We’ll be discussing the Gish Gallop more this coming Sunday as used by a certain GOP nominee for president—the namesake being Duane Gish, a Young Earth Creationist, who perfected the technique of whipping through a dozen or more confabulations in a few minutes that no debate opponent could hope to correct in the time allotted.
But the Gish Gallop is not limited to discrediting biology or protecting a bankrupt ideology, it’s alive and well in the lucrative field of climate change denial. Roy Spencer, profiled here at DeSmogBlog, does the Gish Gallop on human-induced climate change:
All in all, Spencer managed to cram about 24 climate myths into a 13-point white paper. Most importantly, as [Gavin] Schmidt noted, the bulk of those myths served no purpose.
You may come across articles about this all week; Spencer was glowingly quoted for his recent paper in a number of friendly fossil fuel funded sources like the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Meanwhile, we have set monthly heat records for over a year straight and some of the world’s greatest reefs are struggling to survive. Later this year we may well set a record minimum for Arctic ice and 2016 will almost certainly be among the warmest years ever seen, and might well claim the prize of the warmest year in the modern climate record. It begs the question: What exactly has to happen for climate denier holdouts to come clean?