Curried Science

Jay Currie, that ambulatory laboratory of scientific rigour, poses the question: "Just how dead is CAGW?" And of course answers it: "The extremities are still twitching…but the Global Warming canard is in terminal decline."

Well, you can imagine how eagerly I followed his link to the Bayonet ("Skewering the Clueless!" GET IT? SKEWERING?) to witness this historic debunking. I'm wondering if maybe Jay linked to the wrong page, though. Because I didn't find much science there at all.

What I found was:

• Multiple links mocking Al Gore, focusing on his house, his recent separation, and his j-date profile.
• Multiple links of the "it's not THAT warm where I live" variety
• Tons of stories about how weird and dirty and stupid environmentalists are (nothing yet about how smelly their women are, although the "dirty hippy" trope is deployed - I guess that kind of in-depth Coulter/Shaidle paleolithic tribalism is still in development)
• Ritual mockery of Obama, Prince Charles, David Suzuki,George Monbiot - all without actual rebuttal, of course. These are simple rolled out like characters in Commedia Del Arte - familiar to the audience and introduced without preamble, simply to be laughed at.
• Ritual praise of those scientific luminaries Sarah Palin and Lord Monckton. These are like characters in Commedia Del Arte - familiar to the audience and introduced without preamble, simply to be revered.
• One nice photo of Jennifer Love Hewitt.
• A weatherman who says climate change is bogus. (Personal comment: why is it that denialists rely so heavily on TV weathermen, instead of actual scientists? I've known several TV weathermen. Really nice folks. Mostly pretty dim.)
  
• One really scientific looking grid, identified merely as "US Data", without a source, illustrating that weather gets colder and hotter. It turns out that the grid is a heavily edited rendering of data on Greenlandic Glacier core samples, formatted in such a way as to be essentially meaningless, and buried on an extremely amateurish website featuring Homer Simpson animations.

I'm not complaining. Jay has performed a useful public service by reminding us once again of the two tiers of discussion at play on the question of climate change.

On one plane, the question of global warming is being addressed by scientists, many of whom disagree on the scope, mechanism and scale of the problem, but all most all of whom agree that the issue is real and pressing. On the other, lower plane, you have the Propagandists in a Clown Car, spewing fumes and mockery, contemptuous of both science and reasoned discussion, and apparently unable to see that there's something happening here.

Thanks, Jay - we appreciate the reminder, and the illustration of the intellectual and scientific bankruptcy of the deniers.

Crossposted from Stageleft.