Steve Andrew dared to tickle the dragon’s tail and now he is paying for it. The dragon in this case, is Climate Denialists in the Right Wing Media.
Andrew posted something about the recent, very alarming news that global warming seems to be cutting back significantly on the supply of oceanic plankton. The worst case scenario of this sort of process is, actually, mass extinction and everybody dies. There are less severe scenarios as well, but none of them are very much fun.
So yes, even as the climate chickens come home to roost, the denailists can’t keep their bought and paid for (by the energy companies, mainly) mouths shut, and are busy all across the intertubes, blogging, sockpupetting, and generally grand standing about how there really is no problem and we should all just go home and close our windows and lock our doors.
But yes, there is a problem, and our knowledge and recognition of this problem has deep historical roots. The time is long overdue for the denialists to stop denying and start thinking, and get on with helping rather than standing in the way.
You can read about the attack on Steve Andrew here. This particular case has an increasingly common twist: The frustration expressed by the writer is being compared, roughly, to Adolph Hitler ordering the Death Camps, or something along those lines, in an effort to distract from the plain fact that the denialist are not only wrong, but harmful, hateful, and cynical of humanity. This is ironic given the ready tendency these days for right wing yahoos to call for the death of their opponents, often extolling their zombie-like teabagging followers to simply shoot them. And stuff like that.
All I can say to these right wingers who put their graft above the health of the planet: Get a job, morans!
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I can’t say I care for this Steve Andrews chap’s style of blogging or the website he uses (I clicked on an inline quote and it popped up some kind of commercial advertisement). But the subject he writes about is a serious one and should not be discounted. The Dalhousie study seems kosher and is very worrying.
But – there isn’t even any such thing as climate, so how can the earth be warming?
Such fools can be found throughout history. Basically, many people are content with the Status Quo and will grumble about change and some will vehemently oppose change for any number of reasons ranging from the religious through the selfish to just plain “I like things the way they are”. In the corporate world there is a rampant belief that change = loss of profits. Hey, just look at some of the BIG computer companies like DEC – Intel and IBM started making much cheaper and very capable processors and DEC just disappeared; SUN eventually disappeared as well. That change thing will kill your business – so keep things the way they are. Drill, baby, drill!
Greg:
With the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan putting her shoulder to the anti-science wheel, someone should win the Internets by writing something like
“Yes, Virginia, there IS an objective reality!”
Also, this is partly RW infighting. The billionaire who owns the “examiner.com” pseudo-news-sites is also the owner of the Weekly Standard. He’s trying to create a slightly less overt Murdoch system online. The examiner.coms are mostly a sort of modified Matt Drudge model.
Since they’re not in the Murdoch orbit, it makes perfect sense a Fox vehicle would attack a blogger there, especially if he approaches heterodoxy.
The oceanic plankton dying out is a huge problem. I think there should be some serious research done to find the reasons, because I don’t know of any proof that this is global warming. This may be pollution as well.
It took me a while to find it but here it is: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273868/
I saw that episode of “The Name of the Game” in the early 70’s. It was quite memorable. As I recall, a recurring “dead spot” in some ocean didn’t fade away one season. It grew, and just kept on growing until it sucked up all the atmospheric oxygen. For 1970’s television “LA 2017” is beginning to look terribly prophetic.
Good grief.
When are people like MadScientist (I believe the first part, but not the last)[and that was a joke btw] going to accept that questioning AGW does NOT necessarily mean questioning GW.
It really doesn’t.
There is no need to continually polarise the debate between ‘Believers’ and ‘Deniers’ – it really isn’t religion…
Dennis, they are close enough to being the same. No serious scientist questions the A part of AGW. None of this has anything to do with religion.
Current deniers of the A in AGW are like ID’ers to creationism.
But worse, because denying the A in AGW is nothing, absolutely nothing, other than selling out one’s fellow human and the planet for profit.