Of #climate denialists, Toni Morrison and not feeding the trolls…

So, one thing that you learn quickly if you stick your head above the parapet on climate – especially on The Conversation, it seems – is that you’ll attract a few positive comments and at least as many trolls/denialists etc. [Addendum – As a white man I don’t get the racism and sexism that the denialists are usually drenched in, but seem blind to. It is much worse for women and people of colour.] I had a letter in Private Eye about their use of the term “extreme” to refer to Extinction Rebellion, and someone tracked me down to my work emails.

I am not replying to the clown, but I am ‘fisking’ his letter, to show some of the techniques that these sad old men use in their attempts to waste other people’s time.

Don’t feed the trolls, but explain how they work.  And remember what Toni Morrison said of racism –

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Ditto denialists.  They will Gish Gallop and be happy to have wasted your time.

Hello Marc

Your letter in the current issue suggests that XR are not extremists but that the rest of us who use fossil fuels are(1).  It’s a pity that so many of the outspoken people like you, on the subject of climate change, are so completely deluded.  There is no climate emergency (2)  or crisis – this is just yet another example of the modern (3)  trend for describing everything we don’t like as a crisis.  Rhetoric inflation like this has the effect (just like price inflation) of effectively devaluing the currency of the language – eventually, even a genuine crisis atracts (4) no attention.

If you were a genuine scientist (5), you would have gone to the trouble of examining and learning about the science of the climate.  You would know, as I suspect you do very well (6), that there is no evidence to link rising carbon emissions with warming.  People like you rely on the interminable IPCC reports to underpin their convictions on the subject, but if you actually read the reports and follow the arguments, you’ll find that they are riddled with errors, incorrect scientific process, bias and selectivity with data (7).  You can find more detail in the attached report of the Clintel Foundation.  

The reality is that the situation is not severe at all and that (8) extent of any climate change has been grossly exaggerated.  Even if we were to accept that warming is occurring, there’s no reason to believe that it has anything to do with mankind’s activities (9).  Lastly, even if you think carbon emissions are responsible, against all the evidence, the fact is that only abround (10)  3.5% of those emissions come from our activities, the rest coming from natural sources, so you can see that no likely reduction in emissions can make any difference. (11)

Regards

Ed XXXX

Fisknotes

1. The weasel word here is “suggest.”  The letter in Private Eye did no such thing.  Denialists will always try to put words in your mouth, to force you to defend something you didn’t actually say.  For people who talk about the importance of accuracy, it’s actually quite amusing (I’m not sure it rises to the level of ‘hypocrisy’ – they simply, erm, lack the cognitive capacity to be consistent, poor old fools.
2. This is the “CLINTEL” outfit’s key meme – ‘there is no crisis’, so presumably our guy is contractually obliged to get it in the first paragraph. See DeSmogBlog’s page here.

3. “Modern” – this is another sly term they use, trying to insinuate that concern over climate is a new fad.  Even if you take out Arrhenius and Callendar, it still goes back seventy years, to Guy Plass, as per my Conversation article here – Climate change first ‘went viral’ exactly 70 years ago
4. Again, for people who claim to be all about precision, not being able to run a troll message through a simple spelcheck is quite funny.
5. Feeble attempt to bait, via ad hominem, into a meaningless and exhausting conversation.  Ha ha ha!  (The only “genuine” scientists, in these clowns eyes, are the ones who tell them things they want to hear.
6. Insinuating that I am lying, and part of The Conspiracy. Attempt to make me feel outraged enough to reply. Ha ha ha.
7. The reports are “interminable”. But if they were shorter they’d be “skimpy.” Someone is having their cake and eating it. 
8. See Fisknote 4 
9. Hedging here, so can throw two kinds of denial in – trend denial and attribution denial (that it’s humans) (for types of denial, see Rahmstorf 2004).  It’s quite remarkable that, when we’ve just gone over 17 degrees global average temperature for the first time in human history that people are still peddling trend denial, but old habits die hard, I guess.
10. See Fisknote 8, and 12
11. True-ish but irrelevant fact, trying to muddy the waters. This has been covered by Skeptical Science. The key fact is that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we’ve bumped the atmospheric concentration of C02 up from 280 parts per million (which was already high – there’s an argument about previous human impacts from deforestation) to 424ppm and climbing.  And we know it’s “our” C02 thanks to straightforward Carbon-14 dating.  It’s not rocket science.
12. “Spelcheck” was a feeble attempt at humour. Obviously.