Peter Hadfield (journalist)

Hadfield has attacked the creationist preacher Kent Hovind for rejecting phylogenetic taxonomy in favour of the pseudoscience of created kinds,[24] misrepresenting scientific papers to claim that radiocarbon dating does not work,[25] and contorting the historical record to fit Biblical chronology.[26] Hadfield accused Ken Ham, another promoter of baraminology, of working backwards from his conclusion, arguing that his entire modus operandi is to distort scientific facts to fit his beliefs. For example, Hadfield explained that Ham's distinction between experimental and historical science is an entirely arbitrary differentiation designed so that Ham can reject any scientific theories that conflict with his religion and deem them false.[27] He also mocked Ray Comfort for suggesting that the banana was intelligently designed by God to fit in a human hand and not knowing that the fruit had been selectively bred and genetically engineered over human history,[28] referred to the concept of a crocoduck invented by Kirk Cameron "laughable", explaining that ducks and crocodiles were part of completely different lineages that shared a most recent common ancestor in basal archosaurs that evolved in the Early Triassic,[29] ridiculed Chuck Missler for thinking that the theory of evolution predicted that life would spontaneously spring into existence in a jar of peanut butter,[30] derided Buddy Davis for misunderstanding natural selection and denying that birds evolved from dinosaurs,[31] and lampooned Billy Crone for his claim that the magnetic field would have vapourised the Earth if Earth were even a million years old.[32]

Hadfield has stated that both sides in the global warming debate have made erroneous statements, saying, "while skeptics like Christopher Monckton and Martin Durkin fabricate a lot of their facts, many environmental activists tend to exaggerate theirs."[4]

Hadfield has debunked claims that global warming stopped in 1998 made by blogger Michael Andrews and United States Senator James Inhofe.[33] His video about how climate change deniers have claimed that the world has been cooling since 1998 has been featured on Boing Boing, where Maggie Koerth-Baker has called it "true skepticism at its best."[34] Hadfield has also made videos debunking the claims made by Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley about climate science in public presentations; Hadfield's series on this topic is entitled "Monckton Bunkum."[35] Among other false claims, Hadfield debunked Monckton's cherry picking of start and end points in the historical global temperature record that he used to make it seem that the Earth had not been warming,[36] his confusion of forcing with sensitivity,[37] his claim that Himalayan glaciers showed no change over the past two centuries,[38] misquotes of Sir James Houghton,[39] and his assertion that the International Astronomical Union concluded in 2004 that global warming was mostly attributable to solar forcing.[40] A back-and-forth ensued, in which Monckton responded to Hadfield's video series about him on Watts Up With That?, whereupon Hadfield replied in turn.[41][42] Later on, responding to an exchange between Monckton and Stefan Molyneux, Hadfield pointed out that Molyneux did not understand positive feedback, which Molyneux referred to as a "magic multiplier".[43] Hadfield criticised Patrick Moore for obfuscating in a video for Prager University the relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide over geologic time by misusing figures from the works of Robert A. Berner and Christopher Scotese that agreed with the conclusion that carbon dioxide drove Phanerozoic global temperatures.[44] Hadfield put the British journalist James Delingpole in his crosshairs and dismantled his assertions after he misrepresented a Nature Geoscience article and claimed that it proved climate change deniers correct.[45] Hadfield similarly dismissed a claim made by Ian Plimer that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans, showing how Plimer never gave a source for that assertion and appeared to have made it up.[46] Hadfield has taken aim at a number of predictions of a forthcoming "grand solar minimum" and "mini-ice age" made by Don Easterbrook, Kevin Long, Habibullo Ismailovich Abdussamatov, and others.[47][48]

In addition to his debunking of climate change deniers, Hadfield has also disproven false claims pushed by left-wing politicians that exaggerate global warming. Al Gore and his film An Inconvenient Truth were targeted by Hadfield for misleading their audience by implying that the Greenland ice cap would melt in the near future even though scientific studies predict this will happen over many millennia.[49] Hadfield lambasted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for saying in 2019 that the world was going to end in twelve years.[50]

Hadfield has criticised and lampooned the Expanding Earth hypothesis, an obsolete hypothesis from before the discovery of plate tectonics that attempted to explain the apparent continental drift over geologic time. He has referred to the belief of comic artist Neal Adams, one proponent of the theory, that pair production in Earth's core generates extra mass as Earth supposedly expands as "New Age hippiespeak". Additionally, he also mocked James Maxlow, a geologist who continues to advocate this theory, for mistakenly referring to the Sun as a "giant blob of pure energy" after he suggested that the driver of the Earth's expansion may be the same thing as "whatever the Sun is made of".[51]

As an example of his style of debunking, in June 2013 Hadfield revealed that a photo that was provided as evidence for a link between High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) and the 2004 tsunami in the first episode of the television show Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, was purchased from a commercial photographer's website.[52] The photo was introduced by the TV-show's lead investigator Raheem as a picture of the Aurora borealis. Hadfield found that the photo was described by the photographer as being of the Aurora Australis.[53]

Hadfield has been critical of the COVID-19 lab leak theory, pointing out the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science made by many of its proponents, such as Nicholas Wade,[54] Matthew Tye,[55] and Radio France Internationale.[56] Hadfield likewise debunked false claims that significant numbers of deaths were falsely attributed to COVID-19,[57] and has called out various politicians and media outlets, such as Donald Trump, Fox News, and Sky News, for their promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19 despite no evidence supporting its efficacy as a treatment.[58] In addition, Hadfield showed how Trump's lack of understanding of the difference between case fatality rate and infection fatality rate sparked numerous conspiracy theories that scientists were exaggerating the danger of COVID-19.[59] Hadfield mocked Ted Nugent for believing that COVID-19 was the nineteenth incarnation of the coronavirus and that there were viruses named COVID-1, COVID-2, and so on.[60] Hadfield also examined a fake quote from Kary Mullis that claimed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests do not work; the quote was actually from John Lauritsen and said not that PCR tests do not work but that they cannot determine the quantity of a given pathogen.[61]

Hadfield has debunked and mocked the claims of anti-vaccine activists such as that MMR vaccines are a cause of autism, an assertion based on a fraudulent paper in The Lancet by anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield, among numerous other anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.[62] Michael Yeadon, an anti-vaccine activist who claimed outside of peer-reviewed medical journals that the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine could cause infertility because the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein shared a sequence of four base pairs with syncytin-1, has also come under fire by Hadfield.[63]

Hadfield has criticised pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock and his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse for their pseudohistorical claims about a "lost civilisation" prior to the Younger Dryas in a two-part video series. Hadfield revealed that Hancock had misrepresented and exaggerated numerous facts about ancient monuments such as Gunung Padang and Göbekli Tepe by suggesting that these advanced structures appear suddenly in the archaeological record despite being preceded by a record of less advanced sites indicating gradual technological development and contradicting Hancock's "lost civilisation" thesis. Hadfield further explained how Hancock's stereotypical presentation of mainstream archaeologists as dogmatic and close-minded is used to present Hancock as a voice of reason and a victim of censorship.[64][65]