I've long been on the record that the global warming/climate change/climate catastrophe or whatever the preferred alarmist formulation of the moment is bogus. There is no coming climate catastrophe.

One of the main proofs of this is Instapundit's regular claim that he'll start worrying that it's a crisis when the people yelling loudly that it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.

In this vein comes this report on Twitter by Slate writer Eric Holthaus:

Obama invited the best nature documentarian "on the planet" to a private White House chat: http://t.co/ZixHUmQzmjpic.twitter.com/rlFJN7cu7B

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) June 3, 2015

The New York Times has called air travel the "biggest carbon sin," yet Obama calls summons a naturalist to fly from Britain and back for a 30 minute chat on carbon emissions.

Might I suggest the use of Skype in the future?

On a related note: Here's an update on that "scientific" paper which purported to find that 97% of scientists concurred that the Earth is currently suffering from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming by Ph.D. candidate José Duarte. The Cook study counted this paper as an explicit endorsement that humans are causing global warming, and everyone's going to die:

Larsson, M. J. K., Lundgren, M. J., Asbjörnsson, M. E., & Andersson, M. H. (2009). Extensive introduction of ultra high strength steels sets new standards for welding in the body shop. Welding in the World, 53(5-6), 4-14.

Some more background:

The Cook study was invalid because of the search procedure, the resulting arbitrary dataset that gave some scientists far more votes than others, the subjective raters having a conflict of interest (which is unheard of), the basic design, the breaking of rater blindness and independence, etc.

That means there is nothing to count, no percent, not a 97%, not any percent. You could recompute the percentage as 70% or 90% or 30% if you went through the data, but it would still be meaningless. There is no method known to science by which we could take their set of papers and compute a climate science consensus. I need to do a better job of explaining what it means to say that a study is invalid. People have this instinct to still play with data, any data, because it's there, like Mt. Everest. It's an unfortunate artifact of human nature and first-mover advantage, especially in cases where lax journals don't act swiftly to retract.

As always, I want to stress that the study was a fraud, and that this is a completely separate issue from validity. I always remind people of this because I think it would be irresponsible to pretend that is wasn't. They lied about their method. They claimed their ratings were blind to author and independent – they routinely broke blindness and independence in a forum with other raters. Lying about your methods is fraud. That alone makes the study go away. There's no counting to be done. The above welding paper is an example of the third act of fraud – saying that these were climate papers. There are all kinds of these absurd papers in their 97%. This was never real. There was never a 97%.

So, if you hear someone spewing the 97% number while racking up frequent flier miles while living in their 10,000 sq ft mansion in the Hamptons, you know what to tell them.