Kathy Shaidle: Quote miner, barefaced liar

The utter dishonesty and blatant disregard for facts that the climate change deniers exhibit is no secret. Kathy Shaidle provides a sadly typical example of this mendacity.

Shaidle first presents a claim by fellow wingnut Mark Steyn, claiming that no global warming trend exists. She then carefully distorts a recent statement by Tim Flannery of the Copenhagen Climate Council to completely reverse the meaning of what Flannery actually said, and make it appear that Flannery agrees:

…[N]o less a personage than Tim Flannery, Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council and long-time global warming alarmist, admitted on Tuesday that Steyn was right:

When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate…We just don’t understand the way the whole system works… See, these people work with models, computer modelling. So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.

Gee, that last sentence sounds pretty definitive, right? Flannery says there’s no global warming, right?

Wrong. Shaidle is deceiving her readers. Compare the last sentence in the quotation Shaidle posted with the original transcript of the interview with Flannery:

Time scales are important. If you take too short a time scale you won’t get a climate signal, you get a regional weather signal or whatever else. The scales that the climate scientists use to look at the overall trend is century long, and on that trend we are still warming, sure for the last few years we have gone through a slight cooling trend, we saw it in the 1940s the same sort of thing, but that does not negate the overall warming trend.

Note carefully: Flannery has not, as claimed by Shaidle, “admitted… that Steyn was right”. Flannery in fact says the exact opposite.

Kathy Shaidle is employing — knowingly — the fallacy of quoting out of context, also know as “quote mining”. This is the practice of deliberately taking a quote out of context and presenting in such a way as to make it appear the speaker meant something other than the intended meaning.

This is deliberate, premeditated dishonesty on the part of Kathy Shaidle. This sort of blatant lying is far from uncommon among the climate denialists. The science simply is not on their side, so they lie. In a just world, someone as mendacious as Kathy Shaidle would be universally shunned, ridiculed, and ignored.

Of course, in this world, she’ll just go on lying to anyone who will listen.