Phil Plait (sic), an astronomer and climate alarmist who bizarrely states to possess The entire universe in blog form is a self confessed zombie slayer. His zombies are very scary because they take the shape of ideas of climate change denial. Because climate change deniers and their heretical ideas are born from the festering boils on Satan’s scaly backside and it is the bounden duty of the righteous to kill dissent the facts evil unbelievers.
Thus he tilts at his own personal windmill wind turbine when he attempts to slay this anti-AGW beast 0f an idea, armed only with a Warmist approved crib sheet and a small group of sycophants acolytes.
As someone who speaks out against those who deny climate change…
But he doesn’t mean climate change, does he. He means Anthropogenic Global Warming. Only an imbecile denies the existence of climate change. AGW sceptics don’t deny climate change. They do, however, question the extent to which human activity affects the climate. And that gets right up Phil’s nose.
…again…
Oh, those wacky professional climate change deniers! Once again, they’ve banded together a passel of people, 90 percent of whom aren’t even climatologists…
Clearly Phil doesn’t do irony well. Or perhaps understand it either since he’s an astronomer and not a climatologist. He obligingly supplies a link to the offending document but doesn’t go quite so far as to pointing out which parts of the nearly fact free opinion piece are bilge and which parts are nonsense. Or, for that matter, which fact or facts he considers to be correct. Given his in-your-face, post normal science credentials I’m assuming the facts he’s happy with are the very facts under dispute by the signatories. After all, who wants to read about the claims of that international relations and public administration guru august scientist, Ban Ki-Moon, a world renown climatologist, being being brought into disrepute by all those upstart physicists, chemists, geologists, engineers and meteorologists?
And then there is that pesky “cherry-picked” graph that David Rose, a Daily Mail journalist, used to demonstrate the ongoing lack of warming that came to a halt in 1997.
The first graph clearly incenses Phil. Not because the data is wrong, which it isn’t, but because it begins in 1997. You see it is difficult to put a nice, straight, upwardly trending line through truncated data that clearly shows a flat line. So Phil helpfully supplies a second graph, one whose plotted data begins somewhere in the mid seventies, so he can draw his neat, upwardly mobile line.
But wait. Didn’t the previous cool period end sometime in the mid seventies? You know, the same cool period that had climatology Cassandras predicting an imminent ice age? Wouldn’t the exclusion of that data give the false impression that the climate was warming prior to the vague starting date of Phil’s preferred graph? Did he think no one would notice his own cherry-picking?
…and again…
Ah, yes. Hot from the University of Consensus, Not Facts. It seems that I am forced to repeat myself so here goes.
Fact: CAGW sceptics do not deny the reality existence of global warming.
Fact: CAGW sceptics do not deny that man does alter the climate in a certain way, albeit in a mostly localised way (UHI, agriculture, pastoralism etc) and has done for thousands of years. It is interesting that Phil uses the word reality rather than existence because clearly his reality does not inhabit the realm of real world data. Even his own alarmist side has finally acknowledged that global surface temperature stopped rising sixteen years ago. Phil desperately needs to keep up to speed on the recent developments otherwise he could end up sounding like a fool.
Uh oh. Too late.
…and again…
Apparently a burning issue within the alarmist camp Phil’s reality is who labelled what.
Seriously…
…and again….
Carbon dioxide is eeeeeeevil! And Mariana Ashley agrees.
Mariana Who?
Oh, that Mariana Ashley.
Mariana Ashley is a freelance blogger who primarily writes about how online education and technology are transforming academia as we know it. Having spent a good portion of her professional career trying to reform high schools in East St. Louis, Mariana is particularly interested in how online colleges in Missouri make higher education a possibility for students of all backgrounds.
I see she’s very shy about touting her degree in climatology. Or Phil is a shameless hypocrite.
I knew exactly what Marshall Shepherd, the 2013 president of the American Meteorological Society, meant the moment he talked about having to slay the “zombie theories of climate science.
Strangely enough AGW sceptics have the same problem. As for zombie slaying, it seems that Marshall received the idea first. Phil borrowed his slayership from Marshall just like he’s borrowed the rest of his warmist mantra from fellow alarmists. I have yet to encounter an original idea in Phil’s posts. All his arguments are from discredited, climate groupthink authority.
These are ideas that cannot be killed, no matter how thoroughly they are debunked. They always rise to shamble again, reanimated by the deniosphere.
Yes, the idea that honest data and falsifiable empirical evidence trumps climate modelling and name-calling does have that peculiar undead quality. It simply refuses to lie down and die in the face of stupidity.
The Hockey Stick is broken.
True.
…the world hasn’t warmed in 16 years…
Also true.
Antarctic ice is growing.
At a rapid rate.
These ideas are all wrong, demonstrably so, but they are still walking the countryside, looking to eat innocent people’s brains.
These facts are all correct, demonstrably so. Even the most senior of warmists have conceded that warming has ceased. They are all deniers now. Except Phil and his cheerleaders of course.
The only way to slay these undead specters is to keep hammering them, repeating the facts, getting the word out there, and making the message palatable to the folks who may not have all the information they need to make an informed decision on global warming.
Phil’s problem is that people are discovering the information they need to make an informed decision on global warming. Unfortunately for Phil it isn’t the right kind of information. Hysteria and alarmism tend not to make any kind of message palatable especially when it is becoming increasingly expensive to keep warm in winter. I award Phil an F for his communication skills.
Which brings us back to Shepherd. He gave a great TEDxAtlanta talk where he takes on the teeming mass of climate change denial zombie ideas.
The science has moved on, even for the warmists. Watch the video and decide for yourselves which side owns the teeming mass of climate change zombie ideas.
I love this guy. He’s reasoned, genial, and calm.
A veritable paragon of warmist virtue, I’m sure.
My favorite part was at 11:34 into his talk, when he says weather is your mood, but climate is your personality.
Which is as meaningless as saying weather is your toast but climate is a full English breakfast. But hey, Phil was impressed so you should be too.
This one is important because the deniers love to say, “what global warming?” every time it snows. Incredibly, though, this type of claim seems to work; people tend to believe more in global warming after a hot summer and less after it’s cold. Slaying that particular zombie would go a long way toward more folks accepting that global warming is real.
Yes, how silly of people to point out the bleeding obvious mistake summer and winter for regular seasons rather than what they really are; runaway global warming.
Tied to this is the idea that we can’t be certain what the future holds. Climate models aren’t perfect, so we can’t be 100 percent sure how much the world is warming.
Because the climate models predicted more snow, not less. They predicted that temperature is not driven by increasing levels of atmospheric CO2. And they also predicted the ongoing sixteen year halt in warming. Except no, they didn’t predict any of those things. They can’t even simulate past climate. We might be able to guess what the future holds but in truth we have no idea really. Nor do climate models. The only certainty is uncertainty and guesswork. You’d think that Phil would understand that.
However, when it comes to knowing that climate change is real and we’re in for trouble, the models are already good enough.
Hardly.
The hockey-stick graph is quite real and has withstood years of slings and arrows flung at it by the deniers.
Right up until the moment it was defenestrated by the corrupt and biased UN IPCC for being too embarrassingly wrong for even it to stomach.
And in fact the models are getting better all the time; it’s getting hotter, and in the next few decades we’re in for a hell of a time.
The only thing getting hotter is Phil’s warmist fever.
We need to be doing something about this, and now.
Think of the cheeeeldren!
We need to be investigating nonfossil fuel energy sources far more, really leaning in on finding more efficient uses of the fossil fuels we do have to use, and legislating ways of making sure there are incentives for people and companies to do so.
Using fossil fuels more efficiently will benefit everyone. Making them unaffordable in order to fund unreliable renewable energy that needs fossil fuel back-up is insane. State “incentives” to replace reliable fossil fuels with hideously expensive and inadequate green energy is killing people and industry. Bad idea. Very bad idea.
But instead we have to waste our time fighting the horde of zombie denials and trying to be heard above the well-funded and very loud groups who rely on distraction and false doubt to spread their viral ideas. This is the zombie apocalypse, and, unfortunately, it’s all too real.
And Phil calls himself a scientist…
