It is not fair to judge a movement by its most unreasonable advocates… at least provided that others distance themselves from the various excesses. But if they don’t, in the face of news-like objects such as “Scientists warn California major cities could disappear by 2050”, then it is fair to say that they either lack the brains to see why it’s folly, the spines to say so, the noses to detect a foul odour coming from their own camp, or all of the above. Years ago in the Wall Street Journal James Taranto spoke of the need for parties, and movements, to practice political hygiene. It may seem like giving aid and comfort to the enemy to admit the person next to you just said something wrong, misguided or openly stupid, vile or both. But in fact the very act of thinking in terms of enemies to be crushed rather than mistaken fellow humans to be persuaded is part of what makes that smell others will notice even if you resolutely do not. If climate alarmists want to have, let alone deserve, respect, they really need to be more alert to, and vocal about, examples of dubious conduct in their own ranks from mishandling of data to mishandling of questions.

An extreme example of poor hygiene in the alarmist movement is the tendency of greens to adopt ugly unrelated causes. Take, for instance, Canada’s Green Party, which is so dominated by leader-for-life Elizabeth May that it seems she is the party and vice versa. Among her nasty follies she has now “sponsored a petition asking that Parliament declare an LGBTQ genocide in Canada.” Which is an insane lie and has nothing to do with the environment. (She also posted something on the Boulder antisemitic attack so bizarre that even she realized she had to delete it.) Greta Thunberg has gone full Hamas. So apparently have Australia’s Greens; The Australian observes that:

“Greens Leader Larissa Waters has declared the left-wing party will always call out “genocide” and “atrocities” when they occur, in an allusion to the Middle East conflict.”

We don’t even know why the Greens should be a “left-wing party” as opposed to occupying a unique niche in favour of an organic approach whether a specific policy prescription that results is traditional left, traditionally right, traditionally centrist or a complete novelty. Instead they’re not just always in favour of more government, they’re unable to keep out of the fever swamps. And their friends seem unable or unwilling to try to pull them out.

The same thing is true of bad science. A crush-their-tiny-heads approach might yield short-term tactical advantage, but at the cost of a long-term loss of credibility. It’s not just them, of course, by any stretch of the imagination. But when your opponents rush down from the high ground into the bog, why race after them? Even tactically it hurts you.

In this regard Ms. Thunberg in her pre-jihadi incarnation was already a bad example. She was plainly unversed in the science and shrill in her rhetoric. But she seemed to be popular and opponents looked mean taking on a teenage girl. So the same people who were themselves nasty about the credentials of skeptics had nothing to say about her lack of proper training or indeed that of Al Gore. And more seriously, they did not object to her lack of knowledge. Nor to that of António Guterres, whose position as UN Secretary General evidently seemed to them so polemically effective that nothing he ranted or misstated would lead them to say thanks but leave it to us.

Including his prating about sea level rise. Which they also tolerate, when they do not amplify it, from all kinds of people including colleagues who do have degrees in related scientific fields. As they do on things like an alleged increase in extreme weather that not even the IPCC claims is happening. And they do not speak up when people, again including colleagues, make clearly inaccurate statements about the reliability and precision of proxy records.

The press is fond of claiming, and so are some of the experts who say, that the planet is now at its hottest in 125,000 years. And if they’re not motivated to say that plenty of geological or biological proxy data says it’s not, that the Holocene Climatic Optimum was obviously warmer, can they not at least mention that having ancient human artefacts emerge from retreating glaciers shows that the glaciers were not there when the artefacts were deposited? Or will they say that a historian has no business discussing climate because the past has no relevance to the subject including the question of whether it was warmer then? Something is fishy here.

The same is true of clearly unsound sensationalism. If Reuters “Sustainable Switch” emails that “northern China is bracing for typhoon-like gales this weekend… Strong winds carrying sand and dust from Mongolia are normal at this time of the year, but climate change has made weather events more extreme” do they feel no impulse to question the vagueness, the certainty or the unseemly combination? Reading yet another story about how climate change is driving coffee to extinction full of “a global coffee crisis caused mainly by climate change” and “leading coffee-producing countries struggle to grow crops in drier, less reliable weather” and “the gap in the market caused by climate change” are they not moved to say something… even in passing… about the fact that 2023-24 saw the biggest coffee crop in world history?

When Euronews.green blares “Deadly floods, storms and heatwaves: Europe suffered the 'serious impacts’ of climate change in 2024”, do they not wish to instruct the public, and the press, about the difference between trends and fluctuations, or signal and noise? Then of what use to the public is their vaunted training and the credentials it lets them put on their wall?

Or what about trying to scare readers silly about sea levels by warning that “San Diego is experiencing the fastest increase, with sea levels rising by 2.6 millimeters per year”, which doesn’t pass the smell test. At that rate it takes a decade to rise an inch. And since 2050 is now only 25 years off, they’re seriously claiming two and a half inches of sea level rise will sink a big American city. It won’t even affect recreational activity on its beaches.

So what is scary, you might think, is that the journalists either couldn’t do that math, or thought their readers couldn’t and rather than helping them it was an occasional to put one over on them. But what’s really scary is that this kind of journalism doesn’t earn a rebuke, in the form of an Op Ed, a letter to the editor, or even a quiet email or call to the reporter, from reputable authorities in the field willing to say look, we think man-made climate change is a crisis and part of it in our view is sea level rise. But you can’t say that sort of stuff. It’s not true and it makes us look bad.

Do they not know, or not care?