Upside the Head

... The "errors" that Bolt supposedly discovers in my work, extracted in The Age, are in fact howlers on his part. Indeed, so egregious are some that it's hard to believe that Bolt has not set out to mislead his readers. Let's look at five of the biggest whoppers.

1 Bolt says that I claim that climate has been stable for the past 10,000 years. This is not so. In my book I reprint the graph that documents northern hemisphere climate variability over the past 1000 years, and enter into an extended discussion of well-known variations such as the Medieval Warm Period. Either Bolt has not read the book he is critiquing, or he is lying through his teeth. The point I do make, however, is that variability in average global temperature over the past 10,000 years has been small when compared with earlier periods. This is indisputable

2 Bolt accuses me of saying that Katrina was the most powerful hurricane on record. Katrina is not mentioned in my book, which went to press before Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast ...

Tim Flannery on Andrew Bolt in today's Age