Over the weekend Dr. Roger Pielke Junior let it be known on his Twitter feed that he’s had it up to his “keester” with certain climate activists, especially the ones that are harassing a former associate of his, simply because that person IS a former associate.
It’s pretty ugly and it underscores how climate zealotry has gotten out of control. I myself have been at the receiving end of some of this to the point where I have had to increase security at my home and at my business.
I’ve also had to increase my personal security due to the fact that on occasion, due to the fact that I’m a well known local person and recognizable due to my exposure on radio and television, I am occasionally accosted in public over my stance on climate. But my issues pale in comparison to what Dr. Pielke writes of.
http://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/483249583699787776
http://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/483249938235543553
And this is what I consider to be the quote of the week:
http://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/483252448480751617
When I think of “obsessed and malicious” in the context of “climate scientists”, this image immediately sprang to mind. This was from AGU 2013, where a session about “climate scientists under attack” was mainly just a big whiny gripe about FOIA requests.
The irony of this photo is that one of the people on that panel has been launching lawsuits against climate skeptics, yet I don’t know of a single climate skeptic that has launched a lawsuit against any climate scientist, other than a countersuit to force the issue into court, rather than let it be drug out for years as some sort of slow motion financial punishment.
The other irony was that sitting in the front row listening to how these folks tell their stories of how they have been so “horribly abused” by climate skeptics questioning their science, the “climate antichrist” (me) sat there quietly and listened, not disrupting, being careful not to appear threatening in any way. I asked no questions, and left the meeting quietly.
In addition to the regular attacks that we get daily of climate skeptics just being stupid, paid for shills, etc. we occasionally get wild claims that climate skeptics should be put on trial, imprisoned, or even killed. There is also an undercurrent of climate ugliness that pervades in social media. I’m not talking about the obvious rants such as climate skeptics are shills for “big oil”, I’m talking about when unscrupulous people bring your family into it.
There’s just no excuse for this sort of stuff:
I have blurred out the name which happens to be the name of “Goddard’s” son. I’m not going to add to the damage by allowing the name here.
Thankfully, upon being challenged on this ugliness, Mr. Venema apologized and retracted his Tweet; he says it was a re-tweet, but even if it was, re-tweeting something so obviously ugly and stupid puts his motivation into question.
The whole episode is odd, because on one hand Mr. Venema is preaching for tolerance and restraint, and more civil scientific discourse, and then we have an “off the rails” moment like this coming from him.
We all have our moments where our judgment lapses, but this suggests to me that the inner id of some climate activist folks is saying that they know better than we do how to live our lives and raise our children, which is often more the characteristics of a religion, than a science.
Maybe this inner conflict is why some climate activists play dress up Nazis, though, it isn’t always so ugly, sometimes they dress up as superheroes.
Eric Worrall says:
June 30, 2014 at 7:57 am
If you truly believe that the future of humanity is in the balance, that if you fail the world may be destroyed, there is no crime which is beyond contemplation. Any act, no matter how heinous, pales into insignificance compared to the deaths of billions of people.
A crisis is a moral slippery slope.
______________________
Your words are disgusting. “Truly believe” is intellectually shallow and logically weak. You people who espouse “the end justifies the means” place yourselves above ethics and moral code to get what you want. You have closed ranks with history’s worse despots.
By a very strange coincidence, I’ve been looking at videos concerning witch-hunts. The name changes according to the time, but the general characteristic of the witch-hunt remains. In the early 1600s, they were looking for, trying and hanging witches. In the McCarthy era (1950s) exchange “witches” for “communists” but the other details tend to remain. In recent decades, getting accused as a child-molester made you as good as one, which made it a favorite charge in divorce/custody battles. Today, “climate skeptic” seems to fill the bill. Get yourself called a “climate skeptic” and the idea is that you drag your knuckles on the ground, grunt, pound the ground with sticks and generally are still in the dark ages as concerns climate science– while the warmists tell us that unless we act NOW, Godzilla will sack New York. (Seems the big lizard got tired of sacking Tokyo.)
Nothing really changes except the calendar date. Different day, same witch-hunt only with different witches.
Interesting, turning the regular verb “drag” into an irregular verb “drug”.
In a short word what this is all about is Tribalism. We have the CAGW Tribe against the anti CAGW Tribe. The major problem is that they are not playing by the same rules. Hey why play with rules in the first place? Do we call it civilized tribalism? You have the people looking in who belong to neither tribe but unknowingly effected by the different tribal rulings. EG Carbon Tax.People here cite religious wars but that is also tribalism. Gang wars were called turf wars but was all about tribalism. People have a sense of belonging when they belong to a tribe and they feel loss when they are booted out. Tribe members will defend each other to the death. The anti CAGW tribe must learn to fight back because it is winner take all.
Quite the rogue’s gallery in that photo, Anthony:
Naomi: 97% agree with me
Mikey: I’ll sue the other 3%
Ben: I’ll punch them out.
Kevin: Let’s re-define peer review so they all agree.
That’s the Gang of Four. The other two I don’t know much about.
Anthony, how was it basking in their presence?
Also in the photo…
Jeff Ruch (PEER)
Is that what he’s doing?
Alan Robertson: Eric was referring to others and how they think, i.e., “to the true believers it is this way.” While it is disgusting that such ideological beliefs exist, his beliefs are not what he was referring to, IIRC.
Mark
“Hitler did not think he was evil …”
I don’t know of anyone who thinks himself evil merely for the sake of being evil. That’s cartoon villain stuff. Of course, Hitler did not think himself evil, anymore than Roosevelt thought himself evil for the internment of Americans with Japanese last names, or for his pre- Pearl Harbor modus operandi of treating anyone who wasn’t utterly committed to his holy war against fascism as a crypto-Nazi.
“… he thought of himself as a great messiah whose destiny was to save Germany.”
But for the belief on the part of the German people themselves that they needed saving, that is, that they were profoundly, even existentially, threatened, Hitler would have been as failed a politician as he was an artist. Hitler’s mind left him only toward the end. His little talk to his general staff on the eve of the Invasion of Poland showed him to be as clearheaded as a man can be.
“He was NOT insane. When he wasn’t giving speeches, he could sound perfectly rational …”
I’m tempted to say “He *was* perfectly rational.” As Chesterton says, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;” Or one might say, “unfalsifiable.”
“In the McCarthy era (1950s) exchange “witches” for “communists” but the other details tend to remain.”
Except that there actually were communists to be found. And they were real. And communists. We knew only the half of it, until the Venona Transcripts came out.
He isn’t proposing evil. He’s saying that the CAGW crowd will do evil things because they think the future of the world itself is in danger. It is they who are proposing that the end justifies the means. Eric is just making that observation.
@dbstealey
“Priorities have gotten so skewed that bureaucrats’ pay comes first, and the potholes are only filled, bridges repaired, and schools fixed when gov’t comes to the ‘rescue’ by raising taxes.”
But if they filled the potholes, repaired the bridges and fixed the schools first, what would they use to justify raising taxes?
Having a science degree is useful, but a lot of academic research and the archaeological record pertaining to archaeology and palaeoanthropology, (That have units in the humanities and science degrees) that I have plus a GCA in Ancient history, does consider climatic conditions that have forced various stages of evolution and adaptation. One can’t ignore it. One of the catch phrases used by one of my lecturers, the late Professor Mike Morwood, was ‘Human’s propose and nature deposes’ and that still stands today with all our advanced technology. One of the concerns was we could be faced with a catastrophic event, such as Yellowstone Park sits over one of the biggest magma reserves on the planet. It has erupted every 600 k years and it is 620,000 years since the last one. Or an asteroid colliding with earth. And it is a fact that during the last ice age, there was more seismic activity and volcanic eruptions on the islands of Japan and SE Asia than there is today. So – with the suns orbit always changing, it might be a good idea if we knew where it was during the last glacial period as it lasted longer than the present interstadial or interglacial. Because it won’t be pleasant. I still think of the hidden agendas of climate alarmists, if I know this a mere mortal, and a probable knowledge we have more chance of getting extremely colder, why are they going to great lengths to take the opposite point of view to the point of insulting and terrorising skeptics. Seems illogical to a point they are afraid of something, and it goes deeper than just their credibility and funding?
Victor Venema says:
June 30, 2014 at 11:45 am
One aspect of the time I spent on USENET (something vaguely like a free-for-all blogosphere) was that people who engaged in “flame wars” and hit back harder than they got hit really seemed to have pretty unhappy lives. Positive feedback and all that. Things don’t work out all that well if someone who tried to defuse situations gets in a discussion with a flamer, I’m sort of in that position in a couple things over at Steve’s blog. Put two defusers together and you’ll fall asleep reading the first reply.
So there needs to be some level of spice, but gotta be kept calm enough by both parties so there’s some information exchange, not just invective. At the very worst, keep it personal, don’t drag wives, children, employers, coworkers, etc.
Other good things:
1) Cooling off periods
If someone posts something really insulting, don’t reply right away. Other people besides you will see it as an unwarranted attack, you don’t need to defend right away. Besides, you might come up with a great zinger if you keep it in the back of your mind.
2) Let them have the last word
A lot of conversations drag on for far too long because each combatant can’t imagine not having the last word. If you’ve said all there is to say, don’t bother to reply to one of his posts. It probably doesn’t add to the conversation, and anyone who comes across it in the future will give up halfway through.
3) Similarly, don’t feed the trolls
In fact, one of the most insulting things you can do to an opponent in a war of words is to ignore him. He’ll keep coming back to see your response, and the lack of one will eat away at him for days. With luck it will leave a sour enough taste he’ll go away himself.
alexwade says:
June 30, 2014 at 8:26 am
+1
often think of the saying “Jesus, save me from your followers”. The fact that it is appropriate here shows that this is not a scientific issue. One thing I’ve noticed in life is that those who preach tolerance are the most intolerant of all. Not coincidentally much of the intolerance comes from elitists and leftists and their causes.
We already know who behaved worse, you went for his children. WTF is wrong with you people that you’re so fixate on being able to get to we skeptics’ families for disagreeing with your wacko religion of fake science and f r a u d u l e n t misrepresentations of everything, and everyone, you touch?
In the Electronic Engineering fields we don’t have to hide who we are from each other.
This is you. This is the way you people who believe in this scam, act consistently.
All of you come pretending to be messengers of a great light yet your works are the works of cynicism and error after compounding error.
You’re in perfect company with the believers in your fake science religion that leaves you all so bewildered you can’t remember the Ideal Gas Law forbids your story of magical gas.
It’s just pathetic that you’re all to a man this way and it’s past creepy, it’s simply telling we find you dressing pictures of each other up in German Wehrmacht photographs from WWII.
Every instance of creepy blinded revulsive behavior exudes from you people like a stench, and I personally don’t think it’s one single iota an “unfortunate incident” except that the blogger you tried to harass snitched you off immediately to the public as I saw one Canadian professor do,
when he was contacted by a prominent warmer who believes in your kind of “debate” tactics and threatened to contact the Professor’s boss to stop the Professor from ridiculing the warmer’s faked claims of certainty global warming was real.
I think everyone dealing with any of you should keep full documentation of everything you do.
Victor Venema says:
June 30, 2014 at 11:45 am
I hope that Goddard will remove that post and apologize, like I did, and will leave it up to the reader to judge who behaved worse.
Ah, doesn’t it warm your heart to know that warmist scientists care for the family relationships of skeptics.
The new Klan assembles under the sign of a hockey-schtick and their bible is the IPCC reports. They may win a battle, but they will never win their war against truth. I’d love to help pushing their hokey schtick into the abyss of oblivion…
I wonder if VV realizes that when apologizing, sincerity is lost once blame is placed on the person the apology is directed toward. And besides… “Mommy!!! That bad man was soooo wude! Let’s tell the world who he and his children are so they will never be wude again!” Despicable. I hope this is not an example of how you teach YOUR children to behave; if so, I feel sorry for them.
Mark
Thirty years from now, say c. AD 2040, not one of these deviant Screwtapes will ever admit that over decades, grant-mongering catastrophism was their stock-in-trade. We note especially that not a single junior climate-careerist has ever –not one, not ever– dared voice a counter-conjecture “speaking truth to power”.
When climate deviants’ current chivvying, dishonest, pecculating cohort finally reaches that Big Anti-Cyclone in the Sky, long-term consumers of this drivel will find that, lo! like Rene Blondlot, Trofim Lysenko, J.B. Rhine and Immanuel Velikovsky, their gaudy schtick is a grotesque embarrassment.
Like aging Auschwitz guards, the less said about such creeps and thugs, the better.
MattS says:
June 30, 2014 at 8:11 pm
@dbstealey
“Priorities have gotten so skewed that bureaucrats’ pay comes first, and the potholes are only filled, bridges repaired, and schools fixed when gov’t comes to the ‘rescue’ by raising taxes.”
But if they filled the potholes, repaired the bridges and fixed the schools first, what would they use to justify raising taxes?
————————————————————-
Bureaucrat’s well deserved pay increases?
cn
Doug S says:
June 30, 2014 at 10:44 pm
alexwade says:
June 30, 2014 at 8:26 am
+1
often think of the saying “Jesus, save me from your followers”. The fact that it is appropriate here shows that this is not a scientific issue. One thing I’ve noticed in life is that those who preach tolerance are the most intolerant of all. Not coincidentally much of the intolerance comes from elitists and leftists and their causes.
————————————
Did you mean Allah or maybe Al Gore, save me from your followers?
I don’t know of any christians, quakers or atheists etc, threatening and promoting chopping off your head or otherwise causing you harm because they don’t like the fact you disagree with them.
cn
There are valid reasons for anonymity in online commentary. “Common Sense” written by Thomas Paine in late 1775 was published anonymously. That does not invalidate the value of the text.
Damn, I just wrote a very long comment and received the message “Sorry, this comment cannot be posted”.
I recently participated in a history of science workshop at which Naomi O. gave a reading from her new work of apocalyptic fiction (literally). I will spare you my literary criticism. A colleague recused him or herself from the reading because this individual did not want his or her body language to betray the lack of regard in which he or she held Oreskes, who has sold out on the principles undergirding the history and philosophy of science. I later found that this individual had been outed (by another, mischievous, colleague) as a catastrophic climate change skeptic to a very eminent science historian. Sadly, this cost my colleague this individual’s esteem and friendship.
I would suffer a similar fate with regards to my closest colleagues.
This is why, Willis, I chose to post here anonymously, and why, sadly, I keep my views to myself except to a few chosen colleagues. Sadly, I don’t see this situation coming to an end before I retire (at least a decade from now) owing to the money riding on the CAGW narrative. I thought the scam would be over by now thanks to Climategate and the inaccuracy of CAGW temperature projections, but too few people – especially academics – are willing to break from the herd, think for themselves, or critically investigate an issue they broadly sympathize with owing to their political inclinations.
MattS says:
But if they filled the potholes, repaired the bridges and fixed the schools first, what would they use to justify raising taxes?
Taxes are too high already. Between state and federal I pay around 41% income tax. I receive far less than that in services or benefits. How can anyone justify tax rates that high?
When President Reagan cut taxes to a maximum 28%, the economy boomed for the next twenty years. Now the economy is stagnating, and there is no indication it will improve by very much. Can you see the connection?
vigilantfish says:
July 1, 2014 at 8:51 am
It’s a recent WordPress glitch, I’ve been getting it too, in fact I just got it on this comment. Copy the comment, reload the page, and try again.
w.
dbstealey says:
July 1, 2014 at 9:34 am
MattS says:
But if they filled the potholes, repaired the bridges and fixed the schools first, what would they use to justify raising taxes?
Taxes are too high already. Between state and federal I pay around 41% income tax. I receive far less than that in services or benefits. How can anyone justify tax rates that high?
When President Reagan cut taxes to a maximum 28%, the economy boomed for the next twenty years. Now the economy is stagnating, and there is no indication it will improve by very much. Can you see the connection?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Oops, I left off the /sarc tag.