On a collision course with tragedy

I’ve become convinced that we’re on a collision course, not just with devastating human impacts from climate change and peak oil, but also with acts of violence committed by the most militant and deluded of the climate change deniers. The bullying has reached astonishing levels, and as much as I would hate to see anyone on any side of this issue be physically harmed or “merely” intimidated, it’s undeniably true that intimidation is already happening and violence can’t be far off.

Consider, in no particular order:

Scientsts at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia whose e-mail was hacked received death threats.

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Bill McKibben said recently “I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: ‘Nazi Moron Scumbag.’”.

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Joe Romm documents a revolting string of e-mailed atrocities, received by climate scientists and journalists, including:

Did you want to offer your children to be brutally gang-raped and then horribly tortured before being reminded of their parents socialist beliefs and actions?

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F**k off!!!

Or you will be chased down the street with burning stakes and hung from your f**king neck, until you are dead, dead, dead!

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Your mother was a goat f**ker!!!!!! Your father was a turd!!!!!!! You will be one of the first taken out in the revolution!!!!!!!! Your head will be on a stake!! C**t!

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Mark Morano, wo is likely not a new name to readers of this site, even though I’ve very rarely, if ever, mentioned him explicitly, was explicit in his views:

Determining whether any given e-mail is part of an organized campaign is difficult, said Richard Littlemore, editor of DeSmog Blog and author of Climate Cover-up, an investigation of industry’s effort to undermine climate science.

But it’s not happenstance, he said. The bullying doesn’t start serendipitously or from scratch.

It starts with a paid campaigner – Morano; the International Climate Science Coalition’s Tom Harris; JunkScience.com publisher and Fox News commentator Steve Milloy – and filters out from there, Littlemore said.

“They’re the PR guys and they’re in the game and taking money for what they do,” he said. “They also wind up recruiting other folks (who) in many ways are just dupes and sincerely believe they’re standing up for democracy.”

“They’re people whose world view is being disrupted by climate scientists,” Littlemore added. “Sometimes they end up being the most effective and vitriolic.”

Morano, for his part, is unapologetic.

He doesn’t wish anyone harm. But he sees opportunity. “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down,” he said. “They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

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Christopher Monckton admitted calling young people who disagreed with his denial-based view of climate change “Hitler Youth”:

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Rush Limbaugh took considerable offense over something Andy Revkin of the New York Times said:

There’s commentary and then there’s hateful insanity, and nobody is blurring the line between the two better than Rush Limbaugh. On his Tuesday radio program, the shock jock compared environmentalists to jihadists willing to dispatch child suicide bombers in support of their cause. Limbaugh then accused New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin of being an “environmentalist wacko” who believes that “humanity is destroying the climate [and will] cause the extinction of life on Earth.”

“Mr. Revkin,” Limbaugh asked, “why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?”

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Glenn Beck said:

There’s not enough knives. If this, if the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred. I mean, these guys have so dishonored themselves, so dishonored scientists.

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US Senator James Inhofe wants to take a page from US history and hound climate scientists:

The US Congress’s most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists.

8Climate scientists say Senator James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body’s report or had communications with East Anglia’s climate research unit represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.

Inhofe’s document ends by naming 17 “key players” in the controversy about CRU’s stolen emails, including the Britons Phil Jones and Keith Briffa.

“I think this is like a drag net, just to try and catch everyone whose name happens to be on this list. It’s guilt by association and I thought those days were over 50 years ago,” said Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who is on the list of 17 scientists. “It looks like a McCarthyite tactic: pull in anyone who had anything to do with anyone because they happened to converse with some by email, and threaten them with criminal activity.”

Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

Rick Piltz, a former official in the US government climate science programme who now runs the Climate Science Watch website, said Inhofe and others were getting in the way of scientific work. “Scientists who are working in federal labs are being subjected to inquisitions coming from Congress,” he said. “There is no question that this is an orchestrated campaign to intimidate scientists.”

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What to make of this parade of horrors?

For a long time I’ve been one of the people saying endlessly online that the confrontation between, on one hand, scientists and lay people who know enough about the science to realize we’re in deep trouble on the climate front, and on the other hand the deniers, would only escalate as we grew closer to taking meaningful action on climate change. Even so, I was surprised by how quickly this escalation has happened and the disgusting tactics to which the deniers have resorted.

I’m not alone in underestimating this phenomenon; Michael Mann recently said:

Despite all the talk a few years ago about ‘the debate being over’…the forces of anti-scientific disinformation were just lying dormant. But they would be back. And so this didn’t surprise me at all, and in fact, I fully expected that, in advance of the Copenhagen summit, that we would see an increased number of in attacks.

I guess what we all underestimated was the degree, the depth of dishonesty, dirtiness, and cynicism to which the climate change denial movement would be willing to stoop to advance their agenda. that’s the only thing that I think surprised many of us.

One question that always arises when such tactics are exposed is, naturally enough, “Why would anyone do such terrible things?” The explanation is as simple as it is infuriating: The people responsible for these acts have become convinced that their livelihoods, their very lives, even, are threatened by some Unspeakably Evil Other. There are always such people around, people who inhabit a negative space and define themselves by what they’re against instead of what they favor. For some of them, their chosen group to put in the Evil Other box is climate scientists and those who would have us act in accordance with what the scientists say we must do to minimize the human impacts of climate change. Perception is reality, as the management axiom goes, and these people, just like those who insist President Obama isn’t a US citizen, or those who deeply believe that AIDS is not caused by HIV, will continue to act in accordance with their perception, not reality. The universe, of course, is infinitely indifferent to what any of us thinks, wants, or desires, which could be the most inconvenient truth of all.

As for my comment at the top of this post about violence–how can anyone read what’s already come to light and hold out hope that we won’t see someone so worked up the perceived threat from climate scientists and journalists and policymakers that it results in a shooting or bombing or who knows what? The militant deniers not only feed off each other on the Internet, as the above evidence and blog posts and comments too numerous to count show (making the Y2k doomer hysteria barely a dry run for the hypersonic feedback loop we’re seeing now), but they’re being funded directly or indirectly by businesses that want to keep using the environment as if it were an infinitely large open sewer, plus an entire TV network, FOX, that’s built a financial empire by pandering to the most myopic, anti-science elements in its viewers.

And please don’t try to make the argument that we shouldn’t talk about this in the hope that such restraint will make this ugliness go away or, minimally, not incite more people to push it even further. This is one of the best examples one could imagine of “sunshine being a great disinfectant”. If the deniers want to push scientists to make every last iota of their work public (and I don’t have an argument against that, even though I think it’s far from the burning issue some deniers make it out to be), then we should truly level the playing field and make everything public on all sides. Let us see which companies are paying which “experts” to campaign against public policy to curb our CO2 emissions (like Pat Michaels), and we should publish an online archive of all the hate e-mail received, including the full header on each one. This should make for quite the data mining opportunity as we all try to connect the dots.

Frankly, I don’t expect the various places that syndicate this site to use this post. The imagery and language I quoted above is “too disturbing” for the tender sensibilities of many readers, which is precisely the mechanism we have to fight–giving in to the temptation to look away and let the world distract us. Just as many teenagers need to be shocked by graphic videos of the aftermath of drunken driving accidents before they viscerally accept the truth, all the “nice people” who “don’t like politics” need to see exactly what is happening and how it could affect their lives and those of their children and grandchildren. Put more bluntly, if we succumb to the temptation to look away and thereby let these thugs intimidate climate scientists, policymakers, journalists, and others to the point where we take even less effective action than currently seems likely, then we’re just as much to blame for the ensuing increased human impacts from climate change as are the thugs.

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