Climate alarmists are gloating over the death of Weather Channel founder John Coleman, an outspoken skeptic.
Knowing Coleman, I’m sure he would have been delighted by this response from people whose good opinion he valued so little.
What he would have especially relished, I suspect, is the arrogance and pomposity and self-delusion of Peter Gleick’s claim to be on the #Science side of the argument.
That same arrogance, pomposity and self-delusion is evident in this similarly gloating obituary of Coleman in New Republic by one Emily Atkin.
He had a six-decade broadcasting career, including a stint as the first weather forecaster on ABC’s Good Morning America, but late in life became known for his crusade against the truth about global warming.
“His crusade against the truth about global warming”. Say what? Saucer of milk for Ms Atkin!
Later in the article, Emily gets her kitty claws out on Coleman’s lack of scientific credentials:
Coleman was a television meteorologist, not a climatologist; he didn’t even hold a degree in meteorology. But conservative publications began to cite him as if he were an authority on climate science.
What? You mean a bit like the way liberals worship the climate science authority of Bill Nye, the ‘degree in Mechanical Engineering’ guy?
She then sniffily quotes Coleman’s final tweet, as further evidence of his complete ignorance.
But the “97 per cent” claim is one of the most widely debunked fallacies in the entire climate debate. You can read about it here. No serious person who has looked into the background of this flawed, political artefact would ever choose to cite it as evidence to support their case that “climate change is real.” They’d just look foolish and ill-informed. So as a final message for Coleman to have tweeted it isn’t half a bad one. And it ill becomes New Republic or its reporter Emily Atkin to mock it for all it does is suggest that they are deniers of scientific reality.
Climate alarmists, by the way, have quite the track record when it comes to gloating over the deaths of their opponents.
One of the first ‘out’ climate skeptics was an Australian named John Daly – who believed, probably correctly, that climate change has a lot more to do with solar activity and multi-decadal cycles than with CO2 – and maintained a blog which became a magnet for the climate resistance. But then, unfortunately, Daly died, relatively young, prompting this response from Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.
In an odd way this is cheering news!
Jones, of course, would later become notorious as one of the alarmists whose skullduggery was exposed in the Climategate email leak – which is, how, of course we came to know about his “cheering news!” email.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Ancients tell us. Sometimes this is mistranslated as “Never speak ill of the dead.” It’s a noble precept but not one, I suspect, that many of us are capable of living up to all the time. So I’m not necessarily blaming Phil Jones or Phil Gleick or Emily ‘kitty claws’ Atkin or whoever for celebrating the departure of opponents who were clearly a thorn in their side. All I will say, though, is: if you’re going to dishonour the dead, at least make sure that your criticisms are defensible. Otherwise you’re liable to come across like an ungracious, ghoulish creep.
Peter Gleick, for example. That’s Peter Gleick as in the guy who was caught out in the global warming debate’s most embarrassing scandals, sometimes known as “Fakegate”, which you can read about in more detail here.
Short version: Gleick—a noted environmentalist, writer, and campaigner who had chaired an American Geophysical Union task force on “scientific ethics and integrity” [no really] – was revealed as the guy who had used identity theft to trick documents out of the Heartland Institute in order to generate a #fakenews story about a conservative conspiracy to hide the truth about global warming.
Is Gleick really the best person to be telling us, via a graceless tweet about someone’s death, what is and isn’t good for the advancement of “#science”?