Sunday, February 09, 2020

Patrick Moore, Professional Blockhead

As was pointed out in the comments (thanks), Patrick Moore was disinvited from speaking at the sustainability conference in Regina. He took it like a...child:
For good measure, he then tweeted a "satellite photograph" to question the existence of the Pacific Ocean garbage patch:

except as people quickly pointed out, satellite images don't have a Mercator projection, it's extremely unlikely a satellite image of such a large area would have no clouds whatsoever (compare), and satellite images don't show seamounts. Duh.

A video by Peter Hadfield explains some of the many, many errors of Patrick Moore. (Thanks Steve.)


4 comments:

Layzej said...

"Garbage denial" is a new one to me. Once again, he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

"For many people, the idea of a “garbage patch” conjures up images of an island of trash floating on the ocean. In reality, these patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics can’t always be seen by the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes." - https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/

He doesn't seem to know what it is, but he's certain it doesn't exist.

David Appell said...

You last sentence is something I've noticed deniers (of anything) do constantly: think that if they don't understand something, no one does. Or if they think they do (mis)understand something, they think that everyone else is wrong. It doesn't seem to occur to them that if they don't understand something they should go learn about it first.

PaulS said...

I wonder what would be the climate effects of suddenly having no clouds globally for a day?

Thomas said...

PaulS to some extent we are finding out this year as new regulations on international shipping forces ships to reduce sulphur emissions, and those create enough clouds to be clearly visible on satellite images (except the ones from Moore :-)