A couple of notes on the Big Climate vs Free Speech wars: Re hockey-stick warm-monger Michael Mann's suit against me, the dank toilet of DC justice remains clogged as ever, with no movement in sight. But up north Mann's suit against my compatriot Dr Tim Ball will be proceeding to trial in British Columbia Superior Court this February - and I'll be there keeping an eye on things.
Meanwhile, the indefatigable Anthony Watts and Willis Eschenbach have had a paper accepted by the American Geophysical Union's 2016 conference - on how water vapor has a much greater effect on temperature than CO2 does. This is unlikely to get a warm reception from the 24,000-strong AGU crowd but, as Anthony says, you have to take this stuff into the lion's den. And so, at the biggest earth-science beano on the planet, theirs will be a lonely dissenting presentation.
It takes courage to do that, which Anthony and Willis have in spades. But it also takes money. Unlike Michael Mann and the other climate mullahs, skeptics are not living large on government grants and their role as personal climatologist to Jessica Alba. And oddly enough Anthony's check from Big Oil seems to be lost in the mail. So just getting to San Francisco to deliver the paper to the AGU conference is going to impose considerable costs on Messrs Watts and Eschenbach. You can read more about their work here - and, if you can chip in a few bucks, it would help enormously.
~On the other hand, there is some common ground behind the two sides: It turns out it's not just us denialists who want to screw the Earth...
Ten years ago, Iowahawk wrote:
It's that time of year when we honor the ultimate MILF: Mother Earth! Yes friends, Gaia called and you responded - with candid pics showing how you get your freak on with that saucy pagan eco-tart.
I liked that "ultimate MILF" line, and commented:
I take my hat off. This belongs to a very select group of Jokes I Wish I Had Written First.
But last decade's satire is today's new normal:
Ecosexuals Believe Having Sex with the Earth Could Save It
Because she really is a saucy pagan eco-tart:
If you happen to find yourself in Sydney this week, you have the unique opportunity to have sex with the earth. You just need to stop by the "ecosexual bathhouse," which is currently part of the Syndey LiveWorks Festival of experimental art. The bathhouse is an interactive installation created by artists Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair of Pony Express, who described the work to me as a "no-holds-barred extravaganza meant to dissolve the barriers between species as we descend into oblivion" as the result of our global environmental crisis. But they also see their piece as a part of a much larger ecosexual movement, which they say is gathering momentum around the world... We may look back on 2016 as the year ecosexuality hit the mainstream.
It may be another year or two before the US Supreme Court discovers a constitutional right to marry a glacier, but one thing we can say for certain - the LGBTQWERTY parade just got a couple of floats longer:
At last year's San Francisco Pride Parade, they led a contingent of over a hundred ecosexuals in a ribbon-cutting ceremony to "officially" add an E to the LGBTQI acronym... Reed said that ecosexuality is different from other social movements in that it focuses on personal behavior and pleasure rather than protests or politics. She said that some people within the environmental movement have kept their distance from it for this reason. But ecosexual activists interviewed for this story all insist they have a serious goal at heart. As Morgan said, thinking about the earth as a lover is the first step toward taking the environmental crisis seriously. "If you piss off your mother, she's probably going to forgive you. If you treat your lover badly, she's going to break up with you."
I treat the Earth the way I treat all my other women, baby. I walk all over them.
PS If I run into Michael Mann in the corridors of the British Columbia Superior Court, remind me to tell him he could make a killing in the ecosexual market with hockey-stick condoms: it goes up and it stays up.
~Further to my recent columns on the free-speech wars Down Under, The Japan Times reports on Bill Leak and The Australian's pushback against the disgusting Section 18. This passage caught my eye:
Following a famous 2008 case involving the writer Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine, Canada's Section 13 was repealed in 2012 because the government recognized that it was causing more harm than good.
I wish that were true, but "the government" recognized no such thing - which is why it was left to a private member's bill by the Alberta backbencher Brian Storseth to kill Section 13. Aside from the admirable Mr Storseth and a few principled mavericks such as the self-described "brown guy" Keith Martin, Canada's political class was extremely reluctant to abandon Section 13 - the left because it's a useful weapon to impose ideological compliance, the right out of a finger-in-the-windy nervousness about doing anything that the consultants and focus groups might interpret as being against "human rights".
Section 13 died because a relentless war against it so delegitimized the law that it became indefensible: The government's "recognition" of that fact was a very final piece in an already won campaign. I hope my Aussie chums remember that: Two years ago, the otherwise clear-sighted Brendan O'Neill made the mistake of taking Oz's Attorney-General George Brandis at his word and hailing him as Voltaire on steroids. Twenty minutes later, Brandis and his colleagues wimped out. That's the lesson I learned from Canada's free-speech wars: you win in the wider world - and force "the government" to play catch-up.
PS That's another reason to support Watts and Eschenbach's willingness to take on a 24,000-strong climate crowd single- (well, double-)handed. Opening up the climate debate is a free-speech issue, too. You can donate directly to their AGU Expeditionary Force here.
