The ever-expanding definition of “climate denial.”
These sorts of attacks, supported by multiple layers of links that never actually materially support the claims that are being made, used to be the domain of a small set of marginal activists and blogs. Atkin herself cut her teeth at Climate Progress, where her colleague Joe Romm has spent over a decade turning ad hominem into a form of toxic performance art.2
But today, these misrepresentations are served up in glossy, big-budget magazines. Climate denial has morphed, in the eyes of the climate movement, and their handmaidens in the media, into denial of green policy preferences, not climate science.
…More broadly, the expansion of the use of denier by both activists and journalists in the climate debate, a word once reserved only for Holocaust denial, mirrors a contemporary political moment in which all opposing viewpoints, whether in the eyes of the alt-right or the climate left, are increasingly viewed as illegitimate. The norms that once assured that our free press would also be a fair press have deeply eroded. Balanced reporting and fair attribution have become road kill in a world where all the incentives for both reporters and their editors are to serve up red meat for their highly segmented and polarized readerships, a dynamic that both reflects and feeds the broader polarization in our polity. It is a development that does not bode well for pluralism or democracy.
Yup.
[Update Wednesday afternoon]
Related thoughts on the Brett Stephens brouhaha: How to lose friends and alienate people.
[Bumped]
For over a decade, we’ve argued that climate change was real, carried the risk of catastrophic impacts, and merited strong global action to mitigate carbon emissions. We have supported a tax on carbon, the Paris Agreement, and the Clean Power Plan…
So they were supposedly on the side of good, which turns out to be no defense for what happens when your Stakhanovite friends see you stop clapping for Dear Leader too soon.
It’s really hard to work up sympathy for any of these people, who said nothing, and in some cases, provided encouragement and support, until they became targets.
These are also the same people who’ve been providing similar passive support to the “Occupy”, “BLM”, “Resistance” and “Antifa” brownshirts, and are going to be just as bewildered when those people turn on them.
It’s really hard to work up sympathy for any of these people, who said nothing, and in some cases, provided encouragement and support, until they became targets.
OTOH, having the climate change revolution people turning on their allies long before they have seized power is a promising sign. One doesn’t need sympathy to see a promising improvement in such backstabbing and squabbling.
I doubt they “asked for it”. They probably required a clarification of the legislation but I doubt the they required this particular taxation scheme.
Correlation is not causation. OTOH, correlation is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for causation. Sooo
1. The curve for weight gain is anti-correlated with the cessation of individual smoking.
2. I submit on anecdotal evidence that the curve for using the endorphin hit from internet outrage as a drug is also anti-correlated with the cessation of individual smoking. (and the internet)
A New York Times article on dangerous dust storms in China
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/asia/dust-storms-northern-china-beijing.html?_r=0
attributes the problem “to the rapid urbanization of northern China, deforestation and climate change. ”
If I suggest that “urbanization and deforestation” would remain as problems even if international treaties mandated: “a tax on carbon [dioxide presumably], the Paris Agreement, and the Clean Power Plan” –suggesting that “climate change” and “carbon” are NOT the only problems affecting the ecology; perhaps not even the biggest problems; does that make me a denier?
“Obama Uses Private Jet, 14 Car Convoy to Get to European Climate Change Speech”
As Glenn says:
I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people screaming it’s a crisis behave as if it’s a crisis.
You’re not following the rule… it’s only wrong when the ‘wrong’ people do it.
Without shame we’ve crossed a tipping point. It only gets worse.
“This use of “climate denial” might come as a surprise to readers, like me, who thought that the climate denialist label was reserved for those who believe climate change is “an ingenious plan to exert government control over everything we do,””
“Atkin, following climate scientist Michael Mann, wants to expand the denialist definition beyond those who don’t accept the reality of a warming planet to those who “deny” the need for anything but the most aggressive approach to climate mitigation. ”
And what would the most aggressive approach to climate (change) mitigation be? Gee, I wonder why anyone who takes Mann and Atkin at their word would suspect that the real goal is government control over everything we do.
Even the author at the second link is deep into the magical thinking by assuming any warming has to be catastrophic to Earth and humanity.
It is not enough to agree, you have to meet the enthusiasm threshold, just like a cult.
It is a religion to them; having removed God from polite discourse, they’ve decided to worship Gaia. And woe to apostates and deniers of their One Truth: that Four Legs are Good, and Two Legs are Bad! Amusingly, though every one of them has the power to remove at least two legs from the equation, they only seem eager to remove the legs that don’t belong to them.
Four legs are good unless you’re a cow producing heat-trapping methane… 😉