Climategate: The Destroyer Of Worldviews
Spot-on analysis by the Anchoress:
In a nutshell, Climategate is a destroyer of world-views. As someone who has always maintained that the AGW hype was a matter of politicians and grifters seizing an opportunity to use unsettled science as a means of getting filthy rich while imposing harsh measures against human freedom, I am very familiar with the world-view of the alarmists. Whenever I wrote about the “hoo-hah” of AGW (and particularly of Al Gore’s stupendous, international fake-out and hypocrisy), my email would load up with people telling me I was “a stupid hick,” unschooled in scientific method (just like Al Gore) and therefore unentitled to opine on anything, so I should just “shut up” and “go away” and of course, I was a “nazi.” These emails occasionally ended with a diatribe against George W. Bush for good measure, and suggested he and I were both “criminals” against humanity. One person even accused me of being Barbara Bush, in disguise.
All of that was standard-issue hate, but nowhere as amusing as the occasional “Sinner, fry in hell” emails I will get from a Jack Chicker, so I stopped reading them long ago.
But I also had a journalist I admired, and who I still consider a friend, privately and gently suggest that if I doubted the truth about AGW then I was as deluded (and perhaps as evil) as a “holocaust denier.”
Yes. The left went that far. The press went that far. They embraced this unsettled science, this unproven theory, with a fervor of moral righteousness; to dispute AGW was to be a bad and stupid person, even if were a dissenting scientist.
To question the point of “environmentally sound” lightbulbs that give bad light and create a dangerous and toxic risk when they break was to “not get the point,” which was that the planet was “dying” thanks to Hanukkah candles and incandescent lightbulbs.
To suggest that large-numbers of privileged people flying scores of private planes to exotic locals, gorging themselves on fine fare while deciding how the common folk ought to live, in order to “save” the planet from AGW was bizarre, wasteful and hypocritical in an era of video-conferencing, was to be sniffed at as “insipid.” Didn’t one understand the power of the
Gore Indulgencecarbon-offset? Just pay some money to the man with the absolute moral authority on all things green, and your sins are covered. Somewhere, a tree is planted.The scam of AGW was permitted to gain the foothold it did, because of George W. Bush.
It’s Bush’s fault: if Bush had not fought back when CBS News called Florida for Al Gore before polls in the panhandle had closed, if Bush had not taken Gore’s selective re-count to the Supreme Court, if Bush had just taken those hanging chads like a man and allowed Al Gore to ascend to the presidency (as he’d been groomed to do before he sighed and fumed his way through debates, put his common sense into a lockbox and stumbled into the Buddhist convent, discovering the existence of “no controlling legal authority,”) whether the Vice-President actually won or not (the NY Times eventually admitted “not”) then Al Gore would not have had to seek redemption and his fortune in climate hucksterism, and the left would not have had to over-indulge him in it, overcompensating in order to “kick Bush in the leg.”
That’s basically it. The AGW/Climate Change question became a rigorous boondoggle that got out of control not because the scientist who first suggested a connection between human carbon emission and a change in climate were bad people, or that the question was not worth asking, but because bad people then took the uncertain hypothesis, put it on media-fueled steroids, demonized anyone who disagreed with them, made it political -so much so that even the scientists got caught up in the good/bad, smart/stupid, Gore/Bush, Left/Right identifiers- and found real power there; they allowed the AGW movement to become the dubious centering pole upholding the giant circus tent of their worldviews.
As such, it is not permitted to be shaken. Shake the centering pole, and everything could come tumbling down: Oh. My. Gawd! If the Gore-doubters were right about this, what else might they be right about? And if they’re all stupid, and I’m smart, but they’re right and I’m wrong . . .
Implosion.If the true-believers of AGW got this wrong, and they’d attached it to all of their politics, all of their hate, all of their superiority, then everything is in a free-fall.
Definitely read the whole thing.
As the Anchoress adds, “And this is why the mainstream media cannot possibly report on Climategate until they have an acceptable counter-narrative that they can haul out in order to either debunk the story or soften its edges, even as they break the news.”
Also, for a “neutral” media, they’re incredibly invested in the concept of global warming, as David Mastio wrote in Real Clear Politics back in 2006:
Next time you read a magazine cover story like the one Time just published (“Be Worried. Be VERY Worried. Polar Ice Caps Are Melting … More And More Land Is Being Devastated … Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities… The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame”) you should remember one little fact: U.S. media companies, including Time Warner, donate more to the environmental movement than any other industry. Companies like The New York Times, Gannett, Tribune, ABC, CBS and NBC have donated more than a half-billion worth of ad space since the 1990s to raise money for some of the nation’s most extreme environmental groups. And yes, that was billion with a B.
The following year, in what would be a remarkable case of foreshadowing of how the legacy media “reported” the 2008 presidential election, newspaper house organ Editor & Publisher urged, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”
I think we can safely say newspapers took heed of their industry publication’s advice.
This week, Steve Milloy of the Green Hell blog profiled Juliet Eilperin, a Washington Post journalist who frequently reports on environmental issues, and whose husband, Andrew Light Jr., as Milloy writes, “works on climate issues for the Center for American Progress, a global warming-alarmist activist group.”
As Milloy quips, “Wouldn’t it be nice if every activist group owned its own Washington Post reporter?”
And don’t forget the paper at the other end of the Northeast Corridor; the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin was part of the ClimateGate email list, as I noted last week, and Milloy writes in a public letter to New York Times Clark Hoyt ombudsman.
In response, you’ll likely be amazed at how loudly crickets can chirp above the din of New York traffic.
Related: As spotted by Tim Blair, “From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom.”
As Milloy quips, “Wouldn’t it be nice if every activist group owned its own Washington Post reporter?
“Are you saying they don’t?”
Today is the 29th and I still wouldn’t know about this if I didn’t have internet access.
Well, the Little Ice Age ended about then so we would expect some warming. Fortunately, it stopped in 1998. Now, we have to worry about the next ice age which may have started last year.
I fired off letters to my Congressman and Senators asking them if they would vote NO on any cap and trade legislation in light of the climate change scandal. May be pissing in the wind, but if enough letters go out, sometimes these representatives start thinking a little clearer.
“Today is the 29th and I still wouldn’t know about this if I didn’t have internet access.”
Do you have a subscription to the Washington Post?
Probably not unrelated but not mentioned (that I have seen) yet is the concurrent crash of Enron after Bush won the election. The fix was supposed to have been in and for all the “smartest guy in the room” stuff they had touted, Enron had pretty much bet it all on trading in “green” energy and offsets. Without Gore as POTUS to horse through regulations that would have made Enron’s model work, the wheels fell off.
Why do you think the International Left is so desperate to control or destroy the Internet?
“… the mainstream media cannot possibly report on Climategate until they have an acceptable counter-narrative that they can haul out in order to either debunk the story or soften its edges, even as they break the news.”
Let me fix this for you. The mainstream media such as Newsweek can’t report on Climategate until they stop cutting down rain forests to print their f***ing weeks’ worth of old news I can get on the internet without having any trees killed.
A little psychoanalysis: Religion is in decline, patriotism and belief in the goodness of America are beyond the pale, and community ties are dissolved among the left elite. But all people need to believe in something bigger than themselves, and to be part of a cause is also a great attraction to the people of the left, who incline towards internationalism and socialism. AGW environmentalism is a perfect vessel for these impulses for many reasons stated by many people many times, and the “Gaia is judging us” catastrophism of the modern environmental movement substitutes for the loss of Judeo/Christian “God is judging us” dogma. IF AGW falls to ruin (see: acid rain, ozone hole, running out of garbage landfill space, etc. etc.), what will come next among left? Some other man-made environmental catastrophe-in-the-making will have to be invented. I can’t wait!
Everyone has something to lose when it comes to the “chickens coming home to roost” with the climate faithful. The problem with building a house with only ridgepole is that when it cracks, the building is fully compromised and it is only a matter of time before it all caves in.
Years from now we may look back and say that during these times, the MSM and the Blogosphere had collided and the old media faded into irrelevance trying to cover up their culpability much the same way Dan Rather quickly did the same.
So consider this – how many times per day are you chided about what your responsibilities are to prevent carbon dioxide from destroying the planet? That is the damage that has been done, and a year from now we may be looking at a very changed world. How interwoven is all this with the liberal message?
I fear that when the mask is pulled away from all this and we see the extent it has subverted things that our “leadership” will not resort to Machiavellian measures to avoid losing “control”.
On the other hand, you can bet your sweet bippee that our “political elites:” are hearing about it. But MSM won’t ever report on this stuff except peripherally, because it’s utterly against the narative that they have been building toward for the past 20 or so years. Thus, if something is contrary, it will be ignored or glossed over as not being worthy of attention (a al NYTimes last week).
I was on the fence until I started reading some of the emails last week end. Then I took the time to actually try and get through the smaller programs (I have experience with FORTRAN 77) but I was unable to get the $^*@*@$!!!! things to work. In fact, they produce error after error message. My heart goes out to “Harry” of the text files. If he spent 3 years trying to get this KLUDGE to work…then I hope that they have found him the appropriate counselling, because the poor man must be a gibbering idiot by now…sitting his corner on a little stool, drooling uncontrolably while muttering insensibly…
Now, I’m a “denier”/”denialist”…because if these guys haven’t actually fabricated their research, they’ve come painfully close to it. If they have (in the UK at least) actually deleted either datum or emails in order to avoid having to produce information per FOIA requests, then they have broken British statutorial law…and the Brit government will probably come down very hard on them. (at least I hope so).
http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/11/28/the-conspiracy-of-the-centuries-reader-post/
Has more to this
On the rise of the science bureaucracy, and its cozy relationship with science journalism, see “The war on the weather”:
http://vulgarmorality.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/the-war-on-the-weather/
Been here before. By the 90s most lefty economic ideas were thoroughly discredited.. Due to so many failed experiments and good theoretical explanations from some economists (of why they failed). Bill Clinton and his team even were free market true believers.
The left just went underground for 10 years. Then picked some new issues (such as global warming and bush hate) and now they’re back… pushing the same stuff as before… such as regulating / taking over the health care system (based on socialist slogans like ‘people not profits’ and left wing conspiracy theories about corporate behavior… i.e., not reason). Basically, they’re remembered nothing and learned nothing.
Anchoress: ” But I also had a journalist I admired, and who I still consider a friend, privately and gently suggest that if I doubted the truth about AGW then I was as deluded (and perhaps as evil) as a “holocaust denier.” ”
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Sheesh. Some friend.
Maybe she should ask this ‘friend’ for an apology.
It’s common for losing politicians to imply, “You’ll be sorry you didn’t elect me.”
Al Gore took it to a whole new level of grandiosity, even for a politician, with his implied message, “The world will end because you didn’t elect me.”