As I have noted before, the great thing about being an opinion-maker is that you can make a claim that turns out to be wrong or unsubstantiated, but rest easy in knowing that your original post will have dropped off the front page and people will be busy discussing your new content by then. Andrew Bolt has the added advantage of not being a single-issue blogger, meaning that when one bit of cherry-picked evidence falls to pieces he can divert direct his readers’ attention to something completely different.
But instead of just responding to new content, we should retrieve some claims and examine them in light of new information. For instance, let’s look back just one month:
Arctic ice reappears, but where’s Wilkinson?
…
And before your very eyes, the Arctic ice reappears:
Will Four Corners report the rise in Arctic ice the way it reported the fall?
Will Andrew Bolt report the fall in Arctic ice the way he reported the rise?
NB: In an update to the same post, Bolt made an issue of the fact that the introduction to Lateline’s interview with Ian Plimer was available online while the transcript of the actual interview was not. The transcript is certainly there now – obviously, based on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy principle of which Bolt is so fond, the transcript’s publication is a result of Bolt unmasking a conspiracy to keep the people from hearing Plimer speak the truth.
31 Comments
It’s great Bolt has been pwned again.
It’s scary as all hell that the Arctic is disappearing before our eyes.
I take it Mr Ziegler is asking a rhetorical question. Bolt own up to being wrong? Are you kidding?
Parliamentary question time was fun today. I love watching the Libs get rooted up the botty.
well done. I’d like to see this site do more of these retrospective fact-checking because as you say bolt just hopes that once his inaccurracies drop off the front of his blog people will forget about it. But just because he made an unsubstantiated statement a month ago, doesn’t mean we should all just excuse his inexpertise and forget about it.
Top work, Tobby.
i don’t know what’s worse the terrible fact checking or the way he avoids some topics
“i don’t know what’s worse the terrible fact checking or the way he avoids some topics”
Neither – That he has adoring fans is worse…. Unbelievable actually!
I think I now understand how/where Bolt gets his science:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
…obviously, based on the post hoc ergo propter hoc
fallacyprinciple…You know how to talk to me, TZ.
In fairness to Bolt regarding the transcript of the Lateline interview — I tried to access it at the time, the introduction was indeed there immediately, but I stopped looking for the actual interview when it still wasn’t there 2 or 3 days later….Such a long delay is rather unusual.
Scott
Who’s Tobby?
It’s Tobias’ alter-ego.
Gavin, that reminds me of the issue I had a couple of weeks ago relating to this post and makes me wonder whether there’s some funny interactions between proxy servers and the Lateline/ABC site. I had been trying repeatedly to access the transcript I’ve quoted there, from the day after it aired through into the following day, and it wasn’t showing up. Bolt had linked to and pasted from the transcript, yet some commenters on his site were also saying they couldn’t get the transcript to appear. I ended up having to access it from my phone, copy the text and paste it into an email to myself so I could then insert it into the blog post. It was really infuriating.
And Tobby prefers the term “secret identity” to “alter-ego”.
TZ – Nice post. I agree that reflecting on some of the claims by Bolt are worthwhile. He re-posts certain graphs constantly while they show the message he tries to convey but as soon as they go the other way… *crickets*
Hello Tobias,
Yes, I had that same issue with that link a couple of weeks ago too — I must confess I wasn’t as persistent as you…I just gave up
I think the main issue Bolt had with the Plimer transcript not being posted was that the introduction that had been posted contained the comments made by the 3 “anti-Plimer” — (if I can use that term) — scientists who were interviewed prior to the interview with him.
I think Bolt also has a valid point when he says that that Lateline episode exhibited bias as the show doesn’t usually introduce an interview by having unrefuted comments from 3 other people who have views that don’t agree with or which criticise the person who is the subject of the main interview. As an example, I’ve seen Tim Flannery interviewed on the show a few times and never once an AGW sceptic’s comments as an introduction to those interviews.
I don’t get the point you’re trying to make.
Both graphs show more ice in 2009 than 2007.
Both graphs show less ice than in the ten years to 2000.
And both graphs show an expected decrease in ice cover as we move into the Northern summer. In fact, the first day of Canadian summer is a fortnight away.
Of course the ice is going to melt!
I’m no Climate Change denier and I’m no fan of Bolt, but I don’t see anything for either side of the fence to carp about.
The slowed melting of April was corrected by a warmer May and all else is equal.
You’ll go mad trying to put forward an argument based on monthly fluctuations.
The significant evidence would be found in five and ten-year trends.
And I think those will show a decrease in Arctic ice.
Cheers.
sigh
Wouldn’t a real journalist cost just as much as an “opinion writer”.
Hell a new graduate that has learnt to fact check would be cheaper and more interesting.
Marek: would it help to know that the reason 2007 is marked out is because it was a record low? And that the solid gray line is the average for 1979—2000? The Arctic ice has been below average, and getting damn close to the record lows of ‘07, and ‘07 was warmer than would have been expected because of the el Niño of that year. And while you would expect the ice to melt, the rate of melting is steeper than ‘07 or the average.
And, yes, you would do much better to use 5- or 10-year trends for this sort of thing. The point being that Bolt did not, and now that the measure he was so triumphantly pointing at and crowing is now saying that he is wrong — by his own standard. He claimed that this graph proves GCC wrong, and it does nothing of the sort.
Marek Bage – 2007 was the lowest year recorded.
Bolt was carping on with the first graph saying that this year was average when compared to the previous ten.
The seond more recent graph indicates that only one month later that this season is appraching what happened in 2007.
Tobias was highlighting that as someone who states that he is open to debate, Bolt ignores facts when they do not suit his argument.
Marek Bage: “The significant evidence would be found in five and ten-year trends.”
absolutely, which is why bolt’s constant use of day-to-day temperature variations to repudiate AGW is so silly.
The other point to make I guess is if, as this post has shown, bolt’s claims and interpretations can be shown to be false with the passage of only 1 month, imagine what can be done with his arguments in 1 or 2 years! Unfortunately he’s removed the monthly archives from his blog site which makes it hard to check back – surprising that he did that really. /sarc
confessions – you can laboriously go back through the pages which are shown at the bottom of Bolt’s blog. It sure is labour-intensive though.
Marek, as I hope others’ comments have made clear, my point was very much in line with what you have said. The only way to evaluate evidence and draw meaningful conclusions is to look at long-term trends; short-term patterns are going to be affected by too many transient factors to give an indication of climate change.
These arguments can’t be supported or refuted by short-term events and trends, but that is what Andrew Bolt and others draw on as evidence” for their argument. They capitalise on chance – grabbing any event that goes in the direction that suits their argument and reporting it. But when the fluctuations almost inevitably start to go in the opposite direction, Bolt’s readers aren’t shown the folly of his argument, because he is busy pointing out a fortuitous trend in some other measure. He chose to comment on the Arctic sea ice data last month; I don’t expect he will mention it again until there is another uptick in the graph.
I wonder if it is possible to get the links back up onto his blog. I would imagine the moderators would snip them, but it would be a challenge.
Then again, I doubt if the average boltards would be able to work out that they have been duped. I mentioned before, Bolt puts up graphs showing global warming is happening and blithely tells people that it shows it doesn’t. No-one seems to notice.
PeeBee@22
Your right the Boltites don’t care. Andrew once posted a graph that he claimed showed the GW wasn’t happening. What was interesting was that the explanation of the graph, situated right next to the graph, on the original source page contradicted everything that Andrew was claiming.
Who do you think the Boltites believed, Bolt or the authors of the graph ?
Tough question STBD @23….. I’ll make a guess….. Bolt?
PeeBee & STBD: and don’t forget bolt used to always post this graph as evidence sea levels weren’t rising. And his cheer squad swallowed it hook, line, sinker and without question.
Please push this issue, Tobias. Bolt draws his info from consistently disreputable sources. That’s why he never links to the authors of his graphs.
Bolt is also clever at making claims that are *technically* correct but extremely misleading. A few weeks ago I spent some time on his blog pointing out that his claim that Josh Willis said in 2006 that sea temps were declining was true in 2006 but that since then Willis has re-evaluated the *data* and found errors, and so retracted the claim.
Two years after the re-evaluation and retraction, Bolt was still making the old claim.
I pointed this out on his blog and got abused by his acolytes for my pains. They did not seem at all interested in evidence that Bolt was misleading them.
Generally when you go to any of Bolt’s sources his claims are either not true or very distorted.
Congratulations to those who spend time over there trying to instill some sense – it is really a stomach churning environment.
Steve – Same issue with Bolt on constructing a dam on the Mitchell River in Vic. He uses a desk top study done in 2001 as evidence it would cost $1.3b when you compare the pipe to current day costs the delivery system alone would cost more than $1.3b alone. Not counting building the actual dam!
From memory (and someone may have the source) very early in the global warming debate Bolt argued the consensus being put forward and listed a bunch of scientists who he stated were not with the consensus. It turned out the list (like that other discredited opponents list) was mostly crud, and was eventually whittled down to one prominent scientist.
Nine or so months after the event that scientist was contacted and was shocked to find out he was on an opponents list and stated he had long since amended the data being used by Bolt and recanted some of his anti global warming statements. This did not stop Bolt continuing to use the now recanted data nor the scientists name, even when someone pointed this out to him (I think it was on Insiders).
So he has long form on this.