During David Suzuki’s Q&A on Australian ABC-TV, and WUWT regular Bill Koutalianos puts the fruit fly guy on the spot. Video of the interview follows. Andrew Bolt writes:
David Suzuki proves he’s pig ignorant about global warming
The very first question put to David Suzuki on Q&A last night revealed this warming alarmist’s complete ignorance of the most basic facts of global warming.
Fancy Suzuki not even knowing what the world’s main temperature data sets say about global temperatures. Fancy him not even knowing what those data sets are, even when he is given their names.
The only rational response to Suzuki’s astonishing admission of utter ignorance would have been to say to him: “Sir, you are a phony and imposter. Get off the stage and don’t waste our time for a second longer.”
Read the exchange for yourself:
BILL KOUTALIANOS: Oh, hi. Since 1998 global temperatures have been relatively flat, yet many man-made global warming advocates refuse to acknowledge this simple fact. Has man-made global warming become a new religion in itself?
TONY JONES: David, go ahead.
DAVID SUZUKI: Yeah, well, I don’t know why you’re saying that. The ten hottest years on record, as I understand it, have been in this century. In fact, the warming continues. It may have slowed down but the warming continues and everybody is anticipating some kind of revelation in the next IPCC reports that are saying we got it wrong. As far as I understand, we haven’t. So where are you getting your information? I’m not a climatologist. I wait for the climatologists to tell us what they’re thinking.
TONY JONES: Do you want to respond to that, Bill?
BILL KOUTALIANOS: Sure, yeah. UAH, RSS, HadCRUT, GISS data shows a 17-year flat trend which suggests there may be something wrong with the Co2 warming theory?
DAVID SUZUKI: Sorry, yeah, what is the reference? I don’t…
BILL KOUTALIANOS: Well, they’re the main data sets that IPCC use: UAH, University of Alabama, Huntsville; GISS, Goddard Institute of Science; HadCRUT. I don’t know what that stands for, HadCRUT; and RSS, Remote Sensing something. So those data sets suggest a 17-year flat trend, which suggests there may be a problem with the Co2.
DAVID SUZUKI: No, well, there may be a climate sceptic down in Huntsville, Alabama, who has taken the data and come to that conclusion. I say, let’s wait for the IPCC report to come out and see what the vast bulk of scientists who have been involved in gathering this information will tell us.
See those data sets here.
Like I say, a complete know-nothing, citing false claims:
STEWART FRANKS: In an opinion piece last week you wrote that the Great Barrier Reef was threatened by the increasing frequency of cyclones. Everyone watching and listening can onto the Bureau of Meteorology’s website and see that there is no increase. In fact there has been a decline over the last 40 years and no increase in the severity. Are you not, by exaggerating…
DAVID SUZUKI: That I have to admit…
STEWART FRANKS: …or even just getting wrong, are you not actually vulnerable of actually undermining your very own aim in that, you know, the Great Barrier Reef does have environmental threat, but cyclones ain’t one of them?
DAVID SUZUKI: All right. That was one, I have to admit, that that was suggested to me by an Australian, and it is true, I mean, it may be a mistake. I don’t know.
Nor does David Suzuki know what the hell he’s on about when he’s fear-mongering about genetically modified crops:
DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I mean, that is always the argument that’s made. GMOs are very, very expensive. Now, the people that need this food are not going to be able to afford it. Are we going to just create these new crops and then give them away? I simply don’t believe that’s what’s going to happen. I don’t think it is a generosity for the rest of humanity that is driving this activity.
RICK ROUSH: Actually, we are. I mean, Bt corn technology has been given away to the Kenyan State Government research people for use for subsistence farmers. Monsanto gave away insect resistant potatoes in Mexico over 20 years ago. James is working on lots of similar cases. In cases where there is no economic return, it is, in fact, being given away and they’re not so difficult to develop. When I was at Cornell, we got a gene that was a gift from Monsanto for experimental purposes. We made broccoli plants that were resistant to attacks of Dimebag Moths. A student – one of our students made about 50 transformants in about six months. The great cost of these things are no longer the actual creation of the plant. It’s the regulatory challenges to take sure that you can take them to market, to do all that safety testing.
TONY JONES: Okay, Rick, well we’ll get a response to that and we’ll move on?
DAVID SUZUKI: Well, I don’t have any response. It sounds great. I don’t know.
How in God’s name could people take this man seriously?
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Kudos to Bill Koutalianos for asking a simple question. Simon at Australian Climate Madness has put the ABC video on YouTube:
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Ahhhh. Pot. It all makes sense.
LOL, Pamela (7:11pm).
Thanks (ugh) for the vid of a “10th level maggot,” Milodon Harlani (at 6:52pm).
Pretty pathetic, really.
He would probably never, thus, believe me if I told him that Jesus died for him, that God loves him, a mere “worm.” Sad. (well, Milodon H. — I just could not resist! Heh.)
{brrraaaaaccing myself for M.H.’s blistering retort…. I now press “Post Comment”….}
Sometime in the early 70’2 I heard DS speak, I was barely 22 years old and was impressed. But now over the years this person has become delusional, . Oh and BTW @ur momisuglyjst(not)thinking @ur momisugly8.11pm, Most people in BC are not “leftards” as you said (insultingly), as a matter of fact the vast majority kicked them out in the last election and @ur momisuglynigelf @ur momisugly 7.28, as far as DS being considered the most trusted Canadian THAT must have been a CBC TV poll!. Frankly I think Canadians made the same @ur momisugly#$# mistake with Trudeau , both of them peas out of the same pod (drug induced god like thoughts), And frankly how does this “green” guy get to Australia, Brazil, Mexico City, Kyoto, Stockholm, Johannesburg, London, Ottawa, Toronto etc. etc. from Vancouver in the first place? Oh right his diesel burning grand tour in his diesel burning old bus he used awhile ago to support the AGW and educate some more 14-17 year old High school kids,he is a fraud nothing more, or a canoe and/or do his 5 kids ( remember the statement the world has too many people) use kites to get him there? I am embarrassed every time those two guys are mentioned up here as pillars of Canada (CBC again). Thanks for the rant but this guy makes Canadians look bad and that is sad because we have some of the best Universities and Colleges anywhere..
While I personally think that David Suzuki is an [redacted by comment-author] and can’t be ridiculed as often as he says something worthy of ridicule (seriously, that man is a one-man science-obfuscation machine, if there ever was such a thing), I think calling someone “pig ignorant” is the type of conversion commonly referred to as “preaching to the converted”. Pardon me for writing something smug, but besides you feeling smug about something, what exactly is the point in calling someone “pig ignorant”? Don’t answer, this was a rhetorical question.
There is no excuse for Suzuki not knowing what the four data sets are, especially since three of them do still show a global temperature increase over the last 15 years, although it has slowed since the 15 years before then. So yeah, Suzuki screwed up big time and i think he’s a charlatan, but, no, the figures being `relatively flat’ doesn’t equal `flat’ and shouldn’t be treated as such, as at this stage even slight continuing rises are bad.
Well, Mr. Nguyen, re: RSS, Ben Santer’s dataset: “The least-squares linear-regression trend on the data from the RSS satellites since November 1996 shows there has been no global warming at all for 202 months (16 years 10 months).
Indeed, as “fifteen years without warming duly came and went: … Professor Jones of the University of East Anglia was the first to admit this… .”
And “taking the mean of all five principal global-temperature datasets (GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC, RSS, and UAH), since … 1 January 2001 there has been no global warming at all for 152 months (12 years 8 months):”
[Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/%5D
That is, according to the main global temperature datasets, there has been no statistically significant warming trend for over a decade.
As WUWT commenter Ben Frommo has so ably pointed out this week, that this century is the warmest since the earth began to slowly warm after the last Ice Age, is MEANINGLESS v. a v. proof of causation of a warming trend. Paraphrasing Frommo: “Your dad is now the tallest he’s ever been. According to your reasoning, he’s going to keep getting taller.”
It may warm again. It may not. Denying that global temperature has plateaued for about 15 years is to deny reality.
Bottom line: CO2 UP — WARMING STOPPED.
Walter Nguyen says:
September 26, 2013 at 5:16 am
It’s going on 24 years of no significant warming in the satellite data sets, which haven’t been faked as have the surface “data”. The most recent trend in real T data is in fact down. The warming lasted roughly 20 years, so now the flat to down trend has lasted longer than the prior warming phase, just as happened in the 30 odd years prior to the recently ended warming. The previous flat to down phase of course also followed the 20 or so years of warming centered on the 1930s.
DAVID SUZUKI: “No, well, there may be a climate sceptic down in Huntsville, Alabama”
Ethnocentric much? I suppose he deserves points for not saying “redneck”, “hillbilly” or “denier”. I know there is someone he is referring to specifically but he also knows no one is going to be confused as to which Huntsville he means.
Janice, the link you site is broken, i’ve tried searching for the text you quote from watts, but it’s quoted dozens of times, and all out of context and i want to read the original (where Watts got it from). I cant find anywhere else where it’s stated that the RSS shows a flat trend except for this same quote. The rss site itself shows a low increase trend over the last couple of years to date, but doesn’t have a way of isolating the particular 16 + 10 months period mentioned. So, a little help please?
Mr. Nguyen,
I just clicked on the link (sorry for not testing it after it posted) and, yes, it doesn’t work. HOWEVER…. if you paste that link into your internet browser (using Bing, I also had to click just below the address bar on the full Bing-supplied link for watts… — that is, TWO clicks were necessary), it works and that thread will appear. ANOTHER WAY to get to that thread is to type into WUWT’s “Search” box: “datasets global temperature.”
Good for you to persevere in finding the facts!
Janice
Walter Nguyen says:
September 26, 2013 at 5:16 am
“…at this stage even slight continuing rises are bad.”
——————–
What “stage” is that.? You’re not rrying to sell me that we’re at the precipice of impending doom when there’s not a darn thing different than there ever was? What exactly am I supposed to be alarmed about on this oh so typical fall day?
I am so glad this session with Saint Suzuki aired in Australia, you would never have seen it in Canada. He only accepts pre screened questions here. He never allows followup questions. He won’t attend events where the Sun has reporters, he only allows his left wing media buddies to his events. He’s really embarrassing actually. He’s no longer a scientist but a media machine. And hearing him speak in Australia it finally shows to the world how much he really doesn’t know. You could tell by his facial expressions he was nervous. The Australian scientists made him look really bad. And do you think any of this would make the Canadian media? No, the CBC has yet to run a story on this, only the Sun has reported on this much needed coverage to out this has been. His main defence is name calling and saying people are paid by big oil. Well someone should ask him how much he got paid for supporting the US salmon industry in Alaska while saying that the Canadian one was not safe. He was called out on it and immediately the info on his web page was removed. And don’t disagree with him he will either storm out as in the interview at am 640 in Toronto or he will swear at you in public. And he wants people jailed who do not follow his lies? I thought this guy was left wing to begin with but now know he’s way out there where no one has gone before. I hope more Canadians will see this story and see him for what he is, a snake oil salesman. Let science to its thing and in the mean time I fully agree we should be good stewards of our environment and work on getting off fossil fuels all together. But there’s no magical pill as Suzuki will have you believe. Things take time. I would like to apologize to Australia on behalf of many reasonable Canadians and ask can you please keep him?
“””””……rtj1211 says:
September 24, 2013 at 10:54 pm
Look, the discussions about GMOs is primarily about the dangers of a small number of MNCs gaining entire control over the world’s seeds. Every GMO is sterile, so you are dependent on the supplier if they wipe out biodiversity for short-term capitalist gain.
Any numpty knows that in-breeding leads to disaster and biodiversity is the key to long term health of life on earth………”””””””
Well bio-diversity hasn’t been very good for life on earth of the human like kind.
There are more species of critters by far, that look like lobsters, than there are that look like humans; so evidently we are following a failed model.
And the comparison is not insignificant. Lobsters have found that it is survivally more efficient to look where you have been, than to look where you are going.
Looking back at where you once were, is where you know , a priori that there is a threat to your existence, that you need to escape from; whereas your life experience says that most of your environment is benign, and non threatening.
But human kind, having intelligence, gives the right of way to the vehicle that is going forward in the direction that they are looking, instead of giving it to the vehicle that is backing out of that parking spot, and has a very poor view of where it is going, and like the lobsters, thinks its environment is benign. Whereas in fact the intelligent human, driving forward, is silly enough to drive behind the backing out vehicle, thinking (s)he isn’t going to get hit. Common sense says the vehicle in front should have the right of way, since the following vehicle has the best visibility.
In a similar vein, human drivers when encountering a bottleneck, where three lanes squeeze down into two, slow down, and create a vehicle pileup, whereas Bernoulli’s principle says you must speed up, to maintain the non-turbulent flow. Bernoulli’s principle also says that the pressure should drop going through the bottleneck at the faster speed, so the car spacing increases, giving added safety. So we are intelligent; but just not very smart; compared to the lobsters, and their look alikes . which far outnumber us.
David Suzuki works for the Canadian broadcast corp and they give him a free pass on all matters. Not all Canucks are willfully blind to suzuki’s comments on climate change but our left leaning media in an attempt to put the liberal’s back in power have rallied behind the global warming debate to make the Harper conservatives look bad, but they now realize that they have supported a pig in a poke. They will not support the facts because they might have to admit that maybe they were wrong. They have said for years that the debate was over. Never trust anyone who will not debate a subject. Thank’s to ABC for challenging David Suzuki. Good job.
Is the Ocean warming up?