A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
Feb 2, 2012 6:00 PMNov 19, 2019 9:19 PM

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Over the years I have pointed out the fallacious arguments of climate change deniers when they attack legitimate climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann. This is, of course, like kicking at a bee hive, and whenever I do the comments section of my posts fill with lots of angry buzzing. But now, for what I think is the first time, I find myself the target of an attack. And I have to admit, I welcome it: it's a textbook case of denialist sleight of hand, of distraction, distortion, error, and misdirection. Stick around for all of this. It'll be... interesting.


Our story so far OK, first, here's the scoop: a few days ago, I wrote a blog post taking apart two intellectually bankrupt climate change denial articles

, one in the Wall Street Journal, and the other in the UK's Daily Mail. Both were claiming that global warming appears to have stopped in the past few years, a claim which is trivially easy to show wrong. In fact, I linked to two articles doing just that: one at Skeptical Science

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