“It’s kind of like telling a little girl who’s trying to run across a busy street to catch a school bus to go for it, knowing there’s a substantial chance that she’ll be killed. She might make it. But it’s a big gamble to take.”

This, according to Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is what you’re doing if you try to delay action on combating climate change.

But I think we can do better than that, don’t you?

“Climate denialism is like kicking away from a kindly old man the special walking stick which his beloved late grandson carved for him shortly before he was eaten by wolves.”

Or

“Climate denialism is like sneaking into the field of a piebald pony called Misty on the eve of a girl called Amy’s 13th birthday and hobbling it, a bit like happens to James Caan in Misery but with much more blood and tears and lasting emotional damage.”

Or – let’s just cut to the chase here:

“Climate denialism is worse than genocide. Way, WAY worse.”

If Professor Emanuel wants to use any of those he can have them with my compliments. Unlike me, he’s not an English Literature graduate so he probably doesn’t have quite such a way with words. And besides, it’s hard, really hard to do what Emanuel does: keep bigging up man-made global warming even though there hasn’t been any for 17 years; find new ways of expressing how certain you are about “the science”, even though the science has long since abandoned you. So the poor guy needs all the help he can get.

Emanuel was being quoted as an expert witness in a New York Times piece on John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science at University of Alabama in Huntsville. The article purports to be balanced, even sympathetic. It starts by recounting some of cruel things that have been said and done to Christy, just because he is a climate change sceptic.

“I walked over and held out my hand to greet him,” Dr. Christy recalled. “He looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Come on, shake hands with me.’ And he said, ‘No.’

But the New York Times does have a beautiful way of sticking in the stiletto when profiling anyone it considers on the “wrong” side of the argument.

eg

Dr. Christy’s willingness to publicize his views, often strongly, has also hurt his standing among scientists who tend to be suspicious of those with high profiles. Rough translation: He’s so crazy not even his fellow climate denialist lunatics will talk to him

and

His frequent appearances on Capitol Hill have almost always been at the request of Republican legislators opposed to addressing climate change. Rough translation: He shills for the bad guys; almost certainly wears Koch Brothers underpants

and

Dr. Christy has been dismissed in environmental circles as a pawn of the fossil-fuel industry who distorts science to fit his own ideology. (“I don’t take money from industries,” he said.) Rough translation: See? See how evil he is? (But we’ve got a denial from him, in case the lawyers complain).



Meanwhile in the real world, outside the consensus bubble inhabited by Emanuel and his fellow alarmists, respectable scientists like Christy are struggling to get their research funded because it doesn’t fit into the fashionable climate scare narrative.

He says he worries that his climate stances are affecting his chances of publishing future research and winning grants. The largest of them, a four-year Department of Energy stipend to investigate discrepancies between climate models and real-world data, expires in September. “There’s a climate establishment,” Dr. Christy said. “And I’m not in it.”

Pity because if the climate establishment took the time to listen to what he had to say – especially on satellite data versus computer models – instead of just dreaming up emotive analogies to explain why he’s wrong maybe it might actually learn something.