You might have heard me talk about this story sitting in for Rush on Tuesday, but I thought it worth bringing up in print, too. I wrote a day ago about the climate commissars' persistent urge to exile, jail and even execute anyone who disagrees with them. On the eve of a British election day in which the three "mainstream" party establishments are on board with this bullying consensus, The Guardian gives us a glimpse of the utopia that awaits, hailing for its environmental stewardship... Sweden? New Zealand? Slovenia? Not even close:
North Korea: An Unlikely Champion in the Fight Against Climate Change
North Korea is so determined to lower its carbon footprint it's keeping large numbers of its population in concentration camps and starving them. It's so serious about energy conservation that after 6pm Kim Jong-Un has the light bulb. John Hinderaker reminded me of the satellite photograph at right of North Korea by night, where it's Earth Day all year round. I was shown it, oddly enough, at the Pentagon by Don Rumsfeld. And I assume Rummy liked to show it to media types as a shorthand even we could grasp: this is the difference between liberty and economic growth, on the one hand, and a socialist psycho-state, on the other.
But, as the Guardian piece seems to suggest, these fellows don't see it like that. Show the photo to David Suzuki or most of the other Big Climate grandees, and they'd say: Wow! Why can't we get that serious? As Ed Driscoll writes:
Since radical environmentalism is essentially a euphemism for socialism, then North Korea is the radical environmentalist end state, just as collapsed, festering downtown Detroit is the end game of crony socialism.
Fanaticism makes not so odd bedfellows. While The Guardian is seduced by Kim Jong-Un, peer-review fetishist Ed Begley Jr seems equally taken by anti-American film investor and fossil-fuel operative "Muhammad". After its exclusive preview of undercover footage of Begley and other Hollywood activists appearing to agree to secret funding from Middle Eastern interests opposed to US energy independence, The Hollywood Reporter sought a comment from the actor:
Muhammad, accompanied by a man pretending to be an ad executive, seemingly has the two actors agreeing to participate in the scheme, even after he acknowledges that his goal is to keep America from becoming energy independent. The meeting, which appears to have been secretly recorded, took place a few months ago at the Beverly Hills Hotel...
Begley tells THR that if it looks like he's agreeing with faux Muhammad about anything, it's because the Tickells asked him to be polite so that they'd get their funding for a movie they're making called Fracked, a film that will argue a technique for extracting natural gas called fracking is bad for the environment. Also, Begley says that he is hard of hearing and couldn't understand everything Muhammad was saying.
Fortunately, on Twitter his hearing's much better:
Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann May 16
.@edbegleyjr @USGBC Ed does not just talk the talk. He walks the walk--big time!Ed Begley, Jr.@edbegleyjr
Michael! My hero!Michael E. Mann @MichaelEMann
Right back at ya! Ed :-)
Guys, get a room!
So, just to update Michael E Mann's "heroes" and villains: He'll have no truck with #antiscience Judith Curry, Lennart Bengtsson, Mike Hulme, etc, etc, but he's got major-league bromance going with the inventor of the Percentigrade scale of global warming, a conspiracy theorist who thinks al-Qaeda is a western intelligence operation, and a celebrity activist who's happy to take $9 million for an anti-fracking documentary from - what does Mann call it? - "the fossil-fuel industry". Mann made a big mistake getting mixed up with James Cameron, Jessica Alba, Harrison Ford and their unwatched climate-change snoozefest. He should have pitched him and his pals as a Saturday-morning cartoon: Captain Hockey-Stick and his SuperLoons.
Back in the real world, Judith Curry gives a very sober interview to my friends Down Under at Quadrant:
THOMAS: What empirical evidence is there, as distinct from modelling, that 'missing heat' has gone into the deep oceans?
CURRY: Basically, none. Observations below 2 km in the ocean are exceedingly rare, and it is only since 2005 that we have substantial coverage below 700 metres.
The "#antiscientists" are talking about observations in the oceans below 700 meters. The scientists are talking about jailing dissenters and high-fiving Hollywood airheads. Your choice.
~Brandon Shollenberger emails:
Hi Mark,
You recently wrote an article which gave some space to me an a dispute I'm involved in. I'm grateful for the additional attention to the issue, but I'm afraid you misunderstood a post I wrote. Your article says:
'I don't know much about Mr Shollenberger except that he thinks Michael E Mann has a case against me and the case ought to be permitted to go to trial. (Shollenberger rests this belief on the quaint assumption that Mann has been "cleared" by "eight different investigations".)'
I neither assume nor believe Michael Mann has been cleared by those investigations. I've commented on his misrepresentations of them a number of times. The point of my post was to examine the structure of Mann's legal argument, not the validity of his claims. The point I was trying to make there (and have made elsewhere) is I believe if everything Mann said were true, he would deserve to win his lawsuit.
The fact I don't believe everything he says is true doesn't affect that judgment. The fact I've repeatedly said I believe Mann would lose once he reached court doesn't change it either. All I was trying to say is the arguments Mann makes are sufficient that they could win a case, thus he deserves a day in court to make them. You, of course, would be there to respond, pointing out his arguments are all wrong.
In case there is any doubt as to my views, I'll point out I wrote ~20 posts in a series detailing reasons why a person could reasonably believe Mann's work is fraudulent. People kept saying it would be hard to question Mann's work in court due to its complexity. Those posts were my response. They were simple explanations of most of the major criticisms of Mann's work. They were written so anyone could understand why his work is terrible. You can see an index of these posts here.
That's hardly the sort of thing you'd expect from a person who believes obviously false things Michael Mann says.
Regards,
Brandon Shollenberger
I'm not sure what it is you think I "misunderstood". I said that you think "Michael E Mann has a case against me and the case ought to be permitted to got to trial". You've just confirmed that: "All I was trying to say is the arguments Mann makes are sufficient that they could win a case, thus he deserves a day in court to make them."
But it isn't a day in court, is it? It's half-a-decade of my life, and a seven-figure sum - even if I "win". Because, as I've said since this thing started, "the process is the punishment". That's why Mann does it. He doesn't want "a day in court", even If the choked, toxic dungheap of DC justice were capable of giving him one in a timely manner. In his case against Dr Tim Ball, he has no intention of ever going to court and taking the witness stand, but his three years of process-punishment have blown through Dr Ball's life savings - which was the point all along. It's awfully sporting of you to say that I "of course, would be there to respond, pointing out his arguments are all wrong". Has the court given you a heads-up as to when that might be? This year? Next year?
That's what Jane Malloch of the University of Queensland is threatening you with, just as Mann's bullying lawyer Peter Fontaine did to "Minnesotans Against Global Warming" (scroll down to Exhibit B). You appear to understand all the finer points of the science, but you don't grasp what Fontaine and Ms Malloch and Mann are doing in a cruder sense - attempting to make the price of questioning Big Climate too high. Whatever happens when Mann eventually gets "a day in court", I've already lost. I'll never get my time back, and it's time I would have preferred to spend writing about music and other things: as your fellow man of science David Appell likes to sneer, I am a mere Shirley Temple fan. But it will be a long time before I'm back on the Good Ship Lollipop. As I said, if I win, it's a half-decade of my life and a seven-figure sum. If I lose, it's a half-decade of my life and an eight-figure sum. If I win on appeal, it's a decade of my life and an eight-figure sum. A rational person would flee the country.
So I'm not doing this for any "rational" reason - other than that, if Mann were to prevail, it would be the biggest setback for the First Amendment in the half-century since New York Times vs Sullivan. And the "climate of fear" he and his other thuggish enforcers have created would have been given sanction of law, and rendered your own critical posts on Mann unpublishable in the American media. So I have no choice but to slog on and see that he is thoroughly, comprehensively and finally defeated.
But it's not something I should have to do. And I very much regret that you think the process Mann has initiated is legitimate. I have been threatened and sued by various people (some very famous) all around the world, but never before by a man who is such a serial liar that he can't help lying even in his legal complaints: he lies about being a "Nobel Prize winner" and he lies about having been "exonerated" by the British Government. If he said, "Oh, what a beautiful morning", I'd take my umbrella. In a sane system, he'd be laughed out of court. In this one, he gets to inflict procedural torture for years on end. I hope, in your own present dispute, you don't have to learn that the hard way.
~I'd like to express my deep gratitude for your continued support of my pushback against Mann, especially your enthusiasm for SteynOnline gift certificates. I'm humbled by your generosity. Notwithstanding Mann's attempts to delay discovery, we continue to move forward with trial preparations.
