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April 21, 2006

Jonah Goldberg: Hacky Boob

by AltHippo @ 2:11 pm. Filed under hacks

Jonah Goldberg is representative of the right-wing hacks that take up space on the pages of otherwise distinguished publications: He’s a self-made man. That is, If by “self-made” you mean he got his job through his mother’s infamous role in the Lewinsky scandal, and by “man” you mean effeminate boob.

I took a look at his recent vomit, I mean column, Seeing Red Over ‘Green Scare’, and had to wonder if they paid him not by the word, but by the hack.

For instance, this bit:

But Gore & Co. aren’t troubled by such details because the smears are all for a good cause. That’s why Gore saw nothing wrong in bullying dissident climate change scientists when he was a senator or waging a mean-spirited campaign to discredit the work of his old mentor, Harvard oceanographer Roger Revelle, because Revelle thought alarmism was unwarranted.

If you don’t recognize the name Roger Revelle, he’s the guy who coined the term “Global Warming.” If you do a Google search, you can come up with numerous examples of Gore dissing him, like this 2000 NYT article:

His appreciation of science really exploded in his senior year, when Mr. Gore also got to know Roger Revelle, the oceanographer who did much of the pioneering work on the greenhouse effect and global warming — a major focus of Mr. Gore’s 1992 environmental tome, “Earth in the Balance.” When Mr. Revelle shared his research with the students, Mr. Gore was hooked.

“It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates,” Mr. Gore said. “Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!”

Wow, Gore really tore Mr. “Global Warming” a new ozone hole!

(For the record Jonah seems to have been flogging the “Al Gore turned on his mentor” canard since at least 1999.)

I know it must be tough to find scientists coming out against taking action on Global Warming, but Jonah found some guy named Richard Lindzen. Funny story about Mr. Lindzen:

The November 10, 2004 online version of Reason magazine reported that Lindzen is “willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now.” Climatologist James Annan, who has offered multiple bets that global temperatures will increase, contacted Lindzen to arrange a bet. Annan offered to pay 2:1 odds in Lindzen’s favor if temperatures declined, but said that Lindzen would only accept a bet if the payout was 50:1 or better in his favor. No bet occurred.

This bit of sludge towards the end of his piece is too dense for me to unpack entirely:

This is just a small taste of the millenarian battiness running through the green scare. Sure, a one- or two-degree-per-century rise in average global temperatures may have unpleasant consequences — with some pleasant ones as well — but in what study did the New Yorker’s fact-checkers verify that Earth will become uninhabitable? Moreover, the greens’ proposed solutions to global warming are even more otherworldly. Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions to 60% of 1990 levels before 2050, while China, India and (hopefully) Africa modernize, is inconceivable, ill-conceived and also immoral because it would consign generations to poverty.

Besides using the word millenarian incorrectly (it means a positive transformation, not a cataclysmic one as the context implies) he manages to condemn the New Yorker for not justifying their prediction of an “uninhabitable” earth, but provides no justification for his statement that action against Global Warming will “consign generations to poverty.”

Remember though. It’s Al Gore who’s the fear mongerer. Goldberg would never use tactics like that.

Priceless. Though, perhaps “without value” captures it better.

Update: ThinkProgress picks up on the part about Global Warming having some pleasant consequences.

I missed the significance of this being the day before Earth Day, which seems kind of rude of Jonah. It’d be like writing an essay on the evils of presidential arrogance the eve of Bush’s birthday.

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2 Responses to “Jonah Goldberg: Hacky Boob”

  1. saurabh Says:
    April 22nd, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    Lindzen is at MIT and has been a prominent global warming doubter for a long time. He’s generally considered to one of the most credible representatives of doubters. Plus he’s a well-respected scientist. So Goldberg’s not really out of line in referring to him. Analagous to GW believers citing Hansen all the time.

  2. AltHippo Says:
    April 23rd, 2006 at 10:34 am

    Likewise there’s some credible Creation Scientists. But I wouldn’t bet the polar ice caps on what they have to say, particularly when their views are really in the minority.

    It’s important to note that this was not intended as a criticism of Global Warming skeptics so much as a criticism of the Jonah Goldberg’s of the world who have other ideological and financial motivations.

    Oh, and when folks like Goldberg intentionally use innuendo and rhetorical fallacy to mislead their readers, that really bugs me.

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