Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Strange bedfellows at WUWT - the tin foil hat brigade and the pseudo-religious cult

Sou | 6:22 AM Go to the first of 12 comments. Add a comment

Anthony Watts keeps very strange company. Remember last year when he boasted of giving one of his rare, wrong and excruciatingly boring lectures to the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness? Wondering Willis got to go this year and he loved it (archived here). Who'd have thought that they would boast of such a strange alliance.

The denialist doctors are a very weird mob. They are tied in with this mob. They are pro-DDT and are anti-vaxxers. They seem to be a survivalist group. I have images of them hoarding lentils and rice in their garages, checking their ammunition and stoking their back up generators while they wait for the apocalypse.

Then there's the Cornwall Alliance. That's that wacky cult who thinks that their god will protect them from all natural disasters and they have sworn to deny climate science. Today Anthony's hosted one of their mob, Paul Driessen (archived here), complaining that deniers are being scorned and vilified by, well, Greenpeace from what I gather. Not sure when or where. But Pat Michaels (of Pat'n Chip fame, who's not a member of the Cornwall cult AFAIK but often cited by them) and David Legates (who is a member of the Cornwall cult and coauthors papers with the potty peer, Christopher Monckton) are feeling a mite depressed and must've asked Paul to stand up for their right to reject science. You might remember David. He's the one who told a US Senate committee that CO2 is animal food!

Survivalists and a religious cult. What better company could Anthony Watts ask for?


  1. DDP has a long history: see Fakery 2
    p.178-179: ad in Heartland Environment and Climate News, and another list of speakers ... many of the same ones, no surprise.

    p.186: Recall that an infamous paper by Art + Noah Robinson (OISM) and Willie Soon appeared in JPANDS...

    p.192 Jerome Arnett, JR MD ... spoke at DDP
    "Best Available Scientific Evidence Shows Secondhand Smoke Is No

    DDP and friends haven't changed.

    1. Great work, John.

      They are very big on climate science denial. The website has a lot of other weird stuff as well.

  2. The english language needs a new word for political or industry funded lobby groups that masquerade as 'institutes' or other more worthy organisations.

    1. Think-tanks is rather an oxymoron. How about a name that actually represents what they do.

      Here are some suggestions.

      Dumb tanks.
      Dumber than a sack of spanners tanks.
      Tobacco and fossil fuel fronts.
      Astroturfers (I know, already taken)
      Sell my arse for money tanks.
      Physics and chemistry is for nerds tanks.


      Commonly known as 'front groups', we already have 'astroturf' for bodies that falsely claim to represent 'grassroots' opinion.

  3. Had a look at the DDP program - Denier-palooza!


    That's what you got from the article in question? Wow, yet another example, if one was needed, of how totally you (willfully?) misunderstand so much of what is written over at WUWT - or other so-called denier sites for that matter.

    Surely your reading skills are sufficiently developed to see that the article was much more than a whine about Greenpeas being nasty to scientists who don't travel with the herd.

    Perhaps if you read it again.....

    1. hazym
      "In 2009, before Mann’s problems began, Greenpeace started attacking scientists it calls “climate deniers,” focusing its venom on seven scientists at four institutions,..."

      It seems to be quite an important part of the article. What do you think it is about?

    2. Yeah, right, and we should all do this because it's actually a well-considered rational piece painstakingly examining the issues, rather than a semi-hysterical, "scare quote" ridden, lunar-Right political rant, right?

      If you're reduced to defending this sort of stuff, you're really on the way out...

    3. What I got from Driessen's article is that he lies. There is a possibility he is not aware of his lies, but then it is mostly due to ideological clouding.

      The lies of Driessen? Simple
      1. None of Michaels' e-mails were released to Greenpeace, because Greenpeace did not want to pay for any investigation
      (Greenpeace has previously obtained an old Michaels CV through a FOIA request - the one that *did* list funding from a fossi fuel company) and has previously requested further information that Michaels did not want to release and never was released.

      2. UvA made an agreement with ATI to release e-mails (it was a bit slow in responding, but so was ATI in its payments), and it wasn't until Mann intervened and the UvA lawyers noticed that the plaintiffs and the lawyers involved in deciding which e-mails would be exempt were the same people that a previous agreement was stopped through court.

      So the article was about perpetuating lies, and also about not noticing the blatant hypocrisy that Legates fought release of any material using the same arguments as Mann, but when Mann did so, only he is the one trying to hide stuff.

      Where's the outrage of the pseudoskeptics that Michaels does not release all his e-mails himself? Where's the outrage that Legates fought the release of his e-mails and other documents? There is none, because of course only pseudoskeptics have nothing to hide and therefore do not need to show their 'private' communications. Am I right, hazym?


    4. @hazym

      No response from you? What was that then, just an empty swipe at HotWhopper with nothing behind it?

      All that was claimed by the article was that ...complaining that deniers are being scorned and vilified... was in the article. Which it clearly was as my example showed. It did not claim (as you appear to suggest it does) that that was the main theme of the article. Your reading skills may be OK but your comprehension is lacking or perhaps your ability to only interpret what you want to hear is overdeveloped.

      It reads to me as if the article is trying to ascribe blame for who "started" the polarisation of the climate debate and that as "Greenpeace started attacking scientists" in 2009 they are a big part of the picture. I am a bit puzzled by this as evidence for the start of a climate misinformation campaign (by the coal industry) goes back to at least 1991 that I know of.

      So hazym. How have I wilfully misunderstood the article? What is your analysis? What have you got to add?

    5. Yup, my article was about the very strange company that WUWT deniers keep. The headline should have been a clue, if nothing else.

      If hazym wants to write about something else, they can do so - elsewhere :)



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