Air Con author preparing to sue Herald, and Hot Topic

MEDIA RELEASE

13 August 2009

Air Con author preparing defamation papers against Herald columnist and newspaper

The author of an international bestseller on climate change is preparing to sue the New Zealand Herald and one of its journalists for defamation.

Ian Wishart, whose book Air Con has been a #1 bestseller in New Zealand and on Amazon.com in the United States, says Herald columnist Chris Barton has gone a bridge too far by defaming him without first reading the book.

“Barton has accused me of being dishonest, and or stupid, on the issue of climate change,” Wishart said today.

“Honest opinion is one thing, but when such allegations are leveled even though Barton has not actually read Air Con and instead relied on a discredited review by a rival pro-anthropogenic global warming author, Barton and the Herald need to face up to their own stupidity,” Wishart said.

“Air Con is packed full of peer-reviewed scientific papers. It has been read and positively reviewed around the world, including by climate scientists. A negative review based on a genuine appraisal of the book is perfectly fine, but for the Herald to publish Barton’s vitriol on the basis of someone else’s flawed hatchet-job of a review is ridiculous. Barton has done journalism a major disservice today, in my opinion, not just in relation to me but in relation to a number of other people he has defamed.”

“Barton has admitted to me that he has not read Air Con, but claimed he was entitled to take a swipe at me on the basis of Gareth Renowden’s review at Hot-Topic. If he wants to rely on Renowden as the ‘true facts’ in support of his opinion in court, good luck to him,” said Wishart, who added that he may widen the lawsuit to include Renowden as well.

SOME REVIEW COMMENTS ON AIR CON:

“This book by New Zealand journalist Ian Wishart a #1 bestselling author four times, surprised me by the completeness with which he reviewed and presents alternatives to the plethora of IPCC inspired spin and publicity which floods our media today. His sixteen chapters examining aspects of the debate are meticulously footnoted and thus are a valuable reference resource for those wishing to dig deeper or keep up to speed with the unfolding global warming / carbon reduction political drama in years to come. --Dr Warwick Hughes, climatologist

Ian Wishart's AIR CON is another masterpiece of scientific reason, letting the thinking world know that so-called man-made global warming is the greatest scam ever aimed at humanity. Please read this book. - Professor David Bellamy, England

 

UPDATE: FOR ALL OUR PUBLIC ADDRESS VISITORS

You might also appreciate this, and this (Russell, all these people must be "fools" too, yeah?)

 

UPDATE TWO:

Just noticed Russell Brown claims I moderated his comment out, and then gets bitchy as a result. Let the record show Brown has his facts wrong, yet again. His comment appears in chronological order below as does my response. Evidently the Left's leading blogger in NZ hasn't learned how to navigate the "Next" and "Previous" screen tabs.

Comments

[Sam Vilain]

"Barton has done journalism a major disservice today"

Bwahahaha. Unlike your career dedication to journalism, eh?

Let's take a look at this 'vitriol'

There is a lot of [madness] about. Only this week Breakfast TV host Paul Henry flirted with stupi-duty by lending support to Ian Wishart's AirCon, a book that the excellent Hot Topic (www.hot-topic.co.nz) noted "appears to come from another planet".

You're going to build a defamation case on that?

Someone cue the Tui billboards...

[Rob tate]

Looks like you've been busy today Ian, what with interviewing and writing about yourself for a press release about yourself. Thank god for the third person.

International bestseller?! Pardon?

[Anna]

Ian, you shouldn’t let them get to you. You are taking it too personally, he hasn’t even read the book, if he hasn’t read the book it isn’t a proper review and therefore you shouldn’t take it to the next level, as it is not worth it to you.

Your taking it too personally, you don’t need too. The people that review your book and keep an ‘open mind’ are the people you should concentrate your efforts on, mainly.

Your book is a new perspective, a great topic and with merit, be proud, flag the shit herald, what kind of real journalism is in the herald anyway.

If you worry the herald will generate your name in a defamatory way, your making it worse by showing them you are bothered, if your book is good, then it can ride a few criticisms.

[robk]

On the other hand it might be good publicity and I am in favour of lots of that for Air Con.

I rub shoulders with a lot of 'man in the street' types, and I have yet to meet one who believes the AGW myth.

I am happy to have read Air Con, and I have passed on quite a few of the conclusions to them.

[robk]

Sam

Barton's closing comments:

"But to deny that climate change is happening really is stupi-duty."

Leaving aside Barton's fifth reference to what was obviously just a typo - this is such a straw man argument...

Who is denying climate changes are happening? Not Air Con, anyway.

[AcidComments]

"I rub shoulders with a lot of 'man in the street' types, and I have yet to meet one who believes the AGW myth."

Robk,

Of interest.

There's also more and more school teachers out there who're getting sick and tired of shoving the Al Gore AGW/CC brainwashing BS propaganda down their students throats also.

More of them are saying it's a load of Rubbish outside of class.

[Anna]

But there is no way Ian should sue. Barton and Renowden are just playing games to get at Ian, you can tell and using a newspaper that accepts ‘pretend’ reviews to do it! Barton hasn’t even read the book, any respectable author should stay away from the Herald for this is too ridiculous- reviewing a book you haven’t even read how lame can you get?

If anything Ian should write to the newspaper and tell the crap paper you would sue but you don’t want your name attached to the dimwits that used “your" paper to expose their tacky games.

Idiots.

[jonno]

Suing for defamation, based on one throwaway comment? You're wasting your time. Sure, it might raise the book's profile which I guess is your intention in doing this but it makes you look incredibly petty and childish, lacking in any moral authority (not to mention dignity). However, this obviously hasn't concerned you in the past.

Suing for defamation is a bit rich given all the downright nasty things you've said about people based on your own personal prejudices in the past.


Defaming Helen Clark because you don't like lesbians, comparing certain Labour Party MPs to Nazis. Why the sudden call for objectivity and fairness in journalism? Hasn't bothered you before.

{EDIT: Nothing like dealing with a fake, Jonno. You post comments over at Hot Topic, and in your sign-in details here you gave the following email address:
jonno.hanson@mediamonitors.co.nz

I pulled your comment overnight while I checked this out, because a following comment from a "Richard Johnson" also of mediamonitors.co.nz came from the same Orcon IP address 60.234.62.23.

Having spoken to MediaMonitors, they have no record of a Jonno Hanson (or John) or a Richard Johnson.

In other words, like Gareth Renowden's 'review' of Air Con, you're a fake.

Classic.}

[richard johnson]

Narcissist personality:

-criticism adverse
-inflated ego
-lack of empathy for others, especially those of differing backgrounds and viewpoints
-lacking in emotional intelligence
-irrational reasoning

Sound familiar at all, Ian?

{EDIT: See my above response to your alter-ego. Given that much of the above could apply to one with a split personality, perhaps you should be looking in the mirror Jonno

Or is it richard.johnson@mediamonitors.co.nz, 60.234.62.23}

[LessCO2Now]

PUBLICITY STUNT.

[LessCO2Now]

"Air Con is packed full of peer-reviewed scientific papers".

That's odd because I can't think of any article printed in a peer reviewed journal that makes a convincing case that there is any factor that is causing the climate to warm that is more important than CO2.

Also, the IPCC produces no real research of it's own. They just produce a Meta-Analysis of what is already in the scientific literature.

[AcidComments]

"That's odd because I can't think of any article printed in a peer reviewed journal that makes a convincing case that there is any factor that is causing the climate to warm that is more important than CO2."

Quite Simple.

Some of these socalled esteemed peer reviewed journals. Refuse to publish any peer reviewed papers which don't go along with the CO2 AGW Propaganda mantra!

So in reality they're 'pulp' fiction magazines dressed up as 'real science'!

[AcidComments]

Looks like Australia isn't going to be a sacrificial goat for worthless CO2 emission reductions just yet.

Australian Senate Rejects Rudd’s Cap and Trade Emissions Plan

Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Australia’s Senate rejected the government’s climate-change legislation, forcing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to amend the bill or call an early election.

Senators voted 42 to 30 against the law, which included plans for a carbon trading system similar to one used in Europe. Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter, was proposing to reduce greenhouse gases by between 5 percent and 15 percent of 2000 levels in the next decade.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=
aHo_TW08Y3to

[WR]

In his foreword to the 1989 book The Greenhouse Effect Bellamy wrote:

"The profligate demands of humankind are causing far reaching changes to the atmosphere of planet Earth, of this there is no doubt. Earth's temperature is showing an upward swing, the so-called greenhouse effect, now a subject of international concern. The greenhouse effect may melt the glaciers and ice caps of the world causing the sea to rise and flood many of our great cities and much of our best farmland."

[Ian]

Yeah, back in 1989 I believed in global warming as well.

20 years later, not so much.

[Anna]

Any intellectually thinking person will ‘know’ that the most important subjects today in the mainstream agenda will be to a degree deceiving.

Everything you read in the mainstream media will be to a degree untrustworthy. The media is controlled by certain individuals that use mass media, and other methods to control people’s perceptions. Chris Barton states “Pause and ask what motive the scientific community has to gang up and invent a phoney climate crisis.”

Basically any person that states such a docile comment isn’t really worth dealing with. There are many many reasons why the scientific community would create phoney climate changes.

And basically in this day and age there aren’t many journalists that aren’t curbed.

Instead of Ian having a boxing fight with Barton, he should sit back, reflect and ask himself does he want to be a part of such pettiness. Especially with an amateur that uses words like “stupi-duty” on a subject matter he clearly knows nothing about.

Yes it is true we all know Ian Wishart is an a$rehole, and I’m sure he knows this himself, but the a$rehole tag is a bit stale nowadays and it’s time for Ian to move on.

In all of Ian’s latest books he slamming rivals around, slam-dunk smash this person..blah blah. Kick Richard Dawkin’s etc… But really who cares about Richard Dawkin’s or Renowden, if you are on to a subject matter that is worthy you don’t need to kick someone’s a$re to prove it.

You take a subject matter, enhance it, and bring it to light with fresh perspective and brilliant background research. Having fights with people lowers the quality of work. It’s ok to reference opposing opinions but you do it in a sophisticated manner.

Ian is grasping around all the right topics you can see this. But he has gone from being an atheist (who KNEW God didn’t exist) and was “deprogramming” people into a person who wants to “programme” people into being Christian. He needs to flag the programming and focus on the research. Yes Ian your right God exists, you have to be a moron not to know this, atheism is dead (and always has been) most people know this already.

Also Ian should realize that sometimes Christianity (just like global warming) and Islam is being ‘used’ as a political tool. Just like the theory of evolution is and was. Do you really think the Roman’s were true Christian’s at heart? With politics at the heart of everything you have to be aware of how low people can go.

Ian went from being an atheist to a Christian, he ‘sometimes’ judges a person’s actions more highly if they are wearing a red jumper than a blue, instead of boxing people/situations for whatever reasons- you need to get “above” this mentality and loosen up . Your “work” is above this.

[lame-o]

"...when such allegations are leveled even though Barton has not actually read Air Con..."

"...reviewing a book you haven’t even read how lame can you get?"

This lame: the 'Climate expert call[ing] Air Con the definitive book' only read the first 30 pages of the book. The book is 300 pages long. That's 90% of the book unread.

http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/05/climate-expert-calls-air-con-the-definitive-book.html

Now that's lame.

[John Dierckx]

If suing for defamation helps in selling more books, cause quite honestly that is the only ratio can see in such an action, than great! We need to hear the other side of the story as well.

As the replies to the media release show: this whole climate change thingy has nothing to do with science and facts anymore and all with beliefs and emotional attachments. So, bad reviews were to be expected where this whole climate change thing is turned into a “you’re either for us or against us” kind of debate. And by the way there is no room for skeptics, doubters or agnostics, they are considered as “against us as well.

People need to read books like this. The presentation – including some of the responses to this media release on tbr.cc – are brought from a flawed perspective.

The debate is not about whether or not climate change is a reality: it has been a reality ever since well before there were humans. The debate should be about whether or not we are dealing with man made or anthropogenic climate change. I prefer not to speak about global warming as it is debated even whether or not the earth IS actually warming or cooling down.

You are/will be governed and paying on the basis that climate change is anthropogenic yet that is not at all clear. Are you willing to part over your money to a potentially lost cause? Just because Greenpeace starlets say it makes common sense and because politicians say the same? Look at the arguments for targets and taxes, it has nothing to do with saving the planet and all with everyone else does it therefore so should we. It is all about brand and image. Could it be that both the media and politics are not telling us the full story?

Let’s all try to consider what the complete picture is and make sure that we know where we are putting our hard earned cash and freedom of choice. And don’t get me wrong, I am all for preserving this incredible planet called Earth. What I am not prepared to do though is putting my money in financial/political schemes that will not contribute anything to dealing with the (in my view inevitable) climate change. I’d rather put my money on preparing for the change that at least until it is convincingly proven that climate change is actually man made, anthropogenic, caused by OUR emissions and that therefore my ‘emissions tax investment’ is actually contributing to a solution.

Perhaps it is time for another referendum on taxes and targets: because, moral obligation, brand and “green an clean image” quite honestly does not convince me.

Read the full comment on the Media Release and some of the comments thereon at http://johnierckx.wordpress.com.

[sy]

If Gareth at Hot Topic really thought Ian was a lunatic then why has he spent so much time trying to discredit Ian’s work? It doesn’t make sense, since gareth has put so much time and effort into reviewing Ian’s book, why would you waste your time on it if it wasn’t worth it?

The ego game it seems.

Whoever doesn’t believe in a global conspiracy has to be asleep.

[Ian]

Yes, it's not really about ego as it is about accountability. The mainstream media is dominated by journalists and columnists who've become so used to interviewing each other and being praised by lobby groups that basic skills are disappearing and the objectivity and quality of the news products is suffering.

Regardless of bad reviews (and I have no problem with an honest, bad review), it's a cardinal rule of journalism that if you repeat someone else's defamation without first checking yourself you're potentially in the gun.

For Chris Barton to slag a book he hasn't read strips him and the Herald of the defence of honest opinion, because the opinion wasn't genuinely his. It couldn't be, he hadn't read it to form an opinion.

At least when I critiqued Renowden's work, or the IPCC, or in other situations Richard Dawkins and others, I actually read what they wrote first. I didn't rely on echo chambers to inform me.

Gareth Renowden's "review' which led to the Herald's silliness doesn't qualify as an honest review. As I've spelt out ad nauseum in lengthy posts, passages were taken out of context, deliberately, to try and denigrate me and the book.

In various blogsites, and now the Herald, Gareth's review is being relied on as accurate and as proof that Air Con is flawed, by people who have not and subsequently will not read the book.

It isn't flawed. Climate Change Minister Nick Smith was challenged about claims he made that Air Con was inaccurate (possibly based on Gareth's review), and has now sent me a letter backing away from the inaccuracy issue rapidly. And Smith has a team of officials from his Ministry whom I'm sure would have delivered the bullet if they could have found one.

The decision to take legal action against the Herald and Renowden is to restore some balance and sanity to this debate, and to protect my professional reputation in exactly the same way that anyone I've criticised or reported on has that right.

I have stood by for a number of years now and allowed all manner of sniping to go legally unchallenged, but an email this week reminded me of the dangers of not responding:

"Have just read your Absolute Power (courtesy of Library) and congratulate you on a well written, and footnoted, book.

"I am afraid my perceptions before reading it were rather vague, ill-informed and, I would have to say, prejudiced: 1) I knew you had been pilloried by Labour over many ‘scurrilous accusations’ and from that 2) I knew of your name and the existence of Investigate magazine. You being the Government’s bete noir. But it all sailed above my head and I just assumed (rather lazily) that you were not worth the time investigating (so to speak), so I didn’t – until, by chance, I picked up your book that is!

"My impression is that mainstream media have been slightly craven in failing to take up the cudgels once an Investigate story surfaces – effectively leaving you to languish on the fringes. Maybe it is a function of the reduction in journalists. But at least you are respected by your peers which is more important."

If blog sites like Hot Topic and others can successfully marginalise genuine attempts at debate by ad hominem attacks or ridicule, that bodes very badly for freedom of speech and for an informed public.

By all means let's be robust, but let's be honest in our methods.

In a sense, the tactics used by the Herald and Hot Topic are little more than a form of bullying, which further intimidates people from joining the debate.

This isn't healthy in a democracy and I have no intention of allowing myself to be marginalised.

My point, as I have often made before, is that in my line of work I'm required to make every effort to get facts right and stay within the laws of defamation. I see no reason why I should have to peform at a higher standard than either the Herald or Hot Topic.

If, as some of Gareth's supporters here have tried to claim, there is no chance of success then fine, that's life. On the other hand if, as I have very good reason to believe, Hot Topic and the Herald have left themselves exposed with a hole big enough to drive a fumes-belching Mack truck through, then that becomes their problem.

The law is the law. Let's not get emotional about it.