Climate "Dismissive": The New PC Term for "Denier"

Seems like Hayhoe’s “expertise” is in propaganda nuisances/techniques, not climate. Just like most other warmist “climate scientists”.

Well, Nick seems to be trying to horn in on Mosher’s “drive by” action, failing to address the Hayhoe premise and nibbling around the edges of other’s opinions and wording. So boring.
As for me, I think the new term won’t fly, because it means the same thing. Lefties always have to change the term for the things they believe that become unpopular because lefties are wrong-headed bozos. For example, liberal used to mean liberty loving, property rights, law and culture and tradition as a rightful inheritance, protection FROM government. But then the lefties got hold of it and it came to mean collectivist, Marxist, Socialist, Communist, more government, command economy. So it became politically unpopular. Now all those collectivist terms have morphed into today’s “Progressive” which according to the last election, isn’t working out so well for the term changers either. With global warming we see the same thing. First, it was climate change, and now they’re trying to change it again to climate disruption and Hayhoe’s ridiculous “climate weirding” because the alarmist side badly needs bad weather related deaths to emotionally support their feeble scientific arguments. Changing a political category term is always a temporary fix as well as a hypocritical exercise, when the new term merely tries to hide the same old, true intentions. It doesn’t work because it’s fundamentally dishonest, and the emotional aspect of a true hysteria is impossible for alarmists to hide.
But that’s not the real reason Katherine Hayhoe is propaganda peddling polemicist. The reason she is is because she disingenuously misrepresents the categories of who is and is not being labeled a denier by alarmists. One must be on board with entire vertical stack of propositions in the full alarmist hypothesis to avoid being called a denier.
What do I mean by “the vertical stack of alarmist hypotheses?” I’m so glad you asked, Nick. Here is what I mean: Keep in mind that each claim in the stack relies on the validity / truth / acceptance of the previous item in order to logically be valid. They run from A to F. Each one is given with my long verbose response following each.
:
A – The Earth’s climate is changing
My response: Yes, of course it is. This is trivially true and means almost nothing. Except perhaps to those people who’ve never heard of the cycles of growing and melting Laurentide or Cordilleran ice sheets, who don’t know that Puget Sound was carved by glacial ice or that Nantucket Island is a glacial deposit, or who can drive or hike through mountain valleys not realizing that the U-shaped ones were carved by alpine glaciers that are now completely gone (while the V-shaped ones were carved by streams). There are many people who don’t understand how Oxygen came to be in the atmosphere, how the biosphere has evolved from oceans, and that the atmosphere’s chemistry had to change before life could exist on land. There are some people who don’t understand why the Earth is not like Venus not only because we’re further from the Sun, but BECAUSE life evolved here. And that life consumed CO2 and produced O2. And then after enough stuff had rusted, other life subsequently evolved to consume airborne O2 and produce CO2. Some people don’t get that all these life forms evolved in a sometimes cooperative, but mostly brutally competitive arms race with a sort of niche filling pressure. Many people don’t understand that some mineral and much biological chemistry can sequester CO2 for a long time. And some don’t know that if all CO2 were gone from the air, we’d all die and so they can’t appreciate having a healthy safety margin.
B – The world is warming
This one is not quite so simple, but yes, it’s probably true, based on our best observations. It is not so completely “known” that it can be called a “fact” (IMO). And certainly not on the same scale as “the sun will rise tomorrow (which in fact, is a stupid and unscientific way of saying the sun will still be a bright yellow star, fusing hydrogen into helium when the Earth completes its next full rotation), or that Halley’s comet will return as of such and such a date (which isn’t a fact either as some collision or gravity well might destroy it or permanently change it’s trajectory, and we might never know). But IF, as Kevin Trenberth once infamously opined, some missing heat must be going into the deep oceans, and since we measure so little of the oceans volume for temperature, we would be hard pressed to say with certainty that deep oceans are playing this new imagined role in climate change. And if we cannot say that with any certainty, this newly hypothesized process may or may not be happening, how can he say heat or energy is or is not moving there? IF there are some hidden forms of cyclical variability in ocean layer shifting that moves massive amounts of heat energy, and if those forces are beyond our flimsy ARGO measurements, we could be completely wrong to say that the whole ocean/atmosphere coupled climate is gaining heat right at this moment. If that were true, our warming period might really just be a venting of a very long lived heat sink that moves energy in a way we don’t understand. This is why Trenberth, who wants very much to sell a simple model of the climate system as the truth, was stupid to offer a highly complicating feature to that system in order to quickly dismiss one of his sticky problems, that of the plateau or pause in what he desperately wanted to be a continuously soaring temperature record. And that’s why it was stupid for other “scientists” to jump aboard his quick fix bandwagon without any thought for how it complicates their job as climate alarmists. If I were a scientist, studying a new hypothesis for how heat is being stored in deep water as Trenberth suggests, potentially saving that heat up, then releasing a hundred or thousand years later, and I also said that modern warming might be the result of that process, I believe I would instantly be called a denier. Trenberth was not called a denier, of course. Because he was advancing the whole vertical stack. He finessed the whole issue of how his new throwaway hypothesis complicates the whole picture of the entire climate. And neither he, nor Katherine Hayhoe are likely to delve into this and make it their next research project. They wouldn’t dare broach that subject. Because then he’d have to acknowledge the complexity, as Judith Curry does, and then THEY would be called deniers, flat out. BAM, just like that. This issue brilliantly shows how the wicked problems of unknown unknowns can bend over hubris filled scientists and do to them what John Goodman (wrongly) thought the young punk Larry had done to El Duderino in “The Big Lebowski.” Kevin, when you proposed your missing heat going into the deep oceans, I think you really dropped the soap.
C – The world is warming primarily because of Human CO2 emissions from our use of fossil fuels
This claim is quite dodgy, and I feel the evidence we have to date actually shows it to be false. Deep ice cores show CO2 is not driving the big climate shifts and that increasing CO2 is an effect, not a cause. You’ve all heard the arguments. I won’t repeat them again. Climate alarmists blame CO2 for everything done by both CO2 and water vapor combined, while water vapor is the far more powerful greenhouse gas because of volume and mass, and water in the air is a far more important climate change agent due to its role in producing clouds and heat transfers via state changes. For CO2 alarmists, the only mechanisms of “proof” of CO2’s role are tendentiously built GCMs which blame WATER VAPOR feedback for most of the actual warming, and conflate human emitted CO2 with existing poorly understood natural CO2 cycling systems. But even here, most skeptic don’t dismiss that CO2 is playing a role in radiative energy conversion in the atmosphere, and that human CO2 emissions play some small role in the warming. But if you are in that bucket you are called a denier, not cautious, not skeptical, but a denier. You are told that you want to destroy the planet.
D – The Human CO2 emission caused warming is 100% bad. Sea level rise, polar bears, extinctions, human health going down the tubes, crops failing, resource contention, drought, wars breaking out, yadda yadda yadda
Now I feel we’re into the realm of pure poppycock. CO2 fertilization is greening the world, feeding the whales, feeding the cows, feeding the trees, and a small bit of warming will help human beings tremendously in the short run. Crops will grow better, more people can be fed more cheaply. People will spend less to heat the homes, and be able to afford to run their air conditioners. Cold kills more people than warmth. There is even some small evidence that suggests warming might even mean more deposition on Antarctica and falling sea levels. Camille’s butterflies did not go extinct in the Sierras, the pikas are doing fine, animals have evolved and are adapted for large changes in temperature every day, every year. It’s silly to say they cannot adapt to a 2 degree warming. The polar bears will be fine, and seals will have to come ashore to pup, too, probably making them the bigger loser if the Arctic sea ice melts. But there will still be winter sea ice in the Arctic. But If you say the little bit of warming we’ve seen so far is good and a little bit more won’t hurt at all, you’re called a denier. Not a realist, not a cautious-but-hopeful-challenger of dogma, but a denier who would despoil our only planet.
E – The only way to fix the human caused global warming problem is to cease burning fossil fuels, immediately… without adding horrible polluting nuclear plants or habitat destroying dams and hydroelectric plants
This is so far from true, so dismissive of the role fossil fuels play in our civilization that anyone who can believe otherwise is a delusional fool. Will everyone need to convert their gas burning furnaces to electric? Will they have to move to the tropics so they don’t need a furnace? Will everyone need to buy an electric car or forever forego commuting except on a bicycle or bus or train? How many people would not be able to keep their job? How will modern transport be maintained? Will all trains and buses also have to be converted to electric? All trucks? What will provide the base load to energize all that electricity use? Will your grocery store be stocked with food? Will farmers still be able to grow enough food? Or will we all have to move back to farms to maintain a subsistence existence? Is this the new Holodomor? What if the whole economy collapses and humans start behaving like they do in “The Walking Dead?” To say fossil fuel use must stop is a reckless, dangerous, misanthropic position, a human experiment on a vast scale, completely devoid of any responsible evaluation of costs and benefits. And yet, the CO2 alarmists advance their notions with a causal hubris that could make Hurricane disasters or even the Great Wars of the 20th century look like a Sunday picnic. That is a far greater risk than any risk of climate change or sea level rise, IMO.
But now we come to a level where the alarmist camp begins to show clear differentiation.
With some of the most misanthropic alarmists, human death, suffering, civilization collapse is fine, even if it means some environmental destruction in the short run. Because to them, humans are a cancer on the Earth. The sooner we all die off (some of them wouldn’t even except themselves), the sooner the Earth reverts to a “natural” state. These folks won’t admit their true political goals, they understand that saying it out loud would torpedo their goals almost instantly. They could be rightly judged as sociopaths, or even insane. To this most fervent group, they instead use propaganda and emotion to convince useful i d i o t s and K -12 school teachers to advance their agenda by surreptitiously indoctrinate and brainwashing young children in their eco-lunacy cause long before they’ve had a basic science class. And some of theses teachers send their children students home to shame their evil stupid, fossil fuel burning parents. This is a new incarnation of the Hitler Youth, a fascist form of child abuse, IMO.
F – Finally, for those alarmists who are merely the brainwashed, the dupes and fools, but who are not aligned with their misanthropic brethren, and who don’t want humans to be gone or greatly reduced on Earth, they have an out. Because free wind and solar “renewable” power will magically run our modern civilization right now, just a cheaply and as efficiently as fossil fuels, and without nuclear power and new hydroelectric dams. Green jobs and Progressive advances will through this same government mandated magic, create a Gaia Utopia. Humans can still be just as free as ever, only they will first have to replace all their single panel windows in their homes and ride a bicycle to work, which will be good for them. And their job might be something that used to be done by fossil fuel burning machine, so it might involve a little hard labor, which is fine, because that’s also good for their circulatory system. Little children in their mid-twenties going to Universities (at no charge) will still be able to continue their studies without having to do any heavy lifting, of course, or clean the bathrooms, because they will forever be such an important a part of the political elite, governing class. We must not mess with that.
My response: alarmists have gone totally stark raving mad, as mad as those courtiers of King Canute who presumed a King was tantamount to an omnipotent God who could command the seas. They ignore all human economics, all potential for new technologies, they dismiss the power of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, of human ingenuity in adapting to new realities and problems. Wind and solar power mandates are the new Lysenkoism. But if you say wind and solar are more expensive, they’re intermittent, non-dispatchable, kill birds and bats AND THEY need to be backed up by fossil fuel plants anyway, then oh, oh, your a denier, a polluter and despoiler of the planet.
Climate Scientologists, just like real Scientologists, are notoriously hard to deprogram. You can point these folks to power systems experts who will tell you the real costs of “free renewable energy,” and they’ll point you to gutless, weasel-word filled papers or a Guardian article they read (Hi Griff).
That my friends, is the CO2 alarmist’s “vertical stack.” Veer off from any of it’s propositions, and you will be called a denier. If Katherine Hayhoe were to happen to read this and give her enlightened opinion to each item in the vertical stack, and whether it’s controversies were real or imagined, and whether deviation from any alarmist talking point deserved either the dismissive or denier label, I’d be very interested. And maybe if she could begin to see the hubris and folly of climate alarmism, I’d stop calling her a propaganda, group-think-driven, self-interested, self-serving, bureaucratic, tendentious, piss-poor scientist and political analyst (so long as she also agrees to stop calling herself a Nobel Prize winner). Apart from which, I’m sure that she is a lovely, admirable, adorable person.