Climategate Denier Raises Nazi Allusions, Employs Awesome CRU Tactics, Purges Arguments That Prove Him Wrong

The invaluable Climate Depot alerts us to the uproarious antics of Michael Tobis, a leading apologist for the climate scam promoters (I've helpfully shortened the URL to his post -- http://tinyurl.com/ClimateScam). Tobis offers a variety of spectacularly poor arguments, each worth spotlighting for their peg-the-needle disconnectedness from reality.

Best of all, when challenged on his blog, Tobis chose to delete opposition comments -- even when politely phrased and attributed -- an apparent violation of his own policies. Then again, deletion of factual data seems to be a specialty of this crackerjack bunch. Consider the three tenents of Tobis' argument:

1. Did you know: global warming climate change deniers are essentially Nazis?

You'll forgive me. The fact that my paternal grandfather among other close relatives was in fact killed at a concentration camp on the basis of right-wing conspiracy theories makes it hard for me to take the matter all that lightly. I don't imagine that climate scientists are going to be rounded up and gassed anytime soon, but the reinvention of the techniques for stirring up mass paranoia would disturb me greatly even if they weren't directed, you know, at me and at some of the people I respect most in the world.

Oh, and:

2. Did you know: The Socialism-slash-personal profit meme behind AGW is a 'Ludicrous Conspiracy Theory'?

A ludicrous theory exists that people have invented "global warming" from whole cloth in order to advance either our own personal interests (the idea mocked by the title of this blog [ed: Only In It For The Gold] or, more recently, a subversive political agenda intended to

* 1) weaken the west in favor of the less developed countries
* 2) weaken the less developed countries in favor of the west
* 3) reinstate a Stalinist totalitarian state or
* 4) corner the energy market and drive small businesses into bankruptcy.

And Tobis emphasizes one final point:

3. Did you know: the Climategate disclosures represent much ado about nothing

• a rehash of a well-known controversy about how to present tree-ring data
• frustration about too much attention to substandard scientific papers slipped into the literature by marginally qualified people with nonscientific agendas, and discussions about how to handle that
• frustration about opposition by filibuster via freedom of information requests
• a single suggestion about "deleting emails", without any context, which plausibly does not refer to deleting emails from a server (scientists are probably aware that end users cannot really do this) but rather to deleting them from a response to one of many FOIA requests
• some sloppy code and a pretty sad but perfectly typical lack of understanding of the advantages of dynamic programming languages
• a couple of fudge factors explicitly labeled as such probably used in testing, commented out
• some older data for which CRU is not the originator or primary repository is not in any known dataset at CRU
• about 985 emails and 1995 other files of no apparent interest to anyone

I had attempted to respond to these disastrously flawed statements and -- predictably -- Tobis did not allow them to appear on his site. As regular readers of this site know, I let every side of an argument post. I may asterisk out a curse word now and then, but for the most part everyone is allowed to present their arguments.

Tobis' intellectual dishonesty prevented him from releasing this comment:

...the Nazis (the National Socialist Democrats) were leftists, through and through. They used a fascist version of socialism to advance their agenda.

Your apologia for Climategate is quite stunning. As for the so-called conspiracy theories regarding the socialists who have sprung up around the environmental movement, perhaps you could refute the following:

* The current EPA administrator's (Lisa Jackson) explanation that the environmental movement revolves around "social justice" and redistribution of resources ("We need to ... make clear that environmentalism goes hand-in-hand with traditional civil rights and social justice issues in our community").

* Carol Browner's involvement in the world socialist movement (until her name was scrubbed from the website).

* And the long history of the misuse of science in pursuit of "environmentalism" that have inarguably resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of innocents.

Furthermore, we now have reports from Russia, New Zealand and Australia about intentional falsification and corruption of raw data sets.

And the IPCC's own members have set up companies (e.g., EcoSecurities) and various consulting arrangements to make themselves millionaires from the very reports they've created.

This process is so corrupt that even the World Rainforest Movement (not exactly a right-wing group) has called it a "fraud".

Don't be a Climategate Denier -- it's unbecoming from a man of your stature.

Tobis (predictably) refused to let that comment appear on his blog. He alluded to it in a follow-up comment using his traditional standards of minimalist accuracy:

Readers are informed that this blog is moderated for a reason. If what you say only irritates me without interesting me at all, I make no promise to post it.

Please try to be interesting, and slightly more polite than you want to be. Thanks.

One peabrain insisted that Nazis are leftwingers because they have the word "socialist" in their name, and that my confusion on this point invalidates anything else I have to say. Refutation on that point is left as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously that was nowhere close to what was said. I posted one final comment on Tobis' site:

I see you have rejected my comment and made the claim that I am a "pea-brain" for the assertion that Nazis were leftists.

Here is an academic paper on the subject from Lawrence University. Put simply, leftism squarely assigns more power to the state; rightism assigns more power to the individual. On the one end of the former scale is despotism; on the other end is anarchy.

Hitler said himself of Nazism:

I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun...I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.

(Hitler to Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, pg. 186).

Not to worry, I'm sure you'll hit the delete button on this message as well.

Kind of like how the raw CRU data was dispensed with.

Did Tobis permit this comment? Of course not! He's got an agenda -- which doesn't in any way include veritas -- to pursue!

And aside from an almost uncanny ability to clog toilets, Tobis appears to be just another in a long line of talentless drones. And, yes, they are in it for the gold. That much is certain.



Update: Stupid or Evil, Redux: Eternity Road

Update II: Ed Driscoll links -- thanks! -- and has the must-see graphic: 'To Be Fair, That’s A Lot Of Decline To Hide'


Linked by: Cold Fury. Thanks!