Quote of the Week – sensationalizing for the greater good

The Pompous Git says:
January 21, 2014 at 8:32 pm
@ur momisugly Gunga Din
The problem here is we are not in the shoes of the potential whistleblower. Observing whistleblowers it is obvious that they convert most, if not all of their wealth into income-for-lawyers. If they are lucky, they remain married to a loyal spouse, but there’s never any guarantee that’s going to happen. My GP who has some firsthand experience in this area tells me that depression and ill-health frequently accompany the loss of wealth, family and prestige. It’s a hard ask…

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Yes. That’s where the empathy comes in. Some can take a stand and weather the storm. Some know they couldn’t weather it so don’t stand. I can have empathy for them. But what is right and wrong is still what is right and wrong.
(“They” can be wise in how they take their stand. We owe much to “Mr. FOIA” but few, if any, know who he or she is.)

Oh, dear Pompous Git,
When I read “{Regarding} the farm. We shall be putting it up for sale,” my heart sank. My dad and his siblings are doing that right now. It hasn’t been a working farm for a long time, but, “the farm” (still call it that) has been in the family for 4 generations. That you are not leaving entirely by your own choice, that circumstances are forcing you to leave must break your heart. No matter what country they are from: farmers love their land. That your hands have been working that land right up until the end is going to make that last drive out the driveway so hard. I am dreading that day and I’m not even a farmer.
As you wisely say, though, a new chapter with new joys lies ahead of you. We at WUWT will certainly benefit — you’ll have more time to post!
Weeping with you and your wife,
Janice

As the poster of the “astonishing statement,” I have been distressed, disturbed and demoralised by a tattoo of remarkably closely-synchronised assaults on my integrity launched from the direction of the flat-earthosphere. Obviously I can’t even begin to put myself in the shoes of a world-leading researcher like Dr Michael Mann, but I now know exactly how he felt in the darkest hour of his own Garden of Gethsemane*: hounded by politicians crowing over every typo, dogged by deniers baying for blood, ratted out by soi-disant “colleagues” and and mobbed by the bleating, myth-parroting mouthpieces of the Murdocracy (or should I say HERDocracy).
I’ve always gone out of my way to display patience and tolerance for folks who voice doubts, misconceptions and incomplete knowledge regarding climate change, even if their questions have been soundly debunked and/or dismissed by scientists, provided (of course) that their difference of opinion is a matter of sincere ignorance; but it seems it was naive of me to hope for your folks’ respect in return!
To those who have described my comment as “plagiarism” (a mastertrope of dog-whistling, ad hominem and Islamophobia obviously intended to liken me to Edward Wegman’s “foreign,” “non-American,” “A-rab!!!” grad student):
Paranoid much? Think “Skeptically” for a second. If I were stealing statements from climate scientists then how, pray tell, could I have obtained sentences like:
“THEY are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people THEY’D like to see the world a better place… So THEY have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts THEY might have.”
Notice how I refer to climate scientists in the 3RD PERSON? Are you seriously suggesting these are Steve Schneider’s expressions? LOL—OK, riiiight. How anybody could be familiar with the Professor’s lectures and writings on the planetary climate crisis without noticing his favoritism towards the 1st person is beyond me. Even for climate-debate standards, that would be tone-deaf.
The passage you thought you recognized was, in fact, a PARAPHRASE of the climate-scientific ethics Schneider expounded so memorably in a wide-ranging Discovery interview.
Sure, it was that article which first opened my mind—and that of a whole generation of non-climate-scientist readers—to these ideas, but I’ve met literally dozens of climate consensualists who’d confirm and agree with Schneider’s principles, so it seems both supererogatory and arbitrary to demand I attribute them to the individual researcher who just happened to articulate them first/ best to a muggle audience.
We’re having a discussion (or Conversation) about the way **climate science** works (and how it differs from the public’s idealized, black-and-white caricature of science as “just the truth, ma’am”)—which didn’t die with the late great Professor Schneider!
This is something around which many misconceptions still exist—let’s raise some awareness. Imagine how much colder the planet would be if so-called Skeptics stopped being so negative and made constructive contributions?
Instead of impugning my entire life’s work (what’s next? rats on the doorstep? a burning cross on my lawn?), you folks could do some CLIMATE COMMUNICATION with the people who read The Conversation—most of whom, in my experience, still labor under the understandable misconception that climate scientists are pure, dispassionate, asexual truth-machines, who have seen the future and describe their observations. There’s still nowhere near enough appreciation (let alone sympathy) out there for the bewildering flowchart of moral dilemmas, compromises and pitfalls scientists began to encounter (starting about 25 years ago) when determining how, what, to whom and what not to communicate.
Yours in defending the science,
Brad
* Speaking of trials, it seems someone upthread has had the audacity to take a soundbite from the Bible completely out of context and imply that it is somehow incompatible with Schneiderian/Mullerian/Kopaczian climate ethics:
“Why not say–as some slanderously claim that we say–”Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is just!”
Pure disinformation. While technically this is an accurate statement by God (or his Greek interpreter), my critic disingenuously fails to mention that it does NOT come from a climate scientist. In fact Christ and his apostles hadn’t even heard of the work of Arrhenius, so their ethical code, while admirable for the time, was obviously unable to take into account the seriousness of the apocalypse now facing us (if one believes the IPCC’s revelations)—and it is grossly dishonest to insinuate (by omission) that two millennia of advancements and rethinks in ethics, most dramatically in the last two decades, never occurred!

Re: “the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” dear Pompous,… (ahem), just want to be sure you realize that most of us believers in Jeshua as our Messiah (first coming), i.e., as our Savior, read that phrase (given the context of the entire Bible), to mean that the Way into that kingdom, i.e., Jesus, (“I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” John 14:6) was about to die and rise from the dead making a way to enter, i.e., to become a member of, that kingdom, by simply believing in Jeshua as savior. The old covenant of works according to the Law (which we could never perfectly do) was about to be replaced by the new covenant, by faith (in Christ) alone. Now, by faith alone we can have eternal life. By mere belief in Jeshua, we are forever citizens of “the kingdom.”
The “at hand,” thus, did not refer to a geographic location, but to the time being near for the new way into that kingdom to be made.
I realize that we disagree about this. I just wanted to be sure that you knew what mainstream teaching is, on this point.
And I sure won’t be talking anymore about it, here. #(:))
(if you want to discuss it, let me know and I’ll click on your Pompous Git link)

The Pompous Git says:
January 21, 2014 at 5:18 pm
That was Booker T. Washington, President of the Tuskegee Institute, a well known figure in US history. Carver was not a good department administrator & didn’t want the job.