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.

With characteristic attention to the facts, Dennis Avery, Monsanto’s man in the organic food debate, killed both climate change and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a post yesterday on his Centre for Global Food Issues website.

“Consensus on man-made warming is shattering,” Avery announced, basing this wild-eyed overstatement on last week’s story that:

Physics & Society, The journal of the 46,000-member American Physical Societ, just published “Climate Sensitivity Revisited,” by Viscount Christopher Monckton. Monckton is an avowed man-made warming skeptic, and former science advisor to the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (My emphasis.)

This whole story is afloat in hogwash, a fact that APS President Arthur Bienenstock has been at pains to point out.

We've added a briefing note in our database on Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, who is listed as a speaker at the upcoming the "2008 International Conference on Climate Change," being organized by the ExxonMobil and Philip Morris-friendly Heartland Institute.

Here's a New Scientist editorial pointing out the absurdity of Dr. S Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's recent PR campaign attacking the science of global warming.

It's behind a pay-per-view wall, so I've pulled a few quotes for those who don't have access to the whole article:

We need climate change sceptics. Not because they are right - at least not on the big issue of human culpability in recent warming - but because they ask hard questions that lead to deeper knowledge. What we do not need from them is misrepresentation and cynical trashing of scientists' work."

The climate change denial book of the year, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, has attracted a fair amount of abuse (see this great layman's review in the Daily Harold; or this scientific parsing from RealClimate.Org), but one of the authors' sons has posted a legitimate objection to the DeSmogBlog's early response that the book was the work of paid oil industry apologists.

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