UPDATE: Watts edited out all the offending language cited below. I’m hoping in the future people can mostly stick to criticizing what I post myself and not on what commenters here write. I am always happy to be notified about inappropriate comments, which I will work to deal with in a timely fashion. Failure to do so immediately, however, does not constitute endorsement.
Let me state this for the record:
Full-time global warming disinformers, like Swift boat smearer Marc Morano and Anthony Watts, have dedicated their lives to promoting disinformation and delay whose inevitable outcome — if a large fraction of people continue to be suckered by them — is unspeakable misery and/or violence to billions of people. Even so, Climate Progress has never advocated or threatened violence against them. Climate Progress does not tolerate any such threats in its comments. I don’t even tolerate comments that can be misinterpreted as threatening violence, when in fact they only predicted it.
That said, Watts through his website is shouting “no fire” on a burning planet. That is perhaps the most immoral thing any human being can do. Indeed, his website and writing goes beyond that. He, like Morano, is actually shouting “The firemen are liars and are trying to hurt you.” Shame on him. Rational people have every right to be very angry with such disinformers.
The anti-science conservatives are on the rampage.
My Friday post — Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat — generated a staggering number of comments from WUWT devotees and responses by CP readers. I don’t work Friday nights and I have to deal with 2-year-old, so I didn’t get around to reading all of the comments until Saturday, by which time all hell had seemingly broken loose.
One of my commenters had written something that was both inappropriate and easily misrepresented by anti-science conservatives as a threat. Before I discuss that comment, let me note that in the comments section of that post (here), WUWT’s Anthony Watts advances a remarkable policy for comments (one that I and most blogs don’t share) — namely that the blog author agrees with any comment left up for more than a few hours:
Since it has been up for several hours now, it would seem that you agree then.
Like I said, I didn’t read them until Saturday, and I’ve dealt with the ones I’ve seen.
But let me note that it took me about one minute to find the following comments on WUWT, which Watts must agree with 100% since they have been up for several days. In his June 4 post, “George Will: The Green Bubble Has Burst,” Watts has allowed the following comments by Adolfo Giurfa to stand since Tuesday (!) — bold-face added:
Adolfo Giurfa (13:02:22) :
Dave Middleton:Modern prosperity is largely based on our ability to generate more and more wealth per unit of energy used. Making energy more expensive will just make us less prosperous. “¦and promoting feverishly and fanatically using less energy it is plainly CRIMINAL, it is equivalent of murdering people. What is really surprising it is that “human rights” NGO’s say NOTHING about it, and it is so because their patrons and/or founders allucinate a world only inhabited only by themselves. Can you imagine a world full to the top of morons?
That’s right. If you merely advocate putting a price on global warming pollution equal to the harm it causes you are a criminal, no different than a murderer. Using the same logic as Morano and Watts do in “interpreting” the comment on my blog, this is at least an implicit threat to round us up and imprison us, if not do violence against us, since most conservatives I’ve met support the death penalty.
Since Watts hasn’t taken it down or edited it or denounced it, I’m assuming that he is in 100% agreement with it. Here’s another:
Adolfo Giurfa (13:18:54) :
mr.artday (21:04:58) :
The world’s human population has exploded in my lifetimeThere is a simple method to avoid that”¦Give to others the example!, begin with yourself, wipe yourself out of this world, then there will be ONE less inhabitant in this supposedly overcrowded earth 🙂
(Recent studies say that all human population could live and prosper in an area such as the state of Texas, without any problem).
And so I guess Watts endorses one of his readers calling for another reader to kill himself. [And no, the smiley face on the end doesn’t diminish how inappropriate this comment is. Quite the reverse. What kind of a person tells another to kill themselves and then puts a smiley face on it? What person allows such a comment to stay up for days, thereby tacitly endorsing it?]
And yes, humorless deniers, I am just trying to make a point here.
I do not endorse all the comments on my blog. I do try to read them, but sometimes when I get flooded with comments, especially overnight — I don’t see them all until the next day, and sometimes I miss a few.
One of my commenters, Creative Greenius, wrote a comment that predicted the next generation would be so angry at the deniers like Anthony Watts that they would commit a violent act. I have dealt with those comments because they were inappropriate and easily misinterpreted. He is now on permanent moderation.
I have spoken to the author and understand that he is himself a nonviolent person who was making a prediction and went too far.
I’m not going to repeat the comment. You can find it as a banner headline at the Swift boat smearer Marc Morano’s ClimateDepot, if can stomach comically unadulterated disinformation.
Morano is well known for smearing people like John Kerry and utterly misstating what real scientists say — see Scientist: “Our conclusions were misinterpreted” by Morano, CO2 “” but not the sun “” “is significantly correlated” with temperature since 1850.
[Weirdly, Morano posts a link to an earlier CP column with the headline borrowed from a quote of mine: “Joe Romm: You really can’t tell whether the whole damn website — Climate Depot — is just some sort of elaborate performance art.” Well, now we know Climate Depot is nothing more than some sort of elaborate performance art, since what is the defining characteristic of performance art than a self-referential comment on its role as performance art? I rest my case.]
So it Is it no surprise that Morano’s headline, which includes these words, “Romm’s Climate Progress features threat to skeptics!” and the opening sentence, “A comment on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog threatens physical harm to those skeptical of man-made climate fears” are utterly false. As I said, the comment was actually predicting or warning deniers about possible future harm.
Nonetheless, the comment has been dealt with. Rather then deleting it entirely I have chosen to edit it to reflect what the author was trying to say, as the TOS allows.
UPDATE: Swift boat smearer Marc Morano is now running as a banner headline a misquote from my statement below: “Climate Depot’s ‘disinformation’ to be responsible for ‘unspeakable misery and/or violence to billions of people!’ — Declares former Clinton official Romm.” But forget the misquote — it seems just plain weird that Morano is headlining this in the first place. Is he trying to puff up his role to impress his funders that someone is paying attention to his poorly trafficked website at all? Indeed, he seems equally proud of my ridiculing his website as “performance art.” Alternative explanations welcome!
Anyway, I am mostly responding here because the blogosphere lives on forever and because of the staggering hypocrisy of Watts, who allows the harshest comments to remain on his website for days. But we don’t have to make any connection between comments and Watts’ beliefs to see that he embraces the most extreme anti-scientific view, like this:
Indeed, Watts reprinted an absurd essay containing that statement with the headline and intro:
Shocker: Huffington Post carries climate realist essay
Congratulations to Harold Ambler, who frequents here in comments, for breaking the climate “glass ceiling” at HuffPo. This essay is something I thought I’d never see there. Next stop: Daily Kos? — Anthony
Yes, calling human-caused global warming the “biggest water ever sold to the public in the history of humankind” is a “climate realist” position.
Such a statement is anti-scientific and anti-science in the most extreme sense. It accuses the scientific community broadly defined of deliberate fraud — and not just the community of climate scientists, but the leading National Academies of Science around the world (including ours) and the American Geophysical Union, an organization of geophysicists that consists of more than 45,000 members and the American Meteorological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see “Yet more scientists call for deep GHG cuts”).
Such a statement accuses all of the member governments of the IPCC, including ours, of participating in that fraud, since they all sign off on the Assessment Reports word for word (see “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly”). And, of course, this statement endorsed by Watts accuses all of the leading scientific journals of being in on this fraud, since the IPCC reports are primarily a review and synthesis of the published scientific literature.
I repeat that full-time global warming disinformers, like Swift boat smearer Marc Morano and Anthony Watts, have dedicated their lives to promoting disinformation and delay whose inevitable outcome — if a large fraction of people continue to be suckered by them — is unspeakable misery and/or violence to billions of people. Their websites are the equivalent of shouting “no fire” on a burning planet. That is perhaps the most immoral thing any human being can do. Indeed, their websites and writing goes beyond that. They are are actually shouting “The firemen are liars and are trying to hurt you. Fire them.” Shame on him. Rational people have every right to be very angry with such disinformers.