Yesterday, WUWT reposted an entry from Judith Curry’s blog by some random guy named Frank Bosse, discussing a paper published last year and arguing that climate sensitivity is lower than what models (and paleoclimatology) are telling us.
We could get into it, but seeing as how the paper was published in Remote Sensing, the journal best known for publishing a denier study by Roy Spencer that was so bad the editor in chief resigned in shame, and that the journal’s publisher, MDPI, has a “controversial articles” section of its wiki that’s over a thousand words, it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
The same can be said for a post by Christopher Monckton that takes a swipe at a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that shows, per a nice graphic from NASA, that climate models from before the year 2000 have done a fine job simulating actual temperatures.
Considering this is all standard denier fodder, what really caught our eye was something a little different. Okay, well, it’s also a repost on WUWT, this one by Larry Kummer from the Fabius Maximus blog. It’s a two-parter, and in the first Kummer asked readers for “the most radical prediction for America’s future,” and gets things rolling with what he sees as two possible futures, both (supposedly) radically different from the present.
For some reason, Kummer decides that “reproduction is the key to the future,” and describes how the “traditional” system wherein reproductive decisions “were made by families” as they helped women “choose mates” has been upended by feminism. Now, Kummer writes, women “choose guys based on tingles, often picking guys that knock them up and leave…” or while “under the influence of birth control hormones (simulated pregnancy), which drastically changes their preferences.”
Further, Kummer fears that “as the feminists push their gender revolution even farther, they might take one step too far and provoke a new kind of change.” Enter his two imagined scenarios of what this new future might look like. In one, the left welcomes state control over reproduction so that it may force eugenics to “interbreed the races” or to fertilize eggs without men. In the other, “a new religion” or “a new ideology” of the right arises, in which “women face severe constraints on their reproduction,” and “contraceptives and abortion might be rigorously regulated.” (Apparently, Kummer is unaware that the political-right needs no new religion or ideology to try and restrict women’s reproductive rights.)
Kummer followed that post with another, which bring us to the climate angle. This one is equally divorced from reality, literally. Using two fictional movies as a starting point, Kummer wonders if leftists who “believe we are killing the world” might “act on their beliefs and kills billions to save the Earth?
As evidence, Kummer includes some “chilling quotes” from the 2014 James Bonds-esque Kingsman, and 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, wherein humans are described as a virus or infection that needs to be cured to restore the planet’s health.
If these imagined characters can support the culling of billions of humans for the planet’s sake, what’s to stop real leftists from doing that once they get in power? Misanthropes aside, Kummer misses the obvious fact that the whole point of fighting climate change or improving the environment is to protect humans from climate catastrophes and ecological breakdown.
But more important than what Kummer and the commenters say (which is all nutso) is the fact that they’re saying it at all. Because as the evidence for climate change continues to mount, the Monckton-esque attempts at denying the science will get progressively less coherent, meaning the Kummer-type posts will likely become more frequent and prominent. The less sane, evidence-based ground there is for deniers to tread and retread as the real world disproves them time and again (Satellites! The pause! Models bad!), the more apt they will be to engage in the conspiratorial and political content that serves as a much-needed alternate explanation for what’s driving climate change.
Because if it’s not the basic physics of the greenhouse effect behind this warming scare, it must be an international cabal of lefty feminist super-villians out to destroy mankind. In the real world, women are still fighting for control over their bodies, but in the deniersphere it’s control of the climate, politics, and the whole world that they’re taking over.
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