Global Warming
on February 28, 2012 at 5:30 pm…causes amnesia. Is there anything it can’t do?
[Update a few minutes later]
The unbearable Gleickness of being: a ClimateFake update.
[Update a while later]
Heh — from the link:
Second, it is beyond irony and parody to take in again the fixation with Heartland’s tiny $4.4 million budget last year next to the recent news that the Climate Works Foundation, one of the major climate campaign organizations, just got another $100 million fillip from the Hewlett Foundation. This brings the grand total of Hewlett grants to Climate Works to nearly $600 million. I believe this one grant history to just one organization rivals the total combined assets of all the main conservative foundations. And these folks get their knickers in a twist about Heartland and the Koch brothers? The paranoid climateers make the cliché Victorian woman standing on a chair afraid of a mouse look like a Spartan warrior by comparison. I repeat: what a bunch of losers.
Let’s hope they’re losers. So far the losers have been taxpayers and consumers.
[Update early evening]
A huge link roundup of breaking posts: the Gleick tragedy.
[Bumped]
The picture in the last link is awesome.
I tried replying to the powerline comments by MichaelJohnston but apparently their comments system is broken when it comes to communicating with my hotmail ID. Their e-mail doesn’t work either. I admit, the broken comment system of Powerline is pissing me off.
This is what I tried to reply on Powerline:
It’s interesting to see the rationalizations for Gleick’s actions. I would have to say that if Gleick had actually found evidence of wrongdoing or unconscionable bias and he didn’t commit libel (keep in mind that even if he’s telling the true about the “memo”, he still didn’t find information to support it), I would look more favorably on this crime in question.
But he didn’t do that.
So now we have all sorts of defenses of him such as are outlined in the last link. The lapses in ethical and logical thought are remarkable. I think it’d be interesting to do a survey of these sorts of arguments just to get a feel for what people will stoop to in order to defend an ideological stake.
You mean short of guillotines, of course…
True. Though such thugs have a history of rapidly disposing of people who became inconvenient or embarrassing.
My point here is that Gleick screwed up blatantly. These would-be defenders could have just said nothing (maybe while putting names in little black books or whatever). They could have just said “His actions were inexcusable and don’t reflect the rest of us.” Instead, they choose to continue to defend him and rationalize his behavior.
That’s because they desperately want the HI non-story to be a story: they’re losing the debate so they need to pretend that the debate isn’t happening, that some central villian is preventing it. That
lienarrative is too good to let go.If they had any sense about damage control (and perhaps any ethics or objectivity) some of Gleick’s close associates would instead be talking about how he was under a lot of strain (make up a few personal tragedies) and that he had recently changed medications (list some drug whose side effects take up most of a one-minute commercial). Claim that he must’ve drank way too much coffee and whisky, was overcome by paranoia and lack of sleep, and just went a bit off the rails.
Then they could’ve put the whole fiasco down as an aberrant oopsie and sidetracked the whole scandal into ne about the dangers of caffeine psychosis or not promptly telling a doctor about mood changes after a change in medication. Instead, they’ve doubled down on their complete lack of ethics and managed to convince anyone in the audience that they are rabid, delusional, unethical fanatics who will stop at nothing to silence their critics.
I’d love to see somebody print out, “scuff up”, and re-scan Gleick’s forgery, then make an animated GIF out of it, just to remind people of the parallels to Dan Rather.
Well, we already know for sure that Mann Made Global Warming can and does cause scientists to commit federal felonies (wire fraud, identity theft) so why can’t it cause amnesia too? And I’m sure it’s to blame for the current low solar cycle as well…
/snark