I read Paul Homewood’s post on “Denierland,” a new book by Jonathan Thacker.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/03/09/denierland/
It was only when I went to Amazon
and clicked on “Look Inside” and read the introduction, acknowledgements and index and saw the “thanks to Cliscep” that I realised that Jonathan is JIT who comments here. I vaguely remember him talking about a book he was offering, but I thought he was having a clear out like Alan Kendall.
It looks good. I shall buy it on Amazon so I can put up a review there, and possibly buy Mann’s latest at the same time, so it comes up with a recommendation: “people who bought Mann also bought Thacker.” The title alone should confuse a few consensualists.
Climate Scepticism 
The Denial – Ross Clark – (Telegraph journo)
is also very good, sort of dystopian future satire..
of a future UK state, where climate woke orthodoxy rules
but reading it again. feels like predictions/ not satire ;(
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“I vaguely remember him talking about a book he was offering…”
There were comments here:
https://cliscep.com/2021/02/02/andy-west-strong-and-free/#comment-75008
….at which point I grabbed the ebook from Amazon, but JIT has at least one physical copy he was offering.
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@ Geoff thanks for the plug. I had offered copies but when there were no takers for a physical copy (Andy bought the e-book and Dougie got a pdf) I thought I’d better not keep banging on about it.
It’s actually not bad, though I would say that. One day I’ll make a second edition, so welcome suggestions. (Some material, like the pledges at Paris, the mentions of the IPCC’s opinion in AR5 & the discussion of CMIP5 models will shortly be out of date.)
I can go into more detail about how this defiant yet futile blow against alarmism came to be if required.
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Jit I have read comments on Paul Homewood’s site upon your book Denierland. They illustrate to perfection the difficult place you stand in the climate change debate – in the middle. From the outset your book states that you believe climate change occurs and that part of this is caused by human emissions, but you are adamant that this does not imply the amount of change is dangerous. So out come comments from those who challenge even the very idea that climate change is occurring and definitely is not caused by humans. At one point you admit to being a lukewarmer, perhaps the only honourable position to take that considers all the evidence.
I regret the absence of Cliscep’s previously best known lukewarming contributor Thomaswfuller.
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Alan, you’ve got a point of course. It’s like a mouse* running into a bar-room brawl between Rangers and Celtic fans and squeaking about what a fine side Queen’s Park are. The present black or white approach to climate change means there is no room for nuance, and it certainly means that wherever you look our glorious leaders are planning to impose draconian measures on us all without bothering to measure the cost, never mind the benefit. (If there is a tangible benefit to most of these measures, which I strongly doubt.)
Nevertheless, there were a couple of encouraging comments, and I tried to respond as honestly as I could to those who said “No!”
I’ve put my position on record – there may be few who agree with me, but I don’t think after honestly appraising all the evidence I could have ended up anywhere else.
==
*It should have been a spider perhaps, but a talking arachnid was a step too far, or twelve.
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Amazon is becoming a disgusting bastion of wokism! When I search for Thacker or Denierland, it asks if I meant something else.
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When I went to Amazon to buy it , I got offered the Kindle version free as part of my Kindle Unlimited subscription. The paperback was $AUD21
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Well, I’m 2 chapters in so far, and am enjoying it. Credit where credit is due – I regard it as fairly laying out the arguments on all sides, trying to steer a sensible course to a reasonable conclusion, well-researched, and written with a light touch that renders readily comprehensible to a lay person a complex subject.
I commend Denierland to cliscep readers.
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@ Mark thanks for the kind words. I would put a blush emoji but I don’t know how. I never “like” comments but I suppose I ought to make an exception!
@ Mike that is interesting. It came up straight away here when I tried it on an unfamiliar browser. However, by and large if I search for my stuff I don’t find it. I’m too poorly known for the search algorithm to think anybody would be searching for me. Sad days. For my first published (Edison Blue) I thought I had a unique title that would certainly be top hit for anyone searching for it. How wrong I was! I soon found out there was some curious thing called an Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder. Well, at least I learnt something about the history of tech. (Nobody buy Edison Blue by the way, in case you were tempted to. Not that it isn’t good. It isn’t bad. But as a newbie to the field, I tried to save pages, so the print is a little cramped. I’m intending to reissue it in 6″ by 9″ once my designer designs me a cover, probably in about 2031.)
@ Tony if an author enrols in the Amazon scheme, he/she gets a share of a fund in the tens of millions USD based on the number of pages that folk read. It sounds like a lot until you start wondering how many pages are read in a month!
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Hi JIT, following your and Mark’s recommendations I couldn’t resist the urge to buy it, so I have it on my Kindle to devour shortly. I’d be interested to learn from our overseas friends what they make of your Scottish Football analogy (which I enjoyed) – “Queens Park”, there’s more than a few English football fans who’d struggle to determine the context.
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JIT. Let’s hope your “ talking arachnid” position in a pub brawl will be as inspiring as the web-spinning forebear was to Robert (the Bruce). But why twelve steps and not eight?
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@ Alan, the Queen’s Park representative was a spider not because I like spiders but because Queen’s Park are themselves spiders. In this fever dream it stood to reason that our arachnid friend had been sipping a few brews in order to nerve itself to say anything at all. Therefore its entry onto the scene was a bit lopsided, a drunken scuttle, twelve steps forward when eight would have done!
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Looking forward to JIT’s book.
Slightly off topic, but this article raises the question of just how deleterious wokeism is.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/michael-manns-latest-claim-climate-has-no-internal-variability/#comment-47787
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Sorry, JIT. Autofill is a curse. Anyone feel freeto correct.
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@ Hunterson, the mind boggles. I see no mistake so someone must have fixed it. An acquaintance used to spell my name with a G, apparently innocently. But I doubt autocorrect would have switched it to that!
There was a brief discussion of the latest of Mann’s master works on an older thread starting here: https://cliscep.com/2021/02/12/cmip6-in-a-sea-of-junk-models-the-met-offices-ukesm1-0-model-stands-out-as-even-more-junk/#comment-75630
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Hi Geoff & JIT
JIT very nicely sent me a PDF copy for nowt – still working thru’ it but agree with what Mark Hodgson says: 10 Mar 21 at 7:30 pm.
now back to the important quote – “It’s like a mouse* running into a bar-room brawl between Rangers and Celtic fans and squeaking about what a fine side Queen’s Park are”
I lived at Haymarket (at the rail station) Edinburgh for many years & Saturday in the local pubs after a Rangers and Celtic game was an interesting experience (get ready to lift your drinks as the tables & bar area got trashed).
Only lasted an hour or 3 before we (locals) all got back to normal drinking & fun!!!
wonder where JIT got that accurate analogy?
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@ Dougie you might say I have a furtive imagination. Alas I’ve never been to Glasgow, though for a long time I’ve wanted to visit New Lanark (maybe this will turn out to be underwhelming, who knows).
This has just reminded me of the time I was accosted by a drunk Glaswegian, probably on the train to Manchester. It was 1990, the year Ireland qualified for the world cup. It just so happened that I’d been to Co. Kerry on a field trip and had purchased an Ireland footy shirt in Dingle for the princely sum of ten punts. This had a “home” side and an “away” side. The latter closely approximated Celtic’s hoops, and the fellow happened to support the other team.
Once he’d established that I was from lowland England and the footy top was nothing to do with Celtic, he was very charming company. I remember he said something like: “It were like a red rag tae a bull,” a phrase he kept sprinkling into our conversation!
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To whelm is to engulf or submerge. Therefore ‘overwhelm’ is a pleonasm, since it means to over engulf. Saying ‘underwhelm’ is even worse, since it means to under engulf. Not a lot of people know that, and even fewer could care less.
I too have never been to New Lanark, and so I do not know whether it is whelming or not.
God I’m bored. When will lockdown ever end?
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Hi JIT – looking forwrd to reading the book. At first glance it would seem that your climate related thoughts are similar to mine. I noticed at Paul Homewoods blog you said you thought climate sensitivity is “quite a bit” below 2 degrees – I’d be very interested to hear your reasoning for that. My guess is that as of AR6, 2 degrees will be the lower limit for the consensus and therefore anyone supporting numbers lower than that will be back in the outer darkness.
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Well, I’ve today finished reading Denierland (though I will re-read it, of course). Having done so, I repeat my earlier comments with bells on, and commend it to you all.
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@Jit says: 10 Mar 21 at 12:30 pm
“I can go into more detail about how this defiant yet futile blow against alarmism came to be if required”
I would be interested in the “how,when & why” your “defiant yet futile blow against alarmism came to be”
maybe a post by you???
cheers Dougie
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@ Anteros I’ve always admired Nicholas Lewis’s energy budget estimates of ECS, summarised over the years at Climate Etc. He strikes me as a very smart cookie. Of course I might like the Lewis & Curry estimates because they agree with my preconceptions. I would discount some of the high ECS models (I don’t know why anyone takes them seriously – people have what I call “cyber deference” whereby they trust the output of a computer because they have a mistaken belief that its opinion is neutral.) Using MODTRAN gets you to about 1 K of temperature increase per 2XCO2 and to get to high values of ECS from there involves a lot of feedback. (Again you might call this an argument from incredulity.)
The way the ECS pdf is obtained, using a ratio distribution, inevitably ends up with a fat tail and therefore a finite chance of very high ECS, but I’ve never been convinced those values should be taken seriously.
@ John should you not be patrolling the internet for people using the expression “LOL”? I have my own little bugbear, the word “predate.” As an ecologist, it infuriates me whenever anyone uses it in the sense “prey upon.” There was a caption in one issue of Arachnology below a pic of one eight-legged fiend eating another, something like “Figure 1. Species 1 predating species 2.” Nope. (In fact I remember the victim was from a more primitive group.) I mentioned the issue light-heartedly in the group chat and got my head bitten off by a pedantic so-and-so claiming I was being a “faux-pedant” or something. I waited in vain for anyone to come to my aid. Then I just shrugged and thought, this battle is over, time to move on.
@ Mark thank you kindly for the undeserved praise!
@ Dougie to sum up very briefly, it was mostly accidental; like many sceptics I keep notes of the most blatant science abuse I come across and collect data, quotes etc. In the end I had collected enough scraps of things over the years that there was enough material for a book. Of course it was not so simple, because a lot of material had to be updated, and as I went I discovered more and more things that I had forgotten to put in. But anyway I had to publish it, knowing that if I did not, I would just keep adding bits, then having to update other bits, and probably so ad infinitum.
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@JIT – thanks for the reply – https://climateaudit.org/2009/02/02/when-harry-met-gill/
was my 1st step into the climate debate/wars (ohh wars may get banned)
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JIT – many thanks for the well reasoned reply.
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