You'd think climate science deniers would be more laid back these days, basking in the election of an anti-science billionaire, Donald Trump. Instead, it seems to me they've just got more upset with climate science. Maybe they are figuring out that Trump won't stop climate change and can't change scientific knowledge.This little exchange is quite typical of anti-science deniers and climate conspiracy theorists. Deniers are such fake sceptics that they cannot bear to see tweets from a climate hawk on Twitter, as this episode with John Barry @CardsFanTX illustrates.
To explain - this just happened. Someone called John Barry @CardsFanTX tweeted me, before blocking me. He made an easily disproven statement (link):
I replied with this:
@CardsFanTX @GrnConservatism @auffhammer 2 different things. Deniers are rigorous at nothing but rejecting science. They've no scepticism.— Sou at HotWhopper (@SouBundanga) December 28, 2016
@CardsFanTX shot back, as if he wanted to clarify my meaning:
So I did clarify what I meant:
@CardsFanTX @GrnConservatism @auffhammer Yes, deniers of anthropogenic climate change. ie "climate hoax" believers. What else would I mean?— Sou at HotWhopper (@SouBundanga) December 28, 2016
He then sent a mini tweet storm - one, two, three:
And immediately blocked me. (I only knew of his three above replies from emails):
The start of the story
If you want to know what caused the ire of John Barry, this is what prompted it. Max Auffhammer said that the thought of Trump nominations of IPCC authors was scary:
Can the Obama administration nominate IPCC authors for the special reports still? I assume the Trumpians get to pick the AR6 team. Scary.— Max Auffhammer (@auffhammer) December 24, 2016
I replied that while governments nominate, it's the IPCC that selects authors:
.@auffhammer @KathMorrow90 Trump can nominate IPCC authors, but they won't nec'y be selected. IPCC chooses. 1/2 https://t.co/Nz4Xzw9EAb pic.twitter.com/9jDu32Ex9a— Sou at HotWhopper (@SouBundanga) December 26, 2016
I then tweeted this, which got some deniers all in a twitter:
.@auffhammer Could end up with no IPCC authors from USA if Trump selects only deniers (wld be hard, there aren't enough denier scis in USA).— Sou at HotWhopper (@SouBundanga) December 26, 2016
But later amended it to this, which is more accurate:
.@cynthharrington IPCC working groups are able to judge competence of scientists even if Trump is not. 1/2— Sou at HotWhopper (@SouBundanga) December 26, 2016
.@cynthharrington Even if US govt gets out of UNFCCC, reputable US scientists will probably still contribute and their work will be cited.— Sou at HotWhopper (@SouBundanga) December 26, 2016
This little tale is just a small illustration of how deniers have to work to get back in their denialist bubble if they mistakenly stray out of it. Long term deniers of anthropogenic climate change are not innocent, they are wilfully ignorant.
Checking out his Twitter feed, he parrots the same old denier memes found on conspiracy blogs and calls them "Fact". But he thinks he's a 'skeptic'. :D
ReplyDeleteAnd he also appears to think highly of Ted Cruz...
LOL! Now he's blocked me too because I tweeted:
Delete@CardsFanTX @SouBundanga Fact: You get your *cough* 'facts' from pseudoscience conspiracy blogs.
I'm bored, so I logged out of Twitter to view his tweets. He's posted some lovely tweets AFTER blocking us, so we couldn't reply:
DeleteJohn Barry @CardsFanTX 4h
4 hours ago
@Ceist8 @SouBundanga I pity easily duped people like you. I sincerely hope you see the light. Until then, go play with the other morons.
And another just to me:
John Barry @CardsFanTX 4h
4 hours ago
@Ceist8 You're just another gullible victim of confirmation bias. You clearly have no concept of actual science if you are not a skeptic.
Here is some of what he considers to be 'science'
Remember...
Earth has experienced CO₂ levels many times higher than today and life flourished. The big lie is that more CO₂ would be bad.
Never forget that 100% of man-made #climatechange alarmism is based on computer models - NOT observations. It is BAD SCIENCE.
• FACT: US has more temp monitors than any other nation. • FACT: More cold temp records have been set in US recently than warm temp records.
• FACT: Global average temp cooled between ~1940-1980. • FACT: Man-made CO₂ increased ~20% between 1940-1980.
• FACT: The 1990 UN IPCC report included a graph showing warmer temps during Medieval times than now, despite much less man-made CO₂.
• FACT: Glaciers grew during Little Ice Age, which ended ~150 years ago. They've been retreating since, before man's CO₂ could be a factor.
The conflation of anti-pollution & #climatechange's demonizing of CO₂ only fools the ignorant... of which there are, sadly, far too many.
All but the last one of his "FACTs" are the opposite of facts, and the last one is only half right. (Funny how deniers ignore that rapid climate change causes major extinctions.)
DeleteJudging by his reliance on long debunked myths, things he could easily check for himself but won't, it's no exaggeration to say that this person has been radicalised.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe farce is strong in this one.
ReplyDeleteIf the Dunning-Kruger effect could be harnessed to provide renewable energy, the world wouldn't need an ounce more of fossil fuel - Teh Stupid emanating from the planet's climate science deniers would keep the lights on for millennia.
It's not DK. It is agitprop.
DeleteThe "scowling bloke" photo he uses speaks volumes.
ReplyDeleteMakes me think of my cat, when he was but a tiny five week old kitten pretending to be a fierce lion :)
DeleteI think he's suffering from "internet tough guy" syndrome.
DeleteIndeed:)
Deletehttp://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-man-furrowing-brow-portrait-5849985.html
Ya gotta admit, that reverse image search is really handy. You know the photos of the internet 'psychics' you see plastered all over the place, like Mystic Meg? 95% at least are stock photos. Hers is real, though.
DeleteDo we know this guy even really exists - might he just be yet another sock puppet?
DeleteJohn Barry is virtue-signalling to his followers.
ReplyDeleteNow he's calling everyone who challenges him 'morons' and 'stupid f-ucks', then blocks them.
ReplyDeleteRepeats more fake 'sceptic' memes about ice-ages, then rejects a lecture by Richard Alley from the 2015 NAS symposium on the role of CO2 in earth's climate history as 'hilarious' and calls Richard Alley "a well known AGW crank pushing alarmism for grant $'
Oh... and he thinks he 'knows more about this' than anyone else.
This is what he believes is being a 'sceptic'
Has he shut down his Twitter account? I cannot find him.
ReplyDeleteThere must be many denier types like him on the internet. Why, Sou, did this one rankle you enough to write about him?
Yes, there are plenty of types like that on the Internet and on Twitter. I don't often bother with them these days. At first, it wasn't clear to me how badly he was into cloud conspiracy land. I simply answered his tweet.
DeleteI wrote about it because it was too easy, and because it was another fairly common example of a person who puts his toe into the mainstream, only to find he can't handle it after all. His reaction was to block the people with whom he initiates an exchange - but in my case, only after he'd fired off three more tweets that he obviously didn't want me to respond to. That demonstrates another characteristic often seen in deniersville - cowardice. In this case, some would argue, partnered with bullying behaviour.
Malcolm Roberts, the conspiracy theorising Senator from Australia does the same thing. His block list on Twitter is probably longer than his list of followers by now.
I think it's the same reason that Donald Trump won't hold press conferences. He doesn't think he's up to the challenge of facing people who know a lot more about the world than he does.
BTW - @CardsFanTX account is active still. I can't explain why you couldn't find it.
DeleteJust Twitter idiosyncrasies I think. I could see it. Then I couldn't. I still cannot - unless I click on your link - and then it works.
DeleteThanks for the reply. I was just intrigued why you settled on him. As you say he shows typical behaviour by blocking rather than answering and discussing. I notice that a lot in the Brexit and the Jeremy Corbyn leadership campaign here in the UK. Where people would refuse to discuss/engage and block you. It was as if they could not cope with the reality or the facts. So, there was a lot about abuse, intimidation, antisemitism. But when asked where and why they got their information or ideas the response was to ignore and block.
It seems to be the way of the world now. Sigh.
Yes. I'm not against blocking or being blocked as such. There are some people on Twitter who behave in a very ugly fashion and who wants them in their tweet stream? It's when a person asks you a question out of the blue, then promptly blocks you when you answer that I find peculiar.
DeleteOh, the other thing that was in my mind when I wrote the article, was it was an opportunity to address the question of whether Trump can influence the IPCC. Undoubtedly he, with the connivance of Republicans, can cut funding to climate science, which will have an adverse effect on how much more we will learn about climate in the next four years and beyond. However he won't be able to force the IPCC to publish rubbish instead of science. Plus, there are a lot of scientists with tenure at US universities, and I can't see how he can stop their research (although he might be able to chop some of their research funding).
Science in the rest of the world will hopefully continue or we'll be in a real mess sooner rather than later.
"asks you a question out of the blue, then promptly blocks you when you answer"
DeleteI sometimes find they use the blocking to be able to have the lsat word. I think they think they have won the argument if they have the last word.
On Trump and the IPCC. I think there will be a lot of push-back and he will find it far harder to disrupt honest activities than he thinks. And if he goes too far he will find a lot of resistance from everyone.
"I sometimes find they use the blocking to be able to have the lsat word."
DeleteWhich is pretty funny when you think about it and realise that the person they want to receive their last word can't see it :) (A lot of deniers seem to be thick as a brick.)
I just checked my block list. It has about 10 accounts, mostly spam (pure advertising) or porn. I occasionally mute accounts for being too intrusive - including over-enthusiastic climate hawks as well as abusive climate science deniers. Their tweets don't clog my timeline, but they can still see mine.
the person they want to receive their last word can't see it
DeleteI think "John Barry" is playing to his audience, i.e., his followers. He isn't interested in having a conversation. He's interested in bluster. If he makes pronouncements addressed to you, and you don't answer, he thinks his followers will assume his point was so brilliant you were stunned into mute humiliation or admiration. Blocking you achieves that illusion.
This syndrome has become increasingly prevalent, a form of bullying with roots in justified insecurity born of incompetence. A bully who knows he's unable to compete will alter the rules so competition is impossible. We're seeing it throughout America right now, as the ruling party--which is a shrinking minority of the population--changes voting regulations to make it increasingly difficult for the other party's voters to vote. They can't win on level ground, so they change the ground.
A seemingly worldwide celebration of ignorance spreads, being endorsed and encouraged by right-wing forces who are frightened by the world's diversity and by the tolerance which must be accepted for peace to continue. Bigots have just cause to be frightened, because their narrow and ill-informed worldview cannot survive if other cultures are allowed to exist. Reality encroaches rapidly upon the gated communities of their white-pride dominions. To maintain their illusion of superiority, they must pretend the world outside their walls either doesn't exist or is hostile enough to justify the walls they erected.
Trumpism provides permission for this desperate self-insulated bulling. Expect more of it in the coming years.
It's no surprise that Trump uses Twitter instead of facing a Press conference. His tweets are currently attracting a lot of commenters who mock him and debunk his lies. How long till he wakes up to the fact that he can just block these commenters and leave all the "Go Trump! We love you! Make America Great Again!" comments?
DeleteHe'd need to hire a full-time staff to block tweeters, and would wind up with tens of millions of blocks.
DeleteTrue. But his Yuge ego might think it's worth it? Of course that would quickly be reported in the mainstream media. But as his followers have now been convinced that MSM is fake news and only places like Infowars and Breitbart report "The Truth!", they wouldn't believe it? Who knows? It's almost starting to feel like 1984.
DeleteThe pro-Trump twitter bots so much in evidence at Trump's twitter account before the election seem to have been replaced by anti-Trumpites. His tweets get hundreds of hits just in the first couple of minutes after he posts them so the first lot are probably automated responses.
Deletehttp://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/election-bots/506072/
Before the election, a lot of his tweet replies were just for selling t-shirts, or were nothing but meaningless twaddle - obviously automated bots. The replies I see now are more likely to be related to the tweet.
D.C.Peterson.
Delete"I think "John Barry" is playing to his audience, i.e., his followers."
Correct. He knows he can get instant approval and retweets by using this tactic.
I don't find it novel, the MSM have been using the tactic of "pandering to your readers prejudices" all the time. There is a classic "Yes, Minister" episode on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
I think the main reason Trump doesn't like Press conferences could be that political journalists who have been around awhile, are far more informed on a whole range of issues than Trump is, and he doesn't want to look like a fool.
Delete... I ean, MORE of a fool.
Delete