Wednesday, July 14, 2021

The global warming skeptic scam - thanks for the memories!

 I notice that Bjorn Lomborg, who I had totally forgotten about, is on a global Murdoch-y tour to tout his dismal pseudoscience. I'm impressed - most conmen from the OOs have crawled under various rocks, or gotten with the Trumpman, who showed them how to do it. Few would have the face to go to Australia and proclaim that the bush fires were just an out of control picnic, and lets get some gas in the SUV, baby. 

So, I looked back in the archive to see what I wrote about him back then. And I found a nice like funeral speech for the entire decade:

"Literary Criticism should  take up the curious case of ‘scepticism’ in the anti-environmentalist discourse. It is curious that skepticism is a virtue touted by the dubious, and foisted off on the credulous, to prove the incredible. At the same time, in the same decade, in which the overwhelming power of Saddam  Hussein’s secret weapons of mass destruction were accepted as fact by the establishment and the U.S. population in the face of the fact that Saddam Hussein could not,  manifestly, even threaten the breakaway Northern part of Iraq with any real force (sure, he could attack the U.S., but not fearsome Kurdistan!), the same people went into the lab and poured over the science to understand, in as neutral a way as possible, whether pouring Mississippi’s of CO2 into the atmosphere was a good thing or not. Such was the thirst for skepticism that petro companies, in their scientific  fervor, funded think tank intellectuals to find out all about it."

There is a real line to be drawn between the "libertarian scepticism" or "contrarianism" of the 00s and the Qanon freeforall of 2016-2021. There is that longing to believe that you are not an evil fucker, that you haven't lived the lifestyle of an evil fucker, and that you have proof. But since proof goes the other way - well, you go from scepticism to alternative facts pretty quickly. 

However, I'm an evil fucker too, and I want Bjorn Lomborg parachuted conveniently into a forest in Oregon, California, British Columbia, etc. - so that he can do some more of that marvelous research of his. 

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