Guest essay by Russell Cook

Upon seeing DailyKos’ 5/12/15 hit piece against prolific climate issue editorial writer Tom Harris, it reminded me of DailyKos’ hit against me just one day after my WUWT guest post detailing who was behind the smear of Dr Willie Soon. While the folks at DailyKos do all they can outside of their organization to portray critics of catastrophic human-induced global warming as corrupt, the one thing they excel at is suppressing dissent within their walls.

Witness the manner in which they did everything they could to prevent Harris’ rebuttal to the hit piece against him from appearing online at DailyKos, captured in screencaptures at Harris’ web site. When Harris was barred from posting comments at the hit piece against him, he asked others, including me, if we could comment on his behalf, suggesting that if we met the same blocked result, that we could protest to DailyKos’ HelpDesk just as he did. Sure enough, I signed up, attempted to comment but was blocked, and my questions about that appear as comments 17/18 at that HelpDesk link.

On 5/14/15, having not been banned as a DailyKos registered user, I thought I’d try my own experiment of placing a diary entry online there. Here’s a screencapture of the diary post in its entirety, and an archive link I immediately made after submitting the post, showing that its intro was viewable to the general public and not just logged-in users. But mere minutes after that, this screencapture shows that I as a registered user was not even permitted to view my own diary entry. Not long after that, as seen in the current link for my diary post, it all vanished.

For those interested in what was so critical to erase from all view, my diary post is verbatim below.

Meteorologist does “Psycho Analysis of A Climate Skeptic” – something he spaced out, though

Way back in 2009, Dan Satterfield, Chief Meteorologist for WHNT TV (CBS) in Huntsville Alabama, deftly explained at his web page why people like me belong to a “cult of deniers”.

Under his blog heading “Psycho Analysis of A Climate Skeptic”, he offers (boldface emphasis mine) this:

..let’s look at someone who has been convinced that doing something about climate change means a significant change in their lifestyle, wealth, or ability to drive their favorite vehicle. Understand here, that there is overwhelming evidence that this is not likely the case, but let’s assume our “someone” believes it wholeheartedly.

So, what’s most likely to happen when someone who believes this, encounters someone who says climate science is all wrong? They can choose to believe them, and not have to battle with their conscience about being selfish, or they can believe the nearly unanimous opinion of climate scientists that we are heading for a catastrophe.

Toward the end, Satterfield says:

…If I can introduce a reader to real science before they fall into the junk science cult, they will see very quickly how silly the material is on these sites. Perhaps the only way to convince the cult of deniers, is to convince them that their initial assumtion [sic] that doing something about climate change will require a dramatic change in lifestyle is wrong!

All this time I thought I was a guy who couldn’t get straight answers to simple questions, like those in my GelbspanFiles.com blog. But now it is crystal clear to me – among all the other sacrificial green things I do, I drive a 32mpg+ little car, I’ve been a recycler for decades, my utilities bill is so small it makes people gasp in envy, I turn on my A/C wen the temp goes above……… wait for it…………. 86° F, I harvest rainwater and grow tree saplings, and read at night under dim 60 watt bulbs. And I am petrified with the idea that to do my part to save the planet, I must retreat to the stone age!!

NOT. How about, Mr. Satterfield and all you other folks subscribing to that unsupportable talking point about ‘greedy deniers’, that you try this on for size: think of me as the Fox Mulder character from the X-Files TV series / movie, who wanted so desperately to believe in UFOs. Give me some kind, any kind of irrefutable proof showing big industry-inspired / industry-bought errors in the skeptics’ peer reviewed published reports, please hit me over the head with undeniable evidence of the lies skeptic scientists have told and what motivated them to do such shameful acts that are so easily exposed, please, please, please stagger me with point-by-point dissections of all these skeptic scientists’ junk science along with what precisely makes it junk and what evidence there is showing that junk was scripted and approved by industry executives.

If not for me, do this for your own self-preservation. Otherwise, if you keep putting all your eggs in two baskets – skeptics are all corrupted by illicit funding / ‘deniers’ fear change – you will have no position to retreat to when both of those are blown to smithereens. Don’t think of that as a hopeless prospect, though, look at it as one more among other reasons for an exercise in introspection that could very well open up a bright future for you that you’ve had your eyes closed to all this time.

Perhaps best encapsulating the entire situation of not only what goes on at the DailyKos, but also within the larger global warming believer community, was a pair of assertions in comment #20 at the HelpDesk page on Harris’ protest:

Comments that seem to “disappear” are not deleted. They can still be seen by trusted users. They just cannot be seen by people who are not trusted users. […] free speech does not apply.

In other words, Obey. Or risk being labeled ‘untrusted.’

Ranging from early efforts in the ’90s to brand skeptic scientists as ‘industry-corrupted’, to the infamous Phil Jones line “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?“, to what we see today, can there be a more damaging way to undermine core scientific claims about catastrophic human-induced global warming than efforts to suppress all criticism of those claims by any means possible?

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