Fisked!

Over at George Monbiot's place, we get the final of his Christopher Booker prize, awarded for the most unscientific bullshit in environmental journalism, calculated by errors per words (and named after the Telegraph's resident conspiracy theorist and nutter. The winner is John Tomlinson of the Flint Journal for an article which is riddled with howlers, as Monbiot painstakingly and exhaustively (but entertainingly) points out:

He has now seen off all possible contenders (except perhaps a repeat performance by his good self), with a cracking 38 howlers in one short column for the Flint Journal. Ironically he made these errors in response to my exposure of his previous claims.

Amazingly, this even beats his own provisional world record for density: the ratio of falsehoods to words. His first column averaged one misleading statement for every 26 words. This one delivers one per 21 words. I intend to submit his second column to the Guinness Book of Records as the most inaccurate article ever published in a newspaper.

Secondly, this astonishing wealth of disinformation means it has probably taken me 100 times longer to respond to his article than he took to write it.