For those who missed this explosive mini-controversy from last week, the Heartland Institute, a think tank publishing lengthy reports contradicting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about man-caused global warming, paid for the placement of an electronic billboard in Chicago that repeated a notorious criminal’s belief in global warming.
A huge outpouring of criticism about the billboard prompted Heartland to pull it.
It was illustrating absurdity with absurdity that backfired because global warming alarmists weren’t put into a defensive position of explaining why the issue is on the verge of total collapse. As Rush Limbaugh noted recently, “you never descend to the level of your opponent or they win.”
The billboard clearly did not advance the skeptic position, but it at least illustrates how the best defense is to go on the offense. As this opportunity was widely grabbed by alarmists to portray Heartland as daffy, corrupt, and politically motivated, it serves as one more example of how alarmists rely on shell games keep the public from fully comprehending the enormous faults in the idea of man-caused global warming.
Those who find themselves embroiled in a war, no matter how noble their ideals may be, have the same options as any other combatant: surrender, shed endless blood in inconclusive holding actions, or win. If winning is the chosen option, you have to be better than the enemy. That is to say, more devious and more ruthless. The climate front of the green culture war has drug on for over two bloody decades because the skeptics have committed to nothing more than a hoped-for victory by accident or sheer attrition, which is barbaric. That said, billboards with the Unabomber are neither devious, nor ruthless. Just more blood and treasure.
My thanks to Steve Milloy for linking to my blog piece (and for being a guest blogger & article author here at JS), and to commenter Eric above for words that I now wish I could have said in that piece. It’s been my long-term gripe that skeptic climate scientists stop short in denying ‘fossil fuel industry influence’ corrupts their work when a decisive victory in public awareness is always at hand if they go one step further and point out where the corruption accusation originates and how faulty it is. That accusation is rotten to its core, and is only one of two legs holding up the idea of AGW. The other leg is the ‘settled science’ talking point, and we all see how skeptic scientists are chiseling away on that leg.