By James Delingpole
A sharp-eyed viewer has noticed that when I was debating George Monbiot on TV yesterday and I mentioned that his cherished “peer-reviewed science” had been discredited by Climategate he bared his teeth like a cornered cur. Says my body language expert John Lish:
“It was a quite aggressive and defensive gesture which was noticeable when he was attempting to dismiss you (talking about peer review). A definite body-language sign of being rattled. He’s definitely uncomfortable about what’s occurring and others will have spotted that as well.”
Monbiot isn’t the only one. Consider the paranoid tone of this email from climate-fear-promoter Paul Ehrlich, during an exchange with fellow members at the National Academy of Scientists on how best to deal with the Denier threat: (Hat tip: Marc Morano)
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”
And consider this tragic response from the editor of the US magazine Skeptical Inquirer when faced with declining readership. Despite its name, the Skeptical Inquirer has tended to adopt a none-too-sceptical position on AGW. This has annoyed one or two readers who have been cancelling their subscriptions in disgust. The editor Kendrick Frazier seems to imagine that this is not a reflection on his editorial policy but on his readership’s ‘false consciousness’ – as he shows in this robust editorial: (hat tip: Philip Thomas)
"This is the third SI reader who has canceled his (it’s always a male) subscription over our climate change pieces in the current SI (not to mention the at least six who did so after our first round of articles several years ago). Boy, they don’t want to hear anything they disagree with, do they.
It is clear the anti-GW science crowd have their minds made up, and nothing anyone is going to say, no appeal to scientific evidence, no attempt to place things into an accurate context, no attempt to point out that many media and blog portrayals are not always fully accurate, no facts, no explanations, no attempts to show they themselves are being manipulated, nothing is ever going to change their minds. Very much like the evolution/creationist controversy, except that these are some of our longtime readers.
They do not want to engage forthrightly with factual, science-based statements or arguments. They only want their own views reinforced. There is no attempt at open-minded discussion or even fair argument. Just a determination to maintain their ideological purity and not have it be contaminated with any scientific information and perspective that doesn’t support their presuppositions. They want to draw a don’t-tell-me-anything-I-don’t-want-to-hear cocoon around themselves. Unfortunately, that cocoon is growing ever larger. And they know they are punishing us, because, even more than most publications, which have advertising, we depend mostly on subscription revenue.
Guess we should just go along with the crowd, the lynch mob. Hop on the bandwagon. Slam those damned ignorant climatologists coming up with all that nonsense about changing climate and a warming planet. Who needs science anyway?"
All this is a roundabout way of answering one of my editors’ kind suggestions that I respond to this morning’s front page story in which some desperate scientists at the embarrassing, useless and parti pris Met Office have apparently attempted to repair their creaky, wheel-less AGW bandwagon with a hurried new botch job report. Sorry, but I don’t think many of us are going to fall for this nonsense any more. Read more.
No comments:
Post a Comment