Andrew Bolt abused my research: climate scientist
5 Oct 08
In his column (published in the Herald Sun and the Brisbane Sunday Mail in September), Bolt quoted the findings of Jeff Severinghaus, Professor of Geosciences at the University of California, San Diego:
Gore says ice cores from Antarctica, that go back 650,000 years, show the world got warmer each time there was more carbon dioxide in the air. In fact, as the University of California's Professor Jeff Severinghaus and others note, at least three studies of ice cores show the earth first warmed and only then came more carbon dioxide, many hundreds of years later. So does extra carbon dioxide cause a warming world, or vice versa?
Severinghaus told Crikey that he doesn’t make a habit of Googling his own research, but Bolt appeared on his radar when a librarian in Brisbane wrote to him asking if “I’d really meant what Bolt said I meant”.
He didn’t. “Many, many other studies have found that carbon dioxide causes the earth to warm. This is not controversial, and to continue to deny it is akin to denying that cigarette smoking causes cancer,” Severinghaus told Crikey. “The evidence for a human-caused warming of the globe is overwhelming. The scientific debate is over, and what we are seeing now is an attempt to mislead the public.”
Severinghaus explained how Bolt had been slippery with the facts, "...Bolt omitted the key piece of information that the warmings took 5,000 years, thus misleading the reader into thinking that carbon dioxide was not warming at the same time as temperature and thus cannot have caused the warming...”
Severinghaus wrote a letter to the editor of the Sunday Mail, but it was never published. He posted a comment on Bolt’s blog but told Crikey “...effectively I have not been able to make much if any response”.
“At the very least I would like it to go on record that Bolt's abuse of my science is not done with my approval,” says Severinghaus.