Yesterday, a story in the Guardian reporting on a trio of studies that show the current warming is unprecedented over the last couple thousand years caught our eye. The studies should, in the words of climate scientist Mark Maslin, “finally stop climate change deniers” from claiming warming is natural.
But it won’t, because deniers aren’t motivated by the science. They’re motivated by money and ideology- that’s why they’re deniers, and not just skeptics. Because skepticism, as it turns out, is actually pretty rare among the community.
And bizarrely, even deniers are starting to recognize that. At least bottom-tier denial blogger Brandon Schollenberger is, judging by some of his recent posts at Hi-Izuru. Back in June, he published a piece tracking down the origins of a fabricated climategate quote, part of his work looking into Mark Steyn’s book attacking Michael Mann by using other people’s quotes, which Schollenberger describes as “a lazy, dishonest smear campaign.”
Then a couple weeks ago, he wrote a post titled “skeptics aren’t skeptical, an example.” The subject here is an old post by has-been denial blogger Jeff Id, who went on a racist rant defending President Trump’s false claim about millions of illegal immigrants voting. Schollenberger explained that Id relied on some tactics that “no genuine skeptic would ever do.”
Id did not, to put it lightly, take kindly to Schollenberger pointing out that Id’s source material directly contradicted his claim, and responded with his own (sarcastic) “I’m a racist” post. This, in turn, led to a response from Schollenberger, titled “if you’re not a xenophobe, why are you so dumb?”
Now a spat between two deniers is hardly vital stuff, but it’s relatively fun to read, and it’s instructive in showing how ideology can lead to self-professed skeptics behaving in a less-than-skeptical manner.
On that same front, a couple weeks ago, we mentioned meteorologist Ryan Maue’s misplaced hurricane attacks. While Maue was a CATO fellow, and regularly supplies the content for the Daily Caller’s empty stories about scientists pushing back on alarmism based on a couple of tweets, he still has plenty of credibility with mainstream media, at least when talking about the weather.
For example, while we’re not surprised to see Heartland citing Maue in the American Spectator, it’s a little disappointing that the AP’s Seth Borenstein briefly quoted him (as well as Michael Mann) in a piece about the European heat wave breaking records. As did USA Today’s Doyle Rice in a piece about July 2019 being the hottest month on record, which Maue is quoted as saying is “90% likely.”
But the days of Maue being credible may be coming to a close, as a look at his Twitter feed shows that Maue interacted with Mike Cernovich in applying some selective skepticism to the recent story of a Democractic Georgia legislator being told to “go back” to where she came from.
If Maue replying to Cernovich about an attack on a Democrat doesn’t ring some great big alarm bells, well you must not know the reluctantly alt-right figure Mike Cernovich. Mike rose to fame, as it were, fighting against feminists and at one point claimed that date rape “does not exist,” which is somewhat understandable given that he was arrested for rape charges that were later dismissed. He’s a “men’s rights activist” (a fancy way to spell “misogynist”) that wrote a book about the “Gorilla Mindset” about how women love an alpha male, although that didn’t stop him from receiving a seven-figure settlement in his divorce, and then going to live in the basement of his new wife’s parents’ house.
He was also a regular on Infowars, and promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy that Hillary Clinton molested children and ate babies in the basement of a pizza parlor (that doesn’t have a basement.) That’s just one of many claims and views Cernovich tweets about with others including things like that “diversity is code for white genocide.” (Seems like Cernovich and Jeff Id might get along…)
Suffice to say a smart skeptic would think twice about talking to Cernovich on Twitter, and interacting with his ideologically-driven attacks on, as is the case here, a Democratic woman of color.
Which would suggest, then, that Maue is no skeptic.
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