Twitter has been lit up this week following the exchange on the Australian television show “Q and A”, between Professor Bryan Cox and a right wing legislator Malcolm Roberts.
Climate denier Roberts attempted to refute NASA data by appealing to the non-scientist blogger who calls himself Steven Goddard, leaving the audience notably unimpressed.
ONE of the world’s most accomplished scientists clashed with a climate change denier from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party on Monday night. The result? Captivating television.
British physicist Professor Brian Cox and newly-elected Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts went head-to-head over climate change science on the ABC’s Q&A program.
Viewers knew the showdown was coming long before it started. Mr Roberts has previously questioned the legitimacy of claims that humans are responsible for a warming planet. He’s even called for a royal commission into climate science.
Then Cox pulled out a graph showing a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the air, which is currently at its highest levels in 650,000 years.
“So the question essentially, first of all, are those two things correlated, and secondly, do we understand the physical mechanisms — and we’ve understood those since the 19th century,” Cox said.
That wasn’t good enough for Roberts, who wanted to focus on the spike in temperatures during the mid-1930s to 1940s. “Yeah, the 1930s and ’40s were warmer than the current decades,” he claimed.
Except they aren’t, as illustrated by Cox’s finger-pointing.
So then Roberts took aim at the source of the data on the graph: NASA. “The data has been corrupted, and we know the 1930s were warmer than today,” Roberts said.
“What do you mean by corrupted? Corrupted,” Cox shot back.
“It’s been manipulated,” Roberts claimed.
“By who?” Cox asked.
“…by NASA,” Roberts said, to the crowd’s hilarious exasperation.
The charge of “data fraud” was all too much for NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who took to twitter to express his frustration.
The climate denial myths that Denialist Roberts promotes, have been handily taken apart in two of my recent vids.
First, the “no warming in…(pick a number) years” canard, (which has really gotten pretty ragged with 2 record warm years in a row and a third underway) is a favorite of Far right US Senator Ted Cruz. I asked 4 scientists to weigh in on the deception here.
Finally, the idea that “NASA has fudged the data” is put to rest by scientists who actually understand temperature data and how it is used, here.
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