The involuntary public figure. And Monckton is piling on:
I, too, can name-drop sanctimoniously, just like Michael E. Mann.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, by a politicized and now-discredited clerk in the House of Lords acting without the authority of the House, in Michael E. Mann’s Climategate emails, and on left-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to global-warming profiteers of the traffic-light tendency (the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds): groups like Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank, the Environmental Defense Fund, Munich Re, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
As the website WattsUpWithThat has frequently pointed out, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the data that now comprehensively disprove the once-accepted scientific “evidence” simply because it is inconvenient for many who are profiting from attacking fossil fuel use.
Being the focus of such attacks has a lead lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I remain reluctant embrace this role, but nevertheless I choose to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.
Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism in official quarters, in reality the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age. And storms like extra-tropical system Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the oft-precedented heat, drought, and wild-fires of last summer cannot in logic, reason, or science be attributed to “global warming” that has become conspicuous chiefly by its near-total absence over the past two decades and perhaps more. In a deterministic climate object operating on a rational world, that which has not happened cannot have caused that which has.
If we continue down this path of lavishly-funded nonsense, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet—one with more extreme Socialism, more pronounced and widespread scientific illiteracy, worse episodes of cant even than those of Michael E. Mann (if that were possible), and greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies. It will be worse than we ever thought.
My emphasis. As a commenter at JunkScience noted, that’s bumper sticker material, there.
By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age
So establishment scientists are right that CO2 emissions warm the climate, they’re just wrong about it being a bad thing?
Have you always had problems recognizing sarcasm?
No, and I don’t see any sarcasm in the quoted sentence.
So you recognition skills have just been bad for the last few years then?
No, Rand just wants to pretend that Monckton isn’t endorsing the central thesis of establishment climate scientists, which is that carbon emissions warm the climate. In that paragraph Monckton states:
1. “the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong”
2. Burning fossil fuels is “helping to stave off the mass extinctions” by saving us from an ice age
3. Recent storms can’t be blamed on global warming, because there hasn’t been recent global warming
There’s no sarcasm there, just a consistent message that we shouldn’t reduce carbon emissions, because they aren’t doing us any harm, and in fact are saving us from “mass extinctions”. But of course the only way they could be helping us avoid a new ice age is if mainstream climate scientists are right about the effect of CO2 emissions on the climate.
I am not so sure it was sarcasm but while we might be overdue for an iceage, there isn’t any scientific basis that changing human behavior will prevent it.
the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds
I am so stealing that.