Climate Discourse

The Climategate emails released before Thanksgiving have revealed what many of us in the "skeptic" community have suspected for some time: there is a coordinated attempt by activist scientists to manufacture consent around the theory of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming at any cost and to blacklist anyone who disagrees.

In the clip below, Marc Marono spars with Professor Watson of the University of East Anglia over Climategate's implications. Watson, a shrill global warming alarmist, attempts to diminish the impact of the throughly embarrassing emails by talking about focusing on important issues and avoiding personal attacks. Oddly, he does this by avoiding important issues (like the blacklisting and data fixing revealed in the Climategate emails) and by telling Morano to "shut up" and then calling him an "a**hole."

I find it peculiar that Watson urges for a calm review of science when it is his camp, not that of the so-called skeptics, that is often so shrill, constantly preaching gloom and doom despite scant scientific evidence of significant, man-induced global warming. The sexual habits of frogs, future military implications, and even trends in prostitution are linked to alleged global warming now or in the future.

Take a look at this measured appeal from the alarmist camp:

What's more, it is the alarmists that refuse transparent review of data or honest, open debates. Take the data tweaking and dumping revealed through Climategate and the fact that Al Gore, the poster boy for catastrophic climate change, refuses to debate his critics. Of the few alarmists that do go out and debate skeptics, many are quite rude - not up to par with the civil scientific discourse Watson alleges his side insists upon. I've heard this time and time again from friends and colleagues have subjected themselves to these circuses. The one debate I recently viewed, between Dr. Craig Loehle and Dr. Michael Schlesinger opened my eyes to the rude, narcissistic tendencies of the alarmist camp who use an air of prestige as a shield and personal attacks as a weapon to gain a rhetoric advantage over their opponents. At the presentation I saw, Loehle calmly present data and his argument, that man plays no significant role in driving temperature, and global temperatures are not in fact reaching any sort of historic tipping point. Schlesinger, rather than debating the science, snapped that Loehle kept referring to him as his "colleague," when they certainly were not peers. Loehle, Schlesinger alleged, isn't published in "serious, respected" journals like he is. Loehle, he implied, is an inferior scientist. On and on it went, with Schlesinger interrupting, taking more than his fair time, speaking over the moderator, and never getting down to a critique the science behind Loehle's conclusions.

As the Climategate emails reveal, Schlesinger and his clique rely heavily on the ability to obscure data and stifle dissent through any means necessary. Smoke and mirrors, ad hominem attacks - whatever it takes. They do it out in public regularly and they have for years. Few who follow this topic are surprised that they do it behind closed doors.