Alt-Truth
gregladen | April 16, 2013"Denialism on a Large Scale" Greg Laden on Atheists Talk #214, April 14, 2013
I was interviewed on Minnesota Atheists Talk Radio about climate change and climate change denialism last Sunday AM. Since you were in church, I'm sure you missed it! But you can catch the podcast HERE.
gregladen | April 12, 2013I think the primary political framework for climate change denialism is Libertarianism, with a lot of overlap with Tea Partiers, who are essentially Libertarians Without Brains. Libertarians can't live with the fact that their philosophy guarantees the misery and horrors of climate change so most of them (but not all) exist in full denial. At the same time, christian fundies are against climate change science because they are against science. Fundamentalist and Atheist Libertarians overlap in the area of climate science denialsim, and it is often strange to see that. We even see climate…
gregladen | April 7, 2013... James Delingpole's Hate Speech in the UK Telegraph
This is James Delingpole demonstrating his prowess when it comes to understanding and commenting on climate science. Dellingpole is the one on our right:
OK, now that we've established Delingpole to be a misinformed misguided intellectual lighweight, let's look at his latest piece from the UK Telegraph:
Should Michael Mann be given the electric chair for having concocted arguably the most risibly inept, misleading, cherry-picking, worthless and mendacious graph – the Hockey Stick – in the history of junk science?
Should George Monbiot…
gregladen | March 27, 2013There are two very important posts out there that I'd like to make you aware of related to climate change denialism. Here's the teasers, please click through and read them. If you like them, tweet them!
First, from The Scientist, an opinion piece by Michael Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines:
Life as a Target: Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.
As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I…
gregladen | March 13, 2013Today, the Christian Science Monitor published on their web site a piece, Global luke-warming: Is the threat of climate change overstated? by James Stafford. It is an interview with climate science denialist Anthony Watts, in which Watts gives his usual argument that climate change is not important. Well, not his actual usual argument, because he has several different conflicting things to say about climate change, ranging from it isn't happening it's actually cooling to it is only warming a little to yeah, it's warming a lot but we'll adapt.
The thing is, interviewing a denialist like…
gregladen | March 9, 2013This is a must watch video from the US Senate:
I'm pretty sure I heard once that there is a rule in the Senate that you can't call another Senator a liar using that word (lier). So when you see Senator Whitehouse not using that word, that may be why.
gregladen | February 26, 2013[View the story "Why does the science community shun the Bloggies?" on Storify]Why does the science community shun the Bloggies?
I was shocked to discover that @bloggies is unaware of the reason that science blogs no longer participate in the contest. @bloggies noted: Prominent climate skeptic blogs tend to campaign for nominations, while other science blogs don't seem to mention the Bloggies.
Storified by Greg Laden· Tue, Feb 26 2013 10:47:37
@gregladen I don't know what the reason is myself.The Weblog Awards
.@Bloggies Maybe I'll write a blog post about it and send you the link if you…
gregladen | February 18, 2013On February 17th, some 40,000 people showed up at an event in Washington DC in order to draw attention to the most pressing issue of our time: Climate Change. Another group of people also attended that rally. They represented the Climate Science Denialists, which in the US overlaps considerably with the Tea Party. They wore yellow jackets and called themselves "The Light Brigade." This follows the tradition of the Tea Party, who in their early days used the nickname "Teabaggers" for themselves, a term which refers to a particular sexual act, or so I'm told. I was reminded of this because…
gregladen | February 14, 2013Peter Gleick, my sbling here at scienceblogs.com (see his blog here) is famous for a lot of things, but about one year ago he went up against the Heartland Institute and in a daring effort of investigative (if avocational) journalism, revealed that right wing conservative/libertarian "think" tank's nefarious plans to interfere with science education in an effort to discredit climate scientists in the eyes of the American public and our students through a series of rather smarmy tactics, including some really obnoxious billboards.
Scott Mandia at "Global Warming: Man or Myth?" has written a…
gregladen | February 6, 2013... at any serious level, and then, only if enough Republicans get thrown out of the House to allow committee work and legislation to happen. From The Hill:
House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans have rebuffed Democrats’ bid to require the high-profile panel to hold hearings on links between climate change, extreme weather and threats to coastal areas.
On Wednesday the Committee, along party lines, voted down Democratic amendments to its formal oversight plan for the 113th Congress.
One defeated amendment, from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), would have required hearings on the role of…
gregladen | January 18, 2013As I mentioned, I'm busy, so I'll just do this in pictures, kinda like a cartoon:
There was no "walk back" by Joe. He merely added some links.
The results of the poll so far:
Personally, I'm hoping for "Force him" ... that would be fun to watch.
Meanwhile, there is a lesson here. Science denialists like Anthony Watts do not want to be disagreed with. I think we may have already known that, though.
Related posts:
What's up with that?
Greg Laden, Liar.
gregladen | January 17, 2013I know, right?
Anthony Watts, of the science-denialist Whats Up with That blog, has got his shorts in a knot because of a post I wrote indicating that he is a boob. He is upset because in a screen shot of him talking about a totally absurd pseudo-scientific claim that should have been rejected out of hand, I failed to include enough of the post to show that he was skeptical about the claim.
Let me be very very clear: This is not a claim to be skeptical about. This is a Teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars claim. A person who has reported debunked claims about alien life again…
gregladen | January 15, 2013You may know the blog What's Up With That. It is Anthony Watt's anti-science blog, dedicated to climate change denialism.
A current post reports the finding of life forms from another planet, in a meteorite.
This looks to be a huge story, the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, if it holds up....
This is from a recent meteorite find in December 2012. A large fire ball was seen by a large number of people in Sri Lanka on December 29th 2012, during that episode a large meteorite disintegrated and fell to Earth in the village of Araganwila which is few miles away from the city of…
gregladen | January 12, 2013The UK Met Office, a climate agency, released some information about the immediate future, based on modeling. Briefly, it notes that natural cooling effect may temporarily ameliorate the increase in temperatures caused by global warming in some locals; it does not say that global warming is attenuated in any way whatsoever. It is more of a long term weather forecast than a climate change prediction.
The climate science denialist community, a community run by willfully wrong miscreants and with a following of mostly ignorant sycophants, and which only likes modeling when it seems to show…
gregladen | January 9, 2013Climate change science denialism has pretty much run its course. We've been experiencing a large number of climate change related events (see this list for a brief summary) lately. It may well be that the number per year of such alarming events will go down and up over time. It may be that we will forget that some of them are happening because we grow used to them. But they are happening at a larger rate than just a few years ago, the years are getting warmer and warmer, and the effects predicted by the science have been manifest as predicted, but for on thing: They are happening sooner,…
gregladen | December 28, 2012And by "Prestigious" I mean .... well, see for yourself in this story from Media Matters for America (Reposted with permission):
Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc Morano
ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called "the Matt Drudge of climate denial," the "king of the skeptics," and "a central cell of the climate-denial machine," and he revels in these descriptions. Although he has no scientific expertise, he is adamant that manmade global warming is a "con job" based on "subprime science." Morano gained prominence working for two of the most vocal climate deniers in the U.…
gregladen | December 28, 2012Top “Ten” Recent Books (focusing on 2012 but including the last few years) on Climate, Science denialism, Energy, and Science Policy are (including one Post Warming novel) are:
Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand by Haydn Washington and John Cook
Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise (Kindle Single) by Daniel Grossman, TEDx Books (Kindle Single)
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Rising Sea Levels: An…
gregladen | December 14, 2012But not as severely as they should have been.
The IPCC, as you know, comes out with a set of reports every five years. The reports are written by groups of experts. Draft reports are widely accessible to people who register themselves as "experts" and there is no quality control in that process, in order to keep things as transparent as possible. This means that the worst climate change denialists can simply sign up as "experts" and flood the scientists trying to write these reports with irrelevant and stupid comments, thus, I presume, wasting valuable time and effort. But, such is the cost…
gregladen | November 24, 2012Imagine the following scenario. Two guys are walking down the street, in different cities. Guy A has two PhDs, one in quantum physics with a focus on dimensionality dynamics, the other in astrophysics with a focus on relativistic aspects of gravity and black holes. She has published dozens of peer reviewed papers on both topics and is a brilliant mathematician. Guy B never took a physics class but yesterday he finished reading large parts of The Elegant Universe. Suddenly, at the same moment, they each have an idea (they do not have the same idea ... they have different ideas) about how…