In Tuesday’s DR we were somewhat surprised to report that Marc Morano was going after NASA’s Dr. Peter Kalmus for harassment, targeting a man for a change. But true to form, Morano followed the Kalmus-outrage-manufacturing with a similar post targeting NASA’s Dr. Kate Marvel for her solidarity tweet that said “we’ll never head off climate catastrophe without dismantling white supremacy,” followed by a link to Mary Heglar’s twitter list “green voices of color.”
At the same time, Morano was also running the latest attack on Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, a repost from CFACT’s David Wojick. It is based on a rebuttal to a report Hayhoe co-wrote for Alberta, with a distinctively, if not misogynist, then at least unnecessarily gendered framing: “If Greta Thunberg is an alarmist princess then Katherine Hayhoe is the queen of climate alarmism.”
First of all, literally no one has ever called Greta Thunberg “an alarmist princess,” and in fact the only other time that royal title appears to have been used is in a nearly 400 page Japanese web novel.
So where did the original post by Wojick get that reference come from, and what does Greta have to do with a Canadian climate report? Nowhere and nothing, but invoking traditional roles of femininity has long been a staple of misogynist reactions to powerful women, so it makes sense that it would be used to diminish a leading climate scientist and internationally renowned activist.
Wojick isn’t quite telling Hayhoe to get back in the kitchen, but by degrading Hayhoe’s career of hard work by referring to her as “Queen Hayhoe,” he sends a not-so-subtle message that Hayhoe’s standing in the climate community was bestowed upon her, as opposed to being something she earned after years of study, dedication, and hard work.
Despite the subtle misogyny, or perhaps because of it, Wojick’s promotional post was not only picked up by his fellow CFACT-er Morano, but alsos the other usual suspects of organized denial at WUWT and Heartland, which published another piece about it on their climate realism site as well.
Meta-discussion aside, what’s the basis of the attack? Canadian industry front group Friends of Science produced a .pdf attempting to undercut an official report Dr. Hayhoe co-authored about Alberta's Climate Future.
As one might expect from an organization that couldn’t even be bothered to think of an original name, instead just ripping off Friends of the Earth, the report is little more than a flailing attempt to take existing (debunked) denial memes and applying them to Alberta.
The result is, at times, pretty amusing. For example, the report attempts to cast doubt on Dr. Hayhoe and the rest of the climate science community’s ability to accurately use a thermometer by invoking the long-debunked Urban Heat Island effect. While yes, urban areas do warm more than rural ones, this is something climate scientists have long understood and accounted for with the sorts of data clean-up and adjustments that other deniers claim is part of the hoax.
Anyway, apparently Alberta’s temperature record has been grossly skewed because the measurement sites were biased by all of Alberta’s many “urban, densely populated locations.” Because when one thinks of Alberta, Canada, the image that springs to mind is definitely the whole million people in each of its major metropolises, Calgary and Edmonton.
Seriously though, Alberta’s third largest population center is apparently the 99,718 residents of Red Deer, and overall the province has about 15 people per square mile. For reference, a list of the least densely populated places starts at Suriname’s 9 people per square mile, and the US reached a similar population density some time between 1880 and 1890.
Not be outdumb’d, Heartland’s James Taylor thought it would be clever to contrast a chart Dr. Hayhoe uses with one from the very first IPCC report, as though a graph from 1990 is somehow more accurate than something produced with the benefit of an additional thirty years of research.
But given that Wojick had to reach back ages for his old-school “queen alarmist” attack on Hayhoe, we suppose it’s only fair to give Taylor credit for being a leader among deniers, and only being three decades behind the times.
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