Cabin fever is bringing out the best in climate believalists.

As you may know, John Ridgway and I revelled, in a recent thread, in the unravelling of a ranting and raving Steven Mosher. (Good reveries, good reveries.)

No précis could begin to do justice to the informatically-dense skirmish between the Self and the Mosh. So, with the caveat that this is nothing like what happened, this is what happened:

1. If you’re immune to Mosher’s charm offensive at the best of times, you really wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

2. Mosh hate Brad. ‘Stupid fuck’ say bad things about Naomi!

3. Naomi good to Mosh. She smell pretty.

4. Naomi not like others. She not make fun of Mosh for lifelong struggle with orthography and syntax.

5. Naomi MOSH FRIEND

In the meantime Steven has started likening me to the failed Democratic candidate, beloved clown and convicted sex-killer John Wayne Gacy.

Mosher forgets, if he ever knew, one of the rules of debating. There’s actually a downside to comparing people to psychopathic rapists and murderers just because you don’t like losing: if the simile isn’t plausible, you’re the one who comes across as a couple of islands short of an archipelago.

He might be an angry, lonely phenomenon in the Seoul hotel he’s holed up in for 14 days, but he’s not an isolated one.

In the space of hours I rubbernecked two similar incidents on the Twittobahn which seem to demonstrate that an epidemic of (demotically speaking) demented demeanour  is now endemic to the dysangelist demagogocracy. Even their demiurge Oreskes is not immune.

The first thing I noticed was that Naomi was spruiking a new book. The title is certainly a chutzpacious choice of words by an author who’s spent a career hiding her contempt for all things scientific. I can’t decide if it’s a stroke of criminal genius or she’s trying to get caught.

SO gratifying when a reviewer not only appreciates the argument of a book, but understands the whole PROJECThttps://t.co/Ln5yXhn7iB@PrincetonUPress @agent_ayesha

— NaomiOreskes (@NaomiOreskes) May 15, 2020

The book review she links to even includes this hilarious vignette of domestic strife. Let me stress that I didn’t write this shit. Any parody of persons living or dead is purely coincidental. These are not my words:

The question Naomi Oreskes poses as the title of her latest book, Why Trust Science?, is a provocative one: I know this, because after the book arrived and I laid it on the coffee table, my partner bristled silently at the sight of it, and let his indignance stew for several days before confronting me about the implications behind the question. One clearly believes in favor of science, and thus does not need to ask the question, or one is against science, and is asking the question to sow distrust and probably to promote Young Earth creationism or faith healing.

What a sweet couple. It’s always heartwarming to be reminded there’s someone for everyone, no matter how intellectually defective.

The review goes on to reveal the laughable aim of Why Trust Science?: to help you convince your neighbors “that they should get their children vaccinated, floss their teeth, and act to prevent climate change.” One problem with this to-do list springs, throbbing and unbidden, to mind. But in Oreskes’ defense you may need to be familiar with both science and ethics to notice it—which gives her at least two mitigating handicaps.

Someone called Andre replied to Naomi, and I to Andre, and Andre to me:

I don’t know who you are, don’t really care either. If you’re a climate denier and can’t be insulted out of my existence, I can think of other ways of making you disappear.

Please do us all a favour and go drown yourself. I’ll be happy to provide the water.

— Andre Sobolewski (@AndreSobolewski) May 15, 2020

In encouraging news, such encouragements were strongly discouraged by Richard Betts, a climate scientist whose displays of honor and affability have a habit of annoying my prejudices.

Andre, it’s not acceptable to tell someone else to “go drown yourself”

I’ve reported your tweet for encouraging self-harm or suicide

If your aim is to encourage society to act to stop climate change, this kind of thing does *not* help. You just destroy your own credibility.

— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) May 16, 2020

But as I mentioned, this thing goes all the way to the bottom, where the evilest believalist conceivable lies coiled in the darkness, guarding her golden hoard with napalm breath.

Willie soon alerted me to an outburst, straight from the maw of Sarlacc, that appeared to be an attempt at a burn at Willis Eschenbach’s expense:

While we’re regressing to playground polemics, let me state clearly that Professor Oreskes herself has never scraped the bottom of the barrel. She’s been far too busy clawing at the sides of the abortion bucket.

But they say you should never look a gif horse in the mouth. So I took four or five advantages of the chance to hold up a mirror to the demogorgon. For example:

I salute you, .@NaomiOreskes, for speaking up for young people everywhere. It’s YOUR generation that will ultimately pay the bill for OUR treatment of Earth.

I just hope you didn’t have to miss much school to tweet your brave, not-at-all-fallacious attack on Eschenbach. pic.twitter.com/AhXwWxc3hx

— Climate Nuremberg (@BradPKeyes) May 20, 2020

As an extremely young and good-looking person of woman, have you ever found that other pseudoscientists fail to really take you as seriously as you deserve?

For all its progress towards equality, is pseudoscience still—ultimately—a boys’ club? pic.twitter.com/fIlquceuvw

— Climate Nuremberg (@BradPKeyes) May 20, 2020

Nor was this the first time she’d stooped to the Appeal to Youth, or Argument from Argumentative Bankruptcy. Who can forget the day her impotent jealousy of Freeman Dyson boiled over in front of a live audience?

Answer: just about everyone.

So let me act, once again, in my familiar rôle as both cultural memory and collective conscience to mankind by recapitulating.

At the 2011 L.A. Book Festival, an audience member asked Oreskes why Freeman Dyson wasn’t swallowing Teh Science. If this anonyperson was hoping to embarrass Oreskes, she cunningly stole his thunder by embarrassing herself.

“It’s important to realize that he’s now, 90? 92?,” she says.

Sensing where this is going, fellow Dyson-baiter Timothy Farris tries to interrupt: “He’s very sharp…”

But Oreskes would rather miss the turnoff to the Chappaquiddick ferry than take directions from a man.

“I think it’s important,” she continues, “that, again, journalists especially need to understand, scientists are people like everybody else. They get lonely, they crave attention and especially scientists who have been very famous in their earlier period of life and I think sometimes it’s hard for them when they start to lose the limelight so I think we’ve seen that phenomenon here.”

There was nothing sarcastic about the opening sentence of this post.

I just hope that after the pandemic is over the believalists will stay every bit as frank as they are today. Guilelessness is the tribute virtue pays to vice, and their proneness to letting their N95s slip is a charming (if not redeeming) trait.

How can you stay mad at a person like Naomi or Andre who, for all their deformities of character, is an open book—or sewer?

Besides, when two grownups hate each other very much, hate speech is not only an inalienable right but a positive duty. That’s why the door to my office, online and offline, is always open. If someone wishes me ill, I want them to feel safe to say so. As any obedience trainer will tell you, even the most sociopathic Shihtzoodle is to be rewarded for yipping before it nips.

Much as I appreciated the impulse behind Professor Betts’ intervention, penalizing people like Sobolewski for being honest isn’t the solution.

Typical bloody Richard, standing up for decency 🙂
LOL
But there’s still the hard question: where such anger comes from. Even if people don’t *express* it, how did we get to a point where people *feel* things like that—towards opponents in an ostensibly scientific disagreement?

— Climate Nuremberg (@BradPKeyes) May 16, 2020