Henry’s Wandering Geologist (HWG) was away in Iron Ore Country in the far north of Western Australia, (yes gentle reader, HWG is back following the drilling rigs) and discovered that he had not changed his mobile phone SIM card from 3G to NextG – Egads! And then he forgot the PIN on the satellite phone, so communication with civilisation stopped for a while. (Here’s a bit of trivia – 3G does not work in Marble Bar but does in Port Hedland and Newman).

Writing about communications reminds me to offer some advice for those who have upgraded their Telstra wireless broadband to the latest 21 Modem, please do uninstall all the previous software – HWG had a very confused HP mobile workstation which could not really cope with two versions of the software and drivers. Removing the older versions cured the problem, and communications, at least for the email side of things were restored.

HWG has also discovered that removing all traces of Apple software is also most efficacious. If one must use an Ipod, please use an Apple computer; HWG’s field assistants swear by this advice, so it’s out with the Ipod and in with the MPS Wintel portable media.

So it was with some bemusement when I read Ray Evan’s latest Climate Change round-up in Sunday’s email. Seems two of the leading 'foghorns' of the Australian academic political left have decided to take a cudgel to the climate sceptics, not climate scepticism, mind you, but the messengers, probably as an intemperate reaction to the unexpected success of Professor Ian Plimer’s recent book – Heaven and Earth – Global Warming; The Missing Science, and which is now in its third print run.

Op-eds in the Australian last week focussed on pillorying the messenger rather than countering any scientific facts, which amply demonstrates that the argument has been lost by the Climate Changers when all they can do is to play the man, in this case Ian Plimer, or deploy the fallacy of resorting to authority, citing tens of thousands of climate scientists.

What did Einstein say all those years ago when Hitler’s cronies deployed hundreds of scientists to refute his theory? That it only needed one to refute his theory.

Furthermore, the Climate Change ‘foghorns’ have identified most opposition to Climate Change pseudoscience as coming from the Tory conspiracy wing-nuts who, according to them, believe that Climate Change is nothing but a dastardly left-wing plot to implement a World Government.

Sceptics are also portrayed as amateurs and part of the right-wing Australian conspiracy including the Nationals and Liberals. (Where are the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) and other right-wing fringe parties)!

According to the ‘foghorns’ we sceptics also apparently live under the delusion that climate science is based on fraud as opposed to mainstream science (read government science) which isn’t fraudulent(?), and thus oppose any government intervention on principle, and hence Climate Change policy in particular.  The ‘foghorns’ are quite right – any opposition to the State is a worthwhile activity, since it is the State which causes our economic malaise in the first place.

So, these facts now irrefutably prove that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is fundamentally a political movement and not a scientific one. Why? Because science is apolitical – gravity does not choose between some idiot savant lefty academic or some parsimonious right-wing redneck – when either, falling off their respective perches, will hit the ground in a predictable time using Newton’s Laws of motion. Gravity does not depend, nor Climate Change its verity, on which political hue one is coloured.

So when pro-AGW proselytisers point out that Climate Change scepticism is restricted to the domain of their political opponents, we can be quite sure that it’s not science they’re defending, since scientific fact is self-evident, but their belief system couched in the technical sophistication of the scientific method.

Now, I have mentioned before that pseudoscience is science that has detached itself from the rigour and discipline of empirical fact, and substituted physical experiment with consensus among “experts” to establish “the truth.”

Pseudoscience also has the tendency to lose itself in a myriad of mathematical cul-de-sacs (read as short-handed notation for dialectics) during which these times manifest as arcane computer climate models.

However, in terms of Climate Change none of these existing computer models predicted the last 10 years of climate, and hardly surprisingly when a type of science is detached from physical reality and lives instead in the delusional domain of mathematical abstraction.

It matters not one scintilla how scientific one’s techniques are, or how rigorous the application to the problem at hand is if, when all is said and done, the initial assumption that the scientific hypothesis is based on, that of climate sensitivity, is wrong.

The problem is that Climate Changers believe absolutely that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimate of climate sensitivity is correct.

Wrong. Climate sensitivity is an unsubstantiated belief, not empirical fact, and because of this, AGW is essentially a delusion, and by implication, its supporters are delusional.

In terms of the scientific method, AGW has been thoroughly falsified by observation and measurement and it is only the delusional among us who refuse to accept this.

Only the delusional would argue the opposite, for their whole approach to the problem, usually by meaningful debate, or dialectics, coupled with incessant chattering and twittering, concludes, because so many agree, that it MUST be true.

No it isn’t, but what would it take for the Climate 'foghorns' to see the light? Another Little Ice Age with its attendant loss of life, famine and disease?

Louis Hissink (HWG)