We noted last year the emergence of a new global health crisis:
Climate Depression Is For Real. Just Ask A Scientist.
Since then, alas, the legions of depressed climatologists have multiplied exponentially, leading some virologists to speculate whether the disease is now airborne and you can catch it just from reading a Michael E Mann #KochMachineDenier Tweet. This month's Esquire contains a massive peer-reviewed story on pre-traumatic planetary-stress disorder:
Among climate activists, gloom is building. Jim Driscoll of the National Institute for Peer Support just finished a study of a group of longtime activists whose most frequently reported feeling was sadness, followed by fear and anger. Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and graduate of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth slide-show training, calls this "pretraumatic" stress. "So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of posttraumatic disorder—the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts." Leading activist Gillian Caldwell went public with her "climate trauma," as she called it.
If you're having trouble keeping score, the old post-traumatic stress disorder is what you get if you're just some nancy wuss pantywaist who goes to Iraq and gets blown up by an IED. But the far more serious pre-traumatic stress disorder is what you get if you sit around on government grants all day worrying about sea levels in the Maldives in the early 22nd century.
I can't decide which is the more poignant headline. Esquire's print edition goes with the fey:
Ballad of the Sad Climatologists
But Esquire's online edition emphasizes the awesome burden:
When the End of Human Civilization is your Day Job
Inside you'll find the usual suspects - not only Dr Camille Parmesan, the subject of the last "climate depression" piece, but also, of course, Gavin Schmidt and Michael E Mann. As we deniers always say, if there's a 97 per cent consensus, how come it's always the same half-dozen guys quoted in all the stories?
At any rate, litigious fake Nobel Laureate Michael E Mann is now a sad litigious fake Nobel Laureate. It's not easy when the end of human civilization is your day job. Actually, in Dr Mann's case, it's not easy when simple data handling and statistical modeling is your day job - hence, all his problems with California bristlecones, double-counted lone Gaspé cedars, upside-down Finnish lake sediments, transposed eastern and western hemispheres, invented statistical methods, truncated late 20th-century tree-rings, etc, etc. Maybe he should focus on his actual day job and keep the end of human civilization as his hobby.
But, when the end of human civilization is your day job, trust no-one. Nullius in verba, as they say at the Royal Society of Conspiracists. Rutgers climate scientist Alan Robock in The Guardian:
On January 19, 2011, I got a phone call from two men who told me they were consultants for the CIA. Roger Lueken and Michael Canes, analysts for the Logistics Management Institute, asked, among other things, "If another country were trying to control our climate, would we be able to detect it?"
You mean, like if Iran were trying to change regular old clouds into mushroom clouds? Nah, forget about that. Dr Robock was worried that the spooks were asking a trick question:
I wondered whether they also wanted to know if others would know about it, if the CIA was controlling the world's climate.
Could that be the real story behind what sad plaintiff Michael E Mann calls the "faux pause" of the last 18 years? The CIA has built a giant weather machine to make climate models look ridiculous? It's Spooknado meets Skyfall - so no matter how fast NOAA adjusts the numbers the secret agents in the clouds, licensed to chill, zap them back down again?
Oh, you can laugh, but just because Dr Mann thinks he's Napoleon doesn't mean the Koch brothers haven't put a chip in his head playing the 1812 Overture 24/7. Just ask climate scientist Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University:
Three scientists investigating melting Arctic ice may have been assassinated, professor claims
It sounds totally implausible, like something straight out of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Warmists or Murder on the Warmient Express. But as Professor Wadhams sees it, the scientists have been settled - permanently:
Professor Peter Wadhams said he feared being labelled a "looney" over his suspicion that the deaths of the scientists were more than just an 'extraordinary' coincidence.
But he insisted the trio could have been murdered and hinted that the oil industry or else sinister government forces might be implicated.
The three scientists he identified - Seymour Laxon and Katherine Giles, both climate change scientists at University College London, and Tim Boyd of the Scottish Association for marine Science - all died within the space of a few months in early 2013.
Professor Laxon fell down a flight of stairs at a New Year's Eve party at a house in Essex while Dr Giles died when she was in collision with a lorry when cycling to work in London. Dr Boyd is thought to have been struck by lightning while walking in Scotland.
Getting lightning bolts to strike down scientists is the sort of thing James Delingpole or Anthony Watts would like to do, of course, but could they pull it off? Yes - if they were in league with the CIA's diabolical climate machine!
For having the guts to blow the lid off the denialist death squads, Professor Wadhams and his bicycle are now themselves in the crosshairs:
Prof Wadhams said that in the weeks after Prof Laxon's death he believed he was targeted by a lorry which tried to force him off the road. He reported the incident to the police.
Asked if he thought hitmen might have been behind the deaths, Prof Wadhams, who is Professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, told The Telegraph: "Yes. I do believe assassins possibly murdered them but I can see that I would be thought of as a looney for believing this."
Was that Judith Curry at the wheel of the lorry? Or Willie Soon? Or a rogue polar bear in deep cover as a supplier for Bob the Builder?
So the planet is warming. But no one believes it because the CIA has a big climate machine. And the only people who know the truth have all been assassinated by Steve McIntyre and Fred Singer.
Does anyone seriously think it's a coincidence that the very head honcho of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pantsdowni, had his trousers self-immolate and was forced from his job only months before the Paris conference? Isn't it far more likely that the CIA cloud machine overheated his gusset?
Oh, sure, the deniers will scoff, but remember: if anything happens to Professor Wadhams, it was Nigel Lawson, with the ice-core, on the Cambridge bypass.
No wonder the sad climatologists are sadder by the day. These seem just the sort of healthy, well-adjusted people to leave the future of human civilization in the hands of.
In the meantime, if you'd like to hear from a less sad group of scientists, there's always my new book.
~One possible explanation for all the above is that these scientists are being targeted by consensus-enforcer John Cook dressed up as Czech scientist Luboš Motl. I wrote about Cook's kinky predilection for playing dress-up denier on Saturday. Dr Richard Tol, who's a highly paid assassin in the upper echelons of SPECTRE (Shills Paid to Exacerbate Climate Trauma in Real Experts), writes:
Hi Mark
In "Top Billing" you refer to John Cook as "Dr". As far as I know, that is incorrect. Mr Cook is a PhD candidate only. Or maybe not: according to UWA, he submitted his thesis in June 2014.
A major revision has to be submitted within 12 months, so Mr Cook's PhD is already in extra time. The most positive interpretation is that Mr Cook is about to face his second viva.
Sorry about that. I assumed that, having borrowed Dr Motl's identity, Mr Cook had also borrowed his PhD, as well as James Lovelock's FRS, John Houghton's knighthood, Ron Oxburgh's peerage and Michael Mann's Nobel Prize. (The last one doesn't work but that just shows how deep the conspiracy goes.)
~I'll be joining Hannity tonight, Monday, on Fox News, coast to coast across America at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific.
