Finally! The man who pretended to be Oregon's state climatologist, even though no such position existed, is retiring.
Now George Taylor can pretend to be a fake something else, rather than deceiving the public about both global climate change and his qualifications to speak about it.
I've never met George. Likely he's a nice guy. But he's gotten under my skin for some time, along with the folks at Blue Oregon, who have also given him a good bye and good riddance sendoff.
What's amazing is that my local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, called him a winner in an editorial today.
WINNER: George Taylor. As the leader of the Oregon Climate Service and the de facto state climatologist, his out-of-the-mainstream views on climate change attracted fans and foes. But he made people think. Now he has decided to retire.
Wrong. Taylor is a loser.
Because he didn't make people think about climate change. Quite the opposite – Taylor never provided any scientific evidence to back up his loony notions that humans aren't major causes of global warming, and that natural causes are the culprit.
So there was nothing to think about when Taylor spouted off on conservative talk radio, or web sites supported by the same oil company money that Taylor also took.
I'm pretty sure he's never published anything about climate change in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Yet somehow Taylor thinks he knows more than thousands of genuine climatologists whose research has resulted in a scientific consensus.
Taylor and his global warming-denying cronies like to portray him as a courageous maverick who has fallen victim to climate change groupthink. Not true.
He's simply wrong. Just as there are still people around who think the Earth is flat, and that the moon landings were faked. They aren't winners either. Like Taylor, they're wrong.
May George have a pleasant retirement, hopefully one which keeps him as far as possible from making any more erroneous pronouncements about climate change science.
As a memorial to how wrong Taylor has been, here are the posts that I've written about him.
"Oregon's climatologist denies global warming" (March 2005)
"Oregon's climatologist still a Pollyanna on global warming" (May 2005)
"Kansas is to evolution as Oregon is to global warming" (August 2005)
"Willamette Week outs Oregon's climatologist" (August 2005)
"Global warming is real. Debate over." (April 2006)
"So-called 'climatologist' George Taylor has to go" (January 2007)
"Oregon's state climatologist flunks Climate Change 101" (February 2007)
"OSU stiffs Kulongoski on 'state climatologist' title request" (February 2007)
"Facts about George Taylor and the 'state climatologist'" (February 2007)
"Relax, right-wingers: George Taylor isn't being fired" (February 2007)
"George Taylor is a loser, not a winner" (February 2007)
"Climate models undermine global warming skeptics" (February 2007)
The 22 year long temperature rise that got a lot of people convinced that human activity was causing global warming stopped in 1998. Now we see that the average global temperature from Jan 2007 through Jan 2008 dropped more than the rise from 1901 to 2001. What next?
Posted by: Dan Pangburn | February 23, 2008 at 06:46 AM