The noise machine has set its sights on me. What should I do?
My day job is basically software support staff for other earth scientists. Although I've got a PhD in Atmpspheric and Oceanic Sciences, for various reasons not excluding laziness and aversion to rejection, I have not much of a publication record. I'm getting by, barely.
I've been worried about climate change since about 1989, and have been involved professionally over most of that time, and have been writing about it on the internet on and off since before anybody heard of the internet, about 1994 or so.
So in my spare time, I'm a humble, OK, slightly non-humble climate science blogger. Over two years, I've managed to build up my traffic to a couple hundred unique visitors per day. Here's my little corner of the Blogoverse, In It for the Gold. Why should Senator Inhofe's office care about that? Why should Fox News?
Well, it's a long story, but here's the culmination:
For the second day in a row Mark Morano has issued a press release from notorious global-warming-is-a-hoax Senator Inhofe's office essentially reporting that I make an equivalence between criticizing Al Gore and responsibility for 1000 deaths. Unfortunately for me I said something vaguely like that, but it's being oversimplified.
How did Inhofe's secretary Morano make a second press release out of it? Well, he announced that Glenn Beck had made a story out of it, a story that wasn't much different than Morano's first press release. Talk about an echo chamber.
Here's Glenn Beck's TV version (note the strategically placed egghead-mockery):
He's appalled that Pielke would equate George Will and the almighty Al Gore. He says, quote: As for the scope of the ethical risk, let's consider the possibility that the behavior of the Times and the Post this year increases the chance of an extreme event with a premature mortality of a billion people by a near part per billion and a percent of a percent and a percent. Oh, I love my beakers. Hang on. Sometimes I just like to hold them. I cuddle with them. This one I've named Ronald, Ronald my friendly beaker. I'm sorry, got to go back to typing. The expected mortality from this is 1,000 people. Is that mortality equivalent to actually killing 1,000 people? It's not all that obvious to me that it isn't.
Wait a minute. So you're saying comparing George Will to Al Gore as somebody who exaggerates about global warming is equivalent to killing 1,000 people? "Yes, pretty much. You like my lab coat?" Scientists believe that saying Al Gore exaggerates is equal to killing 1,000 people. Well, if that is true -- you know what, we should keep track of the Glenn Beck death count because I have a feeling if we counted all the times that I made fun of Al Gore, I might be equal in deaths with Stalin.
Haha. Stalin humor.
Here is what I actually said, deep in the comments to a long thread. Now I wish I hadn't said it, since it blew up in my face like this, but see if you think that was a fair representation:
Implying an equivalence between Gore, who is constantly treading a fine line between effective politics and truthful description of risks, and George Will, who is wrong from beginning to end in conception, detail and emphasis is unacceptable because it perpetuates this dangerous skew.
As for the scope of the ethical risk, let us consider the possibility that the behavior of the Times and the Post this year increases the chance of an extreme event with a premature mortality of a billion people by a mere part per million, a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. The expected mortality from this is a thousand people. Is that morally equivalent to actually killing a thousand people? It's not all that obvious to me that it isn't.
In practice one can and must excuse oneself behind all the myriad realistic uncertainties. We don't know, after all, which butterfly will cause the hurricane. Most likely if we do find our way to hell, we will have trodden on many good intentions along the way.
But the point is that we really are playing with fire here and we shouldn't be putting our own careers or our own self-worth (like a clever and easy column for the Times) ahead of the enormous scope of the problem, because mortalities on the order of a billion are by no means excluded.
Well, did I really say that criticizing Al Gore was the equivalent of killing 1000 people? No, not exactly. Of course, this sort of thing is perfectly OK if you're a Republican, but never mind that.
As long as they keep flogging this I will get plenty of negative publicity. I'm not sure what effect this will have on my day job. And people are telling me to make lemonade.
So although I've been pretty much a silent lurker on DKos, you were a source of strength and hope for me during the very very long year of 2008, and I have seen how you can rise to teh occasion when someone asks for help. OK, it's a funny sort of help I'm asking for, but here goes.
I'd like to appeal to y'all to help me figure out ways to get some positive attention to balance out all the nasty vibes people are sending my way at this moment.
First, can you offer me any advice to calm me down?
Second, can you figure out any way to make lemonade out of this? I am very interested in giving talks about global change issues and pulling together public interest. Maybe that is a better way for me to contribute to the world. Do you think somehow this burst of negative publicity can be turned into some positive attention for what I can say or do about global environmental issues?
Anything else? Anyone out there been in Beck's crosshairs or something like that? How do you handle it? My head is spinning.