Dissecting the brain of an AGW denier

I have a lovely little email from Miranda Divine, a SMH opinion writer, that gives great insight into how the mind of a denier works when challenged by inconvenient truths.

It's not lovely: it is down-right rude, as was mine that prompted her response. But I had resisted the idea of publishing it on GWW due to the one-on-one nature of the correspondence.

That's until I read this from her latest column, commenting on the CRU hack:

And now damning emails leaked from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia have implicated some famous climate scientists in a conspiracy to manipulate data and suppress evidence to exaggerate the case man-made ''runaway'' global warming is threatening the planet. We see clearly the rotten heart of the propaganda machine that has driven the world to the brink of insanity on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

More than 1000 emails and 3000 documents, covering correspondence between climate scientists for more than a decade, was (sic) posted on a Russian website with a link to the climate sceptic blog Air Vent on November 17, by someone using the name FOIA (presumably after the Freedom of Information Act). FOIA wrote: ''We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.'

Miranda's wheels spin from the start. A mail-server hacked by cyber-criminals who then publicly post-up private correspondence between scientists, is not the heroic whistle-blowing act of 'leakage' that Devine seeks to portray. Rather, it's a bastardly act, yet she is oblivious to the tainted provenance of those emails. She has no evident moral compass at work here.

No consideration is given about the real-motivation of the hacker(s), one month before Copehenhagen. That would be venturing into journalism the other part of her job description. Instead she reward the criminals and publish extracts from the private emails to build-up false allegations of foul play by the community of climate sciences.

We knew but never before had seen such proof of bad faith, overwhelming in its small detail, its shameless dishonesty, its meanness, its totalitarian tactics, pouncing on every deviation from The Word, as handed down by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yet her examples of cherry-picked and context-stripped extracts from private emails do nothing to support her hyperbolic claims of conspiracy.

The good thing is people can now see the tactics of the alarmists and their army of bovver boys. You can read the emails online and then you can read the sly attempts to explain away the misdeeds. Despite their feigned reasonableness and world-weary calm over the email scandal, climate alarmists are in a mad fumbling panic. They are exposed as dangerous megalomaniacs, foolish, but with enormous power.

Nowhere is there the acknowledgement that people express themselves more loosely in email, especially between friends and colleagues, than they do in making formal pronouncements. Nowhere is there an attempt to understand any context or background. Nor, as said before, is there an inkling that Miranda understands the unethical nature of how these emails were obtained and then published.

Rather, she gleefully piles on.

So how would Miranda Devine like it if I published her email so the world can judge for itself whether she is willfully blind to facts, and informed only by her prejudices?

The background is her follow-up article, "Going berko over a bipsycho", Miranda wrote in reaction to the overwhelming deluge of complaints about her provocative article entitled "Roads are for cars, not Lycra louts".

RE: Your "Going berko over a bisycho"
Sat, 31 October, 2009 9:06:13 AM
From: miranda Devine
To: XXXXX@yahoo.com.au

: You are either delusional or a liar. The respones were easily split 50-50 - and I'm being generous. You need to go back and actually read them. I can add to those the roughly 400 personal emails I have received, the majority of which agree with my point of view. There is a groundswell of resentment against the arrogant behaviour of so many cyclists. I never had any intention of retracting anything I said. And pretending that my column will incite murder is a pathetic tactic which just exposes the poverty of your argument.

Miranda Devine - The Sydney Morning Herald - 1 Darling Island Pyrmont 2009 (02) 9282 1102
twitter.com/mirandadevine

And here is what I initially wrote to her to deserve hers. In judging me, keep in mind I commute by cycle whenever the weather permits. I admit to exaggerating my claim a tiny bit, but nothing like that evidenced by the willful denial that Miranda seems to suffer under.

Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:02:03 -0700
From: XXXXX@yahoo.com.au
Subject: Your "Going berko over a bisycho"
To: devinemiranda@hotmail.com

Dear Miranda,

Your above article is nothing more than a transparent exercise in displacement.

I read every single one of the 478 responses to your inciteful piece. 474 of them pointed out you had no right to suggest that roads are not for bikes, one way or another. The other four were your regulars.

For your stupidity, you got pilloried, Miranda.

Rightly so; Imagine trying to turn one part of society against the other taking on a heated subject that boils down to survival on the road for cyclists?

Though you identified yourself correctly in that piece as a coward, it's not for not riding your bike (people can choose how they commute/recreate), but for not directly and clearly retracting your extremist comment that roads are for cars only. Right now there is a freak out there who read your piece, and is armed with the self-righteousness you promoted, driving a weapon weighing up to a tonne, who might reflect on your jaundced words and take it out on the next cyclist they see.

I suggest you explain more clearly how wrong your piece was.

Regards,

Wadard

Check out the comments under the second link and confirm for yourself whether they are split 50-50. Is she really being generous or mean?

So now you know you know how an AGW denier, and Miranda Devine is one too, can believe there is nothing to the message that climate scientists have been telling us for over 20 years. They just blank out the inconvenient truth and keep bleakly pushing their barrow.

Now you know they have no credibility.

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