limbaugh was repeating it to his  20 million followers as scientific gospel just as he has regurgitated  the assertions of climatological boiler room operators before.

What makes this episode richly comic is less K Street gurus finding pure gibberish:

4δ161x Λ³Жญ5,6,1,8Φ-4 = {(ΣΨ²Њyt3-14๖P9) x 49}/2β x ⅜kxgt-§
"very convincing "and swallowing references to fossils from the "Miocene, Pliocene and Plasticine" eras, but that Limbaugh refused to disbelieve the wheeze even when bona fide scientists told him it was a joke.

Scientifically illiterate Limbaugh staffers like Marc Morano infamously insist global warming is a "hoax", but this time Limbaugh moved beyond shaping the ignorance of his listeners to ignoring the warnings of his own "expert climatologist here on staff." who issued this disclaimer--

TO: Listeners of Rush Limbaugh on Thursday, November 8, 2007
FROM: Roy W. Spencer
RE: GLOBAL WARMING STUDY HOAX

"Yesterday (11/7/07), a "research study" was circulating on the internet which claimed to have found the "real" reason for global warming. Even though the hoax was quite elaborate, and the paper looked genuine, a little digging revealed that the authors, research center, and even the scientific journal the study was published in, did not exist. I sent an e-mail to Rush about the issue regarding the hoax, with a copy of the "research study."  Unfortunately...he thought that I was calling global warming a hoax, rather than the study" --Roy W. Spencer                

Unfortunately for Roy, who far from being "here on staff" is Professor at the University of Alabama,  Rush puts a scientific foot in his atmospheric mouth almost monthly, witness his 27 September effort to shred the Montreal Convention :

"This is the big news today, and this is oh-my-God big news.  The atmospheric chemists... It now turns out -- and this is a story from the journal Nature.com.  It turns out that a key chemical reaction that was part of the theory that manmade chemicals are causing destruction of stratospheric ozone has been found to be almost ten times weaker than assumed... these scientists are nevertheless circling the wagons around the Freon ban ...Yes, there are biased scientists out there "

He earlier told millions that ozone depletion stems not from freons, but  an Antarctic volcano , whose chlorine output he exaggerated by four orders of magnitude .

While biowags threaten to name a life form in Limbaugh's honor-- Bombastacter oxycontinans is up for grabs,  Al Gore remains competitive in climate hype,  qualifying for Journal of Geoclimatic Studies editorship by learnedly informing Congress that CO2 has turned Venus "hotter than the boiling point of lead"

Considering how much of the toxic heavy metal has been strip mined from the Tennessee environmentalist's family estate, he ought to know better.

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Comments

[Pyre]

"... hotter than the boiling point of lead"?

Well, what's a 1000˚C error between friends?

As to placing the blame for Venus's surface temperature, I myself once mistakenly believed it might have a bit to do with Venus being closer to the Sun.

However, some while back a radio station reported that a UFO seen overhead at midnight had been given the satisfactory explanation that it was Venus.

Overhead. At midnight.

Thus, now we know Venus is actually farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the cause of Venerian heat must indeed be a greenhouse effect, no doubt due to that unfortunate planet's continued use of fossil fuels, an object lesson for us all.

[Josh]

What was the bad science that Carl Sagan popularized?

[craig]

Well Sagan did push the Nuclear Winter theory, though he later admitted that their calculations were off or something like that (or maybe it was new data showed it was wrong).

[Steve Bloom]

Now be fair, Russell -- I think we can be quite sure Al meant to say melting point. It was a slip, not a fib, in sharp contrast to Rush's output.RESPONSE
To be fair, both are scientifically quite clueless as to what they recite. Al gave fair warning of his innumeracy in Earth In The Balance with a graph of the rate of species extinction going dead vertical in the year 2000.

It has been redacted from the new edition without comment or. correction. Since Al used to be lead zinc mine proprietor I am not sure what he means

[Global Warming Skeptic]

I am a big fan of Rush(as a form of entertainment and opinion, not news). That being said he has fallen for 1 or 2 hoaxes/jokes in the past 12 months.