Looks Like Watts Is Having Second Thoughts

Anthony Watts must have at least a few functioning neurons, because he has a nerve cell somewhere that I clearly struck.

Good.

His kind of abject and loathesome denialism needs to be exposed for all to see. Refusing to publish the very evidence you asked for, after denying it exists, needs to be shown for what it is. Refusing to acknowledge what a distinguished newspaper quotes because "I can just as easily create a list of complaints" -- with the implication that the threatened scientists faked them -- is lunacy. In a few sentences in today's post -- far too few, alas-- Watts seems to sense what he has actually been doing. But he brushes that off and returns to form.

By the way, a death threat doesn't have to contain the words "I," "will," "kill,' or "you." It doesn't have to contain any words at all. Brandishing a noose in someone's face is certainly a threatening gesture, and the noose was chosen for a specific reason.

Most importantly, the person who was threatened, Hans Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an IPCC member, considered it a death threat. Those were the exact words he used to describe it:

"I was confronted with a death threat when I gave my public lecture," Professor Schellnhuber said.

And as with all threats, and all abuse, the person receiving it is the one able to make its most accurate interpretation. Far too often people and families and communities and societies look away from such threats, calling them not real, not serious, not worth investigating. And far too often those threats do turn into action, or incite action, and people get seriously hurt or worse.

Denying these threats as Watts and his minions (microWatts?) do is despicable, and it is dangerous. They have taken this discussion into a very dangerous place, and innocent people are being targeted simply because they are doing their jobs as best they can and have come to a scientific conclusion with implications that some people do not like. It's craven, truly craven.

I'm convinced more every day that the extremism that we've been seeing in the last year or two is strong evidence that everyone sees what's happening to the climate and the planet and all that is left is for people like Watts to do is to thrash madly about and, like a spoiled child who cannot now get their way, resort to causing as much damage as they possibly can. We see this all the time now -- from Anthony Watts, from Christopher Monckton, from bullies like Marc Morano, and several others. What they want -- let's be frank about this -- is for scientists to stop their work and to shut up. Keep quiet, is what they are really saying, or you will suffer. You will be hurt.

And you know what? It doesn't matter one iota if these scientists are wrong. The threats that have been received are unacceptable, period. Threats of violence for any reason directed to anybody are unacceptable.

This is darkly vile, very dangerous, and completely unacceptable, and now at a scale that is without precedent in history. It has to end. And those behaving this way and denying them or stroking such behavior need to be called out and denounced.


PS: Oh yeah, my earlier post -- it had nothing to do with Watts' mother. I wonder, though, how she would have felt about what her boy has been doing.

(Picture via The Beast and Alternet)