Yesterday we were (finally!) treated to the latest installment of Anthony Watts’ pitiful effort to pay people to write climate disinfo posts that he’s far too burned out to do himself, with the publication of the 1st place winner for the general audience submissions for the topic asking “is there really a climate crisis?” If Watts was, like us, hoping for a fresh new take on climate that doesn’t rely on the same stale, debunked narratives, he was no doubt disappointed by all the entries he got, given the one that won. (But at least he got some submissions, unlike in the student category!)
The post by C.M. Compton is a regurgitation of decades of disinfo, attempting to rebut the idea that rising temperatures are unusual, and also that future warming won’t be catastrophic. With zero online presence, but a name and writing style eerily reminiscent of professional denier C. Monckton, C.M. Compton writes that, because there were ice ages in the past, our current temperature change isn’t unique, and otherwise relies on all the old stand-by denial attacks we’ve seen circulating for decades now. Based on the citations, you’d think that ol’ C.M. was writing from at least five years ago. There’s a lot of old references to out-of-date IPCC reports, hockey stick attacks, and other basics of climate disinfo.
What it doesn’t include, of course, is any attempt to rebut the physics of carbon dioxide’s warming effect, or address the litany of attribution studies connecting deadly disasters to climate change, both of which are more suitable underpinnings for justifying a crisis than whether people living in caves could adapt their non-existent infrastructure and cross non-existent borders to survive an ice age.
But it shows that without a set of professionals producing climate disinfo, there would be little to nothing for such a “general audience” to cling to when denying climate science.
This message also came through loud and clear on one of the saddest little podcasts we’ve ever had the distinct displeasure of sitting through. No, not Steve Koonin on Joe Rogan, but instead someone who’s clearly a Rogan wanna-be, bringing on a climate denier who’s clearly a Koonin wanna-be to his podcast’s dozens of fans.
The 'Out of the Blank' podcast describes itself as “just conversation from people with PhD’s or even hits of LSD its a free thought free flow show no script just enjoy the ride.” [And don't blame us for the lack of punctuation! — Ed.]
Though the LSD might sound enticing, the podcast was super boring, in no small part because host Robbie Robertson really likes to hear himself talk, and doesn’t have a single interesting thing to say that you couldn’t find in any other edgy-try-hard Rogan impersonator. (What is it with people whose first and last name are the same? Looking at you, Erick Erickson!)
Anyway, the hour-plus conversation we listened to was with Tom Nelson, who for years has been shouting about climate into the Twitter void. We’ve watched his incredibly active Twitter feed because Nelson isn’t professionally involved with any of the disinformation organizations, so he serves as a bellwether for what a “normal,” unfinanced climate denier finds share-worthy.
But when on air with Robbie Robbie, who promotes the podcast as “no script”, it was obvious that Tom, too, is utterly reliant on professional cranks, and simply walked Robertson through his pre-scripted list of links. From repeating the classic myths about “global cooling” and “global greening”, Nelson recommended professional liars like Marc Morano and burn-outs who can barely stand their disinfo jobs like Anthony Watts. Tom claimed not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, and said that he thinks most alarmists really believe it, he also said that climate change is a “hot buzzword” scientists use to get more funding, which is basically a conspiracy theory.
His catchphrase though, is “which paper proves CO2 is the control knob” for climate? And the answer, of course, is this 2010 paper in Science, titled “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature.”
Somehow, though, neither Nelson nor the host, who complained repeatedly and at length about how vegans and climate scientists will cite all sorts of studies and evidence they’ve never seen, managed to find this study and answer the exact question they think is unanswerable.
And don’t expect a robust comments section to give them the answer. The most popular of all of Out of the Blank’s YouTube videos has just 755 views, and 11 days after publication, Tom Nelson’s episode, #1047, has racked up all of 193 views. That makes it the first of the channel’s daily episodes to break 100 views since a Feb 8th episode with a UFO-debunker, and puts it as the 14th most popular out over 1,000 episodes, a true testament to the power and efficacy of Tom’s thousands of hours building up 32,500 twitter followers.
(By comparison, YouTuber potholer54’s debunking of Roy Spencer’s climate disinfo got more than 32,000 views in just a few days.)
