Grim and Determined Environmentalists

Further to the "narrow intellectual gatekeeping" by a small group of scientists which was revealed by the ClimateGate documents, Wretchard notes that observations about the scientists involved in the ClimateGate correspondence remind him of a type of activist he encountered when he was part of an underground resistance movement against the corrupt Marcos regime in the Philippines. Quoting Steven Hayward concerning the ClimateGate documents:

. . . . How is it possible for a group of smart people to write over 1,000 e-mails over the course of a decade without a single shred of wit or humor in any of them? There isn’t the tiniest hint anywhere that any of these guys ever grin. It jives with my experience of environmentalists for 20 years now that they are the single most humorless slice of humanity on the planet. . . .

The descriptions jump out at you. When you read communications which routinely refer to others as ‘not reliable’; when a 1,000 emails contains not a single shred of wit or humor, then there’s some probability you’re encountering what we used to call the Grim and Determined man or G & D for short. It was an acronym my group of friends had for fanatical and dogmatic members of the Communist Party during the underground days. This behavior was so obvious it actually made it dangerous to be around them. These people could not assume a cover identity. They had only one invariate personality and any disguise they attempted called attention to themselves because it was at such odds with their unrelenting, monotonic and obsessive personalities.

Whenever you saw a G & D man, the odds were that he was being sent over to try and discipline you. It didn’t matter whether or not you recognized his authority, the G & D man always presumed that he had some kind of Petrine authority to bind and loose. They would have been equally at home working for Torquemada or Beria.

Wretchard believes that this personality type is found in movements across the political spectrum. But at this time in history, they seem to have quite a bit of power in the environmental movement. Poem and conclusion at the link. Wretcbard has had a lot of thought-provoking posts lately. On Afghanistan and US politics, reluctance of countries to meet their climate change promises (and the mountain of payments which could be claimed by Russia), the Algerian civil war and terrorist propaganda, how the Mongol empire resembles the internet, and confirmation bias (along with bureaucratic bias) vs. fraud in climate science (interesting comment thread). Scroll through all his recent posts here.

But back to "Grim and Determined" environmentalists: Al Gore is having a difficult time dismissing ClimateGate. He's still calling people who disagree with him "deniers" -- an evil slur which downplays the horrors of the Holocaust and which makes today's real Holocaust Deniers seem rather innocuous. And he's still falsifying the record, even in his latest interview on CNN. And touting the "green" accomplishments of China, without mentioning that the Chinese are also building a new coal-fired power plant every 10 days. A few counter-insults concerning this interview at Deceiver.com:

Putting aside the fact that these “private” e-mails are work product from a publicly funded institution, and are evidence that the science is far from settled, they’re not all 10 years old. They do span the last 13 years, but the most recent e-mail is from just last month. They’re evidence of an ongoing effort to hide and manipulate the data, and to suppress dissent. It’s been going on for a long time, and they’re still trying to get away with it. Al’s doing it right here.