Holy Murderer’s Row, Batman! “Climate Deniers!”

In the course of doing some background research for yesterday’s decision on the winner of the first annual Power Line Green Weenie of the Year Award, I discovered that the fun people at DeSmogBlog—the folks who “broke” the story of the Heartland Institute back in February that actually turned out to be about Peter Gleick’s theft of Heartland documents—have compiled a “global warming disinformation database” of the leading “deniers”—a veritable “murderer’s row” of climate skepticism.

"I have in my hand, a list of 147 card-carrying members of the climate denial conspiracy!"

What most notable about this list the number of people on the list: 147 in all.  (And they left off several people I can think of, like Cato’s Jerry Taylor or Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry, who align themselves with the skeptic camp, or who, like “lukewarmist” Roger Pielke, get attacked by Joe Romm-bo at the Center for American Progress when they don’t recite the party line.)  But I thought we are told repeatedly that there are only a “handful” of skeptics blocking progress on climate action, apparently because of their ninja-like powers.  But even and incomplete roster of 147 starts to look like a critical mass of people rather than some tiny rump to be ignored.  It’s roughly one tenth of the membership of the UN’s climate circus.  (Sure, many of DeSmogBlog’s 147 aren’t climate scientists, but neither are a lot of the “scientists” who participate in the IPCC report process.  There probably aren’t 1,500 genuine “climate scientists” in the whole world.)

But best of all: I made the list!  Woo-hoo!  But I’m not going to give in to this obvious Green Weenie bait and give one to DeSmogBlog, especially since their write-up omits any mention of Power Line.   So much for their “thorough” research.

DeSmogBlog's "killer" chart

More seriously, the DeSmogBlog clown show disqualifies itself with its attempt to end argument by appealing to authority, in this case another “study” of the literature that finds only 24 out of nearly 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate “reject” global warming.  This is supposed to be proof?  Of what exactly?  Apparently how unserious the DeSmogBlog folks are, since virtually no so-called “climate skeptic” “rejects” global warming.  The argument is over how much global warming, first, and second, whether we want to adopt Al Gore’s solutions set to deal with it. The answer to the second question (adopting Al Gore’s solutions) is a clear No.  The answer to the first question, as any honest reader of the IPCC’s reports will know, is undetermined.  No one really believes DeSmogBlog actually read all 14,000 studies, and can characterize how they fall out on the feedback effects questions.  I’m surprised that the number of articles “rejecting” global warming isn’t zero.  But these kind of less-than-subtle nuances are lost on the climate crusaders.  Which is why they’re losing, and why they deserve to lose.  And why, so long as we have DeSmogBlog around, they’ll continue losing.  Hey—maybe they should get a Green Weenie after all.

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