Bob Ward, climate denier
May 13, 2014
Bishop Hill in Climate: Ward

Bob Ward continues to dig himself into an ever deeper hole. This morning, as I mentioned in my earlier post, he claimed that:

[GWPF] denies the risks indicated by the scientific evidence in order to justify its ideological opposition to GHG cuts.

In response, I enquired what evidence there was that it denied the existence of a risk.

Bob's response was that it was all to do with extreme weather events:

Lawson denies that there is evidence of a change in extreme weather, etc

Unfortunately, Roger Pielke Jr was reading and pointed us all to this article by Bob Ward in the Guardian, and in particular the following quote:

But it is difficult to tell to what extent, if any, climate change has also already affected past disaster losses around the world. Extreme weather events are rare, so identifying small trends is difficult when losses vary so much from year to year, creating a lot of "noise" in the dataset, and many competing factors contribute to the overall pattern.

The absence of a "statistically significant" trend may indicate that no trend exists, or instead that a trend exists but cannot be definitively detected until a longer period of losses is available.

So I guess, on his own measure, Bob Ward is a self-confessed climate denier.

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