After the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed signed by 16 prominent scientists that has urged the politicians and policymakers to stop panicking about "global warming" and start to review the money flows directed to climate change alarmism and that has warned about the striking similarity between climate disruption alarmism and Lysenkoism, several alarmist whackos have predictably gone ballistic. They know that the article was influential; the WSJ comment section under the op-ed attracted 2,300+ comments as of today.



If you want to be entertained by these loons who have entered an era in which the newspapers are no longer obliged to pay lip service to their pseudoscientific misconceptions, see e.g.



Finally, see a less emotional but equally pretentious answer by Katharine Hayhoe, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and a few dozens of fellow alarmists published as a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (TRF discussion).It's good to see that after a couple of years in which insanity thrived in the absence of sufficiently powerful natural foes, the pages of influential dailies are suddenly dedicated to the conclusions of prominent scientists while unhinged conspiracy theorists and hardcore commies may use their reserved spots in irrelevant weblogs, before they will be given more permanent beds in the mental asylums. The names of the people and their blogs – John Kook, Tree Hugger, De Smog Blog – as well as the usage of the term "denialists" a few times per sentence are enough to tell you something about the quality of these sources. What do you think sounds more trustworthy, the Wall Street Journal or De Smog Blog and Tree Hugger? ;-) But if you want to appreciate the actual non-quality in its full glory, you have to read the full reactions. Be ready for an extraordinary experience.Most of the authors of the reactions are either notorious inkspillers who don't have any background at all, or self-described "directors" of institutes to spread climate hysteria, or both.It's kind of interesting to see all these hysterical zeroes who try to attack people who have achieved many orders of magnitude more than the zeroes. In particular, the criticisms directed against Burt Rutan, one of the greatest contemporary aerospace engineers, seem to be out of proportion. But does Mr Gleick believe that he is Richard Lindzen's peer when it comes to atmospheric physics? Is Grist's Jess Zimmerman on par with Nir Shaviv? Do they really think that the opinion of 16 or 255 deluded whackos should be attributed the same importance as the conclusions of those who have looked most carefully and who have achieved something nontrivial in different but related sectors of human activity?Those people must feel really hopeless. They have been hoping in the arrival of a totalitarian system in which everyone would be obliged to link all bad events to global warming and the evil industrialists and capitalists; a system in which it would be forbidden to say that the global warming propaganda is/was just a modern counterpart of the propaganda systems of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. A system in which directors of street committee of alarmist juntas would be at least as important as CEOs of global oil corporations if not more so.Instead, what they're seeing is that the most trustworthy dailies are sharing this insight with their readers – an insight that may have only been understood by the best experts and most penetrating thinkers and pundits just a few years ago but one that is gradually being realized to be the case by an increasing proportion of the world population.