At last I can come clean, I am a denier - now read on

I have spent many a merry hour in recent months in the debunking of some pretty serious misinformation, wondering all the time what goes on in the mind of a denier.  Now, at last, I can come clean.  I am a denier myself.

While going down some of the tributaries of misinformation and woo that I never realised existed, I came across a paper called "The Antique Roadshow: How Denier Movements Debunk Evolution, Climate Change, and Nonlocal Consciousness" by someone called Stephan A Schwartz, published in NeuroQuantology, volume 9, issue 1, pages 118-128 (March 2011).  Full text is here.

Now, I am not an evolution or climate change denier, so that only leaves me the option of being a nonlocal consciousness denier.  I should have known, but I must have forgotten, that there are some people who claim there is nonlocal consciousness.  That is consciousness that is not confined to that grey walnut like organ inside your cranium.  Indeed, there are those like Rupert Sheldrake who reckon that the Sun might be conscious. 

You don't have to watch.  Quality is not great - sound mostly, but information content too. 

I will probably mischaracterise nonlocal consciousness but as far as I can tell it is the suggestion that consciousness is not the product of the physiology of the brain but something spreading out wider, throughout the universe, and perhaps even part of the properties of inanimate objects and fundamental particles.

What is there not to deny?  Like the Ruler Of The Universe who solipsistically explains that his cat may or may not like fish, I have as much of a clue as anyone else whether my cat or an electron has consciousness.  I reckon my cat does and that an electron doesn't.  I reckon my cat has consciousness because he behaves in a way that suggests as much.  An electron doesn't.  I have no way of proving either but I do know something about consciousness.

You see, I have one.  I've had it for as long as I can remember and roughly once a day I switch it off because it needs a rest.  On a couple of occasions I have had it switched off for me, by a bang on the head.  I don't lose consciousness when I stub my toe, only when I bang my head.  This is trivial evidence that consciousness is situated in my head in some way, and probably my brain.  There is obviously more (I must read Daniel Dennett), abundant evidence that consciousness resides within the brain in some way.  We don't know how yet and we may never know.

Schwartz links climate change, evolution and nonlocal consciousness denial into one paper as if they were equal.  In order to do so, he states:

Consciousness deniers are materialists who conceive of all aspects of

consciousness as entirely a construct of physiological processes, in spite of hundreds of studies demonstrating this conclusion is not justified.

Materialists here means those that persist in believing only in physical causes for phenomena.  It is a term used in insult.  Note, Schwartz doesn't give any references to any of these hundreds of studies which I, for one, would have welcomed.  Perhaps he doesn't want anyone to read them.  After all, they are probably tat but we'll never know.

So I can proudly proclaim that I am a nonlocal consciousness denier.  Not a consciousness denier, as Schwartz flips the terminology. 

There's something just plain strange about Schwartz's paper.  He admiring quotes Rupert Sheldrake:

English biologist Rupert Sheldrake (1999) conducted a survey of leading

journals published between October 1996 and April 1998. The papers these journals had published were broken into three categories: “1.) Not applicable: papers that did not involve experimental investigations, for example theoretical or review articles; 2.) Blind or double-blind methodologies used; and, 3.) Blind or double-blind methodologies not used” (Sheldrake, 1999; p. 90). The

reader may find the results surprising. As can be seen in Table 2, parapsychology overwhelmingly utilizes this third protocol more than any other discipline.

I'm not sure that's a good thing.  When blinding has been introduced into parapsychological studies, the effect under study tends to evaporate.  It happens in alternative medicine studies too.  So I wouldn't proudly announce the fact that 85% of parapsychological studies do not use blinding, especially when suggesting this means parapsychology cannot be dismissed on methodological grounds  Whoops.

So perhaps Schwartz isn't a scientist.  I'll let you make up your mind by visiting here.

Or I could answer for you: no.

Well, now I know I am a denier, I can truly understand the mind of Anthony Watts or Lynne McTaggart?  Actually, no.  Because my denial of nonlocal consciousness is not the same as the denial of climate change or evolution.  In both of those it is silly to deny the heaps of evidence in favour of those fields of study.  In the case of nonlocal consciousness, the laws of physics, the biological evidence, all weighs in favour of a material basis of consciousness.  I deny nonlocal consciousness because it doesn't exist and never will. Everything points in the consensus opinion that consciousness and the brain are indivisible. End of story.

Schwartz's sleight of hand is that of a poor magician.  He won't get many gigs at the top scientific parties if he tries that trick too often.  We can see what's up his sleeves.  We spotted the swap.  We know it is rubbish. 

Dumb or what?

 

Lynne Habermacher Ritalin is high in fluoride. Also how many children suffer dyslexia who are not bad enough to be 'diagnosed'. I'm totally shocked at how many young people are dyslexic and are not aware of it, but they manage

This is from the What Doctors Don't Tell You facebook page, in a short thread about ADHD. 

Ritalin, as I am sure you know, is full of...er....well, here is the structural formula.

For those non-chemists amongst you, most of the carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms are not indicated because it would make the diagram unwieldy and detract from the important functional groups.  But here is a clue for those keen to play spot the element.

 

C = carbon

H = hydrogen

N = nitrogen

O = oxygen

Cl = chlorine

 

Now let's play the game of spot the fluorine atom.  Yes, that's right.  Fluorine has the symbol F.  If you put your cross anywhere on the diagram at all, you lose.  There isn't any there.

 

It isn't hard to find out, if you try.  But I notice that those with alternative beliefs, in other words those that deny science in one form or another, don't really try to find out.  Some track down scientific papers but it would appear they don't read them properly, just cherry pick some conclusion or result and use that as a peg to hang their wrong belief upon. 

 

Booby prize, if you put a cross on the chlorine atom, you can have a millionth of a point for at least finding a fellow halogen.  

People die after vaccinations - shock, horror, probe

Apparently, people are interested in the last meal of a condemned man.  Why, I don't know.  That's not the cause of death.
 
Curiously, Lynne McTaggart is keen to push her anti-vaccine agenda and prints a news item in her journal of record rubbish with the title "People do die after vaccination".  Well, duh!
 
Her expose says that, for the first time, it is admitted that people have died after having had vaccinations.  In fact, 15,000 of them over a three year period in the US.  Sounds frightening, doesn't it?
 
The link given is to this paper, Mortality rates and cause-of-death patterns in a vaccinated population (Am J Prev Med. 2013 Jul;45(1):91-7. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2013.02.020).  Luckily, and in something that is becoming a bit of a habit at WDDTY, this looks like another foot in mouth for the plucky investigative journalists at the esteemed journal.  If only they learned to read.
 
As the authors of the paper put it:

In the overall distribution of cause of death classified by

body system among all ages, the categories that represent the

majority of the distribution include diseases of the circulatory

system (32%); neoplasms (24%); and diseases of the

respiratory system (10%). In children aged 0–18 months,

congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosomal

abnormalities (22%) were the leading cause of death within

30 days of a vaccination visit; sudden infant death syndrome

(SIDS) was the second-leading cause of death (16%). The

leading cause of death within 60 days of a vaccination visit in

children aged 0-18 years was external causes of morbidity

and mortality (21%); next in leading causes of death were

congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosomal

abnormalities (18%), and SIDS (13%).

In other words, causes of death weren't  related to the vaccinations but to pre-existing conditions, SIDS and accidents.  They also found that deaths occurred more commonly in the winter months, in elderly people and the causes of death were consistent with the wider population.
 
So although Lynne McTaggart would rather have us believe that vaccination is evil somehow, the paper she cites suggests very much the opposite.  The fact that people die after vaccination is not surprising.  They die after all sorts of activities.  Can I get funding for a study to find out how many people die within 60 days of reading McTaggart's rag?
 
Not that McTaggart or her magazine are in any way anti-vaccine.  Perish the thought.  Though in order to muddy the waters clarify matters, the article does say:

Aside from the elderly, other vulnerable groups include pregnant women and those with chronic health problems, so doctors perhaps need to think carefully before vaccinating these people, say the researchers.

What the researchers actually say is this (my bold):

Although there is currently no evidence to support a causal relationship between vaccinations and death, this study provides background mortality rates following vaccinations to be used as a baseline when examining the safety profiles of new vaccines and during mass immunisations campaigns.

 

and

Similar analyses should be conducted when new vaccines are added tot eh ACIP recommended schedule, and also would be useful in other populations, including vulnerable subpopulations such as pregnant women and people with underlying health conditions.

So that's not quite what WDDTY would have you believe.
 
There is a trend at What Doctors Don't Tell You clearly emerging.  Take a health story, twist it so it looks as if it supports the agenda you are pushing and hype it up to make it more scary.  Oh, and trust the intelligence of your readership does not actually rise to the level where they begin to read for themselves and check the references. 
 
It didn't take me long to find the paper McTaggart refers to.  If I can do it so can almost any reader with internet access.   And an inquiring mind might be disappointed to find that the news story and the paper don't support one another. 
 
And she wonders why true skeptics aren't taken with the magazine's efforts.  It's because it isn't honest with its sources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Natural medicine is a human rights issue, same old Lynne McTaggart

Update at the end

Lynne McTaggart has really got angry when confronted with that old skeptical stand-by, evidence. So she avoids it by ignoring real criticisms and inventing a spurious human rights issue. She wants you to have a choice that you already have. If you want to take your chance amongst the unevidenced, mostly unregulated world of natural remedies then no one can stop you. It's your choice. Barry Sheene did it when he was diagnosed with cancer and look how healthy he is today.

Let's look in more detail.

During these past tumultuous weeks, where angry messages have been flying back and forth between two very polarized camps about alternative medicine and WDDTY, one contributor wrote that it was like watching two soccer teams whacking the ball back and forth.

Nice metaphor.

 The problem with that analogy is that, in this instance, team A isn’t interested in a fair game.  Team A wants to outlaw team B, and will stop at nothing – installing a biased umpire, beating up the opposition, calling foul on perfectly good passes – in pursuit of that objective.

I know you're American, Lynne, but you ought to know that it is a referee in soccer.  Oh, and your metaphor now looks silly because what team A wants is fair play and how team B responds is by deleting critical comments and banning commenters. Did she mention free speech yet?

 Make no mistake. This is not a fair debate, a reasonable discussion of the issues. This is a blatant attempt to deny you one of your basic human rights: the right to effective health care.

There it is, free speech, as upheld by Team McTaggart by deleting comments and banning... I already said that. And reasonable discussion? Try treating evidence with proper respect, Lynne, and reporting it fairly.

At the moment, as I have written earlier on these pages, conventional modern medicine kills thousands more people than it cures. Despite all the disingenuous attempts by ‘new’ visitors to these pages to cast doubt about the quality of our research, there is no argument about the fact that modern medicine remains the third deadliest killer in the West. No one in Establishment medicine disputes this.

When asked for a source for the assertion, Lynne is rather vague. When shown the source, she chooses to ignore it because it doesn't actually say what she says it says. There is doubt that modern medicine is the third deadliest killer (tautology) in the West. That's why skeptics doubt it - they want to see the evidence.

Cochrane Collaboration co-founder and esteemed medical researcher Peter Goetzsche refers to the statistics in Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime, and it was first cited more than a decade ago by the Journal of the American Medical Association. At that time, said JAMA, medicine was ranked the fourth leading cause of death – since that time it’s moved up in the league tables of things most likely to kill you.

References please? Show us the paper if it so important to you, then we can judge for ourselves. "So we have a system of medicine that, by its own admission, kills more people than anything other than heart disease and cancer every year, and yet is carrying out a systematized attack on anything else that might actually work and work safely." Well, only in part. Doctors now that some treatments are harmful but they proceed on the balance between benefit and harm. Chemotherapy has many downsides but the big downside of not having chemo for cancers it works well on is rather more severe. That's why it is used.

What this means is that modern medicine, infiltrated and now run by the pharmaceutical industry, is attempting to deny you access to safe and effective health care. That, to my mind, is a violation of your basic human rights. In fact it is essentially a form of persecution – no less than it was to deny a black in the pre-1960 American South a seat on the bus.

Not quite a Godwin but I'm sure se was tempted. This paragraph is classic conspiracy ideation and basically so wrong. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies also make vitamins so they can have a foot in both camps. But I can't remember ever being forced to take what Big Pharma sells me. Indeed, I'm pretty poor and have a cupboard with partly empty packets of pills. No one has yet been round to arrest me for this apparently hideous crime of not taking my medication. Lynne, you are talking rubbish.

"What are we to do about this in a positive way? We can take the lead from Iceland, where a group of 500 concerned citizens launched Heilsufrelsi (Health Freedom), a new health freedom association, to ensure that natural medicine is safeguarded and Icelanders have access to natural ways of maintaining their health.

But no one has said you can't take your leaves. What they are saying is stop playing fast and loose with published evidence and misleading readers. It's not rocket surgery.

"Instead of acting like a oppressed minority or continuing to play a game with loaded dice, it is now time for all of us interested in natural health care to unabashedly stand up for natural health freedom, organize together and insist on that mature dialogue.

Does that mean responding sensibly to questions and criticism or more deletion and banning? I don't think McTaggart is really interested in a mature debate but on assertion, misguidance and carrying on as she has been so far. An empty request, in other words. She continues in a comment:

"Once again the trolls on this site deflect from the important issues I raise in this blog by attempting to undermine our reporting on other issues, or criticizing other aspects of our business, and the comments are beginning to take on an air of desperation.

So by asking for evidence of McTaggart's claims, showing other evidence to contradict her assertions and pointing out where she is wrong is, er, wrong. McTaggart, on the other hand, is the one raising the human rights flag that has long since been conceded by the skeptics. How about that mature debate? Not interested, is she?

"The subject of this blog is not the cervical cancer (HPV) vaccine, but just to clarify, we never wrote that the vaccine KILLED 1700 girls.

True. Instead they said up to 1700. A difference but as all those stores promising up to 70% off in their sales know, the public are gulled into thinking the store has better offers than it really does.

"In our weekly WDDTY e-news, we reported on the figures appearing in an issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (July 26, 2013 / 62(29);591-595), the weekly report prepared by the America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a US government agency charged with the job of tracking infectious disease and vaccination.

Well, the report quotes VAERS data, which is often self reported and makes no distinction over whether there is cause and effect. Besides:

"Among the VAERS reports coded as “serious,” headache, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, dizziness, syncope, and generalized weakness are the most frequently reported symptoms.

Compare that last quote, from here, with what McTaggart says next:

"Between June 2006 and March 2013, said the report, the US’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System has received approximately 1700 - 1675 reports to be exact – of ‘serious’ adverse events occurring in girls who’d received the HPV4 vaccine. Reports are classified as ‘serious’ if they include one or more of the following, said the CDC: hospitalization , prolongation of an existing hospitalization , permanent disability, life-threatening illness, or death. Please see: cdc.gov/.../mm6229a4.htm#fig

I didn't look at the definition of serious, I looked at what serious included. Now I'm not sure how the two actually mesh, but having seen actual girls in the aftermath of their HPV jabs, I can report that there are plenty of pretty psychosomatic responses. Thirteen year old girls don't like having injections and many react with headaches, queasiness and so on. I don't want to diminish their suffering, just that it isn't as serious as McTaggart likes to paint it. And there is an issue. Take the worst case and present it as typical. Don't check whether there is more to this than meets the eye. Miss out important details. All things McTaggart does repeatedly. Isn't that hypocritical? My favourite word.

"As for the idea that we charge £83 for a DVD, we don't sell DVDs. Besides a magazine, downloadable reports and online subscriptions, we sell courses that include both audio and written material – the costs of which are in line with or far cheaper than similar products on other similar sites.

This was in response to a comment about DVD sales. Now when I searched the WDDTY website, all the DVD mentions returned 404 messages so I can't check the truth of McTaggart's statement. I can, however report that £54 gets you one of those courses - a 90 minute mp3 file and some, presumably, word or PDF documents. That sounds like rip off prices to me. And they reckon Big Pharma is after your money. (I searched the net a bit harder and found this page which links to the WDDTY site where you can apparently buy a DVD of some scam conference starring McTaggart and Rupert Sheldrake (ohnothimagen) which might put the lie to what McTaggart said. Strangely, click on the link to buy the DVD and you go to a page where you can buy a subscription to your favourite health disinformation mag.)

So, sorry, Lynne. I don't think you want a mature debate. You could have had one by now. But you didn't bother so I can't believe you'll have one now. When confronted with evidence, you avoid answering the true concerns raised by skeptics. And as for human rights - look at yourself in the mirror. Can you look yourself in the eye and say that the medical establishment forces you to have the mainstream treatment (ie the one demonstrated to do good). If you, your mates, hangers on and followers want to take leaves, nuts, berries, vitamin pills, sugar pills, distiller water, powdered mummy, stick pins in your skin or whatever, no one can stop you. Just don't go running to say sorry to that gp who spent years of their lives learning real medicine and pleading for them to help you.

Spoiler: Barry Sheene wasn't exactly cured by his natural healing regime. Actually, he wasn't cured at all. Sadly he died. His oesophageal cancer has a five year survival rate of 15%. Sheene died eight months after diagnosis. Update McTaggart is so wedded to the idea of free speech that, on the same day she winged about a "campaign" to hide copies of her atrocious magazine, she chose to have another clear out of her Facebook page, deleting comments that she doesn't like. So, free speech is fine of she is doing it but reason for censorship if she is being criticised. If anyone who reads this page wishes to correct me, feel free. I don't censor any comments on this site. Only, so far as I know, one comment has been deleted and that was one I made and rethought. McTaggart does not want free speech. She wants her unscientific way.

Great granddad is a star

Tonight my dad found the unequal struggle against cancer too much.  He has, in the words we've chosen to use with my not quite four year old granddaughter, gone up to be a star.

I was blessed to have him as a father, someone willing to support me in my many enthusiasms, those fleeting and those permanent. 

I was blessed that his taste in music influenced mine - he bought a handful of Beatles singles all those year ago. 

He endowed me with a love of cricket - summers will never be the same again.  His seat at Essex where he was once a member will remain forever empty.

He fostered my love of science, buying me books, putting up with my astronomy, fossil collecting, and anything else sciencey that came my way.

He picked me out of bed so I could watch Armstrong and Aldrin walking on a dusty world a quarter of a million miles from home.

He gave me laughs by the bucket load, with his bad jokes, his tricks and his enthusiasm for life.

I was truly blessed to have had his love, his encouragement, his patient parenting over all those years.

I miss him.

Great granddad's going to be a star

Updated at the end

I spoke to the nursing home where my dad is spending his last days. His condition is deteriorating.  I shall go to see him tomorrow.  I don't know what I shall find.

We took the whole family down two weeks ago because his condition was very poor then.  He didn't recognise us, he was so ill.  My granddaughter had been primed that he was very ill and she went up to him and said "I love you very much, great granddad" and kissed him on the head.  Her mum has explained that great granddad is going to be a star up in the sky. 

I suppose I am a pessimist, resigned to the fate that comes to us all.  It is a long time coming, longer now that medical science has brought us incredible breakthroughs, prevented childhood killer diseases through vaccinations and ended the tyranny of others by the agency of antibiotics.  It would have seemed unthinkable to my grandmother, who lived to be 91, that such an age would be looked upon as fairly mundane now. 

If only there were a miracle cure.  If only there were some magic wand that could counter the pernicious evil that is cancer.  If only cancer were just one thing and not a collective noun for a vast array of cells gone wrong diseases, it would make it so much easier to face and to eliminate, to become something of a curiosity, like measles outbreaks and bacterial infections are now to those who don't truly understand. 

My mother lived in a perpetual fear of cancer.  Her mother, whom she adored, died of breast cancer in 1949, barely fifty years old.  Mum told the story of how her mother, crying out in pain, demanded that the doctor was sent for.  He arrived, and the rest of the family was ushered from the bedroom while the doctor did what he could.  A few minutes later he came downstairs with the news that she would be all right now.  She died that night.  Mum was always suspicious that the doctor gave her mother something to speed her passage.

When dad was first diagnosed with cancer it was frightening but not overly harsh news.  He had a benign skin cancer, treatable but one that kept coming back.  Then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer but it was slow and treatable, non-aggressive, one that could be contained.  For years he would take himself to the six monthly check ups.  Then came Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.  This was a new ball game, a more frightening cancer, with a lump sticking out of his side that looked as if something were trying to crawl out of his skin, the size of a rat.

But the Non-Hodgkin's was treatable, and it responded brilliantly to chemotherapy.  I sat with him on one of the those chemotherapy sessions, eight hours of infusion while he sat, reading the paper, listening to the radio, snoring after lunch.  It was frightening to see him go through that torment but he emerged the other side, with as much vigour and love of life as he did before. 

The fight is one sided in the end. There is a symmetry to an individual's life - you emerge into the world helpless and so often leave it in the same condition.  Dad is leaving that way.  He needs care for everything he does now.  One so vigorous and young at heart has withered to a husk.  You can understand why some people want to find that miracle cure.

I feel sorry for those people, on their fruitless search.  Not only will they not find it in some ascetic diet or cocktail of fruit juices, they will also not find it in fake chemotherapy run by quack doctors.  This week, one of the heroes of alternative medicine, Stanislav Burzynski, has been uncloaked as the dangerous fraud so many people believed him to be.  That he duped so many is bad enough, to have failed to stop the treatment of people he was poisoning to death (and in at least one case he seems to have done just that) is evil.  And too many were taken in by the PR and the fiction that he was curing people.  If he had a conscience, he would have stopped decades ago.  It is pretty clear to me that he has none.

The fact is, if there were a miracle cure for cancer, doctors would be giving it away.  The pressure on the pharmaceutical companies to make it affordable would be immense.  But there isn't.  It doesn't stop people trying but so far the little victories have been hard fought.  If there were something that could prevent the disruption of chemotherapy then doctors would not hide it or suppress it. They would shout it from the rooftops. 

Alas, that miracle is waiting to be found.  Whether it is amongst those millions of biological compounds waiting to be tested in those reservoirs of biodiversity, the rainforests, the reefs, the abyssal plains, maybe one day it will be found.

I find it insulting to the everyday working scientist who takes home a reasonable but not outrageous wage home for her endless hours in the lab has her labours denied by people who don't have a clue what scientists do, how they work, what they strive for.  I spent a while in the gleaming halls of academia, helping a professor of geography tone up a conference presentation on the hydrological cycle (ah, those were the days) because she was afraid someone would pick holes in the work.  I am no hydrologist (though I do have a book on the subject). My role was to ask the idiot questions.  How do we know?  What does that equation actually mean?  Others took the expert role and criticised other aspects. 

Thousands of scientists around the world are seeking something that will cure just one cancer.  Something, anything, because the benefit of a cure outweighs the harm (because life is better than death).  To know whether the cure is really a cure, the testing process is of necessity rigorous.  Wishful thinking doesn't win the prize.

It pains me to know that my dad couldn't be saved by modern medicine.  It pains me to know that eventually no one can be saved.  No one lives forever.  There remains no cure for everything.  I would love there to be, to restore my dad to the man he was when I was a child, playing football and cricket with us because he loved sport so much. 

A few weeks ago I came across a notebook my dad had on National Service back in 1949.  In it he wrote a letter he never sent.  It is a window into his world that is otherwise lost for good.  He mentions his own father's recent illness.  "I don't know what I would do without you" he says to his mum and dad.  I don't know what I would do without my dad.

Update
It was painful to see dad yesterday.  He was in pain, mostly asleep, hardly recognised me.  I'd hate to see anyone like that but when it is your own father it is so shocking. 

I've been taking some photos on my phone when I've been seeing him, just so I have some last memory more permanently recorded.  When I showed them to some other family members on my return, my granddaughter want to have a look.  Her response: "Poor great granddad.  He's dying." 

Just too late for Halloween - zombie Monckton and the ghost of Murry Salby

When I were a lad, I played with Weebles.  Those were the toys that, famously, wobbled but never fell down. 

Lord Christopher Monckton reminds me  of a Weeble.  No matter how often he is shown to be wrong (I could fill this post with links but I am sure you can Google Monckton debunked, Monckton wrong and any number of synonyms), he keeps coming back without changing so much as one full stop of his discredited fake science. 

But this being the season of Halloween, he reminds me of a zombie as well.  Sucking the flesh of the living, Monckton does not seem capable of academic death.  He cannot be killed because his science is literally undead.

So you don't have to go to WattsUpWithThat, I have archived Monckton's latest drivel here.

So far as I can tell, Monckton is bigging up Murry Salby, the sacked academic:

His lecture, a simplified version of his earlier talk in Hamburg that was the real reason why spiteful profiteers of doom at Macquarie “University” maliciously canceled his non-refundable ticket home so that he could not attend the kangaroo court that dismissed him, was a first-class exercise in logical deduction.

 If I were Macquarie, I wouldn't give this flea of a fake scientist the time of day, but I might want to instruct my lawyers to inform Monckton that what he is saying is untrue.  In fact, as soon as the real story came out, that Murry was a serial offender, the deniers went just a tad quiet about Salby and his status as a martyr.

But the fact, no matter how Monckton wants to portray it, is that Salby is categorically wrong.  Better minds than mine have shown this.  Have a look here where Tamino points out that:

The point Salby makes is that the rate of change of atmospheric CO₂ is strongly related to factors like temperature (especially temperature). Knock me over with a feather! We already knew that, and people who study the carbon cycle areseriously unimpressed. He then claims that if temperature influences short-term changes in CO₂, it’s natural to expect that it would influence long-term changes. Remind you of anything?

What Salby does not explain is this: total human emissions of CO₂ from fossil-fuel burning are far larger than total CO₂ increase. In fact, the CO₂ increase has only been about half of human emissions. So, the net emission from other sources has been negative, while atmospheric CO₂ has been rising. It’s especially ironic that Salby offers up a “bank balance” analogy when it’s obvious he himself has failed to do the simplest possible accounting of the carbon budget.

Or you could look here. Or here. Or here.  Like I said, it quickly gets repetitive because it so easy to show Salby is wrong.

And this is where the Weeble/zombie analogy comes in.  Because denialism/contrarianism does not proceed by making new discoveries, it is forever recycling the old arguments.  Science, on the other hand, accumulates new findings, incorporating them in existing theories or using them to build new ones.  Denialists almost by definition are trapped in their personal philosophy.  They cannot escape unless they admit to being wrong and that's not a likely event with an ego the size of Monckton's.  Because it is more full of holes than a teabag, Murry's ideas don't really deserve to have been presented before any audience, let alone parliamentarians (who, let's face it, would be better served listening to climate scientists who haven't been sacked for pretty serious offenses, such as refusing to teach, using University credit cards while suspended and so on).  Still, it occupies the time of Monckton and stops him selling shirts or puzzles or whatever else he is working on at the moment (how's Obama's birth certificate looking, Chris?).

Mind you, I am not sure I'd want to go to see Salby talk.  He has the charisma of a speak your weight machine and his tour included this salubrious location:

Hemingford Abbots village hall, Cambridgeshire

The tee shirts must have sold like hot cakes.