Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Shock, horror at the title of a play


Some of the denialati are pretending to be up in arms about the provocative title of a play: "Kill Climate Deniers" (archived here). According to the Canberra Times, the play, by Aspen Island Theatre Company, is "about a group of heavily armed eco-activists who break into a major Australian institution and hold the occupants hostage".

Talk about theatre. Without bothering to find out what the play is about and based solely on the play's title Anthony Watts exclaims: "Why would government fund what amounts to a sanctioned hate crime disguised as “art”? This is just bizarre."

He quotes Australia's right wing blogger Andrew Bolt: "The Left is the natural home of the modern totalitarian – and of all those who feel entitled by their superior morality to act as savages."

Remember, this protest is from a bunch of people who accuse climate scientists of fraud and worse, and who staunchly defend a person's "right" to compare a scientist to paedophiles under the guise of "free speech".

Andrew Bolt and WUWT's next protest will be staged against Bill O'Reilly for his book about Killing Jesus. Then they'll attack John Grisham for writing "A Time to Kill". After which they'll go all out animal lib and attack Harper Lee.


From the WUWT comments

Most of the denialati are outraged, for a change accepting the "denier" label. Not all of them though.

Pat Frank
September 30, 2014 at 4:41 pm
The Aspen Island site doesn’t have a synopsis of their plot. Maybe the play is a biting satire about frenzied greens and rhetorical excesses. I know it’s a low-probability option, but we wouldn’t want a no-information rush to judgment.

Malc
September 30, 2014 at 5:20 pm
Agree with Pat. We don’t know what it’s about yet. They describe the island as “mounted by an imperial organ”. It might turn out to be a wry exposition of crowd mentality and populist dogma 

Gary Pearse  
September 30, 2014 at 6:24 pm
In Australia? No its real. 

And from someone who calls himself Genghis!
September 30, 2014 at 5:10 pm
This is Hate Speech pure and simple. They should be arrested, tried and put away for good.

31 comments:

  1. I am sure JoNo-one will have something to say about it.

    I noticed the Mad Monk is back in Oz again.

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    Replies
    1. Even funnier,

      We've got Mad Maurie Newman offering his opinions in the Australian again. On the same day as Lomberg no less.. I reckon Lomberg insisted Newman contribute some utter shite so he wouldn't look like a comeplete dickhead in comparison.

      Of course one shouldn't compare...

      R the Anon

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    2. Yes I saw his piece trying to throw mud at the Australian BOM, what a loser. I noticed the article was not behind a paywall (or maybe they give out new monthly reads or something).

      Delete
  2. Given the consequences of climate change denial I would suggest that deniers ready themselves for far worse. Its a measure of how decent the green lobby is that - even given the goading of Delingpole http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/07/1831081/denier-delingpole-wishes-for-climate-nuremberg-says-hanging-is-far-too-good-for-climate-scientists/ - that it has shown remarkable restraint.

    One of my fears is that when the kind of nutcase who currently commits attrocities when pretending to care about animal rights gets on board, then we shall start seeing some pretty awful behaviour. Watts is right to be concerned: I'd certainly lose sleep over it if I was a climate change denier. Only, as usual, his fears are expressed in his usual idiotic style.

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  3. Whatever would they have made of Brecht?

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    Replies
    1. So that this comment is loosely on topic, let us assume that Anthony Watts' acting ability was on a par with the quality of his blog articles. If he was ever to play the role of Anne Frank in the stage version of The Anne Frank Diary, by the time the play reached its dramatic crescendo and the Gestapo characters burst onto the stage, the audience would shout out,"She's in the attic! She's in the attic!".
      Yes, I know. As an analogy it's torturous, just like reading the articles and comments on WUWT.
      GM

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  4. Off-topic - I I see the denial never ends at WUWT. Now they're denying the WWF numbers on our depleted wildlife. Its baseless sez Anthony cos of this Willis piece (which was about species loss, the WWF talk about vertebrate numbers), its baseless say the commentariat, cos its 'model-based' (what do they want the WWF to do, go out and count every fish in the sea and bird in the air?). Its baseless, chimes in Willis, cos as many populations are increasing as decreasing even tho the caption to the figure he cites states 'Figure 8 shows that the global LPI comprises a mixture of increasing, decreasing and stable populations across all species groups. Even though slightly more populations are increasing than declining, the magnitude of the population decline is much greater than that of the increase, resulting in an overall reduction since 1970).

    They aren't really trying anymore. Just knee-jerk, transparently wrong, denial.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, that was an extraordinary article showing the denial philosophy in its full pumage. Apparently wildlife is doing better than it ever has. And extinctions are all natural anyway.

      I noticed that reflexive "it's all models" reaction that somehow explained it all away. No-one seemed to notice or comment that the model was built on huge amounts of data.

      Ostriches with heads in the sand.

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    2. Just how many scientific disciplines can Anthony Watts 'know better than' before even the most clueless dork applies Occam's Razor.

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    3. This is the same day that Anthony Watts says California drought has nothing to do with global warming because he knows there were bigger droughts six hundred years ago. And he's pretty sure there were no SUV's around then. (In other words, droughts can only be affected by one thing and it can't be a warmer world. Dork.)

      BTW - what was Anthony's preferred study based on? You guessed it - tree rings :)

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    4. Speaking of tree rings, you should all get yourselves over to moyhu where Nick Stokes is tearing Steve McIntyre a new one over his disingenuous work in MM05, which led to the nefarious Wegman Report. Specifically, this post is just brilliant in its ability to shine a bright light in those dark corners The Auditor wishes people would forget about:

      What Steve McIntyre won't show you - now

      Whether you use centered or de-centered PCA, the actual reconstruction that results is not substantively different in the time period that matters, i.e. when global warming kicked in. We're talking *hundredths* of a degree. And the earlier discrepancies in the 1400 - 1600s are accounted for by The Auditor insisting on removing the Gaspe series from the reconstruction, which means there are not enough data points left to work with at the start of the reconstruction. So 10 years of wrangling over essentially nothing amount to, as is typical in denierville, nothing more than "Hey look, there goes a squirrel!".

      Naturally, the McIntyre lapdogs are onto it like a flash, posting nasty comments on Nick's blog, mostly as the anonymous cowards that they are.

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    5. Ah, but are they lapdogs or multiple new incarnations of Nigel Persaud?

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    6. Er, metzomagic. Is that not an Anonymous handle you have? Does that make you a coward?

      People post anonymously for all sorts of reasons. I tend to protect my identity because over the years I have had to guard against spam, people being abusive, over powerful intrusions by corporations collecting data etc etc. It is not cowardly. Just what you have to do.


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    7. On the matter of the data summarised by the Living Planet Report Watts and his crowd of Dunningly Krugered ignorami are speaking through their arses.

      As an ecologist I've worked with fish, reptiles, birds and mammals. In each of these taxa the numbers in the populations I studied have almost always decreased, often to below 50% of the numbers even 20 years ago, and sometimes to less than 10%. None of the native populations I studied have increased in numbers to above their 1970 levels. Several of the species that I've held in my hands are probably now functionally extinct in the wild, and certainly will be within a decade.

      A huge swathe of the planet's vertebrate biodiversity is absolutely in crisis. Much of its invertrate biodiversity is similarly threatened, as is a significant proportion of various plant taxa. Biodiversity-loss deniers of Watts' ilk are nothing more than uneducated, uninformed, blinkered, and dangerous fools, utterly hampered by their ideologies, by their superstitions, and by their vulnerabilities to the phenomenon of shifting baselines and to the propaganda of those who profit from manipulating these brain-dead, unthinking examples of agenda fodder.

      Watts fell to pieces like a piece of boiled lettuce on his recent UK junket. If he attended a similar set of talks at any of the conferences that I and my colleagues go to and speak at, his spincter would slam shut so hard and fast that microiamond dust would powder the inside of his bloomers.

      I suggest that Watts stop pontificating on subjects about which he is completely clueless, and instead start reading the primary literature. It would take him a decade to get up to speed on the background scientific concepts but at the end of it all he would understand the stupidity of his blatherings.

      And Codling, and Marohasy especially, need to be very careful about what they say on this subject. They know better than Watts, and it will be very apparent to anyone with even a basic understanding of ecology and population dynamics if these two follow Watts into RWNJ territory.

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    8. ..."microdiamond"...

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    9. Oh, and not to forget frogs...

      My colleagues will not let me forget that omission!

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    10. Jammy Dodger, hi,

      Well, it isn't exactly the world's biggest secret who I am. Just Google my handle. Then go to my site and read all about me in the About and Contact Details page. I'm an EE who's been programming computers since 1974, and co-founder of a successful international high tech company. I sometimes post on places like Real Climate with my actual name, because you're protected there to some extent from the usual denier venom. So 'metzomagic' at least keeps me one degree removed from that.

      Whereas 'Anonymous' really is anonymous.

      Delete
    11. ETA: in fact, all this business playing Whack-A-Mole with the AGW deniers since about 2009 has kept me so busy, that my hobby site has gone completely stale. I'm an avid computer gamer from way, way back when there were only text adventures, but hardly find the time or the inclination to play anything nowadays. *sigh*

      Delete
  5. Books, covers and all that. No doubt these same people thought PJ O'Rourke should be thrown in gaol for advocating we should eat the rich*? As we all know, people took Jello Biafra at his word when he incited them to kill the poor.

    There is no such thing as satire, irony or sarcasm in Denierland. Since Pat Frank has looked at their website ("The Aspen Island site doesn’t have a synopsis of their plot"), but is apparently unable to read, let me quote a paragraph that won't soothe any of their sooking until the next thing to be faux-outraged about:

    "It is a fictional scenario, and we take as given a common understanding that to depict something does not mean to condone it. An idea, or scenario, can be treated in many ways. It is premature to judge the way our production – which we hope to follow our creative development – will do this. Our application for funding describes that we will explore the idea through a satirical exploration of the tropes of the hostage-crisis action film genre."

    So much for their "given". But really could Andy's and Tony's collective pants-wetting be less on point?

    I for one will be at the "national organ" in January to see if the say anything interesting or if its just more dreary shlock-theatre...I wonder if Tony has enough time to get in some blegging for a ticket to Canberra. He can write a report 'n'stuff...


    *(actually a rather benign dummies guide to economics)

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  6. Right Anthony, they are encouraging greens to take people hostage. I think Watt's paranoia is affecting his ability to distinguish fiction from reality. Paranoia does seem to be a common theme with these denier types.

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  7. You have a valid point. CO2 has gone up due to human emissions.

    Sorry, off topic. For some reason I was bored and tried to make a point on a WUWT blog. (What a depressing experience! Resident trolls out in force).

    But I eventually managed to get dbstealey, of all people, to concede this point. I don't think I have ever managed to get a denier to concede anything before, let alone a denier of such stature!


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    Replies
    1. Linky? Given the number of times dbstealey has claimed the opposite, I would love to see it.

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    2. Not allowed to give a link to WUWT!

      Look at the comments for "Slides from the Michael Mann lecture at Cabot Institute in Bristol Anthony Watts".


      dbstealey
      September 30, 2014 at 3:45 am

      You have a valid point. CO2 has gone up due to human emissions.


      Delete
    3. OK, archived it. Here is a link:

      https://archive.today/yiJEM

      Delete
    4. And a more direct link, seeing I just got it :)

      https://archive.today/5vEKf#selection-14835.0-14861.63

      Of course he goes onto say that a 40% plus rise in CO2 isn't "scary". And that CO2 is a "harmless trace gas".

      dbstealey is a greenhouse effect denier among other things. He rejects 200 years of atmospheric physics. At least you got him to accept chemistry (burning hydrocarbons produces CO2 and uses oxygen). :D

      Delete
    5. "Of course he goes onto say ..."

      One step at a time Sou. One step at a time. :)

      Delete
  8. "In other words, droughts can only be affected by one thing, i.e. CO2 ... Dork."

    Signed,
    Every AGW Alarmist Everywhere

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  9. The deniers need to stop banging on about Leo D.'s footprint. And who cares if Al Gore's carbon emissions rival ten small Japanese fishing villages?

    "Over the 4 year lifespan of a MacBook, it is responsible for 460 kg of CO2 emissions (115 kg per year). At 8.8 kg of CO2 per gallon of gasoline, that is equivalent to the emissions of 52 gallons (13 gallons a year). 115 kg is just .6% of the average American's 20,000 kg of co2 emissions a year." -- Internet source

    I implore you -- put down your half fat, double caff, hazelnut latte, shut your laptop for good, take less frequent and more shallow breaths. Every little bit helps. Do your part. Don't make us come get you.

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  10. "Internet source" tee-hee

    "take less frequent and more shallow breaths" - carbon cycle, tee-hee.

    artless dodger is well-named.

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  11. Buy RWNJ logic, the Bard needs to be banned for his "the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" line

    ReplyDelete

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