Climate Prat of 2013 – We have a winnah! Posted by Pointman on December 20, 2013 · 61 Comments

Unlike last year, the available selection this one has been noticeably thin. A lot of the usual prats have been smart enough to pick up on the winds of change and are quietly deserting the sinking ship. All we’ve heard from them is the occasional splash of their tiny, wee, small, pale and pink, ratty hands as they silently paddle away into the darkness. That’s not to say there haven’t been any prats around but there’s been very few of the good old true-believer Panzergrenadier variety of prat you could really enjoy giving a bloody good hiding to.

One or two new ones have appeared on the scene but they fall somewhere in that middle ground between being a true climate prat and simply being too thick to realise times have changed. George Clooney is probably a typical example; armed with all the knowledge one usually acquires before dropping out of secondary education without a diploma to become a matinée idol, he’s taken to calling us poor benighted deniers ignorant.

It’s part of his ongoing effort to rebrand himself as a man of stature who’s to be taken seriously from now on, rather than just an ageing Hollywood pretty boy with a cleft chin whose next stop is the big six o. I wish you luck with that one George but I rather suspect you might be unaware it will involve you having to grow a brainstem. Unthinkingly regurgitating trite liberal truisms, like having a pretty face and a great pair of tits, only gets you so far in rebranding yourself as deep and profound.

Most of the usual lunatics have been very quiet this year. Al “I sold out to big oil” Gore, has been nearly invisible except for a half-hearted attempt at rekindling the old fires with another one of his Climate Reality Events whose reception was so apathetic, nobody actually noticed it was on until it was nearly over. James Hansen, after his parting of the ways with NASA, has largely sunk out of sight, to the point where he only attracted one nomination this year. With a showing like that, it’s doubtful he’ll even be nominated next year. Sic transit pratunda mundi.

However, the competition between what viable prats there were on offer was fierce, unprecedented and brutal at times. Not in the whole history of the Pratties has anything been seen which was so closely fought. On one occasion, there was only a one vote spread between the leading three contenders, which has made writing this results announcement piece problematic to say the least. If it reads like I’ve been swapping paragraphs around, that’s because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing to keep up with them swapping positions. Just like every other blogger, I want to knock off for Christmas and put my feet up until next year, but this one went down to the wire.

In traditional fashion, I’ll announce the results in reverse order.

In last place we have John “dodgy uniforms” Cook. If you haven’t heard of him, he’s one of a cabal of simpletons who run a site called Simpleton Science – oops sorry, I meant Skeptical Science, which despite the name can only be characterised as being neither sceptical nor scientific and if its hit numbers keep up their nosedive, won’t be a site for too much longer either.

Even the name they thought up for the site is an indication of the brains as big as planets at work there; what can only be naturally abbreviated to SS, they peevishly insist must be shortened to SkS. Given the childish ferocity of what’s laughingly called the site’s moderation policy, the former abbreviation is most apposite. Anyone of note gave up attempting to comment there years ago.

Perhaps that apparent cock-up wasn’t one after all, since they inadvertently left some photoshopped images of themselves in Nazi SS uniforms in a public directory on their website. Upon the images being discovered, instead of deleting them, they cunningly moved them to another directory. Of course, the new directory was also public. As I intimated, they’re not the sharpest collection of knives in the cutlery drawer …

More disturbingly, there were also manufactured pictures of prominent male skeptics as bare-chested Spartans in bulging briefs striking very butch poses. It all looked very dark psychologically; somewhere you really didn’t want to explore too deeply. Suck my toes you filthy little climate alarmist ladyboy. Too many overtones of whips, chains, leather, snailbat musk etc etc. Much as I may admire “Magnum” Watts, “Chopper” Monckton and Delingpole, it was all a bit too overtly sado-maso and homo-erotic for my rather vanilla po’ boy tastes.

Now, if it’d been some of the leading female skeptics with half their kit off, I’d have understood.

Anyway, banishing that rather distracting thought from my head and getting back on topic, Johnny boy’s been working very hard producing various DickPols which have provided the statisticians of the skeptic blogosphere with hours of roll on the floor hilarity, because of doing dumbalena things like coming to conclusions based on rigged polls, cherry-picked data and highly questionable methods. One of his “polls” was so far over the top, that when filled in by the fiercest of skeptics, it managed to classify them as rabid warmists!

With one thing and another, he and the fallen out of their tree gang have had an anus horribilis. They did themselves and the cause more harm than good and possibly having put themselves so deeply into that drag-ass plain dawg pathetic not-worth-a-bullet zone, skeptics of taste and discernment didn’t really want to waste a perfectly good vote on the likes of him or for that matter, indirectly on his fellow simpletons either. All a bit too passé Blue Oyster Bar to be bothered with and consequently attracting only a meagre handful of votes.

In fifth place and having attracted not much more in the way of votes, we have Michael Mann. He’s actually become a volatile embarrassment to the alarmists, to the point where the odd paper he produces attracts fire even from his own side. In response, he invariably takes on his mad dawg persona which doesn’t really look too hard at whoever he’s savaging, though given his slide down the significance pole in recent years, savaging should really be replaced with toothless gumming. A bit slobbery and messy but it don’t actually hurt that much.

The only thing I find vaguely interesting about him is his totally consuming ego. It’s blindingly obvious that the two Macs upended both him and his reputation years ago, and you can plainly see that in the Climategate emails from the candid remarks made by his supposed fellow comrades in the cause. They’re just humouring him, managing him and his spikey personality like he’s a spoilt child prone to tantrums. And yet he is still driven by this sort of persecution complex that insists every skeptic still has a major stiffie to get him. Sorry Mickey, you’re not that important. Seriously mate. You haven’t been anything more than the cause of knowing smirks for a long time.

That innate little man petulance of his personality and the pent-up rage about any perceived slight by almost anyone, means he’s become their liability and our asset, or as I prefer to think of it – he’s our poodle now and responds every time we jerk his chain. He’s a bit pathetic I grant you, but a useful filler inner on a slow news day. He’s generated so many skeptic blog articles that given my weekly posting schedule, I haven’t yet managed to do one blog piece on him, since the whole of the skeptic blogosphere has already comprehensively covered his latest crime against sanity before I can even get a frigging pen to paper. It’s one of those timing things Mickey, but don’t you fret laddie, I’ll get around to you in the end.

In fourth place, we have Stephan Lewandowsky. Originating from some Hillbilly hell hole masquerading as a centre of higher education in the Americas, his controversial sojourn at the University of Western Australia (UWA) will I suspect become the basis of more than a few classic studies in pathological science. His nominally academic output there ultimately led to the coining of the word LewPaper. He’s since done a runner to one of the more down market UK universities, a hop, skip and a jump ahead of a lynch mob of UWA alumni, but like all dubious and controversial characters, I’m sure he’ll soon enough land himself in hot waters again and have to once more scurry on to foreign fields. For God’s sake you red brickers, don’t you grant him tenure there.

There’s something repulsively snail-like about the man’s personality which is horribly apparent in his creepy YouTube videos but over and above that, I have real problems with supposedly scientific research on your political opponents which concludes that they’re somehow a lesser form of enlightened life. That sort of scientific “research” has a long and frankly disgusting history. It’s a debasement and prostitution of science, purely for the purposes of hate and can in the end lead to state sanctioned horrors.

He got together with Micky Mann to produce a paper, which if you think they’re both distinctly paranoid about people out to get them, was exactly what you’d expect. Any criticism of climate hazbeens or psychology neverwozzers, was all part of a gigantic conspiracy hatched by blue-skinned beings fresh from the plant Tharg who concealed their lizard skin by pretending to be skeptics and had travelled vast intergalactic distances, just in order to persecute the noble scientists of those two specific alarmist disciplines.

For someone who hasn’t really done much this year, he surprisingly attracted a very strong showing of votes but I think that in part reflects the natural exuberance of the recent Australian “enlightenment” and a residual desire to give him one final kick up the backside from the blog’s Australian readership. They’re a slow lot to piss off but once you do, they tend to have long memories.

Finishing a very respectable third, we have Tim Flannery. I nicknamed him The Tooth Fairy a couple of years back because as Australian Climate Czar, he seriously suggested yanking the teeth out of the dead to save the world from mercury poisoning from their fillings. I wonder how that went down with people freshly grieving the passing of a loved one. He even volunteered a bit of cost benefit analysis by suggesting it’d only require nothing more than a three dollar set of pliers.

You can imagine some deluded Greenie innocently advancing towards an open coffin, waving a set of pliers and being blocked by a line of determined relatives, who weren’t going to be at all receptive to any arguments about saving the Earth. I don’t know its name, but I’m sure there must be a good Latin term for an operation intended to remove a pliers that’s been forcibly inserted up a Greenie’s rear end. At a guess, an anusplierectomy.

Tony Abbot, the Australian Prime Minister leading the new government, presented him with the Order of the Spanish Archer, more commonly known as giving him the elbow, within days of the change of administration. After being fired, Timbo tried a bit of disconsolate panhandling to make up for the loss of his generous government salary, but it appears to have been unsuccessful. I wonder if he can still meet the mortgage payments on that rather sumptuous beachfront property he purchased.

Essentially, he was always what’s technically termed an “educated idiot” who was plucked out of academic obscurity by a thoroughly cynically administration and is now being permanently returned to oblivion, to live on only as a vague folk memory to scare naughty children with and a reminder of just how mad the madness of crowds can actually become. If he’d won, I simply wouldn’t have been able to resist sending him a pair of pliers as a prize, with hand-written instructions as to where they were to be stored.

In second place and this year’s runner-up is David Suzuki. I can completely understand why Suzuki was nominated and received a lot of votes in the final round, but to my mind he’s only a prat in one narrow sense of the word; that’s to say he’s really irritating, like that cliché short person with an outrageously big opinion of themselves. Where he falls short of The Full Pratty is that when I look at his plush lifestyle, I don’t think he honestly believes a fraction of what he preaches, something I consider an essential attribute of the natural free range prat.

He goes on about overpopulation but has five children of his own and given his age, God only knows how many grandchildren by now. He lectures about the evils of big oil, but co-owns real estate with oil interests. He admonishes people for not going back to nature and living the simple life but he himself owns several large luxurious residences worth millions.

My flock, do as I instruct thee, render unto me thine tithes and adore me for I am the one true son of Gaia. Worship me you worthless sinners and I will lead thee into the saving light of Gaia’s salvation. Having rid themselves of any idea of a God and finding nothing else to cleave to in their barren wilderness, they found and worshipped a craven image. That’s what happens in a vacuum of moral desolation – false prophets arise and flourish.

I think the reason for him making a showing this particular year was his absolutely disastrous appearance on Australian television. Uniquely for him, his audience wasn’t hand-picked and the questions were not vetted in advance. That proved to be a heap big bigger biggest mistake of his life; the lazy git got found out. An audience member innocently prefaced a question with a reference to the three main temperature datasets and it soon became apparent that Suzuki didn’t even know what they were! So, a supposed climate guru had to have the acronyms of the world’s temperature records explained to him like the bloody opportunist ignoramus he truly is. You can see the full horror here.

It also didn’t help him this year that when he was on one of his lucrative tours abroad, he committed the cardinal sin that is always guaranteed to piss off all the folks at home; bad-mouthing your own country to foreigners in order to curry favour with the locals. Quite frankly, it’s a wonder the Canucks ever let the miserable little shit back into Canada, but knowing them as I do, they’ve too generous a Christian heart to exclude a person on the grounds of them being an obnoxious prat. That’s a position I honestly think they should reconsider. If he has such a low opinion of Canada, why not live somewhere else, or would such a principled stand as that involve taking too much of a financial hit?

The redoubtable Ezra Levant did a wonderful investigative piece on the true David Suzuki lurking behind the fluffy Mr. Miyagi image he cultivates, which you can find in full here and which, though it’s a bit long, I can thoroughly recommend. The segment about his insistence on being escorted to the speakers podium by a phalanx of nubile young college girls does have overtones of delusions of grandeur or dirty old man; take your pick. Quite frankly, it appears to me he seems to have more of an interest in accumulating vast amounts of money rather than saving the environment.

In short, he seems to me to be nothing more than a grasping old fart rather than an honest to goodness prat, but he was nominated, did run and of course lost. I’m sorta relieved really. If he’d won, it would have somehow taken something important out of the essential soul of the Pratties. It would have soiled the award and made it grubby, a bit like Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize.

Finishing first, and therefore this year’s winner, is Dana Nuccitelli. Being a connoisseur of strange, exotic and fabled creatures, I like Dana immensely because he’s a pure prat, a thinking man’s prat as well as a mustachioed pipe-smoking woman’s prat, a complete thoroughbred prat prancing around like a ballet dancer doing seemingly impossible grand jetés through the mediasphere, clad in nothing more than green hose and a beautiful miniature yellow codpiece with silvery tinsely bits carefully streaming back out between his legs like the tail of a flatulence-propelled Halley’s comet.

He flies through the air, right arm and fist stuck out defiantly like superman and steely eyes firmly fixed on the coming green state of bliss. And all of that in casual hush puppy shoes with invisible high riser heels. Visually, he’s mind-blowing, gorgeous and ultimately jaw-droppingly beautiful. I want to have his babies.

He ticks every prat box for me; a fine old Italian surname ruined by a silly and gender ambiguous forename, looks like a prat before he even opens his gob, has a prat’s droning reedy voice, dresses like a prat, rides a silly boy racer scooter that looks like it’s just had its stabilisers hacksawed off by a doting Momma and writes idiotic but uplifting drivel for the sort of Überprats who could only read that paginated derrière wiping aid called the Guardian.

He tweets incessantly like a disturbed flock of starlings, works indirectly for big oil and big mining, makes marvellous blunders like mistakenly calling a stalwart of the alarmist cause a denier, is profoundly confused about so many things and is generally on a huge ego trip that cannot end in anything other than tears. Bless him, bless him and his pointy little head. Bless, bless. All year, he’s been innocently but determinedly blundering his way up through the foothills of minor embarrassment to that biggie bastard waiting for him patiently at the very top of mount Major Disaster. There’s a kind of Marxist dialectic historic inevitability to his coming fate. One cannot help but feel it’s just a matter of time.

He so sincerely believes in all the rubbish he spouts but actually doesn’t appear to know much if anything about a lot of it. From such minor things as not understanding that there is actually a technical difference between the mode and the mean of a set of numbers, to biggies like reading, comprehending and writing rational critiques of non-alarmist papers. The latter unfailingly results in people like “Chopper” Monckton being handed the opportunity to yet again put on his big steel-toed soccer boots and kick his ass all over the joint. He really bloody rakes him with those studs.

You can nearly hear the poor wretch’s screams as he bounces between the walls, ceiling and occasionally off the floor as various people play keepy-uppy with him. Pop over to WUWT, search for Nuccitelli, and have a look how often he’s getting some sense knocked into him. After a while, it becomes reminiscent of that pull yourself together scene in Airplane.

Don’t you worry though Dana, I’ll always love you. Deeply, desperately, against all the odds and blindly rushing across that minefield of the bitter sectarian divide that keeps us apart. Be still my foolish heart. Though I’m a Montague and you’re a Capulet, it really doesn’t matter, I’ll still collect all of your curious antics and lovingly save them in my favourites directory, like the purloined locks of an unrequited lover’s hair.

Every non-sequitur, every stab at the very heart of a syllogism, every logical fallacy, every blunder, every single one of your cringing disasters as you spin your way ever downward into that inevitable event horizon of oblivion, every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, every word you say, every single day, I’ll be watching you.

You’re pure-blood Dana. Say it loud, say it proud, you’re the climate prat of 2013.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Pratties 2012 – Ladiees and Gennulmen, we have a winnah!

Climate Prat of the Year award 2013.

Climate Alarmism and The Prat Principle.

The shape of things to come; Snailbats, HALsays, Scarems, LewPapers and DickPols.

Being there and not being there.

Click for a list of other articles.