'Rogue Boomers' : Running our world ; ruining our planet

When one thinks of Rogue Boomers, one immediately thinks of people like prime ministers Stephen Harper (born 1959) and Tony Abbott (born 1957) --- and not just because they are currently leading the charge (from the rear) against doing anything substantial about man-made climate disaster.

Rather it is something so unexpected about the vivid contrast between their still-baby faces and their totally Old School ways of thinking that humans can control the natural world - thinking we'd might expect more from their grandfathers, let alone their fathers.

Yes, those I call Noir's Children , the most vocal (and regrettably the smallest) segment of the Boomer kids got it, successfully absorbed the dire lessons (on all sides) from WWII , and adjusted their thinking.

But the Rogue Boomers ( the silent majority of my Boomer generation) carried right on as if nothing had changed, still believing in the simplistic old pre-war ways , despite Science (reluctantly) revealing an ever more complicated world.

It was as if they were to be frozen in aspic, forever locked into a time warp with the first generation of comic book super heroes.

Entombed forever within WWII's golden age of superheroes, superpowers, super-weapons and super-easy solutions to controlling unpleasant reality....

Silent Majority Boomers - not their parents - running (and ruining) this planet

I've changed my thinking - at least a little.

The unacknowledged divisions within the Boomer Generation

I still believe that the most extreme and the most vocal supporters of climate change denial are older people - men mostly - in their eighties - people who were teenagers at the very apogee of Modernity and who thus naturally find it hardest to change ingrained habits.

Rupert Murdoch is a prime example of this sort of 'changed reality'  denier.

But Murdoch and his generation aren't running and ruining this world - at least not officially.

My generation - the Boomers - is.

Deniers NEVER deny problems - merely deny that they can't be as easily solved as Superman jumps over buildings...

Take human-originated baneful climate change : climate deniers don't deny that it could exist, merely that if and when it emerges, it will be a quick job for Batman , Spiderman or Captain America to clear up.

Nobody who makes a living solving problems (and let's see , that includes all politicians, all business people, all experts & professionals, all generals, church leaders, on and on) ever denies that problems (their very bread and butter) don't exist.

Far from it -- they are far more likely to see problems where none exist (widespread satanic cults eating our babies anyone ?) or over-exaggerate those that do exist (just as police chiefs always seem to see a growing crime wave just before proposed budget cuts.)

The only thing that most deny is the problems can't be solved or solved relatively easily.

The subterranean sewers of DARK MONEY killing our future

A long awaited peer-reviewed study out of Philadelphia's Dexel University by professor Robert Brulle tells an incredibly complex story about the largely secret way the rich and the elderly are working to destroy the world.

A world they simultaneously claim they wish to leave to their grandchildren...and to our grandchildren.

The old school of social Darwinists, those active in Henry Dawson's era, loudly and proudly proclaimed their merciless world vision of bulk and greed.

But my era's school of social Darwinists will only proclaim their faith sotto voce --- and even then largely in secret.

 They clearly fear the disapproval of someone - perhaps maybe their own dear grandchildren ?

Since this is Christmas Day, I might be permitted to tell you, just once, why I believe in a merciful Christ. 

I do , because that belief also allows me to believe in a merciless eternal Hell ---- and that some people are on Earth are going there.....

even DENIERS can govern well in abundant times , but ...

... when the available per capita resources get small, look to the small to govern best.

Former and soon-to-be-former PMs Howard and Harper are in the news again this week , charged with leading a renewed "war on science" (so called) but I doth protest - again.

These two, and their ilk, love science : Production science.

The science of dig it up, tear it up and burn it up.

The science of greed. Their science is so bright, you gotta wear shades.

The science they do hate is the science of second-guessing, of naysayers, of the cautious and the skeptical.

Impact science.

Canadian-born sociologist Alan Schnailberg's  seminal 1980 division of science into these two branches should be the foundational mother's milk of every Green intellectual wannabe - but sadly ( Elizabeth ??!! ) it doesn't .

Impact science denies ( OMG, he used the D-word !) the world's resources are infinite and it denies that the world's capabilities to be a toxic garbage dump are infinite.

The DENIERS merely deny the denial ; deny there are any limits to Man's god-like powers over nature and reality.

They deny the claim that we will never ever be able to replicate our Earth-like experience at a mass-level on any planet but this one.

The DENIERS have had a good run of it - with a planet this rich and the past population of humans so small and so technologically simple, they couldn't miss.

But now we are hitting the wall and their political parties and intellectual leaders are running out of moral authority and intellectual gas.

With three varieties of DENIER parties offering to form your next government, what can any fully-visioned voter do - besides cry in despair ?

Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...

To Stars..or LONDON

A whole lot of Denier-Watchers themselves deny that DENIERS even have have "a science" - mostly because they insist that deniers deny and disbelieve the basic tenets of "Science".


Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!

Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"

Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .

Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)

Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)

Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.

My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider  starting up efforts to stop them as well.....

Extreme optimism leads , inevitably, to extreme Paranoia : it sounds counterintuitive but its true

Optimistic Paranoia

If you think reality and the Natural World is far too simple and far too benign to pose much of a threat to Modern Man and you have lost your belief in the possibility of Divine (or Devilish) Acts of Providential Intervention, how do you account for why even simple things can go wrong with no obvious signs of intervention ?


You are left to blame it on other humans, usually working in huge, well organized, highly invisible secular conspiracies --- which is why there are no signs of their intervention.

But if you claim you are very religious, as most "optimistic paranoids" do, why not credit this to God or the Devil and their minions : isn't doing invisible things in mysterious ways supposed to be in their very un-Earthly nature?

And don't most religions also teach us that Man is fallible and imperfect - not at all the sort of being capable of pulling off huge conspiracies -- or in keeping his mouth shut if he did ?

Those who are extreme optimists about controlling Nature, (aka DENIERS of any limits on Man's abilities), in practise also act as if they disbelieve God or the Devil can interfere in human activities.

As a result they are left in the position of those Victorians who lost their traditional explanation crediting God or Nature for their strong sense of the Sublime and had to find new explanations to account for it : most opting for the new Technological Sublime, in many scholars' view.

DENIERS all believe in the Technological Sublime in spades, in the technical fix for what ever small, temporary, local, problems Nature or Man can throw our way.

Extreme optimism about Man controlling Nature leads to extreme paranoia about Man controlled by other men - acting in secret conspiracies....

But that isn't enough : for mixed in with the "awe" of the traditional sense of the Sublime, is also a healthy dollop of "fear".

Free floating fear - nationalistic,ethnic, whatever - really grew up along with the new age of Scientism , being in fact a product of it.

For if we no longer find it easy to fear the dark, the tiger or the Devil, we now must fear being overrun by the Yellow Peril or the Socialist Hordes or the Jewish Banksters instead......

PQ posts SMALLEST PLURALITY EVER for a full-slate Canadian government

smallest plurality EVER !

The PQ set a new record low (31.9%) for the winning government party in Canada on Tuesday - maybe a new low anywhere and anytime in a "first past the post" electoral system.

 (Yes the previous record holder was the provincial Liberals in BC in 1924 (31.3%).

 But as my former Professor Murray Beck was often at pains to point out about "the good old days", many times the major parties chose not to run a full slate and let a nominally "independent" Liberal or Conservative candidate run instead - a independent who soon supported their party once again,  after the election.

 In this case, the true Liberal popular vote , at the first meeting of the legislature,  was a point or two bigger than that of the PQ in 2012).

Impact on Climate Wars at election time ?

Partisanship this loose and fluid gives both sides hope in the ongoing climate wars : because the positions on the question "is the climate changing due to human activity ?" can no longer be resolved by simply counting the party with the most heads in a stable two party situation.

Politics is now very competitive in Canada with no party counting on more than a handful of their faithful to actually remain "faithful" through thick and thin.

The pro global warming vote going solid for one party could spell doom for the smaller but - until now - much more concentrated "climate denier vote"....

Blame OSSIAN, not Obama, for why American Skeptics deny Climate Change

Ossian, godfather of CLIMATE CHANGE !

Ossian ?!  A fake bard from 250 years ago ? What on earth , heaven and the multi-varient Universe does he have to with denying Global Warming  - you're barmy !

Ossian , son of Fingal, is albeit inadvertently , the only-begetter of the hatred thrown up against the revolutionary changes he directly brought in and against the general idea (that he also brought in) that things are always changing and always changing in unpredictable ways.

In this case the hatred is against climate change, but worry not, in time this eternal fear of un-certitudes and against the greys of reality will move on to new targets.

Ossian - if you still remember anything from high school or university  -is that 1760s fake creation from the otherwise-obscure James MacPherson that is generally agreed to have sparked the reaction against 18th century Classicalism that we now call 19th Century Romanticism.

If you were only half listening to your teachers you do recall the terms but deflate them to only referring to literature and , maybe, the visual arts.

Wrong, wrong, wrong !

They were not "just" art movements or even - slightly bigger - "political ideologies".

They were the ultimate biggies : all encompassing worldviews held - in their day - by most anybody who was anybody as just common sense, pure and simple.

Hegemonic hegemonies, in other words.

But then, by the 1850s, Romanticism lost much of its short lived hegemony and a highly self-conscious opposing movement emerged (counter-romanticism/pro-classicalism) and was called - by its critics - Late Victorian Scientism.

But it had to share the stage with Romanticism which had by then lost its self-conscious 'movement' nature and merged into simple common sense.

Today most all of us hold bits and pieces of both Romanticism and its Scientism critics inside of us, all in a glorious muddle.

Where we all differ - and all 7 billion of us do differ - is in the proportions of these two we hold inside us as the basis for all our other beliefs.

To Deny is to be anti-Romanticism

Deniers - it is fair to say - are highly un-Romantic , highly pro-Scientism , not withstanding their attacks on today's living, practising, scientists.

The rapid and rabid popularity of MacPherson's "beautiful poetic forgery" across all of Europe, alarming the powers-to-be everywhere.

Hard to imagine poetry doing that today - but think of alarms over Rap lyrics or the reaction against Pussy Riot, to see we scribblers still have the potential to alarm our barely-literate superiors every time we put pen to paper.

Ossian's poetry emerged in the extreme North West of Europe - as far away as possible from Europe's civilized roots in the extreme South East of the continent - Greece and Italy.

Add to this geographic affront to good taste and breeding , was the fact that this was the work not of Greek aristocrats with education and breeding , but of untutored peasants, living in dire poverty under harsh - not azure blue - skies.

Worst of all, the young everywhere - particularly those with the most education and breeding - loved the stuff , tossing aside their millennium old classic texts with disdain.

This Ossian stuff - they said - was the work of pure genius - pure untutored genius !

Genius - then being using for the first time in our modern day sense of the word, was bad enough.

But its association with untutoredness - no,  more than that - its association only with untutoredness, was literally Revolutionary, in the widest sense of that over used term.

For this poetry literally revolved - flipped - all previous values on their heads : day was now night, black was now white.

Rude, untutored, uneducated, genius (aka street smarts or native intelligence) was now set ahead of highly (highly expensively) educated people from old families of good breeding and manners.

Think of the same situation today - for very little has changed , at least on the untutored side.

When almost everybody today has to have a certificate of some sort to make a living (even ditch diggers need their heavy equipment operating papers ), some people still get fabulously rich, important and admired, without any sort of certificate.

They even make a point of flaunting their relative lack of professional education or institutional accreditation to account for their success.

They are the same people that arose to threat classicalism and the aristocracy in Ossian's day: entrepreneurs, inventors, writers and entertainers/artists.

Who hasn't seen one's friends, people with too much money and not enough self-honesty, sending their lazy dolts of children off to get highly expensive education to obtain a MBA,PhD, MA in creative writing, BJ or MFA because the kid - when pushed - pretends to a faint interest in 'doing' that sort of thing for a living.

From expensive pre-school, to expensive post doc living expenses subsidies, with expensive educational toys,summer camps, tutors and educational trips to Europe in between, modern parents spent a million 2012 dollars to give their kid 25 years of the best possible education of the old breeding and Grand Tours sort.

The only change is that starting in the 1850s, the need to know the classics to be considered a highly educated part of the natural aristocracy was gradually replaced by a need to know some form of science - say hard like chemistry or soft like economics.

Their kids now know everything that is already known about the past and present of their chosen field: and is not the past and present, a la Charles Lyell , a reliable guide to the future ?

(In reality, all this is really just a way to avoid heavy inheritance taxes on your death, by spending as much of it as possible - now - on your kids' education. You are hoping to ensure the family's wealth and influence moves forward in time via education rather than by inheritances.)

Today's professionals are yesterday's classical aristocracy in a new guise

These are the "heavily-tutored competent". Aka the professionals.

(For I think you could fairly abstract the whole point of this post as me claiming that yesterday's aristocracy: classicalism: professionalism: today's aristocracy.)

But then some uneducated immigrant with chutzpah and drive blasts well past your precious kid's MBA or a tiny garage and an lone inventor discovers what a university full of PhDs like your son could not, or a street kid's painting, writings or comic turn makes her a famous personality while your daughter puts her MFA to work teaching uncaring high school kids in some small city in the Mid West.

Those fracking, fracking, damn untutored geniuses - it just isn't fair !

These guys know nothing of the present or the past - thus leaving them open to make lots of mistakes - and to discover the future.

Bruce Springsteen, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson : all have recently blasted well past kids with 25 expensive years of good education.

They represent as much unplanned, unpredicted, uncertain, mercurial change as Ossian did yesterday or the Climate will for tomorrow - and they are all equally hated by well educated professional deniers cum competent nobodies * of every generation.....

* Our think tanks are just filled with the well breed well educated second rates of this world : little wonder they envy the sudden rises of those superstars of academia the climate scientist.

The reason climate skeptic MUST see conspiracies everywhere

Tin Hats against CLIMATE CHANGE

There is a reason why all climate skeptic wear tin foil hats.

Suppose you are a DENIER cum SKEPTIC and your honest scientific beliefs teach you that wrenching changes in the Natural World are literally *impossible* and that only moderate oscillations up and down around an eternal norm are possible .

That is, you un-skeptically believe in the sort of self-flattering-to-humanity type of science that is still taught in our High Schools.

Then you must account , if only in your own mind, for why hundreds of millions of other, decent, honest, ordinary people seem so convinced that the climate is drastically and maybe even permanently changing.

To deniers, the only possible rational reason is that these decent honest people have been conned by a conspiracy, with either profit or domination the co-consprators’ true ultimate aim.

We WARMISTS must equally ask ourselves why so many ordinary people on the other side believe so readily in conspiracy wackiness – unless their scientific beliefs have left them with no alternative explanation……

Hubris vs Science : tired of denying the Holocaust and Climate Change - why not deny DNA , ego-prone Republican DAs do it all the time

DNA-DENYING DAs

Whenever hard facts hit the swollen egos of non-endowed males, guess what always loses ?


Yep, the truth . But when swollen ego denies DNA and innocent men fry, its way beyond a laughing matter about "Truth is from Venus and Egos are from Mars."

The Chair is warmism going too far.

Why can't some men just can never admit they are wrong and say they are sorry ? Poor toilet training ? Dropped on their head while a mere child ? Forced to eat all their peas - or spinach ? Whatever.

No surprise to find that some of the worst offenders are Republicans, who spend their off hours away from denying DNA t denying climate science.

Why do Republicans hate Science so ? Do your think Chris Mooney is on the money about the reason for their animus against logic, reason and rationality ?

I cam across this story off of BYLINER and Conor Friedersdoff's list of "The Top 101 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories of the Year" .

Deep digging keeps some papers alive...

A deep,deep story on "DNA-Denying-DAs" by the NY TIMES's Andrew Martin .

Read it and weep. And rage.

With deep-digging stories like these, newspapers aren't dead yet - even if the Halifax METRO is......

With sterling rhetoric, Sterling T Perkins calls for an END to rhetoric on Climate Change ...

Bombast Central

With friends like Mr Perkins, the case for Climate Change need hardly fear enemies.

We do need more action to reduce disastrous climate changes, but which actions to choose out of a cornucopia of choices ?

 Is it precisely here where more , not less  - and sharper, not softer - rhetoric is needed : to make the differences between those various choices more apparent for all of us to better decide.

Truly nothing is windier, nothing more cliched,  than newspaper opinion pages and opinion page writers getting up on their tiny hind legs to decry rhetoric --- in highly rhetorical language.

Rhetoric is the lifeblood of social, co-operating, beings

I am one who holds that even truly private diaries intended only for the eyes of the writer are filled with rhetoric (a subtle form of whistling your way past a graveyard ?) - as are most business accounting records.

Most students of rhetoric feel the same way - to judge by current research articles.

Humans are highly rhetorical beings - social, co-operating, beings -and it is time that both The Montreal Gazette and my fellow political science enthusiast Sterling Perkins accepted that fact.....

Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable

heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes

"The climate can't be changing - it just can't," all the blue rinsed ladies cry. "Its not fair - everything in life is changing - and now the climate - it just isn't fair !"

After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.

Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.

Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.

Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.

Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.

Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.

In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE

Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.

As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.

Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.

And  modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.

Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science  : the new young whippersnappers.

Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.

Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.

Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.

The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.

The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.

The deniers'  Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.

Shat happens : suck it up....

"Wake Up Call Channel 2" is absolutely certain about everything , including today's JEWISH conspiracy

We Are Strange , Austin

Abstract : "David de Rothschild  & the Global Warming Hoax" : this brief video is the most insightful autobiography I have ever had to endure.

VIDEO REVIEW : Reading a scientific article can be very frustrating : the authors seem to be so,so cautious about asserting that anything can be known for absolute certainty.

I mean, I know that reality is actually like that : as uncertain as the weather is three days from now - but do we really want to have to read or listen to all that uncertainty in our off-hours ?

Why not just grab a beer and a sofa and wallow in ten free minutes of absolutely 100 % total certainties.

Relax, turn off your brain : you are about to enter a Certitude-Only Zone....

But. But if you are skeptical of easy answers, if you historian-oriented (as I am) it is in fact very very hard indeed to have to listen to conspiracy theorists.

These dudes are just so certain about everything and anything : non-stop certitudes delivered smoothly, slickly, at about one every five seconds - for 10 interminable minutes.

As autobiography,  Wake Up Call Channel 2's YouTube video on David de Rothschild's supposed plot to take over the world for the Jews via the Global Warming "scam", is a fascinating CAT SCAN through the hyper-active neurons and  synapses of a world-class world-conspiracy-freak .

I am referring to the fellow who wrote it and probably narrated it (at breakneck speed).

I mean, as a super bookworm and over my long life, I have probably read more words than the population of China has had hot dinners, but Thank God, I don't remember much of it.

I mean, I do believe it all did enter my brain cells, but most of it did not stay long and it certainly did not all connect up in one big ball of wax.

My brain - like your brain - is wired imperfectly, perhaps by kindly divine design.

I do not lie awake nights, unable to sleep as all my neurons and synapses connect to each other , finding connections between anything and everything I ever read or saw or smelt or touched or tasted.

I don't know how it happened that my brain cells don't do that : perhaps unfortunately my mother choose not to drink , smoke or have sex with strange men during my pregnancy, I don't know.

"The snatchers have taken over our fluoridated water, and now our watermelons : our bodies are next..." ---- James Delingpole, fabulist

But some of us are blessed with a sixth sense : an uncanny ability to see connections under beds, in the fluoridated water, through the radio, inside watermelons (!) : whatever.

And they are now leading the denier-charge to prevent us being enslaved by a Jewish environmentalist conspiracy to use some easily-faked signs of global warming (Greenland ice cap and mid-west corn fields) to trick us into giving our rights to own guns and cheat on our taxes.

Don't let THEM do it to us . (Cue the Fifties cheesy SF movie music.)

Go now children -run !!!! -  and scream it from car to car :

 "They're here , already ! " "You're next !" "You're next !"

Come on ,Deniers, learn from the best : the sleazy tactics of GG Simpson, the world's best known continential drift DENIER

Climate deniers are already pretty good at presenting nonsense arguments in science to deny the existence of human-cause climate change ----- but they can always do better.

One of the best of the old school deniers at slashing and smearing opponents was the world-famous paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson , one of the eternal deities of the "Darwinian Heaven".

One of the most effective torpedoes ever aimed at the idea of continental drift was Simpson's 1943 claim that he had studied the evolution and spread of the mammals better than anyone else and that evidence showed no sign of  continental drift.

Wegener was long dead by then so he couldn't defend his thesis - but his chief supporter, South African Alexander Du Toit, tried his best.

Tried, by agreeing wholeheartedly with Simpson's claim.

Agreeing wholeheartedly and then asking "and your point is ??"

He agreed because he showed that both opponents and supporters of continental drift had long ago agreed that mammals only emerged after the last major drifting apart of today's continents , so they offered no proof one way or another about events before their emergence.

I've said it before : the best work Naomi Oreskes ever did about climate change denying was her earlier, lesser known, work on continental drift deniers. I am willing to bet my farm that many geologists were involved in both : both equally wrong.

Consistent in their wrongness, if in nothing else !

GG Simpson was a past-master at bogus arguments to destroy his opponents

Simpson had put up a totally bogus argument, in other words,  in one peer-reviewed prominent journal in one field of science, to smear a scientist in another field.

Now Fred Singer and his ilk might "point with pride" to their unequalled ability to smear other scientists by illogical scientific arguments but are they truly worthy of this bold claim to scientific infamy ?

Come on Freddie : pull up your socks, learn from the best, er, worst : GG Simpson ,past-master of sleeze....

Andrew Bolt as the A J Jacobs of denier authors

A. J. Jacobs used to be well known for a series of  very funny and informative books about his year-long experiments in extreme activities - but that fame is soooooo over.

Now he know globally as the King of the Blurbs  - though that title might well be challenged by his fellow mass-blurbers Malcolm Gladwell and Gary Shteyngart.

His "coming-out" article on his blurbing other life is inside The New York Times' paywall and is very funny indeed.

For me, Jacobs' radio interviews on the article are mostly notable for his uncanny ability to hit all - all - of the highlights of the article in 220 seconds or less : a real pro.

He sets a very high mark for the denier crew (people like Andrew Bolt) to set themselves against,  but they do seem to be up for the challenge.

Air-kissingly gushy blurbs "de rigueur" for denier authors

 Just as fictional authors have long created their own echo-chamber where authors agree to gush over each other's latest novel ; so too deniers blurb each other's book and blog with novelist-like abandon.

After all, don't both groups deal strictly in fictional works ?

Darling, who would have ever thought that all those boring old farts in the denier trenches are actually faux-phony air-kissing "actresses"  of the first water .....

With deniers believing in Victorian Era Science, conspiracy belief inevitably follows

There is nothing at all logically inconsistent with finding that most climate change deniers sincerely believe that talk of global warming is a scam to enable one group of people take over the world by subterfuge.

That strange belief logically follows from their continuing belief in the equally strange - and scientifically disproven - axioms of Victorian Era science.

They are, in a phrase, "People of the First Law" , when the 21st century's leading (tenured/peer-reviewed) basic scientists are all  "People of the Second Law".

Thermodynamics , dear Watson : the two sides of the climate change debate are fighting over nothing more than the human consequences of assigning differing priorities to the two Laws of Thermodynamics !

Majority of deniers think Watermelons, not Jewish families, are behind Climate Change

Some deniers may think that conspiracy group consists of old world Jewish "banking families", but the vast majority of deniers think the actual group planning a world takeover on the backs of a bogus claim of a warming planet are the so called "watermelon conspiracy".

After "Our Side" won the Cold War in the early 1990s, deniers explain, "The Red Side" (not at all to be confused with the Red States - they are the good guys) cheated by just pretending to accept defeat.

But what it actually did was paint a new colour all over itself by expressing a sudden new "green" interest in saving the environment while still secretly planning to dominate humanity via a One World Government scheme, based on old "red" socialist-communist values.

Voila ! "The Watermelon Conspiracy" : green on the outside and red on the inside.

Hence the election of Obama-the-birther, some deniers claim ( shout out to the Viscount !), because "we all know how them there colored boys love ther watermelon".

Along with straight razor fighting and beatin' their gal : yep, its the Era of  "The Coon Song Redux" .

And why not ? Because the science of the deniers is also from that long ago era of more than a century ago - might as well be consistent.

Belief in the priority of the First Law of Thermodynamics sees nature as a largely static backdrop to the dynamic activities of humanity : the climate literally can't change,  can't do more than merely oscillate within a narrow range, back and forth or up and down, around a fixed, eternal, central equilibrium.

If you are over the age of sixty and took any geology in your science education at high school or university, you might recognize this as geology's all-ruling DOGMA, until very, very recently : Sir Charles Lyell's Uniformitarianism.

Expressed in slightly different forms, it dominated all science and in fact all human thought until well after 1945 and the uniformitarian debacle of WWII.

In mainstream Economics and in Darwinian Biology, this mid-Victorian scientific delusion still does dominate.

And of course, in the minds of  the deniers. Most of them are old enough to have the genuine excuse of claiming that it was, after all,  the cutting edge theory of its day at the high school where they last encountered the formal study of science.

With Nature passive and yet Reality highly active, believers in the First Law are almost forced to credit all change in the climate to just two things : a claim that these large and long term changes in our climate are in fact just temporary and local, if you view them from a long enough and distant enough perceptive, like that of say Simon-Pierre LaPlace in his executive suite high above the Universe.

Or that some group of humans, credited as a consequence of the First Law with virtually unlimited powers of will and mind power, have managed to fool all other humans into believing in a delusion : the delusion that the climate - and Mother Nature herself - can actually change.

Deniers sincerely - and consistently following from incorrect axioms - logically believe it is not they but the rest of humanity that is deluded.

As I have always claimed, all debate and all conflict is over initial axioms and nothing else......

famous New Zealand scientist is advisor to denier group that claims Climate Change is a JEWISH conspiracy

Dr Vincent Gray PhD , a New Zealand chemist and a founder of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is an advisor to a well known climate change denier group, The Galileo Movement, which now faces a world-wide uproar over its claim that global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy to take over the world.

The internally deeply-fractured denier movement has held together - at least publicly - until now.

But its members now face a giant moral dilemma.

(A) renounce the anti-semitic racial slur against jews from the Galileo Movement and resign forthwith from its board ---- or (B) silently assent to this 21st century remake of the hoary old hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its false claim that Jewish Bankers were plotting to take over the world - a claim much used by Hitler to justify the Holocaust.

A dilemma for the hitherto tolerant New Zealand culture

New Zealanders are rightly  proud of the tolerant nature of their small island culture and will not welcome to return to the terrible anti-semitic 1930s.....

Canadian denier Tim Ball scientific advisor to denier group that says climate change is a JEWISH conspiracy

Well known Canadian climate change denier Tim Ball is at the very top of a list of scientific advisors to the Australian based climate change denier group, The Galileo Movement , whose managing director Malcolm Roberts says that climate change science has been "captured" by some of the world's "major banking families" who form a "tightly knit cabal".

Such coded phrases are known in Australia as "dog whistle words" because they reference terms that it now illegal or offensive to state openly.

In the best Hollywood fashion, a 21st century re-make of infamous "Zion Protocols"

This coded reference to the1920s faked book," The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", made famous the age-old claim that Jewish bankers had a plot to take over the world.

The claim has now apparently been updated for the 21st century by claiming that it will be done now via controlling the science of climate change : it is left unsaid whether Jewish bankers will actually write peer-reviewed articles for NATURE and SCIENCE to achieve total world domination,  or merely fund their writing.

At this hour, it is not clear whether Tim Ball will immediately resign from and denounce the Galileo Movement for its anti-semitic tenor, or wait until various  groups like the Canadian B'nai B'rith to publicly convince him to do so.....