Crikey

Anti-global warming columnist Andrew Bolt’s recent column “Bulled by a Gore” forensically picked apart Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth by scattering a number of references to studies by eminent scientists through his argument. But one of those scientists is now accusing Bolt of citing his research in a “gross distortion of scientific findings”.

In his column (published in the Herald Sun and the Brisbane Sunday Mail in September), Bolt quoted the findings of Jeff Severinghaus, Professor of Geosciences at the University of California, San Diego:

Gore says ice cores from Antarctica, that go back 650,000 years, show the world got warmer each time there was more carbon dioxide in the air. In fact, as the University of California’s Professor Jeff Severinghaus and others note, at least three studies of ice cores show the earth first warmed and only then came more carbon dioxide, many hundreds of years later. So does extra carbon dioxide cause a warming world, or vice versa?

Severinghaus told Crikey that he doesn’t make a habit of Googling his own research, but Bolt appeared on his radar when a librarian in Brisbane wrote to him asking if “I’d really meant what Bolt said I meant”.

Severinghaus explained how Bolt had been slippery with the facts, “…Bolt omitted the key piece of information that the warmings took 5,000 years, thus misleading the reader into thinking that carbon dioxide was not warming at the same time as temperature and thus cannot have caused the warming…”

Severinghaus wrote a letter to the editor of the Sunday Mail, but it was never published. He posted a comment on Bolt’s blog but told Crikey “…effectively I have not been able to make much if any response”.

“At the very least I would like it to go on record that Bolt’s abuse of my science is not done with my approval,” says Severinghaus. 

So is the professor sick of having his research misrepresented in the press? “My research actually mostly isn’t misrepresented,” he told Crikey. “But it is sometimes misrepresented on climate-denialist websites. I suspect, though do not know, that Bolt got the info from a climate-denialists website.”

Crikey contacted Andrew Bolt this morning for a response, but he did not respond.