Wednesday, 19 July 2023

“Fake invisible catastrophes and threats of doom” | Debunking a debunk

When I looked at the one-star reviews of Patrick Moore's book on Amazon (something I usually do for any book i’ve read or about to read), the most popular post was one directing us to a “debunking” by Sam Holman, here

[Patrick Moore was cofounder of Greenpeace, and early anti-atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, and early campaigner to save the baby seals, both campaigns successful].

I had a look at Sam Holmans’ debunk, and I guess what I’m doing is a debunk of the debunk. Holman covers just four of the 11 chapters and in just two of the 11 does he “partly” debunk Patrick Moore. In the other two he does not debunk Moore (by my calculation) and in the other seven he doesn’t even try to debunk them. 

So, I guess I’d say the debunk by Holman is not a debunk and that for most of what Patrick Moore says there must be some basis, otherwise it would have been debunked. 

Here’s my spreadsheet with my conclusions about the Holman critique: