An Impertinent Pup from Snopes Tried to Fact-Check Me on Global Warming. Here’s My Reply…

As I predicted, my piece “400 Scientific Papers in 2017  say ‘Global Warming’ is a Myth”, is causing greenie heads to explode like watermelons struck by hollow-point bullets.

Here is an email I got shortly afterward from a guy at the completely unbiased and apolitical (lol) fact-checking organization Snopes.

Hello James,

I’m a science writer for the fact-checking website Snopes.com reporting on your ‘400 studies say climate change is a myth’ exposé. I had a couple of questions about your process:

• Did you read all (or a fraction) of the 400 studies listed in that post personally or talk to any of the scientists involved?
• How long did it take to research this piece?
• Were you able to get an early look at the No Tricks Zone post from 23 October before it was published?

Best,

Alex

This Alex is an impertinent pup, isn’t he?

Since I make it my business not to respond to snarky little tics asking irrelevant questions designed to smear and belittle rather than enlighten, I thought I’d instead deal with the issues he raises here at Breitbart.

I do this for two reasons.

First because publicly humiliating one’s enemies is always fun.

Second, because these climate alarmists use the same old tricks, again and again, to prop up their junk science scam. It’s always a good idea to expose these tricks, to show the guy behind the curtain pulling all the levers, because once you know what these people’s game is, their dark magic loses its power.

That’s how I became one of the world’s most notorious and widely-read climate skeptics: not because I have a science degree – which I don’t – but because I am able to explain this dog’s breakfast of a shambles of a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer in language that normal people can understand.

For people like the guy from Snopes who sent me that impertinent email, my tell-it-like-it-is approach is a form of Lèse majesté. It doesn’t treat their beloved Consensus with the unthinking respect they require. It’s the little boy pointing at the Emperor and saying he is wearing no clothes.

They hate that. Hence the contempt dripping from Snopes Boy’s questions, which I’m going to answer in reverse order.

Snopes’s question:

• Were you able to get an early look at the No Tricks Zone post from 23 October before it was published?

My answer:

No.

Snopes’s question:

• How long did it take to research this piece?

My answer:

As little time as I possibly could.

You don’t think I enjoy doing this stuff, do you? When you’re a climate skeptical journalist every day is Groundhog Day. Same old grant-troughing junk scientists spouting the same old junk science lies and propaganda and drivel; same old rent-seeking corporate vultures trying to make megabucks by screwing the rest of us; same old eco-fascist progressives pushing their anti-human, anti-liberty globalist agenda.

Someone’s got to put these people back in their box, sure. But it’s a necessary chore – like pouring RoundUp on your weeds, putting out the trash, shooting rats, that kind of thing – rather than something you’d want to spend too much valuable life on.

Snopes’s question:

• Did you read all (or a fraction) of the 400 studies listed in that post personally or talk to any of the scientists involved?

My answer:

I see what you’re trying to do there. And I’m not playing. Let me explain why.

The other day I read a long book called Life And Fate by the Soviet Russian author Vasily Grossman. Now I don’t actually speak Russian so I had to take it on trust that the English translation was a fair and reasonable reflection of what Grossman actually wrote.

Yeah, for the full authenticity of the experience I suppose I could have done the scholarly thing and spent a few years learning Russian then read it in the original. But instead, I just cheated. “Life’s too short,” I said to myself.

I apply this aphorism to lots of other things too. For example: I get my milk in a bottle rather than squeezing it from a cow’s udders; I send my kids off to boarding school so I don’t have to discipline them or teach them everything they know (just most of it); I get my cars from motor manufacturers rather than trying to build them from scratch myself; if the cat or dog needs medical attention I tend to take them to the vet’s rather than attempt surgery on them myself.

And I also applied it when I came upon an article by Kenneth Richard at a website I’ve come to know and trust called No Tricks Zone.

Richard – bless his cotton socks – had taken upon himself the achingly tedious task of wading through these 400 science papers, assessing their skeptical position on “climate change”, and then highlighting the key passages that supported his argument.

In other words, he’d done all my homework for me.

Yes, I suppose I could have spent days (weeks?) reading all the papers myself, then many more weeks ringing up all the scientists responsible to see whether they still stood by the words they wrote in those papers.

But I didn’t – see milk; schools; cars; Russian novels, cats, dogs,  etc above – because that would have been utterly and dumb and pointless.

Obviously, if it turns out that Kenneth Richard has misrepresented these papers, then yes, I can be criticized for having lazily helped promulgate a lie.

If Snopes can demonstrate this to be the case – viz that the quotations from the papers I quoted are themselves misquotations – then clearly I will apologize.

Otherwise, it seems to me, I’m bulletproof on this one. If this is what the papers say – as illustrated by the quotations – then it is what they say.

And no, it doesn’t at all undermine my case some of the scientists who wrote these papers object to the context in which I have framed their research.

There are lots of reasons why someone involved in climate science might not want to feature in a Breitbart story with the glaring, clickbait headline “Now 400 Scientific Papers in 2017 say ‘Global Warming’ is a Myth”.

One is naked fear. As we know from the Climategate emails, the global warming Establishment is a cabal of bullies. Not only is dissent not tolerated but it is ruthlessly crushed. Skeptics are rarely published, except in obscure journals not controlled by the Alarmist Mob; almost never granted tenure. As a result, no scientist in this field would wish to be seen visibly going against “the Consensus”.

One is dishonesty. (Or, if you prefer to be more generous, cognitive dissonance). I discuss this in some detail here. Basically, some alarmists are so determined never to admit that they’re wrong that they’ll actually go so far as to deny the evidence of their own papers. This is what happened with the Nature Geoscience paper I wrote about here.  It admitted that the computer models were wrong and that – therefore – their doomsday predictions were overdone. But when people like me pointed this out, the authors furiously denied it.

One is dimness. Yes, I dare say it’s true that literally none of those 400 scientific papers uses the phrase “‘global warming’ is a myth.” Anyone who read the piece beyond the deliberately provocative, attention-grabbing headline, however, would find it hard to dispute the premise because it’s bang on the money.

When I used the phrase ‘global warming’, I employed it in the way in which it is most commonly employed by climate alarmists and their friends in the liberal media and people generally these days, viz: the unprecedented and catastrophic phenomenon driven primarily by anthropogenic CO2 which we must at all costs prevent by replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables.

Only an imbecile – or a professional climate alarmist or someone fact checking for Snopes, if there’s any difference – could possibly be so blinkered and stupid as to imagine otherwise.

Happy, now, my little Snopes pupster?

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