On Tuesday, West Virginia’s University of Charleston hosted an event that sought to tackle the how much warming is caused by human activity, and possible policy solutions. Featuring Michael Mann and David Titley on behalf of the 97%, and Judith Curry and Patrick Moore representing the...others, the panelists certainly weren’t all in agreement. Moore represented the strident deniers, Curry the lukewarmers, and Mann and Titley the reality-based community.
But to some would consider all these folks to be on the same side. There is still a group of fringe conspiracy theorists who hold the untenable position that not only is it not warming but that carbon dioxide isn’t even a greenhouse gas at all. Instead, they posit, carbon dioxide, and indeed all greenhouse gases including water vapor, actually cool the climate.
Known as Sky Dragons, or Slayers, after the 2011 book Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory (we swear we’re not making this up), the overly-complicated yet plainly wrong attempts at science by these conspiracy theorists are unwelcome even in lairs of denial like WUWT. But they have persisted in trumpeting their theories for years, confined mainly to the orantely named blog Prinicipa Scientific International. Since they’re scoffed at by even to their fellow deniers, and far too unreliable and unbelievable to be welcome even in the Koch world, we rarely waste time talking about them.
But a new post this week is just too good to pass up--let’s have a little fun. According to Principa blogger John O’Sullivan, the reason lukewarmers like Judith Curry and Anthony Watts write off the Slayers as kooks is not because the idea that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas is so very, very wrong, but because Watts, Curry and their ilk are controlled opposition.
For those not in the know on Leninist-philosophy turned deep state conspiracies, “controlled opposition” is the rather self-explanatory concept of a ruling class secretly pulling the strings of the protesters supposedly fighting against them in order to provide rebels with a safe space to relieve their anger, without actually threatening the status quo.
In this alternate universe, people like Curry, who once noted that she felt her undergrad students could debunk the Sky Dragon book, are actually agents of alarmism. By treating the Slayers’ (really, really bad) science as bad and pointing out its various flaws, omissions and illogical leaps, O’Sullivan seems to suggest, people we consider deniers like Roy Spencer and Christopher Monckton are actually working on behalf of the same climate consensus complex as, say, Mann and Titley. Even though Curry’s presentation on Tuesday was chock full of nutty uncertainty warnings and various other forms of soft denial, by acknowledging that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas at all, O’Sullivan’s postscript claims it is “further evidence Dr Curry serves as part of the ‘controlled opposition’.”
If anyone were controlling the opposition, we would like to think we’d at least know about it. We feel pretty safe in saying that Curry is opposition, but certainly not controlled.
That said, one final note about Prinicipa Scientific International. At the end of the post, O’Sullivan mentions PSI is “legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes” and gives an address for their head office.
Plug that address in Google, and not only does it show that the address is for a mailing box company that’s registered nearly 13,000 companies, but also that the address comes up in the Panama Papers, the leaked trove of financial and legal information of hundreds of thousands of wealthy offshore entities.
Now, we’re not saying that this is evidence that PSI serves as part of a controlled opposition, but if the All-Powerful Association of Climate Alarmists were to create a group to make deniers look foolish, we would probably give it a moniker like “Sky Dragons” and have them suggest that CO2 actually causes cooling.
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