'It is not surprising that someone in Romm’s position might disagree with much of what we wrote about global warming. In this first post – he has since written several more – he had some particularly dismissive things to say about Nathan Myhrvold’s dismissal of solar power as unscalable. (More on that soon, in a following post.)
But more broadly, he made it sound as if we had distorted Ken Caldeira’s views in the worst way: “He [Caldeira] has responded to many e-mail queries of mine over the weekend,” Romm wrote. “He simply doesn’t believe what the Superfreaks make it seem like he believes.”
This was the blog post that launched a thousand more. The headlines varied a bit but the general thrust, perhaps inspired by Romm’s exciting headline, was always the same: two guys who aren’t climate scientists wrote a book with a chapter about climate science and one of the main climate scientists in this chapter is saying they badly misrepresented his views.
Yikes. If that were true, I would come after us with pitchforks too.'
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/global-warming-in-superfreakonomics-the-anatomy-of-a-smear/
Without getting into the rights and wrongs of anthropogenic global warming/climate change/whatever they are calling it this week, I was struck by the sentance above. It seems precisely right for the so-called 'debate' about the topic. A mob of lunk-headed peasants with burning torches and pitchforks, boiling with self-righteous anger, hunting down and lynching anybody who dares to contradict their religion. What mystifies me though, is why the author of the piece is so afraid of them. After all, its only a metaphorical lynch mob, whose real weapons are flame blog posts on scatalogical websites.
Does this guy really give a crap that he is being virtually lynched? I wouldn't.
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