Climate Progress

The debate over Waxman-Markey reminds me of what I love most about blogging.

No, it’s not what you think, it’s not the chance to be snarky.  I don’t need the blogosphere for that.

No, what I like about the blogosphere is that it ultimately drives a precision in language and a clarity of thought because it is filled with people like The Talented Mr. Pielke, people who are too clever by half [or is that half clever?], people who are ready at a moment’s notice to spin some slightly ambiguous molehill of phrase into a mountainous assault on you, people whose primary blog, the ironically-named “Prometheus,” just died – let us pause for a moment of silence … and weekend of celebration, barbecue, and fireworks.

The problem arises for many reasons, such as malicious mischief, but here I’m going to focus on just one — the generally humorless nature of the global warming deniers and delayers.

My father, a lifelong newspaper editor known for his sense of humor, always said that no matter how blatant the humor he might use, some reader would inevitably take it literally and write him an angry letter.  I have endeavored to address that problem here with the “Humor” category — but that doesn’t work for small bits of humor in an otherwise serious post.

So for the first time ever — and I hope the last — I’m going to explain two jokes for the sake of those cheerless cheerleaders for climate chaos, and their head cheerleader [jeerleader?], The Talented Mr. Pielke (Jr).

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Someone sent me this:

Coincidentally, I had a very similar idea when I saw this New Yorker cartoon a couple weeks ago [Note to self -- Bizarre minds think alike]

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The idea for this Father’s Day post came when I was putting my daughter to bed a few weeks ago, and she started to repeat, “Want tiny dog” — one of her favorite stuffed animals.  The room was dark, and so I asked, “Is tiny dog in the crib?”  to which she replied, “Not yet” or, rather, you have to imagine a certain sly lilt, “Not ye-et,” which might be translated as, “You have to find him if you expect me to go to sleep.”

As I’m crawling around the room looking to see if she’s tossed him on the floor or if he somehow got under the furniture, she said, “Must be frustrating.”  And so a post was born.

Since the floor debate on the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy legislation is coming up (though probably not this week), let me, without further ado, offer

The Top 10 Ways the House GOP are like my Two-Year-Old daughter

10.  Core messaging is often infantile. It was, after all, on September 3, 2008 at 10:14 pm EST at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, that the entire GOP decided to make their central message a plea to the very youngest Americans — see “Drill baby, drill”: The moment the Republic died.

9.  Similar messaging tactics.  GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz once said, “There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it, is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.”  In my daughter’s case, the target audience is very small, and, her message, some variant  “Today is Carousel day,” gets heard the first time and the tenth.  For the GOP, the target audience is bigger, but the polling suggests that most people long ago understood they like drilling to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

8.  Very ego-centric.  My daughter has become fond of saying of various things around the house, “Mine!  Mine!  It’s mine!”  In the same vein, former House leader Gingrich is fond of saying, “I am not a citizen of the world!”

7.  Love nonsense phrases that amuse them, if no one else.  See House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.”

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By Alex Hallatt
From the Cartoonist Group (click to enlarge)

I’d be interested in readers’ opinion of this silly segment from NPR’s Morning Edition, “Dude, Where’s My Cap-And-Trade Primer?”

It’s funny, but the analogy makes little sense, and the whole thing is not terribly productive, I think.  I much prefer my musical chairs analogy from this NPR interview last month

Anti-cap-and-traders, feel free to do your thing, too!  That’s what weekend posts are for, no?

UPDATE:  Watts edited out all the offending language cited below.  I’m hoping in the future people can mostly stick to criticizing what I post myself and not on what commenters here write.  I am always happy to be notified about inappropriate comments, which I will work to deal with in a timely fashion.  Failure to do so immediately, however, does not constitute endorsement.

Let me state this for the record:

Full-time global warming disinformers, like Swift boat smearer Marc Morano and Anthony Watts, have dedicated their lives to promoting disinformation and delay whose inevitable outcome — if a large fraction of people continue to be suckered by them — is unspeakable misery and/or violence to billions of people.  Even so, Climate Progress has never advocated or threatened violence against them.  Climate Progress does not tolerate any such threats in its comments.  I don’t even tolerate comments that can be misinterpreted as threatening violence, when in fact they only predicted it.

That said, Watts through his website is shouting “no fire” on a burning planet. That is perhaps the most immoral thing any human being can do. Indeed, his website and writing goes beyond that. He, like Morano, is actually shouting “The firemen are liars and are trying to hurt you.” Shame on him.  Rational people have every right to be very angry with such disinformers.

The anti-science conservatives are on the rampage.

My Friday post — Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat — generated a staggering number of comments from WUWT devotees and responses by CP readers.  I don’t work Friday nights and I have to deal with 2-year-old, so I didn’t get around to reading all of the comments until Saturday, by which time all hell had seemingly broken loose.

One of my commenters had written something that was both inappropriate and easily misrepresented by anti-science conservatives as a threat.  Before I discuss that comment, let me note that in the comments section of that post (here), WUWT’s Anthony Watts advances a remarkable policy for comments (one that I and most blogs don’t share) — namely that the blog author agrees with any comment left up for more than a few hours:

Since it has been up for several hours now, it would seem that you agree then.

Like I said, I didn’t read them until Saturday, and I’ve dealt with the ones I’ve seen.

But let me note that it took me about one minute to find the following comments on WUWT, which Watts must agree with 100% since they have been up for several days.  In his June 4 post, “George Will: The Green Bubble Has Burst,” Watts has allowed the following comments by Adolfo Giurfa to stand since Tuesday (!) — bold-face added:

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What is that wacky Swift boat smearer Marc Morano up to?  I don’t visit his website, of course, since it is filled with disinformation and apparently he is too busy to blog.

But somebody sent me the story and the link to his website, and then I noticed that Morano links to stories here on CP, strangely enough, so I thought I would return the favor this one time.

Anyway, one would suppose the Swift Boat Smearer is being mockingly humorous or satirical, like his namesake, Jonathan Swift, by making this article his banner headline.  But then really most of the articles Morano links to merit mocking or satire –  “GORE LIED:  Global temperatures plunge further; have dropped .63?F (.35?C) since Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth” [he kills me!] — so you really can’t tell whether his whole damn website is just some sort of elaborate performance art, like something Andy Kaufman would have done.

Anyway, if we drop the part of the story that connects things to global warming — which is beyond tenuous — the article itself, from Russia Today, has some interesting stuff on the weather conditions over the Intertropical Convergence Zone that can make for “white knuckle” flying:

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Anybody watching the tedious markup of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill, saw a rare moment of bipartisan levity:

[Note:  If a typical flash-in-the-pan gets 15 minutes of fame, it's only right that a speed reader get two minutes of fame.]

TPM explains why Waxman had a speed reader on hand in the first place:

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