The Ugly Misogyny of Big Climate: Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/7123/the-ugly-misogyny-of-big-climate
“A Disgrace to the Profession”: The World’s Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science
Before we start, a quick addendum to my post about “science journalist” David Appell’s false accusation that I doctored a quote in my new book. Mr Appell has now withdrawn the charge:
Fair enough. I’ll believe him. My bad. My apologies.
You might think he’d learned his lesson about making specific accusations about a book he hasn’t read. And yet, amazingly enough, he goes and does it all over again two inches down the page:
I wonder if Steyn has examined any of the other evidence for the hockey stick, some derived with independent mathematical techniques. Like Marcott et al Science 2013, PAGES 2k, or Tingley and Huybers.
I expect he hasn’t. If not, why not?
Yes, why not, Steyn? Ha! You’ve got no answer to that, have you?
In fact, there’s an entire section on other, supposedly “independent” hockey sticks, starting at page 171, and I devote pages 185-190 to Marcott et al.
Between apologizing for his previous false accusation and making his new false accusation, Mr Appell observes plaintively of himself:
Me, a poor freelancer scratching the floor for grains of wheat.
You might want to re-think your business model. Assuming people are as stupid as you wish they were doesn’t usually work out well.
Alternatively, if you want to continue playing Duck Season/Wabbit Season over every page in my book, then go ahead. Shoot me now! Shoot me now!
~Michael E Mann Tweeted the photograph at top right from a female admirer, who has had his hockey stick tattooed on her arm. [UPDATE! Michael Liebreich says it’s not Mann’s blade but the Keeling curve.] I don’t know how common this is among Mann’s fans. I understand his devoted Mini-Me, Greg Mann-Laden, prefers to wear it as a novelty tramp stamp: The shaft runs straight across the top of his left thigh and then the blade shoots up his butt.
Like Sixties rockers, climate alarmists seem comfortable with women as adoring groupies, but don’t appear to have much use for them in any other capacity. In my introduction to the aforementioned “A Disgrace to the Profession”, I say en passant that I had trouble finding female scientists to quote:
There are fewer women than one might wish [in the book], but it seems to be a male-dominated field and indeed there is a palpable misogyny in the way some of Mann’s defenders attack his female critics.
On the general point that’s true, and a bit surprising. I’ve spent most of my adult life around the arts and the media, and I would be surprised to find myself on a project with as few women as climate science. The editorial director at Faber & Faber, my publishers on Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, is Belinda Matthews; my publisher at Regnery, for The [Un]documented Mark Steyn et al, is Marji Ross. But it was very hard to find prominent female climate scientists. The Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia is a boys’ club, and so is Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt and Kevin Trenberth’s equivalent coterie across the Atlantic. My book includes, as I’ve mentioned, Dr Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, as well as her compatriot Rosanne D’Arrigo, Australia’s Jennifer Marohasy, and Welsh lukewarmer Tamsin Edwards. Others turn up along the way, including Sallie Baliunas, who co-authored one of the first papers critical of the hockey stick, was promptly clubbed to a pulp by the Big Climate enforcers, and has mostly kept her down since.
Perhaps climate science is not a field in which women excel, or perhaps there is a real glass ceiling. Whichever it is, as I said in my book, there is “a palpable misogyny in the way some of Mann’s defenders attack his female critics”. And at that point I included a footnote:
Diehard Manniac blogger “Tamino”, for example, condescendingly refers to the aforementioned and distinguished Dr Judith Curry as “Aunt Judy” (see https://nigguraths.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/biotech-biostitutes/), which appears to be a derogatory porno term for an older woman one would be willing to have sex with if no one younger was to hand. Given that Mann enthusiastically facilitated the reduction of scientific dispute to name-calling, it would be unreasonable to expect his Mannboys to confine themselves to merely the Holocaust echoes of “denier”.
Brandon Shollenberger, one of the most extraordinarily un-self-aware people even by the Internet’s standards, has begun an ill-advised Tweet-as-you-go of my book and thus spent most of this morning stridently debating whether “Aunt Judy” is a “porno term” or merely “derogatory”. Start here and scroll down. Look at the first response he gets, and how he insists on arguing the point back and forth. (I hope the lady customer at SteynOnline who very generously bought Shollenberger a gift copy of the book because he was “having trouble” with his bank account is enjoying his peculiar priorities.) And, by the way, do click on the link I include in the book to Shub Niggurath’s post for a clear-eyed take on the subject.
So Shollenberger wants to spend his morning insisting that “Aunt Judy” is not a “porno term”. In that case, what is it? And why do you support its application to the former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee and the NASA Advisory Council Earth Science Committee, recipient of the Henry G Houghton Research Award from the American Meteorological Society, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences? It’s not just that Mann’s friend “Tamino” does not refer to Mann as “Uncle Mike”, or Schmidt as “Uncle Gavin” or Trenberth as “Uncle Kevin”, but they don’t even dismiss the guys on the other side in that way: Fred Singer is not “Uncle Freddie” and Richard Lindzen is not “Uncle Dickie”. Shollenberger defends Tamino because he believes that, in looking for a condescending sexist sneer, he just stumbled entirely innocently on a porno term.
Er, okay…
Do you ever listen to yourself, Shollenberger? Are you so tone-deaf you have no idea what you’re defending here? Tamino’s commenters certainly aren’t shy about taking their cue from his slur:
Curry is as dishonest as they come. Shes an attention seeker, whoring her credentials for adulation from angry old white men.
Gosh – and once you start “whoring” there’s no telling the depths to which you’ll descend. For example, “science journalist” David Appell based his false accusation against me on a post by a particularly repellent climate-change blogger. Instead of apologizing for misleading Appell, that blogger posted this comment on Appell’s site:
Curry, however, is a supposed scientist who has (perhaps) literally gotten into bed with slime like Steyn.
The ugly slug sock-puppet who wrote that would be of no importance – except that Michael E Mann has enthusiastically linked and reTweeted him all week long.
Compare and contrast:
Professor Sir Tim Hunt, FRS, who unlike Mann is a real Nobel Laureate, made some harmless remarks about “falling in love” with “girls” in the lab – and had his career ended instantly. But the most prominent woman in climate science worldwide is routinely compared to a whore – and Michael E Mann links day after day to the guy who does it. And David Appell uses the Aunt-Judy-is-a-whore expert as a source.
Nice girls in the lab you fall in love with=repellent misogyny that has no place in science.
Female climate scientists “literally” whoring and slutting around=perfectly respectable talking points in the climate-change debate.
For what it’s worth, on the one occasion we’ve met, I found Dr Curry shrewd, insightful, very funny – and vivacious and attractive. But, best of all, she’s fearless and resilient. Because you’d have to be. After the Big Climate enforcers took the hockey stick to Lennart Bengtsson in the back alley (see page 241 of my book), the poor chap retired from public life. I don’t begrudge him that. You have to be enormously tough to stand up to bullies determined to destroy you pour encourager les autres. After the Climategate revelations and “Hide the Decline”, Dr Curry came to see that Mann & Co had knowingly promoted a level of certainty that wasn’t there in the science. And she spoke up against it. And instead of taking on her arguments, far too many persons who claim to speak for “settled science” decided they’d rather do nympho slutty milf gags.
I find this, to put it mildly, odd. The over-rated “consultant” Rick Wilson Tweeted the other day that Ann Coulter was a prostitute to whom Donald Trump “paid more for anal“. He was immediately forced to issue the usual mealy-mouthed apology. Because even politics has higher standards than Big Climate. If Wilson had said it about Dr Curry, Michael E Mann would be reTweeting him for the rest of the year.
My fellow Canadian Kate McMillan likes to say “Scratch a leftist, find an anti-semite”. Scratch a climatologist, find a sexist? It would certainly explain a lot.
For the record, I am not “literally” in bed with Dr Curry. But Michael E Mann ought to ask himself about who he’s willing to get in bed with …and how his daily promotion of such persons will come across to the women on a DC jury.
~As for my book, personally autographed copies of “A Disgrace to the Profession” are available right now at the SteynOnline bookstore, and I’m signing them as fast as I can. But, if you can live without my cheery greeting, you can pre-order it from Amazon in print and Kindle. Profits therefrom help to prop up my end of that DC trial – and Josh’s cartoons are worth the price all by themselves.
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