Sunday, February 20, 2011

Pete Ridley: Global Warming Denialism's Benighted Black Knight

"The earth is suffering from global warming as a result of our excessive consumption of energy."---The Vatican (Scroll down.)

The scientific agencies of the U.S. government, the National Academies, the CIA, the Pentagon, the United Nations, and the Vatican all say that there is man-made global warming.

A global warming denialist blogger who calls himself Pete “the ferret” Ridley (his own appellation, see comment) is threatening to “ferret” me out and tell the world my real name because I criticize denialists behind a nom-de-plume. (Ferret means "little thief in Latin.)

The supremely overconfident Ridley reminds me just a bit of the Black Knight in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Pete "the ferret" Ridley has already claimed over at DeSmogBlog that Kent Clizbe (a self-proclaimed ex-CIA case officer who reportedly spams college professors and offers them a multi- million-dollar bounty from the federal government if they will denounce the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann for fraud) can easily find out who I am with the help of his CIA contacts.

It is possible that Kent Clizbe really is a trained ex-CIA operative privateering as a political operative for some political entity or for a denialist politician such as Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli; but I doubt that Kent Clizbe has many contacts in the CIA, because he is off-message when it comes to global warming: the CIA isn't harrassing climate scientists; the CIA is giving climate scientists security clearances so they can help the CIA study the national security implications of climate change. The CIA official in charge of the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security is named Larry Kobayashi, not Kent Clizbe.

"Beavis" Ridley and "Butthead" Clizbe can easily "ferret me out" by asking Virgina’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to blow the lid off "Snapple." I email his deputy W. Russell all the time to complain about the persecution of our scientists, and I use my real name.

Since Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli can’t seem to expose Dr. Mann, he might just have to settle for exposing old ladies who teach Catholic school. Perhaps Cuccinelli would also like to round up the Catholic Sisters who teach children about climate science, while he’s at it. Catholic schools don’t teach global warming denialism because it’s not science and it’s not Catholic.

Attorney General Cuccinelli cites the Kremlin’s official press agency RIA Novosti in his suit against the EPA, but the Vatican says there is global warming. Choosing between the Vatican and the Kremlin is not exactly a tough pick, like Thin Mints versus Do Si Dos.

Cuccinelli home-schools his older children; but if I am outed, young Virginians who attend Catholic school might end up discussing science and religion on that Facebook and Twitter the young people use these days to foment revolution.

If Cuccinelli outs me to this "ferret" or to this apocryphal ex-CIA operative, Cuccinelli might actually make a lasting, if unintentional, contribution to climate science; he might even trigger a Facebook revolution against foreign tyranny in Virginia, all in one fell swoop! After all, Cuccinelli is always encouraging Virginians to remember their revolutionary roots, and I hear him loud and clear!

Pete Ridley says I am a coward not to use my real name on my obscure blog and that he has a “low regard for those who hide behind false names.”

The low regard of benighted, hypocritcal ferrets who threaten me with apocryphal Clizbes does not especially trouble me. We are used to that in Soviet Studies. For example, the famous dissident samizdat publications Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania and the Chronicle of Current Events in the USSR were written by anonymous authors. That slowed down the political operatives of the Communist Party, the KGB.

While Pete Ridley may have a low regard for sharp-tongued, anonymous teachers, the not-very-sincere Ridley actually has a high regard for the anonymous hacker-criminals who stole the CRU emails and denounced the climate scientists anonymously. The criminal hackers are also big fat hypocrites who call themselves “honest men.”

Perhaps the benighted Pete Ridley grew up in the USSR where accusations of disseminating the CIA or Vatican line could get you charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda; but so far, spouting the CIA and the Vatican line is not a crime in Virginia.

If you are an aficionado of irony, check the ferret’s droppings in the comments here and here.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Pete Ridley said...

PART 2

You say “Almost all climate scientists say there is global warming. The National Academy of Science says that global warming is happening”. Most of those who are sceptical of CACC have no disagreement about the small amount of warming (less that 1C) that the globe may have experienced since the Little Ice Age. The debate is not about global warming, but about specifically what, if any, significant changes are taking place in the different global climates and what might be the causes of any such change. The scientists have a very poor understanding of these.

Do you have any particular expertise in this (other than what you have heard about from the media) and if so then please would you share this because at present our scientific understanding is very poor. As Barry Brook, a professor of climate change at Adelaide University and one-time chief scientific advisor to the Australian Government said in April 2009 “There are a lot of uncertainties in science, and it is indeed likely that the current consensus on some points of climate science is wrong, or at least sufficiently uncertain that we don’t know anything much useful about processes or drivers” (http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/). Brook then went on to say “But EVERYTHING? Or even most things? Take 100 lines of evidence, discard 5 of them, and you’re still left with 95 and large risk management problem”. The implication to be drawn from that is that we only have uncertainty about 5% but he offered nothing to substantiate that figure. It appears to have simply been plucked out of the air in the same way that the IPCC assigned confidence levels using “expert judgement”. The difference in this case is that ecologist Brook has been recognised for his expertise in specie extinction but I could find no evidence of him having done any (let alone significant) research into the processes and drivers of global climates.

Another apsect of this debate that is of particular interest to me is the validity of attempts by paleo-climatologists to reconstruct past atmospheric concentration of CO2 from air allegedly “trapped” in ice for hundreds and thousands of years. If you have anything worthwhile to add to that debate then please rejoin me on my "Smogbound on Molecular Fractionation in Ice” thread (http://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/2010/12/smogbound-on-molecular-fractionation-in.html?showComment=1298203385231#c7015992832028715255) but please observe the request that I make ahead of the “comment” box “Open debate is encouraged but please be civil and if quoting from others please give a citation and provide a link when appropriate”.

If you prefer then lets have it on your blog, but p[lease let us debate the science and drop the rhetoric.

Best regards, Pete Ridley

6:11 AM  
Anonymous Pete Ridley said...

I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS THAT YOU HAVE AGAINST THIS FIRSAT PART SNAPPLE.

PART 1

Hi “Snapple”, don’t you think that it is time we stopped exchanging nonsense and started expressing opinions in a reasonable manner. You and I are both intelligent humans, each with our own opinions and the good fortune to live in countries where they can be expressed without fear of being attacked because they don’t conform with the propaganda fed to us by our “rulers”.

It’s a far far worse situation in places like Zimbabwe, Libya, the Yemen, Jordan, Venezuela, etc. etc. etc. Even life in Russia and China would be an improvement for many, so lets be civilized and debate with reason – how about it?

You have for years expressed you strong feelings (to put it mildly) against Ward Churchill. I had never heard of him until you came into my life with comments about climate change. Because of that I have learned something, not only about him but also about native Americans. That’s good, as long as what I have learned is truth and not just dogma. You come across as having personal knowledge and understanding of that situation arising from your immersion in it, but others who appear to be close to it hold opposing opinions. I have no opinion on it and quite honestly am not really interested, any more than you will be interested in my opinion about the privileged in the UK strutting the world stage at the expense of the hard-working taxpayer.


One thing that we do have a common interest in is the processes and drivers of the different global climates. This appears to be something that you have now turned to rather than Ward Churchill (what happened to him?) but have you studied it and looked carefully at the arguments presented by sceptics?

3:31 PM  
Anonymous Pete Ridley said...

PS: Hey, Snapple, as a self-proclaimed “ .. expert on Soviet persecution and manipulation .. ” can you advise on this one “You'll never guess who's frightened Obama is too weak” (http://www.personal.psu.edu/glm7/m918.htm) ?

Best regards, Pete Ridley

3:02 PM  

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