

Thu, 2011-11-10 05:23Chris Mooney
Chris Mooney's picture


This would be sad, if it weren’t also so telling.


So much for that!

Beginning with Roger Pielke, Jr. (not technically a conservative, but, well…), and then spreading to climate "skeptic" blogs like Watts Up With That and Marc Morano’s Climate Depot, conservatives are claiming that the book is a form of “new eugenics” and that it describes them as “genetically/mentally/psychologically inferior,” and so on.






If this is not committing the "same dumb mistake," it is definitely pretty close. 

I won’t do any more to defend a book that isn’t even out yet, except to say two things: 1) It is based on solid science from psychology, political science, and other fields; 2) the sort of behavior we’re seeing here—jumping to conclusions based on heuristics ("judging a book by its cover"), misrepresenting opponents' views based on no evidence…well, it turns out that these are precisely the kinds of things I’m criticizing. For a tiny taste, see this study, about "traditionalists" vastly misrepresenting the views of those who challenge them, in this case about changes to the English literature curriculum.




I can only assume this is the reaction you were looking for with that cover. People do judge a book both by it's cover and whatever they might know about the authors previous writings. This is a good example of building a market for a book. Good sales strategy.


Not only are these people intellectually blind, they've got a hair-trigger response...

This is partly the internet. But I think you'll find the book casts light on that....

Perhaps you could add an appendix to the book if it's not oo late, and place the comments in there as further amunition to your thesis.

On the other end of the spectrum, although at a more extreme end, Bill O Reilly's book is copping a flogging .

Some reviews from good people:

1) "I wouldn't buy this book if the two inches of height it provides by standing on it would save me from a hanging."


3) "Anti Liberty, Anti American from start to end. Historical facts stated simply not true. Terrible book. Don't buy even at gunpoint."

4) "I wanted to like this book, I really did. It was just a poorly written, opinionated piece about nothing relevant. It had a clear bias throughout the book. Look, if you want to learn about Lincoln, there are plenty of biographies you can pick up...I don't recommend this to anyone."

5) "We shouldn't be surprised that a petty dictatorial man like Bill O'Reilly would write so glowingly about a petty dictator like Abraham Lincoln. But we SHOULD be surprised that he'd write so POORLY about him.

I wish I could give this book a ZERO."

Considering he was writing about something that has volumes of information on it already, O Reilly still got it wrong. Where as Mooney is writing about psychological viewpoints & theories that are relatively new.........& getting it right.


On another side note & forum whinge. Chris how come you can do strike through's on your text & we can't? The formatting tool bar on here needs work for us commenters.


It's bizzare how white statist men like to consider themselves some separate racial group .




Otherwise , it's all just cheap self gratification .





the "watermelons" don't need to do any math because the experts take care of that. You need to be smart enough to get around planetary temperature concerns espoused by the experts in that particular field. That doesn't change the fact that watermelons indeed exist and are motivated by great ideas of societal change.


Rick, your suggestion that "watermelons" (why not just say "commies!!!!") are dumb because they give weight to expert knowledge rather than their own wishful thinking is comical given the wild intellectual flailing denialists perform.

I'm giving you credit for listening to experts while not ignoring the possibility of other motivation. I'ma  nuanced guy.


Watermelon is not my preferred word. I was just referring to the other comment. However commie doesn't cover it because there isn't necessarilly any green in a commie. Surely you agree that it's possible to use green issues to further a leftist cause.

Talk about pompous .  I'm just fed up with the arrogant ignorance .



About as much to be learned here as among a flock of domesticated ducks -- lots of quacking ; no independent intelligence .



Texas, Australia, the Amazon Jungle are in an ever increasing cycles of drought.  So... CO2 and no water = dead plants.  Its simple simple simple math.


Talking about Concentrations without any understanding also doesn't help.  Small concentrations make a big difference.  Ever do a titration in university?

If you think we're erroneously 'defending science' please show me a paper that clearly demonstrates this.  (Please, not another random blogger.)



Back to small concentrations...  H2S or Hydrogen Sulphide is hideously dangerous stuff. At 10 PPM you smell rotten eggs, at 100 PPM you start to suffer from oxygen asphyxiation, at 300 PPM all your brain activity instantly stops.  You can't even hold your breath well enough to prevent this.

Going with your arguement for a moment...

So where is the Pine tree getting the water from?



I bet they'd be happy if we could just bring back the dirty 30s dust bowl.



You can see where this is headed;

Dust, plants must love dust;


Grim Predictions:

Please sir, can we have some more?


You've heard of the dust bowl haven't you ?  Was that caused by lack of CO2 ?




Texas should just do what he did.

They should put a GIANT tarp over the entire place, to control the environment, then pump the water in from somewhere else.  I dunno... Thailand?  (They probably won't mind since their plants are starting to grow gills.)


Did you even look at the 6 decade Texas Precipitation trend line?  Precipitation is going down, or in 2011... arriving at the wrong time.



One might as well try to argue with christian zionists .



But beside the fact that there is absolutely nothing unusual in the globe's continually chaotic weather , show me any physical derivation which leads from an increase in CO2 to drought .



I'm sorry , my patience with the willful arrogant uneducated ignorance here is exhausted .

Bye , bye .





" I'm sorry , my patience with the willful arrogant uneducated ignorance here is exhausted .

Bye , bye ."

Translation. Defeated by logic. It would have been nice to see some of Bob's discussions with actual climate scientists.


Bob keeps saying that people who accept climate change don't read science books. If he were to read high school and college science books, he would read about climate change.



Bob keeps asking for information, but he doesn't read the textbooks or the IPCC reports.

He alleges that climate scientists are "self-selected," and refers without specifics to some other science that supposedly disputes climate change.


The denialists Lord Monckton, John O'Sullivan, and Pat Michaels have appeared on the English-language Kremlin-financed Russia Today satellite TV.




President Medvedev used to claim that global warming was a trick, but after the fires he said it was true. He is the former CEO of Gazprom. I think Putin put him there. He's not really a gas guy; he's trained as a lawyer. Actually, many Gazprom officals are former KGB. 

Right now, the Russian Academy of Sciences is having a conference about climate change. They admit that it is happening, but they don't seem to be discussing moving to renewable energy. They are discussing the idea of putting aerosols in the atmosphere to keep out some sun.

During the forest fires, a Russian academic named Areshev accused American climate scientists of causing global warming by beaming secret climate weapons at "some countries" (Russia). Now it turns out that the Russians have been experimenting with aerosols.

The Academy of Sciences seem to be discussing the possibility of making a small "nuclear winter" to cool the planet. This will not solve the problem of the oceans becoming more acid. 

One American presenting at this conference is Alan Robock, an expert on nuclear winter. His talk is called "Smoke and Mirrors."

He has a power point for his students with the same title, so I think he is going to tell the Russians and the other scientists that aerosols won't solve all the problems of global warming and may make new problems. 

The FBI is one Federal organization that spreads false information about climate science and unsubstantiated, defamatory propaganda about climate scientists under the guise of "warning" our academics about foreign spies. They are part of the National Intelligence Council, which publishes about climate science, so there is no excuse for their propaganda. 

The FBI recently published a ridiculous white paper that smeared climate scientists who study nuclear winter as Soviet dupes for being fooled about the "hoax"  of nuclear winter. They cited a book about a KGB defector who has claimed that nuclear winter was a "KGB hoax."

The FBI did not go so far as to call nuclear winter a "KGB hoax," but they gave tremendous credibility to Sergei Tretyakov, the KGB defector (now dead) who did make this claim.


The book the FBI cited, "Comrade J," quotes extensively from the denialist Russell Seitz.


The book claims that the Soviets only exploited nuclear winter as part of their "peace" campaign against putting Pershing missiles in Europe, but that "nobody" in Moscow believed in nuclear winter.

In fact, that "nobody" General Secretary Gorbachev says he signed a missle treaty because of the concerns of US and Soviet scientists about nuclear winter. Somehow, the FBI "intelligence analysts" overlooked that salient fact.


It seems to me that it was a good thing that the Russians learned about nuclear winter, and if the KGB tried to use it for some propaganda, it didn't work. The Pershings were installed.



The FBI didn't make their case that the nuclear winter scientists were fooled by the KGB. Shame on them for publishing a conspiracy theory about our scientists! They sound as moronic as the KGB raving about Sakharov being manipulated by his wife the "Jewess Bonner" on this one.





The FBI never even identifies the specific "disinformation" they purport to expose. The FBI is supposed to counter disinformation by correcting the record, but the FBI never tells what the false information was. 


Really, this white paper looks like something a mononic KGB hack would write to defame a Soviet scientist. "Russia's master spy" Tretyakov is dead, so it is hard to really know what he believed. Maybe he was just a blow-hard who wanted to be an expert on things he didn't know about. He may have let the book's author, Pete Earley, put words in his mouth to give the Russell Seitz line credibility. Now the FBI is giving this book credibility. 

Still, if nuclear winter is a "KGB hoax" the FBI should all enlighten us about the specific disinformation they claim the KGB spread. If they don't know the truth, how do they know something is disinformation? This disinformation happened in the 1980s, but still there are no specific facts about what the false information was.





If the scientists are manipulated, the FBI should tell what is the disinformation. They shouldn't just quote some KGB guy who defected after communism ended, bought expensive cars and properties in Florida, and then gave the Russell Seitz line on nuclear winter.



Nuclear winter, like physics, is not a KGB hoax. I expect only the highest standards from the FBI. They should either "show us the beef" or retract their smear AKA a "white paper." We can't have an organization that investigates crimes writing defamatory trash. They have to have high scientific standards and do real historical research; otherwise, "law officers" who are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry like Attorney General Cuccinelli will exploit the credibility of the FBI and even try to turn them against our scientists like the Kremlin bosses turn the KGB on some of their great scientists.

People who want to know what the KGB does, need look no further than the campaign of defamation spearheaded by Attorney General Cuccinelli. He has turned his office into a political police, and Cuccinelli even quoted the Kremlin's news agency RIA Novosti in a legal document against the EPA.

Is that where the FBI wants to go?

Now I see that Cuccinelli has taken that document off the Internet. I guess he doesn't want people to see that he cited the Kremlin when he defamed the CRU scientists.




russellseitz - Mon, 2011-11-14 14:02



Vote up!


Vote down!


If he thinks  'denial' consists in criticizing Carl Sagan's popularization of Nuclear Winter as a locus classicus of putting PR before peer review, he'd better add Steve Schneider and a dozen more critics to his roster. 

Then again he might bother to read what we wrote , change his mind, and proffer as many apologies. It is always hazardous to rely on third party polemics without checking their primary sources- If he didn't read what i wrote in Nature last July  my blog  at once speaks for itself and provides links to a plenum of my writings.






Unfortunately droughts we're invented before global warming and there is no link between any drought and a 1/2 degree of warming.



You're doin' it right now Ralph.







Where is this "truth" you talk about? I go to the major institutions and I cannot see any mention of no warming in the past 15 years.

All I see is stuff like this:



Global temperature rise





Ralph, before we move onto the next post where you will repeat this statement again, can you provide evidence of this? From an institute that measures it.....not someone who comments on it or an interpreter of interpretations.



From here:







I'll put this here for you, PM, but Snapple's post motivated it.

My argumentative trajectory has shifted from making arguments (which assumes a rational argument) to analyzing psychological motives (which assumes motivated cognitions for underlying denial) to evaluating political warfare tactics (which assumes bad faith argumentation and an immoral or amoral adversary). If the point of the argument was to make progress on issues related to climate science then it would be worthwhile but it's a little like attacking a scientific Potemkin village. At best, we're hoping for signs of good faith, since that would mean that there's still some potential that the arguer will recognize her/his irrationality. But at the worst, the 'denialist' is actually a propagandist whose point is to obfuscate and neutralize the enemy (us, in their eyes) by any means possible.

Segueing back -- one of my pet peeves is the notion that I need to specialize in every area of climate science or -- ergo -- it's invalid. This notion seems to be a misapplication of the fallacy of appeal to authority. By the same token, automobiles can't work because I'm not a mechanic. Electricity can exist because I'm not an electrician/physicist. And so on. It's a fallacy of incredulity (appeal to ignorance). How appropriate! [correction: it's actually argument from incredulity/lack of imagination]

I'd accept the burden of proof if proof actually meant something in the denalist universe, but it doesn't. The whole point of polical warfare is to produce doubt by producing an anti-truth (a lie) for every truth. The strategy is to create confusion. Another goal is to cite memes from the freeper codebook and thus maintain the Potemkin parallel universe. There's a peculiar rationale that guides denialist posts but there's never any progress towards explaining anything because the intent is to defeat truth rather than harness it. There's no attempt to expand on denialist's alternative explanations because they're like roads in a Potemkin village. They serve no purpose other than preserving the pretense.





Read this;


I started worrying about what was going on when I spoke to a conservative Environmental Engineer in Alberta.  When I mentioned climate change, it touched off a torrent of hate for Al Gore, something I simply couldn't understand.  Like somehow Al made it up and climate scientists are all wrong.



I started leaving links to more appropriate information sources rather than engage in arguements.  I simply reply... say a bit, ask pointed questions, like "Who told you that?"





...and what I see repeatedly are shocking displays of denier incompetence and/or laziness.



Here are two specific examples of this:

1) UHI is responsible for the warming trend.

This can be disproved by downloading the GHCN raw data, writing up a straightforward gridding/averaging program, and computing global-average temperature anomalies for rural vs. urban stations.   The urban/rural station designations are included in the GHCN data files and can easily be parsed out with some simple string processing routines.  Don't trust the GHCN rural/urban designations?  Then verify them for a representative sampling of stations with Google Earth.  Use Google's API to overlay the station locations on top of the high-resolution satellite imagery and verify the stations' rural/urban status directly.


2) The warming trend is an artifact of "dropped stations" .

This is even easier to disprove than (1) above.  Simply modify the gridding/averaging code to  process only the stations still actively reporting data.  Compare the results with the results you get from processing all of the data.  Sifting out the "dropped stations" takes only a few lines of code, btw.  This is something that a competent analyst could do very quickly.



(And yes, I've personally done both -- and my results have proved that the UHI and "dropped stations" factors have virtually no impact on the global-temperature computations).



While your comments here, Rick, are using "green issues" to advance a reactionary right-wing cause...

Why are you rooting around for "motivations" when the science lies before you?

people are complex. 

I find the science interesting but I don't believe the future is all figured out. The future implications of the science vary a lot from nothing to unknown to catastrophic.

In the mean time individuals gravitate to one side or the other of the issue or more often totally ignore it. Why do they do these 3 things? It's not as simple as it may seem. Motivations are complex and we often don't  understand our own motivations all that clearly. The assumption of political superiority on one side or the other indicates strong bias and muddies the waters.

Some interesting commentary over at the WUWT article about Chris Mooney's reaction to all the buzz he's generated. This comment in particular struck a cord;


Roughly translated - 'Mooney is making bags of cash preaching to the choir".

Nothing wrong with that, eh? Everyone's got to make a living.

what is new?


At the end of the day it comes down to this, some people want evidence, some people want experts. When there is no warming there is no problem, right now we don't see anything other than claims of warming to come, but many of us have heard the climate scientist cry wolf for far too long.


I personally believe that way over 99% of the population could be described as defacto deniers. It's why emissions are going up and up in years to come. Concern about agw does not touch lives in any meaningful way. Sometimes it's a way of making a living and sometimes it's an intellectual pursuit but it does not reach past that for almost anyone.

"Ralph", thanks for drawing our attention to a Heartland Institute lawyer's right-wing denialist "scientific insight." I love to watch fools dance!

I do note that Mr. Taylor's tired arguments, (not warming... much, not our fault, too expensive to address even if it was), are completely unrelated to Chris Mooney's premise, other than to provide the billionth example of right-wing double-speak and truculent scientific misrepresentation.

I'm so glad we don't need to do anything that might impact corporate profits our quality-of-life.


This may be a tired scientific fact but get used to it, each year we see no warming and more c02 emissions people start to realise that global warming is not an issue. A friend of mine who is a professor of biology put is best. "It's incomprehensible that anyone still believes in this!"



Snort! The tired argument is to pretend that every brief "pause" in warming is proof that there is no AGW impact while deliberately ignoring the widespread evidence that shows the opposite over actually meaningful time spans. 


It's funny, "Ralph", how you were such an advocate of automobile safety when the chances of a crash, on any particular trip, was so small. Now you seem to be rolling the environmental dice on all our behalf. I hope it's not senility setting in.

The textbooks say there is global warming, so you are the lazy ignorant, person who doesn't read the books.


Catholic schools, for example, use an AP Environmental Science book that cites the IPCC as well as Pontifical Academicians Paul Crutzen and V. Ramanathan. Their research is used for the IPCC Report, and they advise the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences as well as other scientific and governmental organizations. Crutzen has a Nobel Prize, and that's who we read in our textbooks.

If you read our excellent textbooks, you might learn something. Perhaps you should read Dr. Michael Mann's easy-to-understand explanation of the IPCC 4th Assessment. The book is titled Dire Predictions.



Thomas Fingar said:




They don't even want to admit who's telling them that the world is warming.

Its our governments.  Bush's government.  Harper's Government... all the governments.  Government research... government satellites... Government organizations...

And oh... the military.  Yup... Appearently these guys are so deluded by some green movement that they are commiting TREASON to lie to their own people and collude with foreign military forces.

And some how all this is believed with zero nadda sippo evidence.  Then if they get questioned...  they yell "Al Gore!" or some other distracting public figure.


Meanwhile the trail of money from oil companies is quite clear.  Tim Ball and his so called 'Friends of Science' got caught fraudulantly washing money through the University of Victoria.  All oil money from red neck executives... Who clearly profit by smearing climate scientists.


Yup... Must be a secret green plot.

No, most greens aren't smart enough to come up with anything beyond holding signs up and chaining themselves to concrete. (how to they go to the bathroom?)

On the internet in places like this, scientific uncertainty is minimized. A phrase like "the world is warming" can mean almost anything, but it's always used in a fear mongering way.


Lets be generous and say it's about trying to alert a sleepy public to the issue of climate change. So we have to magnify our worst fears. Okay, Ill buy that. But it's not working.









Related reading:


Klein’s article is one of the best-written explanations of the "politics" of climate change that I have ever read.


It doesn't completely trash the folks on the right.



It really should be read by all.


Effective global warming mitigation will require a world government, which will reduce our freedom to act in our own national interest.  It will also cause a hell of a depression.  The Stern report is pie in the sky.  Of course, not mitigating global warming will cause an even worse depression.  But I can't blame conservatives for looking for evidence that the science is false. As Will Rogers said, "It's hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it."





But didn't we already know this intuitively? 

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but this is a good video by Dr Barry Bickmore, a conservative discussing why conservatives oppose AGW.

Dr Barry Bickmore - How to avoid the truth about climate change








Curiouser & curioser.