Climate denial is by and large not exactly a growing field. Though Trump is a breath of fresh air, denial remains more of a last gasp than a second wind. Generally, we see very few young and up-and-coming denier scientists.
But since there are always exceptions, we’d like to bring Duane Thresher and wife Claudia Kubatzki to your attention. They (particularly Duane) have burst on to the scene this year, plucked out of relative obscurity and thrust into the fake news spotlight by Breitbart.
And why shouldn’t they! After all, Thresher and Kubatzki are, according to Thresher and Kubatzki, “the most qualified real climatologists to ever come out as global warming skeptics (including even more than Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. Judith Curry, although we acknowledge their revolutionary courage).”
This is how the “About” section on their website, Real Climatologists, begins, and it doesn’t get any more humble. As what seems like every post on their website states, Thresher got his doctorate at Columbia, and worked at NASA-GISS under both James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, with whom he is listed as co-author on a handful of papers published a decade ago.
Since 2007, though, Thresher hasn’t published much at all. “I am proud to say I am not particularly well-published,” Thresher writes in one of his bizarre, conspiratorial, Nazi-laden rants attacking Stefan Rahmstorf. “I resisted publishing a lot of little papers (‘islands of minutiae in a sea of trivia’) and my few big papers were in opposition to climate dogma so were unpublishable.”
Besides not doing any climate science, what’s Thresher been doing with that illustrious Columbia PhD, of which he’s so proud? As he describes in a Daily Caller post, he started doing IT work after quitting climate science. But once Trump was elected, he decided it was time to speak out. (He created Real Climatologists the day before Trump was inaugurated.)
Thresher and Kubatzki’s arguments are only marginally more advanced than the garden-variety denial we know and love. The principles page of their website contains only the boring denier basics--models can’t predict the climate, paleoproxies are useless for figuring out temperatures, and the peer-reviewed consensus is due to funding bias.
But for some reason that definitely isn’t a reflection of prizing ideology over substance, the rambling and aggressive posts on the blog get picked up and kicked around the fake news echo chamber, from denial blogs WUWT, JoNova and Climate Depot to Breitbart, Newsmax and the Daily Caller.
So no doubt these self-proclaimed “Real Climatologists” are not going away anytime soon, though it seems like they’ve yet to break out of the fake news bubble and hit the mainstream. And although Duane admits to running away from academia and then running away from California (“if you think neo-Nazis are bad, try being a global warming skeptic in the Bay Area of California, where we had to move from for our own safety”), he’s not running away from court. A separate “Legal” tab of the website states that “We are not afraid of lawsuits… We will represent ourselves… In fact, we may sue you first.”
Because not only does this failed climate scientist think he is more qualified than practicing climate scientists, he also apparently fancies himself a lawyer.
As the old adage goes, anyone who acts as their own lawyer has a fool for a client.
(Hope they don’t sue us for that…)
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