Kate Marvel is one of the new brand of climate evangelists, preaching a message of politics, emotion and rhetoric, who are helping to destroy the credibility of the field. She climbed aboard the climate gravy train from another field only about five years ago, but despite her lack of experience she’s frequently given high-profile platforms to present her opinions.

The latest of these is in Scientific American, where she discusses Why I Won’t Debate Science. You may recall Mark Maslin saying a similar thing in the Conversation, and getting completely taken to pieces in the comment section. But Kate has chosen a Safe Space at SA where comments aren’t allowed, so no pesky debate can occur.

Refreshingly, she is quite up-front about the reasons for her refusal to debate — she knows that she would lose. After establishing her politics with a Trump-sneer in the first paragraph she says

In fact, as a general rule, I refuse to debate basic science in public. There are two reasons for this: first, I’m a terrible debater and would almost certainly lose.

And the second reason is

But second, and maybe more importantly: once you put facts about the world up for debate, you’ve already lost. Science isn’t a popularity contest.

This is quite amusing, since the argument that science isn’t a popularity contest is commonly used by sceptics against the 97% consensus nonsense!

Although Kate is not prepared to debate with climate sceptics, because she knows she would lose, she is quite happy to use the platform at SA to spread lies about them:

Too often, we scientists find ourselves asked to “debate” people who believe (simultaneously) that the Earth is cooling, that it’s warming but the warming is natural, that the warming is human-caused but beneficial, and that NASA somehow made it all up in between faking moon landings and covering up alien abductions.

After that, having accused sceptics of “no internal logic”, the article becomes itself ever more illogical, incoherent and infantile, burbling about Frodo and Mr Rochester and ending by saying that she’s part of the “pink team”. (Isn’t that a bit racist?)