2005-05-08

Weasel words from Peisner

What a lot there is to write about at the moment...

So, the excitement is over at Deltoid: here, where the discussion of Peisners abstracts continues, with P trying to defend himself. His latest line is:

Even if there is disagreement about any of these papers, it is highly improbable that all 34 are ambiguous.

Which is appalling, though I think it now explains why he has so many dubious abstracts in there: he is trying to say, OK, so I was wrong about most of them, but is it likely that I was wrong about *all* of them? Ie, scattershotting as many as possible in the hope that something might stick.

He has also found the "missing" abstract, of which he sayeth:

The attached abstract includes a statement stressing that the "development of alternative, environmentally safer energy production technologies will benefit society whether or not global climate change actually occurs." I interpret this statement as a weak form of scepticism about what Oreskes defines as "consensus position".

Err... which is nonsense: see Deltoid for the full abstract. Peisner has thrown in the towel on Deltoid, without even trying to defend his choice of abstracts: very poor work. It was also pointed out to him over there why he got the wrong number of abstracts: he has failed to answer that, or to retract his now obviously false claim that Oreskes was wrong about the number.

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