Discussion > The Moral and Intellectual Poverty of Climate Alarm
Yeah…. Wot ’e sed. 🤷♀
I don’t know Monbiot personally; he may well be a perfectly charming, affable person. My only experience of him has been by such articles as you have directed us to, and appearances on TV – neither of which endears him to me, at all. He does seem mainly to engage in such character assassinations (and I will not explore as to whether or not they are deserved), or embark on some wildly insane proposals for “the environment”, most of which seem to be to inflict some form of punishment on humanity. Because of that, I tend to dismiss much of what he says or writes.
Radical Rodent
More ad hominem. Duly noted. Really, just a 'no' would have done. ;-)
Phil Clarke
ha-ha ... engage with the Moonbat? - only on his terms, every time. He prefers to (refuses to, even) operate in anything other than a tightly controlled PR / media environment.
Bollox.
Here's a televised debate with Ian Plimer.
Here's a correspondence with Alexander Cockburn.
Many more examples out there.
Phil Clarke
No, not ad hominems, really, more like rational observations; biased, maybe, because we are all prone to subjective interpretations of others, and events and data, but I can live with that – however, I would rather live without any reference or recourse to Mr Monbiot, if I can.
Radical Rodent
Given your repeated and unsupported attacks on me for 'attacking the messenger while ignoring the message', my irony meter is maxed out.
Bye for now.
Phil Clarke
The first link didn’t work; as to the second – well, that starts well:
I am not qualified to comment on the scientific claims made in Alexander Cockburn's article. But nor is Cockburn qualified to make them.Make what? – is the first response. Then: why not? (presuming that he is referring to making claims based on Dr Herzberg’s assertions) Anyone is qualified to make comments about any scientific field; that they may be wrong, or may not fully understand is a point that can be raised when the comment is made, and discussion develops. This might even be how a patent clerk managed to come up with some pretty smart ideas, as he chatted with his colleagues around the drinks dispenser.
I won’t go any further, as Monbiot resorts to his usual character assassination of Mr Cockburn, while proving himself a liar in his second sentence (the first one of the quotation) by proceeding to comment on the scientific claims (that he initially admitted to being unqualified to comment on). Ho-hum…. You will really have to do better than that, Mr Clarke.
Given your …. unsupported attacks…Oh the irony!!! 😂 🤣 😂 🤣
Radical Rodent
Klein bottle....
I have engaged trivially with Monbiot on several topics unrelated directly to climate - he is capable of rational, reasoned argument right up to the moment where he drops a huge divot of conflation and eco-Marxism into the matter to hand. If he just left it - or even gave a reasoned expose of what he's just pronounced on I'd have a lot more respect - but no - he wallows in bulgy-eyed peremptory denunciations of the classic activist variety. Mildly pointing out that just maybe he's overreached / been a tad OTT will get you excluded from admiring his handiwork closer up than official output.
Monbiot's Twitter block list and the moderation waste basket at The Guardian likely tell their own story.
What's not to like? - quite a bit as it turns out.
fred
Wikipedia notes his attraction to controversy and politics, and how he causes conflict with his own beliefs.
"Monbiot has lived in Oxford for many years, but for a few years from 2007, lived in a low emissions house in the mid-Wales market town of Machynlleth, originally with his then-wife, writer and campaigner Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and their daughter.[50] Because his new partner lives in Oxford, Monbiot returned by 2012"
golf charlie
Phil Clarke
Pythons ?
Terry Gilliam was in the "The Independent" yesterday needling woke zealots - with a bit of success.....
tomo
A good article that highlights the cognitive dissonance of the trendy-lefties, for whom anyone can self-identify as whoever they want to be – unless they look and act like straight, white men, who cannot identify as anything other than what they are. The conflict truly rattles the interviewer’s thought(?) processes.
“It’s been so simplified is what I don’t like. When I announce that I’m a black lesbian in transition, people take offence at that. Why?”Open you mind a little, dear. Open your mind.Because you’re not.
“Why am I not? How are you saying that I’m not?”
Are you?
“You’ve judged me and decided that I was making a joke.”
You can’t identify as black, though.
“OK, here it is. Go on Google. Type in the name Gilliam. Watch what comes up.”
What’s going to come up?
“The majority are black people. So maybe I’m half black. I just don’t look it.”
But earlier, he described himself as a white male.
“I don’t like the term black or white. I’m now referring to myself as a melanin-light male. I can’t stand the simplistic, tribalistic behaviour that we’re going through at the moment.” He smiles. “I’m getting myself in deeper water, so I have to trust you.” I’m not sure what he’s trusting me to do.
Radical Rodent
@RR
the absence of a scintilla of self awareness on 'lill Alexandra's part is umm... rather obvious - she'll have to put a bit more effort into her sneer technique I feel.
tomo
CO2 Alarmism continues to produce so much dross that I cannot keep up with it here.
But here is a more general essay on the corruption of academic research in pursuit of government grants. Climate research is of course heavily dependent on the bonanza of government grants of the past few decades.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/01/the-intellectual-and-moral-decline-in-academic-research/
John Shade
I reckon we could have regular topical posts here for each of the continents - highlighting some deceit or drivel published to promote alarm over our gentle, beneficial, warming and/or some nightmarish projection of it.
Here are three that would file under Antarctica:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/02/09/medias-horribly-dishonest-antarctica-propaganda/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/09/antarctica-threatens-florida/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/08/antarctica-hottest-ever/
But who has the time?
John Shade
Triggered (in both senses) by a new record at Esperanza base: 18.3C, 0.8C above previous highest temperature for the continent.
"Nothing to see here, just a new record at a single location, caused by Foehn winds - warm air coming off a mountain, happens all the time. Blah blah"
Oops, another new record, Seymour island, 2 days later, this one 20.75C.
Those goddamn Foehn winds must be getting warmer. LOL.
Phil Clarke
The Guardian?
Weather ... Northern tip of the peninsula - 1200km from the main land mass...
waaa! The Antarctic is melting!
tossers
fred
I think it's worth observing that at 64.2333° S, Seymour Island is north of the Antarctic Circle, so can be described as being Antarctica, the Antarctic, or whatever, only in the loosest sense. Not that you would know this either from the Guardian headline:
"Antarctic temperature rises above 20C for first time on record"
or from the article itself:
"The Antarctic has registered a temperature of more than 20C (68F) for the first time on record, prompting fears of climate instability in the world’s greatest repository of ice."
From the same article:
"Schaefer said the temperature of the peninsula, the South Shetland Islands and the James Ross archipelago, which Seymour is part of, has been erratic over the past 20 years. After cooling in the first decade of this century, it has warmed rapidly."
The graph contained within the article shows the temperature being sub-zero on 1st February, and heading down that way again by 12th February. The article carefully avoids telling us how long temperatures have been recorded at Seymour Island (they have been recorded for less than 60 years at Esperanza), and it also avoids showing us an extended temperature graph, thus avoiding the readers being able to see if this is really part of a continuous trend or or if its a blip.
Climate alarmism is rife at the Guardian. I don't discount the possible significance of this story, but I'd like a lot more information in order to be able to form a sensible opinion. Still, headlines grab the attention and do a great job in spreading the "climate chaos" meme. Who needs lots of useful information in order to put stories in context, and properly understand whether they are significant, or insignificant, after all?
Mark Hodgson
Yeah, but its not volcanoes (ThongChai) is it?,And if it's localised winds then why are they getting warmer?
Intellectual poverty indeed.
Phil Clarke
Might be fun to start a thread to post each new record as they come along, followed by coverage of the scramble to explain exactly why it is not really a record, or if it is, it is not significant, or if it is significant it is not a sign of GW, and if it is GW it is not AGW and if it is AGW it is not CAGW (etc etc).
LOL.
Phil Clarke
some colourful animations of those Foehn winds
It's not so much the actual temperature number as the blizzard of utter BS from alarmists and tosspot journalists that accompanies every press release that's tiresome - even The Sun got in on this one.
There have been cold "records" repeatedly broken - but ...... tumbleweed....
fred
Phil, the intellectual poverty is the hysterical reporting of each new "warm" record, without context, while failing to report each new cold record (with or without context).
I am a sceptic, I don't have my head in the sands. I accept that the planet is warming. I suspect it's part natural, part human-influenced. My scepticism is in large part about the agenda, and about the unreality of the demands that we utterly change our lifestyles at great expense with no guarantee that it will achieve anything. In other words my scepticism is aimed more at the politics of the situation than at the science, though in my book, the scientists don't get away scot-free, especially since so many of them have ceased simply to report on what they believe the science to be and have become highly politicised along the way.
I would like the media and scientists to report openly, fully, and without an agenda. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. Every day (literally every day, I suspect) some new report is published blaming something on climate change, however implausible, however irrelevant to most people's lives. Where is the money from all this coming from? Why is it happening? Why the uncritical approach to it from the MSM?
The age of curiosity seems to be dead, and I find that to be very sad. It's not good for science either.
Mark Hodgson
https://apnews.com/7d00e38b9ba1470fa526b1da739c5da8
Phil Clarke
There have been cold "records" repeatedly broken - but ...... tumbleweed....
I am sure if a record worldwide cold year comes along it will make headlines, after all the last one was more than 90 years ago, hardly topical. 2018 saw 40 new all-time cold records. And 430 new hot records.
July last year was the hottest month on record and 2019 was the warmest year on record for sea surface temperatures, second warmest for surface temps.
Phil Clarke
Odd as it might seem to you, Mr Clarke, I have no problem with “hot records” being broken – for one thing, they demonstrate that the world is continuing to warm, which is a good thing; for another, these “records” tend to break the “old” records by a few tenths of a degree, so are not really that scary, anyway. What I do fear is an onset of cold records, as that would indicate that the world is now cooling, and that is a very, very bad thing (unless, of course, you like the idea of Scotland and much of North America being under kilometres of ice).
Radical Rodent
ha-ha ... engage with the Moonbat? - only on his terms, every time. He prefers to (refuses to, even) operate in anything other than a tightly controlled PR / media environment.
Monbiot blocks anybody who even trivially challenges him (on Twitter fwiw) and assiduously sets up any appearances to exclude effective challenges. The BBC like him because he's such a careful stalker of his ambush victims.
I'm not saying that Ridley is better but pfff... What really, really irks about Monbiot is that he piles into domestic foes and by and large ignores as far as I can see the likes of China and India. I prefer Bob Geldof - and that's not a compliment.
He's so far up himself he's the human equivalent of a Kein blottle.