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....

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....

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...."

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 !

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.....

Denier, denier : heartland on fire : Romney's heartland burns while Greenland threatens to , well , become a GREEN land

This week it was announced that Greenland's icecape is melting like the bejesus.

That continent-sized island may soon be green in appearance, as well as in name.

The amount of water sitting on top of it , if it leaps into the water and melts will do two things very quickly : raise ocean water levels worldwide and leave a huge hunk of land that now absorbs sunlight rather than reflect it.

This land warming will couple to the atmosphere instantly and will greatly strengthen our weather's energy reserves --- our deadly weather bombs will move from the A-bomb to the H-bomb variety.

I may soon have to move inland and upcountry quicker than I had expected.

Sea levels don't need to rise much higher before where I live (coastal Nova Scotia) will only houses lobsters and clams, rather than earthlings and SkyGods.

I don't know what The SkyGods Of The Universe, perched in their eeries, high up in the glass and concrete towers of Wall Street and Threadneedle Street, are making of all this.

That is assuming that these latter-day Harry Limes even care what is happening to the "dots" (earthlings), way down at sea level aka ground zero.

I am sure that their astro-turfing think tankers don't care.

I gather most deniers  - at least in America and probably in Australia as well - don't live by the coast but in the high interior.

Republicans and Australia's Libertarian party both speak of the outback as their heartland for voters.

So today Libertarians and Republicans will continue to deny that the world is getting hotter, from among the hottest hellholes on earth - while watching their crops fry......

new POLL : 70% of Aussies dislike "The Nasty" abbott : Drought in USA hits deniers in the gonads

Romney-the-denier's election hopes wilt in republican mid-west drought

I bring you good news, fellow bloggers, albeit perversely good news.

New evidence is emerging (er, re-emerging) that since more CO2 inevitably comes with more heat, global warming beyond what we already have will not be good news for our main calorie-producing crops like corn and soybean.

Deniers read up, carefully : yep, global warming will NOT be good for the corn and soybean crops of the Republican-Libertarian-Denier heartland of the American Mid-West.

I bet  Mittster-the-denier is wilting along with potential ex-voters' crops .

Apparently all the denier think tankers are not baking on a vacation beach but are back in their air-conditioned beltway offices - sweating the bejesus.

Thomas Homer-Dixon in Canada's Globe & Mail ( you can tell there is a real crisis when even a denier rag like the godawful G&M is willing to give a climate change believer an Op-Ed spot ) says corn and soybean can't stand even short bouts of really high temperatures ---- temperatures that are just beyond the high temperatures they normally demand to flourish.

In denier-speak, that means their response to heat is not linear but dose-dependent.

Ironic what - deniers bitten by their own rhetoric !

The news from America has apparently hit even the shores of  VAN DENIER'S LAND itself.

Aussie voters know one or two things about The Nasty abbott - in particular that he is a big climate change denier.

A  new poll  in the Australian says that 70% of Aussies don't like
him.

I don't like him myself.

I mean I am a Catholic ,like our Tony, and I actually even like some of his social conservative views ( others I hate).

So the man does not want to directly kill the unborn -- he merely wants to promote the slow and indirect killing of all life on this Earth.

  I don't recall seeing that anywhere in my pre-Vatican II daily missal, while growing up RC....

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 ......

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....

Why the fighters of Climate Denial are sometimes their own worst enemy

No politician sets themself up as Goliath and their opponent as David, but scientists *ALWAYS* do

If we are ever to defeat the evil forces of Climate Denial, we need to take a page out of their book and keep our Boffins "on tap, not on top".

Nice guys, but no political smarts.

I cringe every time I see another denier fighter start off with the claim that 97% of our smartest, best educated , best paid, best pensioned scientists at all the big universities back East know a lot more about climate change than some unknown with a BA from Hamburger U, operating out of Dubuque, in little old tennis shoes and a blog.

Oh yes, and doesn't he believe in Creationism and a Flat Earth as well ?

(All this is what football fans call The New Yorker Magazine Defense ---- a play that they say very rarely works.)

True it might knock 'em dead in the Faculty Lounge, but outside - in the real world - it is just setting yourself up for a political fall.

 There are always a lot more populist-minded plebs from the hinterlands than there are elitists from the Big Cities in the East.

I have friends and acquaintances who are mildly denier-istic and they always enjoy reading about an unknown blogger taking on those smart asses at the big universities.

True, none of these friends have graduate school level degrees, but then that is true of 97% of the world.

Solo denier bloggers..... with big corporate funding

I try and point out this "lone blogger" actually gets a lot of funding from big bad fossil fuel corporations but it cuts no ice.

The optics just aren't right in their mind's eye.

But when I say all this controversy is caused by the big lobbyists and big think tanks inside Washington's Beltway, they listen up.

Most people wouldn't vote for Christ Himself, if He came back to Earth and got an apartment "Inside the Beltway" .

So here's the deal : I set myself up as the nobody from nowhere blogging on the reality of climate change from my bedroom, while all my opponents are the big city Think Tanks, just stuffed with snotty guys and gals with snotty accents from Yale and Oxford.

So Jane,  please get it right : me david - you Goliath ....

Comments, denier-fighters ?

'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....

PhDs who can, teach ; PhDs who can't, 'TANK' in Washington, the original 'tank town'

There is new hope for all those kids who got a pass-level PhD but can't find work at a real university: they can find work at the ever growing number of 'tanks' that fill the Washington Beltway and cluster around every national political capital world wide.

(Before 1941, many reporters from bigger cities used to regard Washington DC as a 'tank town' : in many ways, it still is.)

If Libertarian Governments continue to cut science research and universities grow ever smaller as a result , soon there will be more people with PhDs working in the think tanks than at universities.

Those PhDs capable of teaching and doing research will be in the universities while those PhDs only capable of offering opinions will 'tank' out of  academia and into the warm financial embrace of those libertarian stalking horses, the partisan think tanks.

Better to teach at Hamburger U than tank in  'tank town'

At least at Hamburger University, the teachers engage in real world activities : flipping burgers.

The partisan think tanks merely engage in magical thinking and conspiracy theories : they are the Roswell Area 51s for guys in suspenders and bow ties whose daddies went to Yale : academia for mouth-breathers.....

the "TANKER" party : 'tank' in academia, become a Republican and work in a think tank....

Thanks to the supposedly proven success of Big Science in winning the war , (government-funded) university research worldwide expanded so greatly after 1945 that tough peer-review became de rigueur for young Republican academics seeking to get into the best regarded science journals.

There was also much more competition from other young ambitious non-Republican researchers at your own university as well.

Thanks in part to programs like the various GI Bills around the world, suddenly university educations were not just for white Protestant native poor sons of the well off.

FDR couldn't draw flies in university towns ...

American university towns, for example, had long been strongholds of Republican party strength in the FDR Era, but after his death all that began to change to such an extent that even historians doubt me, when I mention this inconvenient fact !

This effect was duplicated in British university towns as well, indeed the effect was probably worldwide in its impact.

Informal quotas to keep out women, Jews, Blacks, Catholics,  working class democratic voters, ethnics and minorities began to fade out after 1950 in the best known universities----- under the growing external and internal response to the events at Auschwitz.

And Big Science and big mega projects were now so truly BIG that they began to overtly display global impacts - but not always a good global impacts.

So, after 1970 , government-funded university research began to shift in response to these changes: less government grant money went to production research (building ever an ever bigger machine) and more went to study the impact of the machine in the garden - ie studying its global effects out in the real world.

Research dollars also tended to divide politically - a smaller proportion went to production science - usually for weapons research, scooped up by production-and-defense-minded Republican party supporters.

But the bigger proportion went to study impact of these production efforts and in addition the all important academic prestige tended to hang out here as well - at the Democratic end of the academic pool.

The reasons for this was because the best science journals were now almost forced to accept fewer and fewer production science articles and publish more and more impact science articles.

After 1945, as they faced too many potential articles for too few spots in their journals, the editors of the big journals, those well read world-wide, tended to formalize a requirement that the successful articles had to be about subjects with truly great global impact.

(Say something of importance to most or all of their globe-wide readership.)

Rarely does a new production science process appear global in importance when it is first announced - that only appears evident perhaps twenty years later, in 20/20 hindsight.

But "global impact" research fits this requirement, almost as if by design !

Most Republican party academics, at least at first, adjusted well to the new realities - either continued to publish production science but in smaller journals or struggled to get their impact science articles into the big journals , just like everyone else.

But those who resented the fact that their colleagues (in formal academic review or simply behind their backs) regarded them as second raters began to see another alternative where they could get prestige, of a sort, and wreak revenge upon their leftish academic superiors as well.

After 1970, wealthy Republican party donors and wealthy Republican party-oriented businesses and business groups (often one and the same) decided to create a new parallel academia but oriented to production science and without either peer-review or experiments : the partisan think tank.

Tens of thousands of these Trojan Horses now exist worldwide : mercenary lobby groups guised (astroturfed) as mini-university research institutes.

(This was because the older universities were doing mostly Impact Science --- and Impact Science tends to say that the products of their corporations hurt almost as many people or creatures as they helped - who wants to hear that ?!)

Now there is a big place in academia and science for long thoughtful review articles that collect and then access masses of experiment science articles , to pick out their common threads and globally assess this particular field of research's importance.

In a sense, this is what most political think tanks do : they review and assess others' science experiments rather than create experimental evidence themselves.

(The relatively few truly non-partisan think tanks tend to do more original field research, in addition to review articles.)

Partisan think tanks fear peer review processes because their review and assessment efforts usually fail - badly - any common sense test of fairness and completeness : they selectively cut and paste tailor the evidence in their reviews to suit their pre-determined (partisan/self-serving) opinion.

Second raters in academia, once they had established a low minimum credibility as an academic (a PhD from a smaller university, followed by a few years in non tenured entry level position at a smaller university) could now get a good job at a Republican (libertarian) think tanks.

There they could drop the need to do slow difficult field or lab work or the equally long and hard process to first secure funding and secondly, find a suitable publication venue.

Now they were well paid to write all the opinion-oriented review articles they wanted, articles as long as they wanted them to be, for near instant publication.

In journals that the President himself might cite !

And Libertarian values were easy to espouse because these rebels from conventional academia had come to really believe in those values.

There are no individual efforts in today's academia  - a committee decides if you can get accepted into grad school, get a university job, get promoted, get a grant, get on a society executive, get into a good publication.

You either like this system or you don't.

If you are smart and well accepted socially by your colleagues, you probably not just accept it but defend it.

But if you are a second rate intellect and or your opinions clash with the majority around you and you fail to shine socially (in the academic world sense), you are likely to hate it and seek your revenge against it, if given a chance.

I am the child of an academic and I know of academics in my father's department whose opinions clashed badly with their colleagues but who were tolerated because they were either smart or charming.... or both.

So, that in mind,  I can't help feeling from the biographies of many deniers,  that they were people who tanked ,literally, in academia and have been wreaking revenge ever since, from 'the home of the tankers' : Republican think tanks ....

rise of THINK TANKs closely followed rise of rigorous PEER-REVIEW

Junk Science is the Think Tank's raison d'etre

If you got away with JUNK SCIENCE before 1945 - and many academics did because rigorous peer-review before publication was not actually all that common back then - increasingly you couldn't so after 1945.

Second rate and lazy scientists and academics who couldn't cut the mustard, cut classes - bailed out of academic life after they had established a few credentials and swam - like rats - to the rising ships of the anti-peer-review-oriented think tanks.

The post-1945 rise of the think tanks were also industry's and the wealthiest families's response to that fact it was getting harder and harder to find real university professors willing to be their denier-liars  for hire.

The two trends met in the middle : both needed each other.

Think tanks thus do serve an useful role for society after all ; providing the first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of scholar....

THINK TANK boards should reveal funding - or go to jail

Its getting hard for a selfish man to find a secret place to put his greedy gains to work ,manipulating public policy for profit.

Face it, more and more nations are forcing political parties to reveal their funding and spending. They are registering lobbyists. They are prosecuting companies for offering or accepting bribes.
Even the banks (!) are getting done  for looking the other way with laundered money.

Thank God then for those people of the forthright and plain spoken advise, the think tank.

Those frackers are ever after hectoring governments day and night, demanding answers, information, openness and frankness.

But turn your squirt gun on their big artillery and ask them to give us, the public, a little information as to who exactly who pays them , sorry "donates" to them, and they go ballistic.

Ballistic bombast is not good enough - I say bring in a law that says to think tank boards that if you don't tell all about who pays you to pipe that tune - its off to jail for you.

I almost hope the think tanks refuse to say and all their board members trundle off to jail -- the world could be a better place for all of that.

But they will probably comply --- but that won't end the addiction of the world's selfish to be forever manipulating public policy behind a coward's shield.

They will drop the think tank approach like a stone and develop yet more astroturf "citizens groups" instead.

Regulate them, in turn,  and it will be some new scheme.

Greed never sleeps .....