Malcolm Roberts

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has taken the unusual step of personally telling Senator Malcolm Roberts he was "mistaken" in his claim that the agency had falsified key data to exaggerate warming in the Arctic. He expressed surprise that Roberts had actually been elected as a Senator.

"You appear to hold a number of misconceptions which I am happy to clarify at this time," Schmidt wrote to Roberts. "The claim that GISS has 'removed the 1940s warmth' in the Arctic is not correct."

The influence of president-elect Donald Trump’s attack on “elites” is taking hold in the Australian parliament, with the Coalition attacking “latte-sipping” opponents of coal mining and joining enthusiastically in a debate questioning climate science in the Senate.

Climate science denialists will often fool people, and sometimes themselves, by cherrypicking the bits of evidence they think fit their argument.

At other times, they’ll construct elaborate conspiracy theories about human-caused climate change being a front for a New World Order, with the United Nations as the Illuminati.

But often, they just get things badly, horribly, terribly and embarrassingly wrong.

Some would have seen One Nation Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts' performance on ABC's Q&A on August 15. He went hammer and tong repeating ad nauseum that academics are doctoring the science, that the major science bodies are corrupt and that the science on climate change is anything but settled. Here is one small excerpt from his exchange with British physicist Brian Cox: Roberts: “I'm saying ... two things. First of all, that the [climate] data has been corrupted and we know that the 1930s were warmer than today.”
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