First thing is – I screwed up, and there’s absolutely nobody else to blame.
I posted yesterday this blog post.
It’s something that I wrote the first draft of a year ago, and had updated at some point since.
The problem with it is that the quoted scientist, Mike Pentz, was not warning about C02 build-up, but rather ‘waste heat’. If I had been paying closer attention, I would have spotted that.
The consequence is that I’ve put out a blog post (and it gained some traction – a bunch of likes and retweets) which is inaccurate, which pisses me off.
Fortunately, someone on Twitter, Mike Holderness, very kindly pointed out my error. See here.
The whole story – that some scientists were worried about an ice age from all the dusty and aerosols (Reid Bryson, and early Stephen Schneider), while others worried about ‘waste heat’ (Howard Wilcox, Mike Pentz) while still others (Keeling, Bolin, Flohn, MacDonald, Commoner, Kingsley Dunham, etc) were worried about carbon dioxide – is a MORE interesting version than what I told.
So, that means that a) people have been misled (albeit unintentionally) by me and b) I look like either i) I don’t know what I am talking about or ii) I am deliberately over-egging the pudding (which I don’t need to do – there are plenty of earlier-than-1973 examples of carbon dioxide warnings). Not a good day’s work…
It happened, as far as I can reconstruct, because I was so taken with the opportunity for a “50 years” post (I do like my round numbers) and didn’t read the article carefully enough. Then there was the symmetry with the Canberra Times article comparing climate to nuclear war… So, I saw what I wanted/needed to see, and didn’t double-check…
Can this be avoided in future? Well, I can try, but to be honest, in the absence of someone vetting every single post, I can’t exclude the possibility that it will recur. If it does I’ll do a retraction/explanation.