Cautionary tales of instant expertise

I've noted before how Barry Brook and then Andrew Bolt were quick to link to an explanation of the Fukushima reactors by MIT Research Scientist Josef Oehman, which contained the prematurely reassuring words:

"there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors"

As it turned out, Oehman had not worked in the field of nuclear science at all, and New Scientist has an interesting report explaining how Oehman came to write the article, and how it was picked up as having more authority behind it than it deserved.

It was all sort of a mistake, not written for wide publication at all. Oh well. Everyone can be an instant expert on the internet, even by accident it seems.

A second cautionary tale tonight regarding Andrew Bolt. He quotes a story from his own paper today which claims an ANU study shows a temperature rise of .5 degree over 160 years. The IPCC figure was .76 degree C over the same period. What gives? say Andrew.

Answer: the accuracy of journalists, Andrew.

The full quote from the body of the report on the study is (with my emphasis):

"There is sufficient evidence in the long run of temperature records to support the existence of a warming trend," Prof Breusch said today. "From the 1850s to today it's somewhere over half a degree (celsius) a century.

That is, no inconsistency exists. Several people in comments have already pointed this out to Andrew, who has found time to make a couple of other posts but not to come back and acknowledge the error.

Poor Andrew. He's really become quite upset ever since Julia Gillard belled the cat (about time, I say) with this last week:

''I ask, who would I rather have on my side?'' she said. ''Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt?

''Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world?''

Exactly. Andrew's agitated response ever since that speech keeps reminding me of Jones' famous words from Dad's Army "they don't like it up 'em".

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt has corrected his post, but in a rather unusual way:

Readers point out that the report of the ANU survey is wrong. The survey found that rise to be about .5 degrees per century, thus about the same as the IPCC. Except, of course, that the IPCC has all that 0.7 degrees of warming since 1850 occuring in just the past century…

Wouldn't that be all the more consistent with AGW then? Or does he mean the IPCC is inconsistent with the ANU survey in a corrupt way? What's the point of his point?