Peter Gleick, over at Circle of Blue (a site I highly recommend, by the way), shines a bright light on yet another example of classy denier behavior:
Here is the second best argument used by deniers against global warming, (but edited for children) from a message received by a colleague of mine:
Mr. xxx, this is John Q. Public out here. Perhaps you don’t understand there’s no such thing as man-made global warming. I don’t care if you call it f!@%$#%@ing climate change, I don’t f!@%$#%@ing care what you call it. The same thing you communists tried in the 1970s. I’ve got a f!@%$#%@ing 75 articles from Newsweek Magazine stating we were making the earth freeze to death and we would have to melt the f!@%$#%@ing ice caps to save the earth. You, sir, and your colleagues, are progressive communists attempting to destroy America…Your f!@%$#%@ing agenda-driven, money-f!@%$#%@ing grabbing paws and understand there’s no such thing as global warming, you f!@%$#%@ing idiot and your f!@%$#%@ing colleagues.”
Nice, eh? Unfortunately, lots of climate scientists get emails and other messages like this. Note the careful reasoning? The persuasive and logical nature of the debate? The reference to the best scientific evidence from 1970 Newsweek magazines? Very compelling arguments, yes?
Scientists are used to debating facts with each other, with the best evidence and theory winning. Well, this is a bar fight, where the facts are irrelevant, and apparently, the rules and tools of science are too. But who wins bar fights? As the Simpsons cartoon so brilliantly showed, bullies. Not always the guy who is right.
It’s long past time someone with the proper contacts among scientists started a repository for these acts of thuggery, and not just the ones that contain threats of violence and death, to help authorities investigate such incidents.
I think the miscreants who do such things deserve all the public attention we can give them, and it might be the only way to prevent this from escalating to actual physical attacks.
Why even bother to give such obvious cranial vacancy a mensh? You give them the oxygen of publicity by reacting.
Simple: If we don’t shine a light on them, they’ll continue to intimidate scientists with impunity. If we do what we can to expose them, then the whole world will get to see how ugly they are, as a group, and hopefully expose some individuals to being prosecuted in those cases where they’re breaking laws.
The deniers scream until they’re blue in the face about wanting absolutely every little detail of everything scientists do to be public, so I think we should apply the same set of rules to them. We should expose all the people sending hate mail, and make sure everyone knows which of their spokespeople are being paid how much by which think tanks and corporations. After all, fair is fair, right?
Agreed.