Subjects of the Empire of Denial

Denial has conquered the United States of America. To those of us who have been fighting climate deniers for years, this is a nightmare, a sickeningly familiar nightmare where the personality-disordered trolls and con men have exploded out of the comment threads and seized the reins of a great nation.

To the average citizen, the kind of people who have triumphed in our most recent election seem disturbingly unpredictable. They are by turns abusive and wheedling. They aver a broad range of fringe beliefs, untroubled by the explicit contradictions between them. And Americans are scared. They can sense the sickness of the denier, but do not understand them, and they are all the more frightening for that. But they can be understood, and it is critical to try and understand them, and in particular to understand their relationship to factual truth.

The thing you must grasp about a denier is that they don't care one whit about factual truth. It has no purchase with them. They exist in a world of emotion and spiritualism, in which the group and the cause are all.

They are not ideologues. They are not even fanatics. Fanatics believe in things, and will sacrifice to live out those beliefs. Deniers do not sacrifice, because sacrifice doesn't feel good, and feeling good -- feeling egosyntonic, not egodystonic -- is all.

Deniers are bullies and sycophants, and everything they say and everything they do refers back to that. They talk, and think, and reason in ways that are about tribal allegiance, in-group posturing. That is the only truth they care about -- the truth of "us" and "them."

To decent people, their behavior is baffling. They assert blatant lies, which they will defend passionately, but then suddenly abandon, sneering at the fools that treated those lies as important. Others, less creative but equally performers, will profess to believe those lies, even though in reality if you required them to stake their lives or even a hundred bucks on the factual truth of, say, the notion that the world is cooler than it was in the middle ages or that Mexico will pay tens of billions of dollars to build us a wall, they would never in a million years lay money down.

You may wonder why they lie, if on some level they know they are lying. The answer is that they perform belief in the same way the Japanese would draw and release empty bows, believing the noise drove away menacing spirits. As long as they see themselves as Good and the other as Evil whatever they say that embarrasses, frustrates, distracts, or stymies their Evil opponents (intellectuals, leftists, people of color, foreigners, Jews) serves the cause of Good.

The denier's sense of truth is emotional. What feels good to him is true. What feels bad to him, what provokes guilt or embarrassment, is an evil lie, probably put there by a Jew.

The denier's sense of the world is fundamentally childish, in the way that children identify authority with reality (everything is my parents' fault.) Atavistic, the denier regards facts as an emanation of power, as an expression of his evil enemies' agency. For the denier this is a moral struggle, a conflict between good and evil, and what we term the physical reality must ultimately reflect their wishes, because they are good and God is good. God would never permit the greens, socialists, atheists, women or Jews to be right. Therefore they are not right, whatever the evidence may be in this specific case.

The existence of a cold uncaring universe which will unfold implacably according to its own arbitrary laws, regardless of what we think or believe, is abhorrent to the denier, if he can grasp it at all. Clinging to a religious mindset (the world is divided between the saved and the damned; the saved know the truth and the damned are deceived; the true struggle is the moral struggle of the True Believers to save the world) they pursue religious solutions, professing their "truth," banishing doubt with faith, and seeking out the corrupters who lead honest folks away from the truth.

It follows that the denier is supremely unprepared for victory. While the denier is in rebellion, factual truth is seen as an aspect of the oppressor's authority. By denying reality the denier fights the oppressor. Once he must deliver results requiring navigation of reality that narrative no longer functions.

His reaction to this breakdown, predictably, will be one of denial -- denial, in this case, of his own power and agency.

You may expect him to double down on stories of invisible enemies, of malignant forces which somehow still threaten the Good, despite its apparent victory over all of its rivals. Nothing will be built up, nothing will be reformed or improved, because the denier is fundamentally not creative or inventive, but rather self-absorbed and petulant. As his failures mount, scapegoating -- always a key feature of deniers relationship to the world -- will become more aggressive. The denier's search for new enemies can become a lethal delusion.

Denier comment of the day: undermedicated at WUWT

So, let's talk about what went wrong here. First question: what is it about the mentally ill that makes them adverse to paragraph breaks? Really, I sincerely wonder this. Lots of great writers and artists in general have been pretty nutty, yet skilled at their craft. But if you wander into the dark corners of the internet where aliens built the pyramids, vaccines cause autism, or "the Greenies" cooked up the global warming scare, you get headache-inducing rambling like this, the written equivalent of pressured speech. At a certain point horror gives way to pity, and I just wish I could help.

The CO2 numbers are wrong in predictable and boring way, debunked by better men than I here and here. But I do find this interesting: "CO2 naturally is . . . ."

Essentialism is, of course, not a scientific concept. It's interesting to me that for all their hostility to "greenies," many deniers partake in this idea of a natural world with a fixed set of characteristics which is set apart from humans and our influence. This set of assumptions clashes with many other parts of their Weltanschauung, but it creeps in over and over.

A trace gas in our atmosphere being blamed for as we all know here, everything bad. Somehow my civilian intellect is screaming WTF? That on the surface does not make any sense to me.

The denier has a high regard for his own intuition, which he confuses with rational thought. They form a false idea of the subject which emerges from their lack of understanding of the physical world and is animated by paranoia. The reminder of their process of deduction will involve seeking out confirmatory evidence and ideas and shunning other facts and arguments as the pleas of the condemned.

I have complained before to the CAGW Alarmists, I want them to explain exactly

Like a particularly obnoxious child, the denier firmly believes that other people owe him "exact" answers to any question he might be able to formulate, and that a free education is his right. Meanwhile, with ignorance his holy shield, he will beat off any effort to actually help him bring his thoughts in line with reality.

When I read these reports and NOAA comes out saying warmest winter ever, I get crazy.

 Your words, man. Your words.

Judith Curry fails at another profession

Judith Curry has the guts to ask the big question:

Which is a good example of the following principle:

GISTEMP is in: 2014 is the hottest year; there's still a tiger in your bedroom

Anomaly +0.68C. 2014 edged out 2010 at +0.66C.

Warming continues to be closely in line with the trend since 1970:

Many people have tried to explain this to climate deniers, who chose not to understand it (1). If anyone else is confused by it, this is the bottom line: you need to apply the same standard of proof to a hypothetical change in the warming trend as you would to determining the existence of a trend in the first place.

Having determined that there has been a warming trend of about 0.16C/decade for the 30 years between 1970 and 2000, the correct question is not has the warming stopped OMG (a question you will never be able to answer with a few years of data) but rather is there any reason to think the trend is different from what it was before?

If you determine there's a tiger in your bedroom, and then (wisely) don't go into your bedroom for a while, the test for whether there's still a tiger there in not whether you've heard it roar in the last 5 minutes. Unless you have convincing evidence, you probably should conclude that the tiger's still there, until and unless you get some strong evidence something has changed.

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1. 

So, what is wrong with Cruz’s statement?  Well, assuming that by ‘recorded warming’, he means the satellite-derived lower atmospheric surface temperatures his statement is absolutely correct.  If he is referring to globally averaged surface temperatures since 2000, there is only a very small amount of warming; this small amount of warming is indeed contrary to the theory of AGW.

Who? Who else?

Has Christopher Monckton ever won a lawsuit?

My lawsuit was much better than "Cats." I'm going to file them again and again.

Christopher Monckton is an ignorant, incompetent, dishonest, delusional mess of a gibbering idiot. I've reported on this fact for years and I have yet to hear from any lawyers, which is why I was skeptical that the Nova-Monckton account of him repeatedly crushing his enemies in lawsuits was anything other than a slop bucket of narcissistic lies(*).

First claim: Monckton sued the British government over using An Inconvenient Truth in schools, and won.

We have had some good court victories. In 2007 the London High Court condemned Al Gore’s mawkish sci-fi comedy-horror movie. It found nine errors so serious that the court ordered 77 pages of corrective guidance to be circulated to every school in England. The judge said: “The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.”
Two days later, Gore won the Nobel Mickey Mouse Prize. But he was holed below the waterline. Now he is seen not as a prophet but as a profiteer.
The whingers of the do-nothing brigade were at work even then. The lawyers refused to file the case on the ground that there was no chance of success. They were fired.
The new lawyers said we could not possibly win on the science and refused to use any scientific testimony. The judge threw the case out. I recovered the position by instructing the lawyers to write to the judge asking if he had even seen Gore’s movie before he had reached his judgment without holding a hearing.
Tellingly, the judge did not reply. I insisted on – and got – a new judge. This time the lawyers did what they were told. I wrote 80 pages of scientific testimony. Bob Carter and Dick Lindzen– bless them both – worked from the document in crafting their evidence, and signed off as expert witnesses. As soon as the other side saw it, they collapsed and settled, paying the plaintiff $400,000.

Reality: Monckton wasn't one of the litigants in that suit, which the deniers lost. The quote from the judge, which I've bolded above, is a fabrication -- a total fiction (for a comparison with what the judge actually said, see this outstanding analysis, beginning at the two-minute mark.)

He claims to have asked one of his friends to fund Stewart Dimmock, who actually sued. Dimmock has been asked who helped fund his suit, at refused to name anyone, calling it "a private matter." Many sources, understandably, report this as fact, because who would lie about participating in a failed lawsuit? But the reality is that Monckton lies constantly, habitually, and always by way of growing the legend of Monckton.

The case, Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills, wasn't settled, and Dimmock didn't get a payment of $400,000. He did, as is routine in British legal battles, win a payment for a portion of his legal costs, leaving him 60,000 pounds poorer.

His stated objective in the lawsuit was for An Inconvenient Truth not to be shown in schools any more. The judge rejected that request.

Monckton claims to have been involved in funding this failed lawsuit, but as far as I know, no one actually involved in it has confirmed that, placing his role in the same category as his claimed discovery of the cure for AIDS.

The second win claimed by Monckton has already been exposed as another fantasy: he claimed that Mann had settled a lawsuit with Tim Ball for a million dollars. Whoops! Pure fiction, and Jo Nova was troubled to print a correction.

Monckton also trumpets a huge, simply huge, victory against the dasterdly BBC:

I sued the BBC a couple of years ago when they did a hatchet job on me. I had been told – in writing – that I should have the chance to alter any points that were inaccurate. Fat chance.

So I lodged a High Court application for an injunction. The BBC’s first reaction was to deny that the director-general’s office had received my letter. Not having been born yesterday, I had delivered the letter myself and had insisted that the director-general’s personal assistant should sign for it.

I insisted on seeing the programme before it was broadcast. It was a disgrace. I wrote to the Director-General listing two dozen factual errors and numerous other biases in the schlocumentary. No reply.
So I lodged a High Court application for an injunction. The BBC’s first reaction was to deny that the director-general’s office had received my letter. Not having been born yesterday, I had delivered the letter myself and had insisted that the director-general’s personal assistant should sign for it.
The BBC crumbled and cut the programme from 90 minutes to an hour, taking out the overwhelming majority of the vicious nonsense. There were still some objectionable points, so I went into court.
I fought the case myself. When I introduced the two barristers and three solicitors for the Beeb, the judge interrupted me and said: “Lord Monckton, I fear I must draw your attention to a potential conflict of interest. You see, I am a member of your club.”
I had no objection and invited the BBC’s expensive QC to give his opinion. He had no objection either, but added: “Er, I too have a conflict of interest. I also am a member of Lord Monckton’s club.”
The judge did not prevent the Beeb from leaving a few barbs in my side. The BBC issued a lying statement that I had lost. But the judge held that I had “substantially won” the action. A 90-minute programme had become 60 minutes. The Beeb had lost. Big-time.

He lost, of course. Really this story gets to the heart of why Monckton is such a memorable liar. It's full of specific details -- about the club, and the judge, and the director-general's personal assistant. Yet nothing that can be easily checked, nothing that can be readily verified. It's full of numbers -- two dozen errors, 90 minutes to an hour, two barristers and three solicitors, etc. And it has a simple story of Monckton prevailing against odds. Really the only weakness of the story, as is typical of Monckton, is that he cannot control his own narcissism long enough to sell the story. Monckton is always the least believable part of a Monckton anecdote. He demands! He sues! He belongs to a fancy club! He takes on an army of lawyers and wins!

Monckton has surely mastered the Big Lie(**), as his fictional legal career illustrates.

Monckton has also threatened legal action against George Monbiot after an article dissecting Monckton's dishonest hackery. (He claimed it was "libellous of me in my calling.") But no lawsuit ever emerged. He promised to have John Abraham brought up on charges of academic misconduct; he didn't. He made the same threat about Dr. Barry Bickmore: again, no follow-through.

So here is my question of the day: Has Monckton ever actually followed through on his profuse threats, undertaken legal action against a critic, and won a judgement against them? Or are his repeated claims to have done so -- claims that have now progressed to advocating specious lawsuits against critics as a strategy, since it's worked so well for him -- simply another of his narcissistic fantasies?

See also:

Skeptical Science's Monckton Myths.

Barry Bickmore's Lord Monckton's Rap Sheet.

Abraham debunks Monckton (1/6)

Monckton Bunkum (Parts 1-5):

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*That, and of course the fact that their mouths were moving.

** The Big Lie is a propaganda technique described by Hitler in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Monckton, exceptionally, explicitly admits to hiding behind this cognitive glitch:

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong but that I got just about everything wrong. And how plausible is that?

WUWT denounces innumeracy, demonstrates illiteracy

Where have all the flowers gone?

Innumeracy is terrible, don't you know (and I suppose they would know):

For any rational discussion of the effects of CO2 on climate, numbers are important.

OK, so far so good, when you mention "rational discussion" in the first sentence the phrase "protesting too much" comes to mind, but numbers are indeed important, so so far, so sane.

 An average temperature increase of 1 C will be a benefit to the planet, as every past warming has been in human history.

 . . . and here comes the crazy. What?

 And the added CO2 will certainly increase agricultural yields substantially and make crops more resistant to drought.

 Evidently the author missed the part where the added CO2 causes warming, droughts, and extreme weather, leading to an estimated 200 million additional food insecure people and 24 million addition malnourished children by 2050.

 But in articles like “Scant Gains Made on CO2 Emissions, Energy Agency Says” by Sarah Kent in the Wall Street Journal on April 18, 2013, we see a graph with a 6 C temperature rise by 2050 – if we don’t reduce “carbon intensity.” Indeed, a 6 C temperature rise may well be cause for concern. But anyone with a little background in mathematics and physics should be able to understand how ridiculous a number like 6 C is.

The article is paywalled, but they also attribute the assertion of 6C by 2050 to Joe Romm, and that we can check:

This is one of the most enlightening calculations I’ve seen in awhile, and it is worth your time to understand it because it speaks clearly to debunk many of the claims of temperature rise in the next 100 years made by activists, such as the 6c by 2050 Joe Romm claims,

Emphasis in the original. But if we follow the link, we discover the headline is the result of a reading comprehension problem:

 “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius [11°F], which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

2050 is not mentioned. There is a rather obvious error in a Reuters article cited in the post (they've corrected it), but as Romm did not repeat the error, to attribute it to him is simply a lie, and to build a post around "refuting" the red herring is  . . . well, it's what they do. Somewhat more surprisingly, David Appeal made the same obvious mistake. Rabbit is on the case.

Grandpa's favorite climate blog

WUWT, of course, uses this flimsy excuse to launch into a bunch of cargo-cult math, embarking on a "greatest hits" of basic scientific mistakes, including:

• The warming caused by CO2 is instantaneous! (So the warming caused by 280ppm --> 400ppm is only the warming seen so far.)
• Never mind, because climate sensitivity is only 1C per doubling! (No evidence for that; it seems to have become an article of faith.)
• CO2 increases, like any other trend, are completely linear and can be extrapolated infinitely! (If CO2 is rising by 2ppm/year now, that is the rate of change expected for the next 12,000 years.)

WUWT, grandfather of the denialosphere, continues to demonstrate an effortless command of the three Is of full-spectrum ignorance: innumerate, illiterate, and ill-mannered.

James Delingpole is a sensitive soul

Right about everything, and in no sense a thin-skinned fanatic.

You wouldn't know it from a Twitter account that proclaims "I'm right about everything," but James Delingpole is a tender-hearted soul who just can't abide insensitive folks like me.

James was wondering aloud when his critics would "apologize" by the people who "vilified" him, since he has now been proven right about something or other. I'm always interested in cultivating the acquaintance of the infallible, and his website made him seem really cool and approachable (and not at all narcissistic):

James Delingpole is a libertarian conservative who writes brilliant books and brilliant articles, and is really great on TV, radio and the internet too. You’ll love him. You’ll want to read his stuff, buy his book and music recommendations; follow him on Twitter, and generally be his best friend

Emphasis mine. Well, of course I can't just ignore people vilifying my new best friend, so I looked into James' purported martyrdom, and found this note that followed an investigation by the Australian Press Council:

The Council has upheld three aspects of the complaints. First, it has concluded that even if the REC scheme has the weaknesses alleged in the article it cannot tenably be described as a “kind of government-endorsed Ponzi scheme”. . . .
Second, it has concluded that the claim that a law firm sought gagging orders has been publicly denied by the firm and, in the absence of any supporting evidence, constitutes a breach of the Council’s principles concerning misrepresentation. . . .
Third, it has concluded that the report of the anonymous remarks concerning paedophilia, a very serious and odious crime, were highly offensive. The Council’s principles relate, of course, to whether something is acceptable journalistic practice, not whether it is unlawful. They are breached where, as in this case, the level of offensiveness is so high that it outweighs the very strong public interest in freedom of speech.

The article itself is replete with hyperventilating allusions to:

[C]hickens [] laying eggs without yolks; [] ewes were giving birth to deformed lambs; their once-active dogs spent their days staring blankly at the wall  . . .

And of course:

[S]huttered houses and a dust-blown aura of sinister unease, as in a horror movie when something dreadful has happened to a previously ordinary, happy settlement and at first you're not sure what. Then you look up on to the horizon and see them, turning slowly in the breeze . . .

Best friends don't let best friends practice the paranoid style, so I offered my new pal a little reality check, and, well . . .

A long quiet spell

 I've let this space go dark recently, partly because my real job has been all-consuming for the last little bit, and partly because I was thinking about the direction I wanted to take this blog in future.

I started here in a fire of righteous indignation at the politically and ideologically driven science denial propagated -- chiefly across the web -- by those who wanted to sweep the problem of global warming under the rug. On that front, I and many others that took part in the struggle to reveal the true face of climate denial can declare victory, for victory it is when the public recognizes science denial as one facet of the polarized right's assault on American society, and they have.

Sorry, 8%ers, you lose

I can pinpoint the moment I knew we'd won this battle. It was when Todd Akin's theories on pregnancy and "legitimate rape" blew up across the interwebs, claiming his political career as a casualty almost as an after thought. (Quick, what state did he lose his race in?) At that moment, it was crystal clear to everyone with eyes to see (that is, everyone not already sunk deep in this radical right-wing social movement) that a certain portion of the public had decided they could just make up science on the spot. And most people quite rightly recognize this as quackery. Mission accomplished.

Exposing quackery was all I ever wanted to do with this blog, and it stands exposed. Very well, but shoddy thinking in the name of the cause is an immortal enemy, and it will rise up as many times as it can be laid to rest. Nevertheless it still warrants some reflection about how best to go about fighting distortions and misinformation. Clinical psychologist Norbert Schwarz argues that repeating misinformation in order to debunk it may contribute to the problem.

Even if we can avoid reinforcing misinformation, the larger problem with approaching climate change from an attitude of refuting science denial is that, implicitly, it grossly exaggerates climate deniers' importance as an impediment to effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Deniers are not the problem. They are not what is standing in the way of effective action. What is standing in the way of effective action is this:

Sixty percent of the public wants Congress to act. Seventy percent want corporations and industry to get busy. But:

It's hard to find questions about climate change with the cost to the responder cooked in. People doing serious surveys of climate change attitudes don't tend to like them, and this question illustrates why: posit a cost of $15 a month, and our majority for climate action falls to a measly 39%.

That's the climate problem, right there. It's not a tiny minority shaking their little fists and demanding Mann be indicted. It's a broad majority that recognize climate change as a serious problem, but not so serious, or so pressing, that they are ready to vote for, and pay for, effective strategies to cut greenhouse gases. What seems like an exciting clash of intellect and science versus ideology and hokum turns out to be something much more familiar and prosaic: voters that see a long-term problem and prefer to procrastinate rather than make tough decisions with real costs. See also, infrastructure. See also, education. See also, healthcare.

It's not clear that dissecting the horrifically ill-reasoned and often just as ill-argued talking points of the climate denial movement helps move forward the ball towards getting the broader public buy-in we need for carbon taxes and such. Since normal, non-blogging people avoid bitter, divisive arguments -- rather than leaning into them -- attacks on climate deniers, however witty, may contribute to the majority's determination to avoid engagement.

I might retort that I do this for my own amusement and those of like-minded people, but that's not true. I want to have a positive impact, however small, on the discourse of climate change. Maybe arguing, provoking, and poking fun are not the best way to go about it. I put it to you, loyal reader, what is?

Graph of the day

Courtesy of Mother Jones, h/t The Dish:

Lewandowsky madness: Steve McIntyre equates deleting comments on your own blog to the mass murder of Jews

Really.

If you follow the link (I don't recommend it) you quickly discover that Steve McIntyre doesn't know what a "pogrom" is. He's referring to Lewandowsky deleting some comments on his blog. That is what he is calling a "pogrom." That's right: Steve McIntyre equates deleting comments on your own blog to the mass murder of Jews.

These folks are getting punch-drunk and they're getting desperate. Hysterical race-baiting -- the new denier normal?

UPDATE: He appears to have realized that "pogrom" was an incredibly stupid word to use. Without acknowledging the change or the reason for it, he's deleted "pogrom" from the blog post. His less offensive alternative? Here:

Less bad, surely, but someone should tell him that if you're going to use a dog-whistle term like "cleansing," you probably shouldn't start out with the explicit comparison to racist mass murder. Subtle hints are kind of redundant at that point.

Threats against climate scientists: Phil Jones' inbox

The looney right did this up themselves, as a "joke."

Glenn Tamblyn at Skeptical Science flags the University of East Anglia's release of threats and hate mail sent to Phil Jones. PDF here, examples below:

1. “Subject: Kill yourself scum
Fuck you for your lies and deceit. You deserve to die. And if you don’t take your own life, I fucking hope somebody does it for you.”

2. “Your children and family will know because we know where you live. expect us at your door to say hello ^\-(”

3. “Faggots like you will be dealt with, as now people know what you need and will beat the living shit out of you every time you show your socialist ass in public. I’d kill you in a second if given the chance. . . . I’m now going to take physical action against you. You deserve it you fucking prick!”

4. "If anyone of those perverted assholes ever steps within the boundries of the U.S., they decimated [sic]. We have 2nd amendment [sic] and you as a stupid Briton probably don't know what that means. We have a right to bear arms and these perverted assholes will be wasted. We will have plans for you as well. If you bring your family all the merrier.

You fuck prick! [Sic.] Britain needs to kill these scam artist [sic]."


 5. "Keep this in mind. Not all will tolerate your thieving lying ways when it impacts their family.

Beware of retribution upon yours.

Someone some where [sic] will hurt you down."

6. "wanker you wanker you nead [sic] to be killed"

7. "i [sic] hope you fuckers die slowly and painfully.

you are the scum of the earth and should be put in front of a firing squad."

8. "update your google search, it should say, widely known group of cocksuckers and liars that tried to enslave the world through a huge scam perpetrated by a bunck of fuckin cocksuckers, if was i charge [sic] you would all be lined up againt [sic] a wall and shot."
----------------------

So what is the significance of this, besides telling us something important about the character about a certain group of "climate skeptics"?

I think it puts the question to people like Judith Curry and Roy Spencer, who still have a foot in the world of science, but derive much of their hit counts and claim to public notice from "climate skeptics" who regularly air similar paranoid ideas and abusive language in their comment threads.

Let me be clear; I am not calling for them to moderate with a heavier hand. What I am saying is that if you put yourself at the head of a mob waving pitchforks and torches, you have some responsibility for the kind of people who take you as an inspiration. I have no hope for people like Anthony Watts, who is merely a "shock jock" of the internet. But I would like to see more grown-up climate deniers and lukewarmers taking pains to isolate and marginalize the violent, paranoid, homophobic and neofacisist elements of their fellow travellers. If they and other vocal opponents of strong mitigation cannot grow up, as a movement, enough to denounce their bigots and terrorists, then they and their movement will be defined as a movement of bigots and terrorists in the public mind, and deserve to be.

The academic that launched a thousand insults.

Earlier posts on threats against climate scientists: 

 

Threats against climate scientists -- a glossary

Coward deniers continue threats

  

UPDATE: Supporting documentation here (h/t Quark Soup).

Quote of the day: Andy Lacis FTW

Andy Lacis tells it like it is. Read the whole thing. Money quote:

As Garth notes, it is therefore not surprising then, that  “it is indeed vastly more difficult to publish results in climate research journals if they run against the tide of politically correct opinion” (in reality) a fully demonstrated understanding of current climate science. “Which is why most of the sceptic literature on the subject has been forced onto the web, and particularly onto web-logs devoted to the sceptic view of things.”

Why would anyone want stuff that is patently erroneous, irrelevant, or otherwise deficient to be published in the long-established climate science literature? Clearly, there has to be some sense of quality control to define what we reliably understand in science, and what we don’t. Why not just trash out the junky stuff in the web-blogs where that is already happening? Should anything of value be uncovered, it will surely survive the thrashing, and then it will make it into the peer-reviewed climate science literature and become recognized as a recognized part of current climate knowledge.

As I like to remind people "ignorance on your part does not constitute an obligation on my part."

Science illiteracy as cultural signifier

The Dish reminds us that conservative science denial is bigger than climate denial:

Notably, belief in straight-up evolution is increasing, even as naive creationism flourishes. I think Sullivan's take on this bears repeating:

I'm not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it's less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that some of that 46 percent are giving that answer not as an empirical response, but as a cultural signifier. That means that some are more prepared to cling to untruth than concede a thing to libruls or atheists or blue America, or whatever the "other" is at any given point in time.

Right now, climate change denial is an easy way to throw red meat to the radical right. Americans (and Europeans -- most of the world, for that matter) is focused on the economy. We've had two back-to-back La Ninas coming on the tail end of the deepest solar minimum of the last century, making last year's very hot temperatures relatively cool by 21st century standards.

These short-term circumstances have been used to advance the ridiculous claim that serious climate change legislation is now and forever dead -- the politics are impossible. What usually follows from such an analysis is a plea for appeasement -- Won't we please drop this whole upsetting subject of greenhouse-gas emissions, and start talking about energy independence or local adaptation or something that is less provocative to the "God created humans in their present form" crowd?

Well, no. We won't drop it, and the graph above shows why such a tactic wouldn't work; the right wing in America is hardening and deepening its rejection of modernity. That's not a process that's being cause by provocation from the other side; when was the last time you were confronted with an angry Darwinian polemicist? Yet naive creationism flourishes, because the people who proclaim it are looking for a fight.

Thinking that you are going to win over right-wing climate "skeptics" with energy independence is like thinking you are going to find common ground with anti-abortion activists in promoting free contraception and universal sex ed -- hey, it cuts the abortion rate!

We need to win this fight, not evade it. There is a saying in chess: "The surest way to lose is to play for a draw." I think that applies here. To win the fight, we don't give up the high ground. The high ground is the truth: Our greenhouse gas emissions are warming the climate and endangering our civilization; many things must be done to confront this reality but the most important is to dramatically cut humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases.

This fight is far from over. Elections are coming, and so is El Nino, and so is the peak of the solar cycle. Climate impacts will multiply; the damage will become more dramatic and threatening year by year. The political calculus on this issue will be recalculated again and again in the coming years, with the only constant being that the further we travel into the future, the more destructive change will have happened.

How do you beat a cultural signifier? You make it too expensive in terms of how the culture is viewed from the outside. Support for segregation was a cultural signifier. Segregation lost when people peacefully but determinedly got up in segregationists' faces and forced them to declare to the nation just how ugly, irrational, and destructive their hatred was. They didn't win by changing subject. They won by turning the conversation again and again towards the truth their opponents' insisted was divisive and inflammatory.

Heartland apologizes to donors for sunlight

From an email to Heartland donors in the wake of Heartlandgate:

I Apologize

I am very sorry that the identities of some of our donors were revealed by this theft. I apologize to them, from the bottom of my heart.

We are calling everyone who was named in these documents to give them the bad news and offer whatever assistance we can to repair the damage.

We promise anonymity to many of our donors because nobody wants the risk of nutty environmentalists or Occupy Wall Street goons harassing them. We know that privacy is important to you.

Literally the first Google Image for "Occupy Wall Street goon." Terrifying.

 

Peter Gleick tricks Heartland scum, feels bad about it.

Peter Gleick turns out to be the clever prankster that coaxed Heartland's professional liars into sending him the inside scoop on their charity-status-abusing, million-dollar-donor approach to manipulating the public.

He apparently regrets his trickery. Bloggers pronounce themselves outraged.

Maybe I'm missing the big story here. Gleick fibbed and took advantage of the gullibility of the Heartland extremists to uncover their criminal use of charitable funds for political ends. These are people funneling millions of dollars from right-wing whales into a well-oiled propaganda machine that pays for fake science and fake scientists, a la Bob Carter. He gave them a fake name? Meh.

Liberal Science Denial

MarkH makes the case we are letting liberals off the hook too easily:

. . . liberals are just as likely to to disbelieve science that challenges their ideology, only the issues where liberals tend to deny aren't quite as earth-shattering (although anti-vax is a serious public health problem) and not as much in the media spotlight. And recent cognitive studies on why people believe what they believe support the likelihood that all of us, liberal, conservative, or moderate, are poor rational actors in the evaluation of science. . . . 
For instance, I've found liberals are far more likely to be interested in "greening our vaccines" (note the liberal pull of the label "green"). There are conservative anti-vaxxers but they come to it ideologically as well from the "the guv'mint can't tell me to vaccinate" standpoint. Liberals are far more likely to buy into altie-med, to believe "toxins" cause all illness, to engage in "big pharma" conspiracy-mongering, to express paranoid delusions about GMO foods or irradiation, to espouse insane theories about food in general, or to believe Bush was behind 9/11.

 But commenter Rev. Enki sets him straight:

Here's a question: How many (relatively) liberal, serious presidential primary contenders (say, getting >10% of the primary votes in multiple states) for the past decades have been anti-vaccine? How many have been anti-GMO? How many have been HIV denialists? The primaries are generally considered to be significantly biased toward the liberal activists. The liberals among liberals. On the other side, how many serious conservative primary contenders have been anti-evolution? How many have been deniers of, or at least minimizers of global warming? How many have been anti-vaccine, for chrissakes? How many have outright declared, or at least intimated that the UN is considering taking over the world?

Exactly so. While in principle, liberals are just as capable of science denial as any conservative, in practice, denialism among US conservatives at this particular moment in history is mainstream, whilst liberal denialism is relegated to the fringes where it belongs.

If you keep looking and you look hard enough and long enough, you can find ample evidence for the irrationality of all humankind. The fear of nuclear power. Resistance to education reform (lately better) and so on. But denialism is a little more complex than that. It also incorporates a hostility towards the educated, an embrace of conspiracy theory and crackpots, and rage and hostility when confronted with the facts. It takes root and flourishes among those that see themselves as persecuted and threatened by powerful, sinister forces responsible for the lacuna between what they feel to be true and the actual evidence.

This is typically a minority outlook, for obvious reasons. But sometimes a larger political movement will either pander to that outlook or be captured by it outright, and that is what the American conservative movement is flirting with today.

Five denier memes for 2012

In 2012, deniers will still not be Galileo

What denialist tropes will the cool kids be pushing in 2012?

All the golden oldies will remain in heavy rotation, including slandering scientists, "there's been cooling/no warming for X years," and "there's no consensus." But be on the lookout for the following memes, which are focus testing in the small markets of the comment threads now:

1. It's way too small to make a difference.

Notes: Deploying this strategy is as simple as minimizing something by comparing it to something vast. The fallacy is that instead of comparing cost to benefit, the denier compares a tiny instance to a world-spanning, expensive view of the whole, which is relevant only if someone is claiming that instance will address a whole issue by itself (no one ever is).

It's use is as simple as dividing X by Y. For example, if Jo Nova sadistically murdered eight children, that would be merely an insignificant 0.000000115% of the world's people.

Usable on almost anything the denier wants to dismiss; the emissions caused by the Keystone XL's dirty oil, the Greenland ice lost in a single melting season; the contribution to the grid of a single wind farm.

2. It's too late to do anything.

This is the next logical fail back position after "It's not warming" and "We're not causing it" and "It won't be bad." Expect it to surge among the more refined "skeptics," who are still subject to embarrassment when their original line of bull has been shredded.


3. Misrepresenting the world.

Note: Watch out for the sentence beginning "India and China will never . . . ." What follows is almost always an exercise in wishful thinking.

4. God save the white race!

I'm getting a really loathsome, racist vibe off of a lot of deniers these days. I'm not sure why this is making a comeback on the right. More marginalized, less inhibited?

5. Equating inaction with the success of their arguments.

 Deniers are less important than people concerned about inaction think, and much less important than they think they are. They cast themselves (and sometimes we, their opponents, collude in this) as the primary reason the world has not taken action to fight climate change, but here's what we know:

* Denialists have, through two years of relentlessly promoting the fake scandal "Climategate," left 75% of the public blissfully unaware of their anger and striving. 75% of Americans have never heard of "Climategate."

* Those that vehemently deny global warming consistently poll between 10-15% of the public. Of those, less than 5% admit to ever posting a comment about the subject online. So the highly visible fringe of the denialist movement represents a small minority of a small minority, talking mostly back and forth to each other. When they tell you more and more people are flocking to their banner, laugh.

* It's no mystery why Americans and the rest of the world haven't taken the right steps to fight global warming, the steps everyone is going to wish had been taken sixty years from now. It's a long-term problem. Is our political system good at those? It requires a certain degree of scientific literacy just to wrap your mind around it. Is that one of our strong points?


Special bonus prediction: Combining memes 1-4, 2012 will see a surge in the "Our emissions don't matter; the global South's emissions will soon dwarf ours." (Not true, poorer countries emission are important and will become the majority of emissions, but rich countries will maintain a large minority share but when has that ever stopped them?)

Jo Nova: nonsense headline of the day

From Jo Nova's spiteful-stupid slanderous slurry come this gem:

. . .

. . .

Hot Air denizens: Bigoted, racist, and in denial

From the geniuses at Hot Air, whilst busily denying that the sea is rising:    

Racist, religiously bigoted, and a climate denier to boot! Ladies, form one line.

Really, "burrata" is just reflecting the general tenor of the conversation over there. The original post, by "Jazz Shaw," informs us that sea levels are not really rising, according to "sea level expert" and master dowser Nils-Axel Mörner. Yep, who are you going to believe, an occultist divination expert or your own lyin' eyes:

But what do I know. I can't even find underground water sources through divination. I don't even own a magic stick.

Five things I learned in 2011

1. Trees matter. A lot. They sequester more carbon than we thought; they generate cooling aerosols in their own right. We could do a lot to slow the advance of global warming if we decide to stop reducing forests in extent and start intensive reforestation.

2. The howls of outrage from deniers in the blogosphere in response to an argument vary in direct proportion to how effective that argument is with the broader public. There is a scientific consensus, and in many respects, the science is settled. The global is warming, and humans are the cause. Many deniers or "skeptics" get their funding from fossil fuel companies, exaggerate their qualifications, and misrepresent their results. This is simple stuff to those of us that live and breath this stuff, and deniers try to discourage us from making this arguments with howls of rage and jeering contempt. But they are not the people we need to convince, and the people we do need to convince -- the broader disengaged public -- these are powerful messages that should be underscored. Deniers know they are powerful, which is why they try and silence them.

3. Methane and CO2 release from the North (permafrost and methyl hydrates) could be apocalyptic in its effects. But the significance of this is undercut by the fact that the BAU pathway will almost certainly be apocalyptic in its effects. A lot of carbon is going to come out of those frozen deposits, but having studied it a fair bit this year, this quote from Raymond T. Pierrehumbert most closely reflects my own layperson's view:

But the clathrate release problem is in a rather different category from the runaway greenhouse issue. It has to be seen as just one of the many fast or slow carbon catastrophes possibly awaiting us, in a system we are just groping to understand. The models of destabilization are largely based on variants of diffusive heat transport, but the state of understanding of slope avalanches and other more exotic release mechanisms is rather poor — and even if it turns out that rapid methane degassing isn’t in the cards, you still do have to worry about those several trillion metric tons of near-surface carbon and how secure they are. It’s like worrying about the state of security of Soviet nuclear warheads, but where you have no idea what kind of terrorists there might be out there and what their capabilities are — and on what time scales they operate.

Or to put it another way: what would be the state of the climate today if this carbon didn't exist? Call that scenario one:

On a BAU pathway, we face mass extinctions, tremendous human suffering, and unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere.

With intensive mitigation, many of the same problems await us, but will hopefully develop more slowly, over several centuries, blunting the impact somewhat and giving us an opportunity to reverse some of the effects. We still have to worry about unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere, but forcing the system less intensely will, logically, reduce the risk.

Now add the carbon back in:

On a BAU pathway, we face mass extinctions, tremendous human suffering, and unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, release of methane and CO2 from permafrost and methyl hydrates, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere.


With intensive mitigation, many of the same problems await us, but will hopefully develop more slowly, over several centuries, blunting the impact somewhat and giving us an opportunity to reverse some of the effects. We still have to worry about unpredictable feedbacks that could greatly accelerate climate change, including ice loss, glacier melt, forest fires, changes in ocean currents, release of methane and CO2 from permafrost and methyl hydrates, and other known and unknown shifts in the climate and the biosphere, but forcing the system less intensely will, logically, reduce the risk.

In isolation, the potential for destabilization of this buried carbon would be a looming global catastrophe. But as it is, it becomes one aspect of a global catastrophe already in progress. That's how I see it, anyway.

4. Climate deniers represent a hard fringe of the American right; climate deniers in the blogosphere are an even smaller and more radicalized sub-group. Their views are not only more extreme than the large minority of the public that doubts the science of climate change, or the majority that is not ready to pay a significant price to combat climate change: they are fundamentally different in their outlook. You can see this in the opinion polls; you can see it in the comments and posts they make, in which a extreme anarcho-libertarianism features prominently. This ideology is totally unknown and would be bizarre to most American conservatives; to climate deniers it is practically conventional wisdom. Note also the amazing prevalence of what can only be described as the mentally ill, suffering from delusions that demonstrate grandiosity, paranoia, loose associations, and flight of ideas.

We can win the undecided middle to our side; there is evidence that this is already happening. We do it not by trying to win over or placate deniers, nor by trying to bait them. We win by telling the truth in a clear, simple, understandable way, by being less crazy and more normal, with the caveat that part of being normal is reacting strongly to people who attack hysterically and dishonestly.

5. Even as the overall picture continues to be grim, I found some of the research I came across this year comforting. This is turn reassures me that my filters, such as they are, are not the industrial-strength blast shields one often notes in one's opponents, but can easily overlook in oneself.

Although I remain very concerned about agriculture, I was happy to see that models that incorporated varying the type of crops and where they are sowed found a less severe impact from warming. Some crops will benefit from a CO2 fertilization effect.

Since warming over the last couple of decades has run at about 0.14-0.17C/decade, versus slightly more, 0.18-0.21C, as we would expect from the bulk of the models, the cheerful possibility exists that short-term climate sensitivity is a little lower than we thought, 2-3C instead of 3C-4C (possibly because the aerosol forcing is on the high side). So while the consequences of climate change, like glacier melt, continue to mostly run ahead of the models, it is hopeful that temperatures are running slightly behind. Of course, even a warming of 0.05C/decade or 0.10C/decade would be incredibly fast in geological terms and very dangerous. To see the danger we need only look at the response of the climate and the natural world. Still, better to be warming a little slower than we expected than a little faster.

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What did you learn in 2011?