Gus: am I being nasty to call this man, Minchin, an idiot? A stupid man? Or is he devious to the point of being brainless, dazed, deficient, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, dull, dumb, a dummy, foolish, futile, gullible, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, ill-advised, imbecilic, inane, indiscreet, insensate, irrelevant, laughable, loser, ludicrous, meaningless, mindless, moronic, naive, nonsensical, obtuse, out to lunch, pointless, puerile, rash, senseless, shortsighted, simple, simpleminded, slow, sluggish, stolid, stupefied, thick, thick-headed, trivial, unintelligent, unthinking, witless... all decidedly because he's a pollie who does it with intent? Sorry guys I have run out of adjectives...

 AT NO STAGE HAS ANYONE OF INTELLIGENCE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING HAS CLAIMED "THE WORLD IS GOING TO END..." Minchin is a devious idiot...

From Unleashed

...

In climate science, there is a clear consensus. Two recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that 97-98% of working climate scientists think humans are significantly affecting the Earth’s climate. So why does Senator Minchin glom onto the work of a single scientist, whose views are representative of such a tiny minority?  Is Roy Spencer’s work so straightforward and compelling that Minchin was drawn to his conclusions by irresistible force of logic?

Unfortunately, it turns out that Roy Spencer’s views are on the fringes for good reasons.  Spencer’s claims are documented on his blog and in his latest book, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists. I recently completed a three-part, online review of the book - Part 1 can be found here. In the review, I document a number of glaring errors in Spencer’s claims. Following here are a couple of the main points.

First, Spencer published a 2008 paper in which he used a simple model of the Earth’s climate to show that standard methods for estimating climate sensitivity were greatly overstating warming effects.  It turns out that other climate scientists (including one that initially gave Spencer’s paper a favourable review) have now published a paper showing Spencer was only able to obtain this result by assuming unrealistic values for various model parameters.  If realistic values are used, the effect Spencer described is negligible.  

Spencer has done further work in which he claims to show with his simple climate model that, not only is climate sensitivity low, but most of the global warming in the 20th century can be explained by a natural cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.  Dr. Spencer tried to get this work published, but it didn’t pass peer review.  He claims his paper was rejected because the peer-review process in climate science has been “short-circuited by zealots adhering to their faith that humans now control the fate of Earth’s climate” (p. xvi), but my examination of his work does not support this interpretation.

I took apart Spencer’s climate model, programmed it into my computer, and showed that, once again, he was only able to come to his conclusions because he was willing to use absurd values for some of his model parameters.  Furthermore, he used a bizarre statistical technique that he apparently just made up, because it was capable of giving him nearly any answer he wanted.  

Politicians like Senator Minchin usually want to be seen as tough-minded iconoclasts who boldly go where the evidence leads them.  In this case, however, we can clearly see that there is no compelling reason to think Roy Spencer’s work trumps that of the rest of the climate science community.  In fact, much of his work is of demonstrably poor quality.  The sordid truth of the matter seems, instead, to be that Senator Minchin simply believed whichever expert would tell him what he wanted to hear.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/45086.html