Give It Up, Progressives

After my attack on activist and environmental journalist Mark Lynas, I thought I’d test the waters with Tom Chivers who is a science editor at Buzzfeed.

Chivers has been a nemesis of mine since my days at the Telegraph. A likeable, good natured nemesis – but an irritant nonetheless. It’s bloody annoying when you’re a seasoned hack breaking stories like Climategate showing alarmists to be a bunch of lying charlatans and you’ve got some dogged progressive fresh out of ‘uni’ in the neighbouring pages, brandishing his science degree like it automatically trumps your Oxford arts degree, explaining patiently, goodnaturedly, passively aggressively that there’s this thing called the “science” and that what the “science” shows is that global warming is real, regardless of what some batshit crazy conspiracy theorist from the bad old days when the Telegraph was conservative might say.

So I thought I’d goad Tom, partly for the pure mischievous hell of it; but partly because I’m genuinely interested in seeing what coping strategies professional climate alarmists are going to adopt as their bankrupt theory crashes about their ears. Are they going to make a clean breast of things – admit they got the whole man-made-global-warming thing wrong and hope that we sceptics don’t shoot all our prisoners? Or are they going to go down with the sinking ship?

Well, this morning I had my answer from Mark Lynas.

Interesting. Such, even now, is his contempt for what he calls “climate deniers” that he feels under no obligation to defend himself against the perfectly valid criticism that he called “the Pause” completely wrong, misled his readers and traduced an honest journalist. He calls fair comment “trolling.” Clearly, he will  remain loyal to the Emperor on that remote Pacific island many decades after Hiroshima has been nuked.

But then, as alarmists go, Lynas is pretty out there: you need to be quite committed to doing what Lynas once did to Bjorn Lomborg and assault someone with a custard pie at a book signing.

Surely, I thought to myself, there might be at least a little repositioning from the less dogmatic or, at least, more diplomatic Chivers. So I asked him whether he’d ever doubted the Pause and whether he’d since changed his position on it.

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