Saturday, January 15, 2011

Vitriol of the Climosaurs

While the extreme vitriol of the extreme right-wing in still in our minds since the Tucson murders, can we (again) talk about the extreme rhetoric and hatred coming from those angry about climate change?

And the rhetoric of the right has clearly moved from denial to anger, led, primarily, by climate dinosaur ("climosaur") Marc Morano. Did you see his extreme, personal, unacceptable attack yesterday on Kevin Trenberth?



There is no other way to interpret this but as a direct and dangerous attack on a scientist doing the best work he can with absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing on his part, except that he has come to a scientific conclusion of which Morano and his backers do not approve.

Morano's demonization of Trenberth is not only wrong, but just as dangerous as the crosshairs Sarah Palin put on Gabrielle Giffords.

And the sickest part of of all this is that Morano will no doubt claim this label with pride.

I still worry that there is a real danger that someone in the climate community is going to get hurt over this kind of demonization. As ever, extreme climosaurs like Morano will maintain that (wink, wink) they had absolutely nothing to do with promulgating such hatred.

Wink, wink -- sure.

27 comments:

Brian G Valentine said...

Don't approve of the message? Or just plain don't believe it?

Wasn't Trenberth's "tragedy" the simple fact that he couldn't find any AGW?

And then went on to excoriate anybody who "misinterpreted" him?

Frankly, it sounds to me like a Junior High delinquent making up fantastic stories when questioned "where were you when the Junior High school windows were smashed?"

The fantastic stories that come out of it are essentially an admission of guilt, but the kid making it up is too stupid to realize it

David Appell said...

> Wasn't Trenberth's "tragedy"
> the simple fact that he couldn't
> find any AGW?

What? That is simply am absurd, even stupid, statement....

Anonymous said...

So, promoting to blow up skeptics is no problem? Pretty hypocrite if you ask me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Mw5_EBk0g

Anonymous said...

David, the last time I left a comment was after your nervous breakdown over the tribute to Ronald Reagan. You had to delete your rants to your echo chamber. I suspect you are off your Meds again.

The cross hairs on the map from Sarah Palin had absolutely NOTHING to do with the shooting. Likewise Trenberth has shown he is acting as an activist and not a scientist.
And BTW I think what Brian is referring to is to the lack of increased warming and that they cannot find the missing heat in the Oceans---because there is none.

Mike Mangan said...

Let me try, Brian. Apparently Mr. Appell is unaware of Trenberth's infamous Climategate email and the travesty of being unable to balance the earth's energy budget...

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048

Trenberth is no poor, hard-working, good-intentioned scientist. He is a hyper-partisan, right at the forefront of say-anything, do-anything to protect CAGW. He deserves the Morano treatment. When he addresses the AMS I hope they all pull down their pants and tell Mr. T to kiss their collective ass.

Anonymous said...

The Tuscon shooter was a flag burner and used the term "peace out". Are you suggesting those are actions and words used by the tea party?

No Pressure... said...

Would you agree that the same applies to the demonisation and veiled threats against climate sceptics?

Like that 10:10 video of children being murdered? Or the continual dehumanising connections to holocaust denial, Hansen's "death trains", or the tobacco lobby? Or constant accusations of corruption and dishonesty as a part of some oil-funded conspiracy theory? What did you think of a Greenpeace director putting up the words "We know where you live"? Or those now proposing that a less democratic system of government may be necessary? What do you think of the philosophy of Pentti Linkola? What are your views on the book "The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy", for example?

Do they not "attack" climate sceptics? Do you think the red button of the 10:10 video might conceivably be interpreted like a set of cross-hairs by some nut like James Jay-Lee? Do you think about the possible consequences of encouraging people to hate sceptics?

If Morano got shot (wink, wink), would you feel bad?

Peter Wilson said...

Actually, it seems yo me tha Brians comment was quite reasonable - you make no mention of Trenberth's attempt to "shift the burden of proof" and reverse the null hypothesis - both utterly absurd and unscientific ideas.

But all you can do is call Mr Valentine (whom I know to be a perceptive commentator, both here and elsewhere) stupid.

Classy

blogagog said...

"Morano's demonization of Trenberth is... just as dangerous as the crosshairs Sarah Palin put on Gabrielle Giffords."

In other words, it's not dangerous at all, just like Palin putting a target on a map wasn't dangerous.

Brian G Valentine said...

Thanks for the kind words, but whatever I say doesn't make a big difference.

What matters is what the public thinks about all this, and except for the NRDC, Sierra Club etc types who will never be convinced of anything except impending doom, ordinary people have come to the conclusion that they've been had (and played for fools) by a cabal of self-styled "scientists."

Which is true. But the ego that calls statements "stupid" is the ego that will force its owner to see whatever they have convinced themselves of, independently of the evidence in the external world.

(But that's what everybody else sees)

Steve Koch said...

David,

I disagree with you completely. It is shameful and profoundly biased and intellectually dishonest to connect Palin in any way to the murders in Arizona. Trenberth is a "scientific" hacktivist whose propaganda/insanity demands a response.

But, since everybody has been jumping all over you, let's change the topic just a bit.

Oregon is an amazingly beautiful state. There are some rivers in Oregon that have been dammed up to generate electric power. What do you think of the idea of using nuclear power to replace some of the hydro electric power so that dammed up rivers could be restored to their original amazing beauty/state?

kenneth said...

Open letter to Trenberth;

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/15/unequivocal-equivocation/#more-31727

Alexander said...

The problem Trenberth and other modellers face is that in 1974, Lacis and Hansen at NASA/GISS introduced Sagan's 'two-stream approximation' to the optical physics of aerosols.

It's wrong because it fails to take into account two optical processes; as well as internal diffuse scattering, there's direct backscattering at cloud tops, a form of shielding, much greater for larger droplets which is why rain clouds are dark underneath.

So,'cloud albedo effect' cooling, 1.75 times raw, median AGW in AR4, is imaginary and the IPCC's predictions of future CO2-AGW must be reduced by at least a factor of three. No current climate model can predict the future.

After NASA learnt there was no experimental proof of the effect, it published a 'surface refection' argument purporting that polluted thick clouds with small droplets reflect more sunlight; there's no such physics. What's more, 'cloud albedo effect' heating is another form of AGW so net CO2-AGW could well be zero.

For nearly 37 years, climate science has been based on a fallacy. It's time that the CAGW hypothesis was put into the bucket marked 'failed science'.

movielib said...

David Appel, did you read Trenberth's preprint? If so, I'm sure you missed the nastiness of using the term "denier."

Morano is an aggregator. The page you show is merely summarizing all the reactions to Trenberth's scientifically and philosophically wrong pronouncements.

Then Steve McIntyre uncovered how Trenberth seemingly plagiarized much of his commentary from a piece by Klaus Hasselmann in Nature Geoscience (August 2010). See the present front page of Climate Audit: http://climateaudit.org/

Then, miraculously, Trenberth's article changed. All these citations to Hasselmann appeared. Some of Trenberth's more ridiculous claims (which McIntyre had criticized) disappeared. Missing was any acknowledgment that there has been revisions or any acknowledgment to McIntyre for spurring the changes.

There's plenty of vitriol, all right. But at least 90% of it comes from your side.

But, as we know, the science is settled, the alarmists are trying to save the world and the skeptics are the bad guys.

Russell C. said...

"...the extreme vitriol of the extreme right-wing in still in our minds since the Tucson murders"

While the extreme vitriol of the extreme left-wing, including that against skeptic climate scientists, is M.I.A. in all the mainstream media discussions of toning down the rhetoric, as was pointed out in this article: "The Far-left ‘Jumps the Shark’ over Tucson Tragedy" http://biggovernment.com/rcook/2011/01/12/the-far-left-jumps-the-shark-over-tucson-tragedy/

Firkin Ridiculous said...

You guys are being a bit harsh. Appell is a freelance science journalist. Unless he sings the songs of the political and academic elites, he don't eat.

Brian G Valentine said...

Let's ask him.

David, do you derive any income from attacking "climosaurs"?

I derive $0.00 from confronting AGW for the junk science it evidently is, but I do it so that other people can eat.

(And without fossil fuel energy, probably four-fifths of the world population couldn't.)

Anonymous said...

Trenberth, at least on the 1st post of his pending speech, claims global warming has been happening (which is true, at least up until 15 years ago, and no rational skeptic denies that anyway), then somehow goes on to conclude -- "therefore it was caused by man.

That connection needs to be proven. Nobody doubts that man, may have had some impact on our current temperature rise. There is not a shred of evidence that this contribution has been significant. None. There is mucho evidence that it has been warmer during this interglacial on several earlier occasions, for longer durations, the most recent being the Medieval Warming Period.

There needs to be some evidence that this time man is causing what, in the past, was clearly the work of Mother Nature.

Computer models are not evidence, and Trenberth's claim "since GW therefore CAGW" is merely evidence that his logic is not to be trusted. If a scientist's basic logic is faulty, it's not likely that he/she understands the "scientific method" either.

Anonymous said...

It's ludicrous for anyone on the left to accuse the right of "dangerous language" given the green's recent 10-10 video.

Steve Bloom said...

~25% of the American public believes in astrology, which is to say there's an endless supply of flying monkeys who just love the sound of their own voices making shit up. Science? Not so much.

Time to take out the trash, David. It's discouraging to them if they don't have an audience outside their tight little circle of paranoid fantasists.

Colorado Wellington said...

David,

You published the Climate Depot screenshot but did you actually follow any of the links and try to understand?

If so, how could you write this about Dr. Trenberth "... scientist doing the best work he can with absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing on his part, ..."?

Do you think unattributed plagiarism is not wrongdoing?

Do you think that fixing a published text---without acknowledgment---after it has been criticized is not wrongdoing?

Do you think Trenberth's attempt to reverse the roles of the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis for CAGW is good science?

If you answered "yes" 3 times you have an entirely different problem. Otherwise, you should do some homework.

As it is, the null hypothesis to your breathless post is that the greatest personal danger to Dr. Trenberth arising from Marc Morano’s attention is ridicule.
*****
Rule #1: You can never ask too many questions. So I did.

Dano said...

You can always tell when the bots find the keyword and swarm to a blog to spew their umbrage...

Best,

D

Brian G Valentine said...

You can always spot the greenie bloggers who visit blogs for no other reason than to display their distaste for "deniers" by their embarrassment to relate their authentic names - they're just "Dano Characters" who like the "environment" and have little use for "deniers."

Tough luck, "Dano Character"

Dano said...

You can always spot the greenie bloggers who visit blogs for no other reason than to display their distaste for "deniers" by their embarrassment to relate their authentic names - they're just "Dano Characters" who like the "environment" and have little use for "deniers."


Devastating, seemingly confident, and aggressive assessment, surely.

But let us not interrupt the spate of vitriol of the bots who swarmed here in anger about a blog post on Morono's tactics.

Surely Mike has at least one sock puppet in here who was hoping for no interruptions...

Best,

D

Dano said...

That was a short-lived bot swarm. Who is Morono defecating on now, one wonders?

Best,

D

Colorado Wellington said...

What do you say about the subject at hand, Dano? You care about the environment and green infrastructure. What do you think about Trenberth’s piece? Did he do a great job in support of your interests and passions or did he damage them? Did he make climate science less or more credible to the general public?

And what message have you sent by changing the subject and calling others bots and morons? I am sure it feels good to get things off your chest but do you think that you advanced your cause?

Just wondering.

Dano said...

The subject at hand is the bot swarm that occurs when Morono unleashes it against those who point out his tactics and lies, and the vitriol contained therein.

That is the subject within the larger subject of the mendacity of the denial industry.

But thank you sooooo much for trying! heart!!1

Best,

D