Death of "K and r selection" : for PhDs and Punksters alike, popularity is anathema

Memes are like indie bands

Nothing kills a good scientific metaphor  more stone dead than having it taken up by the detested "civilians".

Supposedly grown-up male scientists tend to act just like not-yet-grown-up male scientists : nothing kills the young male science student's interest in some obscure punk indie band faster than if  the rest of humanity also decides to like it.

Panarchy reigns....or should reign

I still think that "K and r selection" is a highly useful metaphor (and am glad that people much smarter than me, like Buzz Hollings and Brian Walker agree in its continuing value as a scientific metaphor in discussing Panarchy concepts.)

Yes, in stable statutory and economic environments, big K-selected organisms like Canada's Bell Aliant can totally dominate the Canadian media niche.

But, equally, in time of turmoil (say a drastic change in the artificial CRTC rules that restrain true competition) , nimble little r-selected media businesses might pick up the pieces when Bell fall apart.

Except that, unlike in Nature, Bell is usually judged "too big to fail" by the libertarians (sic) that dominate our government, universities and media and so remains bloated but alive, held aloft by nothing more - or less - than trillions of taxpayers' and consumers' dollars .....

Tony Abbott would deny his OWN EYESIGHT --- if it made him Prime Minister

Denying will bite, Tony !

On the assumption that Australian Libertarian Party leader Tony Abbott can and does read, today's Australian newspapers couldn't have been pleasant reading. (Cue the inside story.)

"Naked ambition versus scientific facts, part XXCLV"

AUDIO : sound of newspapers being thrown angrily away...

VOICE IN HIS HEAD : Best soldier on ,Tony, just ignore your  eyesight, got to focus on that prize in your mind's eye : that dream of a lifetime.

TONY : Becoming Prime Minister !!!
(Not really quite sure what I'll do when I get there, but "the joy is in the dreaming" , as my priest always says.)

VOICE : Bad, bad newspapers ; spoiling the Nasty Abbott's day like that . (Cue : Aussie sharks washing up on English Channel beaches ; tropical fishes ending up off Tassie.)

VOICE : And blaming it all on global warming : the cheek !

TONY : Rupert - bloody -Murdoch and his warmist claptrap !
Must-remember-mummie : the prize-the prize.

FADE TO BLACK.....

All climate-deniers are equal but some are more equal than others...

Bloody in-fighting among the tiny tots in the climate deniers camp this week recalls similar infighting among the farm animals after the Glorious Revolution in Orwell's Animal Farm.

You remember, when Napoleon's killer-dogs tore the throats out of the pigs and hens, in a very public execution.

Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera has a nice post on  all
throat-tearing here.

 She credits WTD (Watching the Deniers) as being an excellent news source and SVE can only agree with that assessment : required daily reading --- from the 99%, for the 99%.

Great fun, but a bit pathetic too , because these poor denier nobodies have long been used by libertarian think tanks / newspaper chains / political parties as very public, easily ridiculed , stalking horses for the libertarians' own sinister ends.

the real paymasters of the tiny tots deniers are the sinister libertarians

But when the public ridicule gets too loud - as it is now over the Galileo Movement's managing director Malcolm Roberts saying climate change is all a Jewish bankster conspiracy, the libertarian powers-to-be remain silent in the deep shadows, unwilling to come to the defence of their embattled dupes.

Just as Napoleon's real paymasters were the human bosses , who were content to remain in the shadows when the killings were being done....

QUEER-BASHING and CLIMATE DENIAL : related ?

Gay-friendly Tassie !

Australian politics perhaps shows best how closely related are the strident opposition to both Gay marriage and the reality of Global warming .


In that Antipodes nation, the right wing of the socialist party joins with the capitalist parties in opposing both : and that adds up to about 70% of the voters on Election Day, though polling on these issues alone shows a much more even split among the  population.

Electoral systems that favour the two biggest parties give the "paranoid" voter the final say on every thing.

Clearly the parties are well behind current public opinion. This is because both main parties need to get as many of the "paranoid" voters as possible, to form government in a distorted electoral system that wildly favours the two biggest parties - by design.

(The left wing of the socialists joins with the Greens in favouring gay marriage and the reality of climate change.)

At the federal level, the governing Labor (socialist) party is trying to straddle the fence, knowing it appeals to both queer-bashing Labor activists and gay-supporting Labor activists..

But in Tasmania, the governing Labor party will use a small loophole in the Australian constitution to allow gay marriage in the tiny island state - heartedly supported by most Greens but opposed by some Labor activists.

(By contrast, the Libertarian party and its rural and far right fellow travellers are undivided in roundly opposing gay marriage.)

Much the same for global warming ; the right denies it 100%, the Greens support it 100% and the centre-right socialists tries to have it both ways.

Switching to America , a life-long active Republican worker and professional denier for Big Tobacco and a host of other big rich unpopular industries, Frank Schubert , is leading the richly financed anti-gay marriage movement in the United States , further cementing the arguments that all denier movements are intimately connected......

new HORROR : Rip Van Winkle awakes and PASSES 2012 high school science exam with flying colours

Rip Van Winkle awakes from long sleep and wins big science scholarship to famous university

There is absolutely nothing in most 21st century high school physical science courses that the average smart lad or gal from the Victorian Era couldn't pass with flying colours.

And that curriculum is killing our planet.

One hundred and twenty five years of science - all the new science discoveries since the 1890s - the science we need to save this planet - has been deliberately ignored in the world of popular education.

 And need I add that most of the science done in the millions of years of human existence has been done very very recently, ie in those last 125 years ?

Unbelievably but true that most of humanity's body of science is not taught - by deliberate design - to most high school and even most university students.

Instead they learn the science of George Babbitt and the science known by the man who knew Coolidge, the science of mid-west Lions and Rotary Clubs, the science of small town boosters in loud checkered suits : the science of the Holy Anglo Saxon Trinity of Newton , Dalton and Darwin.

It is the self confident, arrogant,  science of Babbittry and it is killing this planet ; the science that fuels the certitudes and hubris of the climate deniers and of the vast majority of ordinary people wavering in the middle of that debate.

I - jokingly - argue sometimes we need to do an Admiral Byng every now and then : pick one or two high school science teachers, high school principals and school board curriculum directors at random and put them before a firing squad " pour encourager les autres".

It basically boils down to this ; how do you set and mark an exam question on determining the position and speed of a quantum particle ?

Public - compulsory - Education was birthed in the high Victorian Era and was deliberately designed to convince the doubting working class that Reality was an easily controlled and manipulative object for the greater profit of Man.

Education deliberately designed ideologically, from the ground up, to teach certitudes, not "Indeterminacy".

But un-certitude-ism is the real grain of reality - never more so than in the area of weather and climate.

The best that our best scientists can currently say is that  Airliner Earth has a 60% chance of crashing and burning fatally , if we don't quickly reduce the carbon pollution we pour into the skies.

That is not 19th century science's 100% certainty certitudes of the  libertarian bureaucrat think tank deniers - but it is real science, the science of today.

More to the point, would you not avoid flying a airline company that said its planes crash and burn 60% of the time, every time they take off?

Indeterminacy as the fundamental core of reality needs to be taught not just to bright-eyed 15 year olds : we senior citizens need to learn it too and apply it to our lives.

If only for the sake of the future lives of those bright-eyed 15 year olds.....

grampa's SUNNY science vs today's GRIM realities

Grampa's science is still judged only one safe enough for kids

If you want to build the world's longest, straightest, airport runway all you need to succeed , on time and under budget, is still just GRAMPA's SCIENCE.

The science from back before the 1890s , the kind of science 21st century high school administrators still think is the only one safe enough to teach children.

Good old, solid, commonsensical, white protestant ANGLO SAXON science : the Holy Trinity of Newton, Dalton and Darwin.

Science when Science, by God ! , was like a religion, a faith.

A positive, outwardly-looking, optimist, can-do, religious fervour, type of science.

Science so intuitive and commonsensical you almost didn't need some fancy-assed professor to teach it , merely have a fellow from your own church, with a BSc and a great game of golf .

Someone who could confirm your childhood scientific insights for you.

None of that dour, new-fangled, complicated, so called "jew boy" science.

The science so tough that high school principals think it should only be used by adults : science rated PG-18.

That counter-intutitive science of relativity cum quantum physics, green chemistry and horizontal gene transfer oriented biology.

Yep, science like grampa's can still build great runways.

But - if you let it build your GPS for you --- by using good old newton's laws --- your airplane would crash and burn about 15 yards beyond the runway.

New science does many things much more accurately than the old science of 150 or more years back.

That is only natural : we don't much use horse and buggies to get people to emergency departments anymore : we use helicopters.

Today we face new - unparalleled - problems, a whole new reality and we must use the newest and the best science to help prevent the airliner Earth from crashing and burning 15 yards beyond the runway.

Grampa's science is simple enough for kids - yes , it truly is simple.

Libertarian bureaucrats in advocacy think tanks, the ones that are "skeptic"   big deniers of climate change, are along with high school principals, among the world's most strident believers in the comfortable old simple science from back before the 1890s and the "Great Schism in Science".

Bu, unfortunately, our problems today are complicated and like it or not, we need complicated science to help solve them.

Child-like problems (designing yet another routine runway) only require the sweet, gentle medicine intended for children.

But grown-up sized problems requires grown-up science, bitter-tasting as that might be .....

Profs who can, PEER-REVIEW ; those who can't , THINK TANK : revenge of the second raters !

If the climate denial scam succeeds, the "second rate" , not the Meek, will inherit the Earth --- or what will be left of it

Think of today's thousands of advocacy think tanks as a "pollution by-product", cast off by the rapid expansion of the world's universities in the 1970s.

By the 1980s we had a huge population of second raters with pass grade degrees who had been burned by the parents' firm belief that anyone  ---anyone--- with a university degree had a job for life, regardless of their individual talent and drive.

Which was true - in their parents' 1940s and 1950s.

But by 1980, the market was flooded and once more talent and drive weighted more than a mere diploma : businesses had been burned too often with MBAs with no eye for business, newspapers with BJs with no ear for a great lead sentence.

And to be frank, too many universities, in their rush to expand, had hired too many profs with no talent for real teaching, real research or - most importantly - no real ability to get along in what is a very collegiate atmosphere.

Second rate minds combined with prickly personalities --- truly the bane of every university department.

Everybody it seemed - society and the university -  would be better off if has-bin profs joined their pass grade BA grads at the new libertarian think tanks springing up like, well like redbrick universities had in the previous decades.

These think tanks had lots of money, but could only flourish if they could lure a certain type of had-been academic to them.

They were needed to give a fig leaf of credibility to what, by all other measures, was just another lobbyist-group-for-hire.

The libertarian philosophy is very very attractive to people with second rate minds, but without the matching insight to realize and accept that fact.

I have a second rate mind but I hope my life shows I have accepted and adjusted to that fact : no life in the peer-reviewed fast-lane for me.

The chief characteristic of the other type of second rater is that, against all evidence, they still think they are right and it is mere jealousy by all the world's academic elites that has kept their work outside the best journals.

Finally the think tanks provide an attractive alternative : a bureaucratic sinecure for life .

Because the hurly-burly of the real business world is all very nice to write about for most libertarians; but in practise, as unattractive to the second rate as the peer-review fast-lane was.

Libertarian bureaucrats, (avoid the ironic obvious, dear reader !)  managing budgets of a cool $ 100 million a year.

 "Research" institutions, albeit in fancy big skyscrapers next to the White House, that let them say whatever they want for as long as they want.

Without the need for painstakingly long pesky original research or for enduring the formality of passing through the peer review portal for work that is, after all , self-evidently first rate.

But let us play the Devil's Advocate and ask if these institutions are not the peer-review equivalent of diploma mills .

 Four decades of huge budgets ( by most research institution standards)in some cases ----- and yet never an article published in a journal covered by The Web of Science or similar indices of quality research.

That is why I believe that advocacy think tanks are a scam : gullible senile billionaires being bilked out of hundreds of millions to support 'research' that has no credibility outside the think tank echo chamber.

The billionaires could have better spent this money on commissioning tenured, peer-reviewed, professors with libertarian views to produce nuanced libertarian-oriented articles in peer-reviewed journals.

These articles would have been far less strident, admittedly, but in the end, in the long term, far more credible......

end CLIMATE DENIAL SCAM : bring back BERLIN WALL !

Let us not be unkind : libertarian bureaucrats NEED the "climate denial scam" to secure their pensions

We earthlings need, on the other hand, to reduce our carbon output NOW and in fact we also need urgently find ways to put much of what carbon we already have into green trees and out of our atmosphere.

So we need to end the Climate Denial Scam - NOW.

But we can't let the tankers starve and face it, as second-raters they're too inept to find real work.

Even fat, frackin'-lazy, libertarian bureaucrat lifers in think tanks in Canberra and Washington need to eat (at swanky expense-account restaurants) and drink (at fancy nightclubs).

So let's throw them a bone : convince our German allies to re-erect the Berlin Wall and install a communist government in Saxony.

That ought to be enough incentive for middle-aged libertarian bureaucrats ("the lifers") to find new ways to con and swindle senile billionaires (with too much paranoia and not enough brains) to fund a war against the RED TERROR.

I am sure the Germans will help out, when they realize that the alternative is thousands of strident advocacy think tanks braying at climate change until the Earth crashes and burns.

Either that, or until the money for libertarian bureaucrat pay cheques runs out.

Failing this re-inventing "new reds under every beds" scheme , we could move to PLAN B : the libertarian battle to save salt , sugar , fat and "fast food" billionaires from the medical doctors.

Think of all the food billionaires worried to the point of hysteria about the threats to their profits and their waistlines.

 Surely the libertarian bureaucrats are capable of dreaming up new variants on Stalin's "Doctors' Plot",  to make lots of money from.

Just leave the rest of the world alone, go play in your profitable sandbox, and let us get on with healing all the harm your former marks , clients, have already done....

Russian oil barons: Commie Red on the outside, Republican Red on the inside

The Red-Red Terror

Russian oil barons, secretly denying climate change because it threatens their profits are only Commie Red on the outside --- inside they are as Republican Red as any mid-western state GOP lifer.

Ironic isn't it that those former supposed enemies-to-the-death, the American libertarian think tank bureaucrats and the Communist oil barons of Russia, are actually more united than anyone else in world in denying the reality of climate change ?

"Reds always stick together", my mom said whenever she sorted clothes for the wash - how right you are Mom !

As a teenager in the late 1940s, Mom had had friends among America's super rich auto barons in Detroit's suburbs AND spent a terrible six months in Budapest at the height of that country's Stalinist state of terror : so she knew red staters of both varieties.

She never liked either of them and always lived by the principle that 'there are no pockets on a shroud' .....

climate denial scam : COMMUNIST oil barons secretly funding LIBERTARIAN think tank bureaucrats ?

Russia economy has by far the most to lose if world rejects CLIMATE DENIAL ...

Because fatcat think tank bureaucrats only want others, never themselves, to display  "transparency in governance" , we will never know the true originators of all the money laundered into the libertarian think tanks that most stridently deny climate change.

But whether via tax-free Cayman Islands or secret Swiss bank accounts, money can weave a long, hidden, trail between the first giver and the last spender.

But no economy in the world would be as heavily hit - with dire, perhaps fatal, consequences for its rulers - than Russia if the world reduces hydrocarbon use.

It is the top producer of oil and top exporter, eighth in oil reserves.  Russia is second  in coal reserves. First in natural gas reserves and top gas exporter. 

And it wastes energy like nobody's business -third biggest energy user in the world.

Russia fails to export much services and in fact fails to export much goods, nothing at all equal to its export of these raw materials.

Russians have no plan B - unlike for example in countries like Canada or America who can up non-raw-material exports, by currency devaluation, if hydrocarbon sales fell.

In my opinion, the battle over climate change will be won or lost in just four countries : The Gang of Four Anglo Saxons : America, Australia, Canada and Britain, in that order of importance.

Russia needs to have its own pony in this race,  but can't publicly tip its hand since the most strident climate deniers are also the most strident Russia haters.

But no organization - not even the KGB , is half as secretive as the many strident advocacy libertarian think tanks that led the climate denial scam ----- at great profit to themselves.

I can imagine the Russian communist oil barons' grim satisfaction thinking that it is their petro-roubles that are funding their erstwhile arch-enemies, the American libertarians, in their mutual battle to deny climate change .

As my fellow Hungarian, Alanis , likes to sing : " isn't it ironic...."

denier think tank BUREAUCRATS & billionaires: who is the con artist and who 'the mark' ?

billionaires bribing think tank bureaucrats or tanker bureaucrats scamming billionaires ?

Most denier fighters hint (libel alert) that it is billionaires that have led the battle over climate denial .

Via their family foundations or the big corporations they control, these rich guys have supposedly discreetly 'bribed' libertarian advocacy think tank bureaucrats to work up credible denial efforts.

All to combat current attacks by government and environmentalists on the products that have made these billionaires wealthy.

Denier-fighters hint at this process by (A) noting that this think tank did a one time major denial effort on tobacco in 2003. And (B) one or two paragraphs later, when they drily note the only year this think tank got money from Big Tobacco was...... 2003.

You are led to - sorry left to - draw the conclusion that Big Tobacco was the instigator in this process .

And that supposedly the process works in the exact same way, in the current case of climate denial and the hydrocarbon producing or using industries.

But how true is this narrative ?

Students of how lobbyists work or how election fund-raising works are not so naive.

When the senior majority or minority member on an American House committee faces a fierce, expensive, primary or re-election fight, they often do "The Abramoff Manoeuvre" .

The politician suddenly lets (or encourage others to let) dozens of intrusive new regulations become attached to a bill affecting, let's say the potato farmers in Idaho.

Working closely - and profitably - with a lobbyist for the potato farmers of that state, he and the lobbyist convince enough gullible farmers that these regulatory threats are real, real enough to spend some very heavy money to squash them before they get to the formal vote.

The lobbyists tells the farmers , 2000 long kms away from the Beltway, that "old Joe is right dead set on seeing these regulations pass - but you may have heard he is in a bad battle to win his primary, back in New Jersey."

" I just bet X dollars for his campaign might move him our way - and he is the lead minority congressman on this issue you know..."

Old Joe gets his money, the regulations disappear and the potato lobbyist gets his percent of the money flowing from Idaho to New Jersey.

Its a win:win scam !!

Think tank bureaucrats of the cold war advocacy variety are pros at this sort of game: ever seeing new reds under new beds to scare gullible paranoid billionaires ---- or today, ever seeing new greens under new protest banners.

Let me hint , just as the other denier fighters have.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall slash Commie scam was over - so over.

Now most cold war advocacy think tank bureaucrats had to unexpectedly find new money cows to feed their salaries, expense accounts (don't get me started !) and fat pensions.

Suddenly climate change, a science news story about thirty years old by that point, became an overnight global threat to every free market company .. that had lots of money.

Ending the cold war was supposed to provide a peace bonus to many different people ---- firms might take the money that they had wasted for 40 years donating to cold war think tank bureaucrats and put it into something truly useful for them and society ------ like R & D.

But no --- a new, worser , terror lay on the horizon : the Green Terror.

"I'm a telling ya : way worse than the Red Terror : cause at least the commies also had their smoke polluting power plants, just like us free marketeers, but these greenies are truly scary - they got horns !"

"Thanky  , thanky  ,thanky  : you just keep 'em silver dollars coming in, and God Bless your continuing Prayers for our Holy Crusade."

Fundamentalist tele-evangelicals, politicians seeking re-election, think tank bureaucrats or 'discreet' lobbyists : they all have the same quasi-religious spiel .

That's why I say we are looking at gullible billionaires and cynical think tank bureaucrats milking them for all they are worth --- NOT the other way around.....

if BERLIN WALL still existed, would DENIER INDUSTRY exist ?

climate denial is a SCAM by unscrupulous think tank BUREAUCRATS to con money from naive Corporate executives

When first the Berlin Wall and then the Kremlin went tumbling down, the communist bureaucrats inside were not half as terrified as were their exact bureaucratic counterparts in the free world's thousands of COLD WAR think tanks.

FACT : 97% (note the neat symmetry with you know what) of the world's strident advocacy libertarian think tanks were created between 1945 and 1992 , IE during the Cold War.

They got their money from gullible government politicians, paranoid billionaires and big corporations executives by always seeing ever new reds under ever new beds.

Students of lobbying might recognize this as a variant on the classic Jack Abramoff  move of deliberately ratcheting up your own client's fears, to scam more out of them.

When unexpectedly (well stoking anti-communism had seem a secure job-for-life) the red terror self-imploded, these well-paid bureaucrats had to cast about for a new scam.

It is not a coincidence that the very same year that the Berlin Wall fell, that a new terror threat arose to afflict those who are conveniently both easily scared and very wealthy : The Green Terror and Climate Change.

Even if global climate change goes away as a profit centre for evil tankers inside the Beltway, because voters of all parties say it is real , ever new terrors will be dreamed up to scare the rich and gullible.

Perhaps strong medical evidence that fat, salt and sugar now kill far more than bacteria and viruses do today in the rich countries will become something new to deny : like the 1950s "commie fluoride in our water" panic.

Rest assured that wherever thousands of fat lazy bureaucrats gather in an attempt to avoid a real job, think tanks and scams of denial will flourish....

Tankin' Globalcide : how to get a lifelong sinecure lying about the climate

In this recession the only industry growing new jobs are the lying, denying think tanks ... 

                  10 rules for success :

1. Do NOT take a single physical science course in university.

2. Get a BA (bare pass grade) in economics or political science and call education a day - it makes your head hurt.

3. Get ye inside the Beltway (Washington) , Whitehall (London) , the Triangle (Canberra) or up on the Hill (Ottawa).

4. Become an employee of a big strident advocacy think tank (#1 Libertarian grade) .

5. After taking 100 mg of Atarax , resign yourself  to faithfully listen to Glen Beck or Andrew Boltz or Lawrence Solomon or Viscount Ridley,  for a few months.

6. Self-declare yourself an expert on Climate Science.

7. Lie, lie, lie.

8. By the time you get your pension, watch the world's populations begin to :

die, die, die.

9. Go to church whenever it will help you at work and pretend to profess a belief in Heaven and Hell.

10. Because Hell , brother and sister, is definitely, where you are going to end up !

dear think tanks : I will DENY Higgs Particle for cash - no marked bills please ....

Political science BAs are like old school nuclear physicists , we think we can talk about everything like an expert

Why not ?

If Marc Morano is qualified to be an expert on climate change, than so am I on the Higgs particle.

Like Marc, I have a BA in political science, hold strong opinions and am at times very partisan.

On the other side, it too is a similar story : teams made up of thousands of scientists at universities and institutions all over the world have laboured for decades before coming up with a a cautious scientific consensus.

(A) Humans are causing the atmosphere to heat up  (B) we have located evidence that the predicted Higgs particle exists, to Sigma 5 level of probability.

So on one side, high level tenure & repeated high level peer-review has qualified about one earthling in a million to truly be regarded as experts on a technical scientific matter.

These 7,000 experts have divided themselves into two big world-wide groups to look for the Higgs by two totally different methods and each big group has now separately decided, by general consensus, that the Higgs does exist.

One the other side, amateurs in the academic world's second oldest profession : not pros but game - on the game in fact.

Now all we need is a pimp and a john.

Strident advocacy think tanks die without constant infusions of hot cash --- they'll know who has some readies available.

Maybe Big Asbestos - they under the gun lately - seems at least 100,000 people die annually thanks to this killer mineral.

But how would proof of the existence of the Higgs particle damage the libertarian-capitalist world view enough to waste money refuting it ?

SOLID science is threatened, like never before, by Higgs

Well, I guess I would begin - strictly as a Devil's Advocate - to argue that what all of the various denier efforts have really been fighting is the notion that erroneous common sense (solid) science has been losing a century long battle with nonsensical but accurate quantum science.

The Higgs particle is the missing keystone to the Standard Model of how ultimate fundamental reality actually works.

How it works is in a manner totally in conflict with the 19th century commonsense positivist science that all deniers and corporate CEOs expouse.

Basically what we take to be a solid reality, based on a solid science, turns out to be neither.

Solidity is a vivid illusion - but illusion nevertheless.

But who can blame the deniers & CEOs - it is what they were taught and what 21st high school teachers still teach kids, (in part, because it is easy to teach and easy to write exams for) .

Solid - Newtonian - science is a BLACK BOX - it gets more less accurate results at a certain limited but common scale of events, but it is not a true explanation of the world.

But it is this old fashioned newtonian and daltonian and darwinian science that we spoon-fed high school and yes university kids with.

Rather than teach their trusting charges science that is difficult and unsettling but also happens to be true : quantum physics, quantum chemistry and yes, quantum biology.

By no coincidence, High School teachers teach this crap because because politicians in school boards and departments of education force them to.

Politicians and their corporate handlers sense that if quantum science was taught to all of the population, in a lay manner, it would unsettle the current human belief that we are the only smart and rational beings in a stupid but stable and simple world.

This belief is what lies behind libertarian skygod-ism and the denial of human climate pollution.

Attack Higgs, you attack the quantum theory and thus you attack the quantum (earthling) way of looking at the world.

So gentlemen, when do I get my money ......

denier BLOGS ; read 'em, but don't write about 'em : focus on THINK TANK deniers

We are handing deniers a winning narrative - how can we be so dense ?

I love to read the blogs of the denier-fighters in the morning, none more so than Mike at Watching the Deniers, a denier-fighter from down under in Van Denier's Land  .

He's an ordinary guy like me, with a day job and all, trying to find out the time to peck out his assaults on the deniers and offer his support for the climate believers.

And I try and find time occasionally, very occasionally, to read the blogs of the deniers.

But I don't ever - EVER - write about the denier bloggers.

He does - I don't.  Mike & Mike : yes, we disagree.

But not on climate change, but rather on the tactics we bloggers might use if we really want the world to take some action on global warming as soon as possible.

I save my small poisoned penmanship to poke at the big guns of denial : those key hired hands of denial , aka the libertarian advocacy think tanks.

Here is why.

We already have the ordinary public (ie the unsophisticated), all be it weakly, on our side.

In Nova Scotia, even the most rural illiterate have heard about global warming and are always ready to half-seriously blame any heat or storm event upon it.

We have public science on our side - the peer-reviewable active climate scientists are 97% (or better) for us.

(True, weathermen-cum-climatologists are frequently against these newly visible basic research type of climate scientists, because until recently even an ugly guy could always get laid in a small town, if a woman recognized him from his TV weatherman job : he was a Star !

Sheer envy, over this transfer of status to new climate experts, lies behind 99% of the bile against climate change among the significant percentage of old fashioned weathermen who claim to disbelieve climate change.)

But this aside, we have public science as well as voters on our side.

We have TV on our side - here I disagree profoundly with Jim
Hoggan of DeSmogBlog. In his chapter , Manipulated Media in his great book Climate Cover-Up, Jim says the shift from a reading culture to an visual and oral culture has hurt us denier fighters.

I, by contrast, think that the relatively small percentage in the past who actually enjoyed reading are still around, still reading, still enjoying it.

The others prefer TV, yes, but we must recognize that TV in  2012 is not the TV of 1952.

The growth in cheap, light video camera equipment, satellite transmission, the internet's YouTube, the growth of national TV news networks in every third world nation - all this means any and every storm in the world is likely to flash before our eyes and ears rather than be something only an astute reader of the New York Times used to read on page 53 , paragraph 12.

We do have more and more powerful storms than we did 60 years ago - but we can only demonstrate this truthfully in some long complex journal article that only scientists in that area could understand and believe.

Lucky for our side, we don't have to.

Because those same denier-oriented TV networks we love to hate, in an increasingly competitive news market, hype any and every bit of dramatic news video ---- and storm disasters top that list.

So - ironically - the Murdochs of this world are converting voters into believers on their companies' TV news, regardless of how many unread OP ED columns in their newspapers claim its all baloney !

What we don't have on our side is popular science (and about half of the educated classes: the rich half.)

Only one group among the many people that makes up the denier
classes can provide credibility in that area of popular science for deniers.

Big corporations and the super rich have no credibility, nor do industry lobby groups, nor do denier politicians. Not on science, for sure.

Frankly, nor do denier bloggers.

Peer-reviewed scientists who blog are respected - as peer-reviewed scientists, academic historians who blog are respected - as academic historians, professional journalists who blog are respected - as professional journalists.

Blogging is something we all feel we can do and about half of us have seemed to have tried it at least once : it gets no respect.

Denier bloggers get no respect when they blog, either, even if they were once well known scientists before they went off the rails.

It is only when big money hand-delivers them a lot of cherry-picked snippets of facts and a bundle of money and asks them to write a book around those snippets and assuring them it will get a real publisher, a round-the-world book tour, guest speaker talks-at-seminars and interviews with the biggest media, do they become respected --- as "authors".

When we ordinary (non-expert) people with day jobs and no hidden funder become denier-fighter bloggers and then proceed to engage only other bloggers (who happen to be deniers), outsiders see us both as just typical hot-air-driven loudmouths.

We are momentarily equal to the much richer/full-time deniers - yes.

Yes, momentarily equals in outsiders' eyes - equal loudmouths: denier bloggers and their blogger opponents.

But our bun fight with the denier bloggers is irrelevant to our main aim.

 That main aim is taking down the only credible group the deniers have in the real war, which is always over popular science.

 (Popular Science I define as the whole world wrestling over the meaning of published science's results: in this case, the meaning of their results regarding global warming.)

That group is the libertarian advocacy think tanks.

Only they stand at the nexus between (A) the super rich foundations together with the big corporations and their industry lobby groups and (B) the individual bent scientists who happen to blog, but who are mainly useful when trotted out at think tank seminars and conferences - not as hand-to-hand bloggers fighting us out in the blogosphere.

We bloggers-cum-denier-fighters need new tactics.

We need to highlight, not hide, how unfunded we are, how we work elsewhere unrelated to climate change and only blog in our spare hours.

In our spare bedroom. That we are not experts. That we don't live inside the Beltway or inside the Triangle- that we are nobodies from nowhere.

And that we are davids, in a tremendously unequal fight with well funded, well connected, huge think tanks located in Snottyville and just filled with snotty Yale and Harvard grads.

But - but - despite that, in our spare time and in our spare bedroom we checked the math on their latest glossy report damning climate change - and the math is wrong .

Wrong, wrong, wrong - there on page 17 !

Because while bloggers are dissed as bloggers, we are respected as people who can sometimes scoop the world media on facts and stories.

Now we have a narrative the mainstream media reporters can run with, over the bodies of the people who actually own their outlets:

Little david brings down rich snotty GOLIATH with a tiny slingshot filled with inconvenient facts.....

Area 51 Alert : 97% of ice MELTING ; 97% of scientists VOTE agreement

the 97 % solution ....

It was like something out of Roswell New Mexico's Area 51.

 Or  A. "nasty" Abbott's worst nightmare.

An unlikely but true coincidence ----- or is it, boys and girls ?

Space photos showing 97 % of Greenland's ice cap melting at the same time that 97 % of the world's climate scientists have voted that the whole Earth is getting hot.

97 Percent - wow !

Like that is three times the vote that Stephen Harper got when he was elected absolute - majority government - dictator of Canada for 5 years to life, with time off to Canadians for good behavior.

But is just 97% of the votes of the climate scientist electorate enough to push ahead on bold new changes on how we run our national governments ?

The 37% solution

No, of course not, for that you need a, er, much lower vote - like 37%.

Like the sort of vote that Nasty Abbott or Harper or Cameron get when they are given majority government to make bold new decisions.

97% is much too , er, high  for politicians.

But for scientists ? Politicians - the lying, denying politicians anyway - say that   97 %  is way, way too low.

Politicians simply point out that on this, as in so many things, citizens must simply learn to suck it up ; it is "do as I say --- never, do as I do" .

the 100.00000000% solution of the think tankers

Libertarian denier think tankers have made this point very clear - and as long as Tobacco or Oil or Asbestos keeps feeding them money, they're the experts.

They say we shouldn't act on the gravest crisis facing us since Adam ate the apple until every last one of us, that is all 6.7 billion of us , becomes part of the consensus: 100.00000000% agreement, or nothing.

'Cause I mean, after all, saving our great grandchildrens' lives isn't anything like voting is it ?

For something like saving our own kiddies, it is a case of every last one of us on Earth must be on board or none of us is.......

why earthlings should leave Think Tanks to the libertarian SkyGods

Helping others murder our planet - with our own tax dollars !

For every one dollar in annual income that earthling oriented (aka green,steady state, perhaps a few of the left) think tanks have, the SkyGod libertarians have $1000.

There are about 10,000 think tanks world wide and most of the ones we could even begin to call earthling (and Earth) friendly are small in income, small in numbers, in uncertain health or already effectively moribund.

The vast number that are both very rich and very active in their strident advocacy are the libertarian denier tankers.

We earthlings only add our considerable credibility ( precious and scarce) to the alleged legitimacy of the thousands of denier tanks by supporting the idea of think tanks in general.

If instead, we steered totally clear of them - instead of trying to feebly compete within their world - we could then strongly denounce them and all of their works as that of the Devil.

This is because all advocacy think tanks are but a money laundering scheme.

Albeit the sort of money laundering Yale and Oxfords grads would get into : morally dubious but perfectly legal (who writes the laws after all ?) and highly profitable for all concerned.

Life was so much more straight forward in the 1940s.

Just before election day, the boss put a little piece of paper in your pay packet, telling you that if you voted for Party X on Tuesday, you could kiss your job good bye on Friday - and then he signed it.

He ran ads in the newspaper saying the same thing - and he signed it.

Flash forward to today.

Now the super rich 1% have their tax free family foundations donate to tax free charities called strident advocacy libertarian think tanks.

The think tank then pays an unknown denier with just enough degrees to be called "a scientist" or "an academic" to "author" a "book" and then do a "book tour" of the world denying climate change at think tank sponsored "seminars".

Since the super rich own or control all the big media, they ensure their employees "cover" these meetings like the dew, and then splash the contents on their front pages and TV screens for all of us to endure.

Just imagine how ineffective a denial would be that insists burning coal does not cause smoke pollution , if delivered by a coal mining heiress  in all of her newspaper chain ?

Even Stephen Harper might see through that gauze !

Now imagine if our obese heiress choose instead to launder her money through foundations to think tanks and tame publishing firms and tame newspapers.

So now it appears that a 'disinterested, objective' academic had delivered this 'balanced review' of the evidence for and against coal's atmospheric effects and rendered a reasonable verdict in favour of the innocent coal mines.

All are opinions but not all opinions are EQUAL

Look there is already a place for people who claim to be either (or both) academics and scientists : it is called inside peer-reviewed papers.

The best science and academic journals demand so much transparency on your data, funding and conflict of interest that 99.999999999999999% of advocacy think tank research would never make it past this first hurdle.

Next your toughest critics are asked to tear your actual data apart and if the editor doesn't feel you answered them effectively, you're dead.

Pass these two stages and the hardest by far still remains : "is what you are saying truly new and if so is it global enough in IMPACT to make other people outside your narrow field waste their time to read it ?"

Getting a paper into NATURE or SCIENCE or about 10 to 20 others is rather like how a Patent Office should work - but rarely does - patents then would only be issued for truly new and workable processes.

The advantage of a paper in NATURE for over-busy  journalists is obvious : it has been pre-vetted, you don't have to read it or think about it, merely act as a public steno and paraphrase its abstract to your readers.

Journalists who are over-busy and under-intellectualized dig themselves even deeper into the quicksand : they don't bother to check to see if the paper they are being pitched has seen a peer-review, they don't read the paper.

They read the author's CV , if it is more impressive than the journalist's, then they are regarded as an expert and even an academic and a scientist.

So an economist whose life work has been Iowa pork belly futures is allowed to spout off opinions about climate changes effects on the ocean currents of the  South Pacific.

I spout off opinions - all the time, I am a blogger - but I never claim to be an expert/scientist or an academic on the subject : just a blogger with an opinion.

And, by design, I have no CV full of  expert credentials .

Most journalists trying to assess the value of my opinion need both time and the ability to contrast it with the widely held scientific or academic consensus on the subject, before they could tell if it is worth them passing on to their readers.

My blog opinion then is in the same position as a big think tank's new policy paper : it is merely a bucket of spit until conventional peer review or a bunch of smart competitive journalists or perhaps the entire blog-o-sphere has assessed it thoroughly.

All this takes much time, thinking , researching, reflecting , re-reading and reflecting again.

It is a process, not an event ; it is ongoing and never stops.

It is all just opinions or hunches.

Sometime those hunches come in fancy dress : theories or hypotheses.

But all - from dashed-off blogger rant to cover article in NATURE - are just opinions.

But some opinions, like reports from NATURE or SCIENCE or LANCET or the IPPC have a much bigger and deeper consensus around them than others : thoroughly peer-reviewed articles from the biggest journals and the biggest international panels.

Think tank funders - the greedy libertarians - crave that sort of prestige and credibility.

But being lazy as well as greedy, libertarians want all of that  without going through all the rigour and dreaded transparency of peer-review.

Libertarianism ( and think tanks) is the natural home of the hard-to-get-along-with academics who tank in the world of collegiality.

the poet Longfellow had great advice

If we earthlings let them, they will fall back on the pseudo academic halo of the think tanks.

But we shouldn't let them ; we should abandon all of our side's feeble think tanks and denounce the entire concept of think tanks as intellectual money laundering.

To paraphrase the poet Longfellow:  if Gina loves Priscilla of the Desert, great - but she should tell Priscilla herself - not pay some john inside Canberra's The Triangle to do it for her.

Gina, go pimp your own opinions ......

dear DONNA LAFRAMBOISE , if you are going to play 'little david' at least do it right

Dear Donna :

I feel that since you and I are in the same 'game' and because I am so much older than you, perhaps I might be permitted to offer you some fatherly advice.

If you are going to play at being little david to the great big bad Goliath (in this case, of the IPCC) at least try to do it right.

I too claim to be a solo blogger, albeit on the other side of the climate change debate.

But I have a real job, totally unconnected to my passion about climate change, that supports me and my passion modestly (my annual income is about $8,000) .

I do not accept any financial support, I do not copyright my climate change writings and I wouldn't cross promote my other money making ventures on my climate blog, even if I had any commercial ventures to promote.

My passion is entirely my own, not paid by others and not a loss leader cum CV/RESUME to promote my other money-making ventures.

I am a genuinely low income blogger from a genuine backwater , Nova Scotia, thousands of kilometres from the well-funded Libertarian-denier think tanks of Washington or London --- and so when I rail against them, I do so credibly.

But you, Donna : you are just astro-turf .......

Being LIONIZED sure beats having to WORK for a living doesn't it ?

Just think "tankers" and you understand the scam....

One minute you're an under-employed Canadian nobody, the next minute you are much feted denier-author, plucked from obscurity to burn lots and lots of greenhouse gases promoting your new book in far off Australia.

Some cynics might think it is because you have taken up a profitable (but definitely minority) opinion to espouse.

But they would be wrong , wrong , wrong.

It is in fact precisely because you are publicly regarded as a nobody, that you have become so lionized.

You have just been (profitably)  "astro-turfed" .

little david versus the big bad IPCC ???????

All the fossil media journalists will see (only because that is all their employer has told them to see)  is that you are a solo blogger and so they can pull out cliche #13   and pitch you as little david against great big bad Goliath : the IPCC.

No fossil-journalist will ask how 'little david' can afford the airfare and hotel bills to fly from Canada to all the big cities of Australia.

No fossil-journalist will look beyond their noses to see that this is really Libertarian Think Tank astro-turfing , 2012 style.

Denier-fighters - please ! - ignore the solo blogger - focus on the big city think tanks that fund the astro-turfing bloggers.

Don't 'intellectually kill the messenger' : go after the funders instead....

'Tankers' have the money , bloggers have the brains

Asymmetrical journalism : bloggers besting 'tankers'

A red broadband and three cords , located somewhere in a bedroom in the hinterland backwaters , may not seem equal to all the corporate firepower concentrated in the Think Tank phalanxes of  Washington, London, Canberra and Ottawa.

But didn't Mr Bono also evoke having "The Truth" in his definition of asymmetrical "punk" journalism ?

I am sure he did.

The battle ground is Climate Change, the stakes (a big cliche, but still true) "The Fate of the Earth" .

Libertarian Think Tanks

There are hundreds of wealthy libertarian Think Tanks world wide that deny that "Man"  has caused potentially irreversible Climate Change, indeed deny any limits on "Man's" ability to quickly get out any jam He or nature might have... temporarily ...created.

It will probably take tens of thousands of part-time bloggers, in tens of thousands of bedrooms,  to successfully combat this Life-killing philosophy -- but I am sure we can do it.

They have the money true ; but after all , we have the beauty and the brains....