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Dennis Avery may have done the fact-challenged (yes, again) WaPo columnist George Will one better by actually admitting he’d “misstated” that CO2 levels at Mauna Loa were declining (when they were, in fact, quite clearly rising), but the remainder of his column was so error-filled that I thought it deserved another look.

Take the first half of the piece, in which he approvingly cites Australian – and Oxford-trained – research physicist Tom Quirk to make the jaw-dropping argument that natural climate variability, and not anthropogenic activity, is to blame for elevated atmosphere CO2 levels. A quick look at Avery’s list of citations informs us that Quirk’s article appeared in a recent issue of Energy and Environment, a “peer-reviewed” journal curated by Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, which does not inspire great confidence in its scientific rigor.