This is very long, and won’t interest everyone. I had a rather odd conversation with a defender of Stop Oil Now on Twitter.
To my surprise, my comment got a lot of likes, and provoked this reply:
Paul McMc: You’re neither though, so how would you know?
To which I replied:
Geoff: Do you think only specialists know things?
Enter Anthony Cadman @climateboss1949
Cadman: Depends on the things.
What follows is the major part of our discussion, minus an intervention from the estimable ManicBeanCounter and some digressions. I’ve added a word or two to improve the syntax where Twitter’s character number limits made my text obscure, and I may have got some parts out of order due to bifurcating threads. It’s not a masterpiece of Socratic dialogue, but it does illustrate what we’re up against, I think.
First, a certain Matt entered the fray:
Matt: So the consensus amongst climatologists is we are all going to die from climate change?
Cadman: Who said that? No Climate Science I have heard says that.
Geoff: Science doesn’t “say” anything. It’s is a process, not a Holy Scripture. What I (and Matt I guess) supposedly can’t know about (because we’re not specialists) is whether we’re all going to die from climate change. Idiots can spout this nonsense ‘cos scientists, alas, stay silent.
Cadman: Splitting hairs over word interpretation? Bad form. Matt made a statement, my challenge was where he drew that from, I am not aware that anyone having said that. Climate Scientists have never stayed silent, just their words fall on deaf ears.
Geoff: Not splitting hairs. Stop Oil freaks are deluded by hysterical headlines claiming “the science” says we’re all going to die etc. and few climate scientists have stepped up to correct them. Instead, rational sceptics are derided as flat earthers. Tell Stop Oil the truth please.
Cadman: No they are not. Where are these headlines ? Nowhere. Who are these rational sceptics? Usually Climate Science Deniers. Stop inventing a narrative, if you make a claim, be prepared to prove it.
Cadman: Brilliant vid and discussion about Renewables and Fossil Fuels. https://youtu.be/wNHe-lQrrOs
Cadman: Like this !
Cadman: Just seen this, and think Matt and yourself should.
Geoff: [ignoring above diversion tactics] So if we agree that climate science doesn’t say “we’re all going to die” and you say there are no headlines saying so, where does Stop Oil get this idea, which is clearly implied in their questionnaire?
Cadman: It was you that made the claim about “we are all going to die” headlines, not me! Have you talked to someone from Just Stop Oil ? Where is this implication? I have not seen it.
Cadman: I have blocked your idiot mate, Matt, you are welcome to the same.
Geoff: Blocked from what? […] Matt was only asking for evidence.
Cadman: Do you know what a “Gish Gallop” is? Essentially an offensive barrage of questions delivered at speed, so that the opponent cannot reply, it is a form ad hom fallacy, meant to disable the person, and not the argument. That is your mate, Matt.
[By the time I got round to transcribing this, nothing was visible of Matt’s Gish Gallop except his one intervention above]
Geoff: […] Well now we’ve slowed down to a trot: If there are no headlines saying that “we’re all going to die” and, as we agree, climate science doesn’t say so, where did StopOil get that idea?
Cadman: I have no idea where that comes, I have not seen it, and you are the only person that has mentioned it. Is is sourced directly from Just Stop Oil literature ? Have you posed that point to JSO?
Geoff: From the JSO site: research: document: “Just Stop Oil: the Why and the How” p6:
“Further expansion of oil and gas production globally is putting us on course for human extinction”
It took me 3 minutes to find. There are thousands of similar quotes everywhere in the climate movement.
Cadman: Right, that clarifies it. That is an acceptable scientific and academic position to hold. We have had 5 Extinction events, the last one, End- Cretaceous about 30 mya. One of the defining features was C02 levels. Throughout the Holocene, the C02 level we (humans) evolved in was around 280 ppm, over 10,000’s ys. Our CO2 now is around 418 ppm and rising fast, over 300 years. See the problem? So, a reasonable worry is, we are the 6th Ext.
Geoff: You say: “Our CO2 now is around 418ppm and rising fast, over 300 years. See the problem?”
and we have been putting significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere for about 70 of those 300 years. See the problem?
Cadman: Absolutely, and glad that you do. Over the last 70 years we have added about a third more, so since the 1940’s we have increased ( by a third) the C02. If you are aware of this, and the dangers associated with it, you really should be campaigning with some climate group.
Geoff: No. I’m asking: do you see the problem of attributing catastrophic climate change to us, when temperatures have been rising for 300 years, & we’ve only been adding significant amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere for 70 yrs? What was the CO2 concentration in 1722 by the way?
Cadman: Nah, look again at your initial comment and my response. You claimed death, not the same as Extinction Event. I claimed I had not seen the comment you referred to, but am aware of Extinction Events. You playing “gotcha!”
Geoff: I’ll try again:
StopOil said: “..everyone is dead” (i.e. if we don’t stop oil) and: “.. on course for human extinction.”
You said: “I have no idea where that comes, I have not seen it, and you are the only person that has mentioned it.”
Stop Oil clearly think death & extinction are the same
Cadman: Death caused by Extinction, and death caused by old age, heart attack, starvation, war etc are not the same thing. Stop being disingenuous !
Geoff: No-one mentioned heart attacks etc. I’m asking where Stop Oil got the idea we’re all going to die from climate change if not from climate science or media headlines.
Cadman: Ask Just Stop Oil. We have been over already. Stop being disingenuous. Stop with the Sealioning. Block on the horizon.
[Link to Professor Richard Alley]
Geoff: From summary of Alley : “burning .. fossil-fuel.. and releasing the CO2 will cause large and long-lasting climate changes [which] will make life notably more difficult for future generations. A measured response starting soon is economically favorable.”
That’s not “we’re going to die” is it?
Cadman: So you have exhausted the other lines of attack, so returned to a post made earlier. True Sealion behavior. Look again and think about the quote you selected. Block looms ever closer.
Geoff: Block from what? Is this your twitter account? Are you StopOilNow?
Cadman: Guess. Go ahead, take a guess!
Geoff: So it’s you who put that quiz up. Why didn’t you say? When you recommended Alley I thought you were a climate scientist. We’ve been talking at cross purposes haven’t we?
Cadman: What quiz? Damn, you are weird!
Geoff: The one at the top of this thread. I tend to avoid long words like “questionnaire” because I’m afraid of overrunning my character quota. When I worked in market research we used to say “qu’aire” but with my English accent that could be misunderstood.
Cadman: Looking at your comment now, just another slither on your Sealion path, and another slither towards that beautiful block.
Cadman: Post it again, my “quiz”!
Cadman: So, you decided not to. Anytime!
Geoff: Decided not to do what?
Cadman: Re-post the “quiz” you claimed I posted!
Geoff: We’re at cross purposes again. I took your “Go ahead, take a guess,” together with your reference to blocking as an admission that this is your twitter account. Otherwise how could you block me?
Cadman: No, we are not, you claimed I posted a quiz, I did not. Repost or retract, your choice.
Cadman: So, you running then, looking for the exit?
Geoff: I’m trying to establish whether this twitter account is yours, but mainly: Where did Stop Oil get the idea that “we’re all going to die,” if not from climate scientists or the media? Why should I want to repost a quiz?
Cadman: Nope, you are playing disinformation games. Re: your claim about “my Quiz” Repost or Retract…. it is that easy, prove that I am lying or you are!
Geoff: So you didn’t post the quiz at the top of this thread? So this isn’t your account? In which case, what’s all this about blocking me?
Cadman: Repost it, this quiz that you claim I posted, so all can see what you are crowing [emoji of cock here] about. Nobody else has seen it except for you. Are you telling lies? Attempting to misinform and mislead? Are you a Climate Science Denier?
Geoff: As I explained (perhaps you didn’t see it) I used “quiz” as shorthand for the questionnaire at the top of this thread. If you didn’t post it, fine. What I was interested in, and what you seemed to be interested in too, is the source for StopOil’s claim that we’re going to die/become extinct.
Cadman: Nope, you lied and attempted to misinfrom and mislead. You attempted to create the false impression that my Twitter account was not mine. You attempt by constant negative repetition to undermine lines of debate, to gain dishonest advantage. You are dishonest, a liar. A sealion.
Geoff: Yes, but what about the question we started with about the source for Stop Oil’s claim that we’re going to die/become extinct? You said it’s not from climate science, & it’s not from press headlines, so where’s it from?
Cadman: Try this first !
« Nope, you lied and attempted to misinfrom and mislead. You attempted to create the false impression that my Twitter account was not mine. You attempt by constant negative repetition to undermine lines of deabate, to gain dishonest advantage. You are dishonest, a liar. A sealion »
Geoff: I’ve already read that. That’s what I was replying to. So please answer my question.
Cadman: So you have gone. Good. Next time you enter a discussion on climate, do so honestly and openly. I hope you have learnt that, this is way too important for playing climate science denial games with.
Geoff: What do you mean, “gone”? I’m waiting for a reply. You seem to agree with StopOil that we’re going to die from climate change, & you state that neither press headlines nor climate science make this claim. (Prof Alley certainly doesn’t.) So where does it come from?
Cadman: 2nd thoughts, going to mute you.
[I’m not sure what muting involves on Twitter, but this dialogue certainly left me speechless]
Climate Scepticism 
I think those responses might fail the Turing test. Did he respond really really fast? Perhaps he was reading your texts too quickly to actually digest what you were saying before he eagerly rushed out the next reply.
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ANDY
Wordpress won’t allow me to like your reply, so I’ll have to reply myself. I had to look up Turing test. The Wikipedia article is very long.
Are you serious?
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I see I got JustStopOil’s name wrong, in my tweets and in this article, calling it StopOilNow, even after Cadman referred to it as JSO. A psychoanalyst would say I don’t really care.
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Anything rather than discuss the data. Cad man prefers to dissemble, divert and disparage.
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Geoff, I give you full marks for patience and persistence, but Twitter isn’t my gig. It can be useful occasionally, but not for developing arguments or having meaningful discussions, IMO. Still, that transcript does amply demonstrate what we’re up against. It’s a religion. Logic is nowhere in sight.
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Geoff, you’re right about it not quite being worth reading line by line in full considered detail, I only skimmed really. But it think you missed the low hanging fruit straight up. Your antagonist said something like “Nobody has ever said ‘we’re all gonna die'”; and while I’m sure there’s plenty that Google could find on that, the really obvious rejoinder is that it’s right there in the name: Extinction Rebellion.
This is the same tactic used about the term “woke”. It’s very well known that it was cool hipster slang until 2019-2020, when it was “discovered” with much delight by the unwoke. Muppet activists say this stuff (we’re all gonna die, stay woke, CRT, bridges are racist, etc etc), then when they’re put on the spot, they gormlessly reply that they never said that, it’s all made up in the minds of denialists, bigots and haterz.
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Geoff. Why did you persist? You essentially were asking a single question to which he seemed to give an answer then almost denied that he had. This I gathered about half way through.
I need to lookup “sealioning”
Also intrigued by the claim that the last big extinction event (=end Cretaceous) was associated (?caused) by CO2 rather than an asteroid impact into beds of CaSO4 releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Read recently that this impact caused mile-high tsunamis; another factoid needing research.
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OK so I now have repaired my knowledge-hole re zalophusig (=sealioning) and discovered that if anyone had flippers it was your opponent Cadman. Just how often do we find climate alarmists accusing us of their own failings?
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Very well done Geoff – both in the public interaction with Anthony Cadman and in the way you’ve written it down here. Neither is easy but because the Twitter interaction part is public – more public than the words here, in a meaningful sense – I judge it to be very valuable. I write that on the blog having resigned from Twitter on 31st January 2021 – in the full Liz Truss sense of resign. At least I detect the paradox.
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What a great, calm, way to handle morons on Twitter.
The calmer you are, the more it infuriates them. Win/win.
Another way to handle them is by ridicule.
“Cadman: It was you that made the claim about “we are all going to die” headlines,”
“Cadman: I have no idea where that comes, I have not seen it, and you are the only person that has mentioned it. Is is (sic) sourced directly from Just Stop Oil literature?”
Poor Cadman exhibits the onset of dementia:
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Hi Geoff
“ANDY – WordPress won’t allow me to like your reply,”
I often suffer that bug reading WordPress blogs.
The workaround is to log into WordPress.com, then open the post there that you wish to ‘Like’ or even sometimes post responses!
I frequently have to do that to post or ‘Like’ comments on CliScep. Ironically, my above comment this time was made directly within CliScep. 😀
When it came to making this 2nd comment, W/press demanded I fill in my details again!?!
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Geoff, tongue in cheek; but the answers seemed so far adrift to what you were asking, I could certainly imagine a not particularly advanced artificial intelligence supplying them 0:
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Great discourse! Did anyone see the fireworks at the Dartford bridge?
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Lorde Late: ‘Did anyone see the fireworks at the Dartford bridge?’
Not in person, honest. A great show, though.
Did everyone see the tweet linked by Mikehig at Open Mic 12 yesterday? Great fun. A ‘scientist’ (nope) who had glued his hands to the floor of a Porsche showroom/museum complained that he and his fellow hand-glued ‘scientists’ weren’t being provided with potties*, heating and bespoke meals.
In the middle of last night that hand-glued ‘scientist’ came up with a new complaint: the hand he had stuck to the floor of the Porsche showroom was a bit swollen. Because of unexpressed pee? We’ll never know. Mysterious state actors took that ‘scientist’ to a ‘hospital’. That’s prolly the last we’ll hear of him.
===
*Why didn’t Prof Gail Whiteman, ‘scientist’, deliver potties and posh takeaways to her fellow ‘scientist’ protesters? She’s currently getting ready for another WEF jolly jape at Hotel Schatzalp. How long would it have taken her to drive from Davos to Wolfsburg in her Porsche Cayman? Four hours? Were you pitiless, Prof Whiteman, or just pottyless?
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Vinny – loved your above link & H/T to Mikehig.
liked this comment – “If you really want to send a message, glue your testicles to a car. Glueing hands to the floor is a half measure. Make this count!”
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Ways to destroy a sunflower – drought, floods, heat waves, fire, hunger?
A sunflower is a monocarpic annual, so it flowers once and dies anyway. How is hunger supposed to destroy a sunflower? This clown is aware, I hope, that plants make their own food from today’s bête noire, carbon dioxide? Most of the other ways are nonsense. Sunflowers like it hot. I doubt their main growing areas are subjected to floods, unless in the winter (when the fields are empty). As for fire, the plants are too juicy to catch fire, except when already dead. The sole realistic possibility seems to me to be drought, but to judge from the places sunflowers are grown, they seem quite resistant to a lack of water once they are established.
Good ways to actually destroy sunflowers include cutting them off about a foot below the flower and selling them as extremely short-lived decorative bunches, and planting them in suburban back gardens rife with the introduced snails that used to be called Helix aspersa.
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First class rebuttal!
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The pottyless Porsche protester has explained why he went on hunger strike at Autostadt: he was disgusted by the insincerity of the pizzas provided by the management.
Insincerity cropped up again in his potty explanation. His apparent complaint about not being provided with a potty was actually a complaint about the insincerity of people who could smile and say nice things while not providing a potty. Not providing a potty was OK. It was the smiles that disgusted him.
Ditto his apparent complaints about there being no heating or lighting and no food other than pizza. They too were, in reality, complaints about insincerity.
The globetrotting experimental economist has yet to explain why he wore a white coat and called himself a scientist.
He has deleted his potty tweet.
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It is important not to underestimate how deeply embedded is the doomster brainwashing. Take this vox article excerpt as example:
“These kinds of protests are perhaps having a moment; on October 23, the German environmentalist group Last Generation threw mashed potatoes on one of the paintings in Monet’s famous Haystacks series at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. The artwork sold for a record $110 million in 2019. As with the van Gogh protest, the painting was enclosed behind glass, and the museum later confirmed it was unharmed.
“If it takes a painting … to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all,” the group later tweeted, “Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!”
There’s a huge difference between a climate protest that destroys art in the name of saving the planet and a climate protest that threatens the destruction of art but doesn’t actually go through with it. The former treats the art and the cultural value we ascribe to it as incidental in the fight to save the planet, ignoring that a civilization without art is an incredible loss.
The second kind of protest, however, raises all kinds of questions in the absence of actual destruction. What would it have meant if we had lost Sunflowers? Such an act would have generated a period of international collective mourning, a unified sense of loss that no amount of urgency over the climate crisis has been able to equal. But what could the loss of one great painting — the reported $81 million value of which derives not only from its beauty and historical import but from the deeply subjective and often-fraught methods of the art market — mean to a civilization that doesn’t exist? The prospect of that loss, averted, allows us to seriously confront the degree to which we as a society collectively dismiss and downplay climate change.
One reason for this might be the sheer scope of the crisis: It’s so huge it’s almost impossible to fully wrap our heads around — the planetary version of one death versus a million deaths. It’s hard to look head-on at the real destruction climate change is already causing, and even harder to know how to make meaningful changes individually while battling climate anxiety. That can all lead to dismissiveness.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/23414590/just-stop-oil-van-gogh-sunflowers-protest-climate-change
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That being said, I read recently, “Having lost at the ballot box, millennials will stop at nothing to impose their will on the rest of society.”. Thus it seems likely that actual destruction will be next, as was done in the US with politically incorrect heroes of the past like Confederate generals. The public “silent majority” will then have to push back or lose everything.
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Joe Public
Thanks for the tip. I have to do that to get inside “my” site e.g. in order to post an article or see the stats. It still won’t let me “like” the comments, though today, for the first time, it’s letting me post a comment without re-logging in. It seems to me that this new technology, which I don’t begin to understand, far from suffering from over-complexity, is like a door with rusty hinges. If you haven’t got any 3-in-1 to hand, the best thing is to keep banging away at it until it gives in.
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Since WordPress still won’t let me “like” a comment, I’d like to thank everyone here for their comments, particularly Vinny for sharing his intimate knowledge of the defecatory habits of climate activists, Jit for his encyclopaedical knowledge of Sunflowers, ditto Alan for his knowledge of geological history, and Ron for always providing proof that agreement is not only possible but enlightening and fun across a political divide.
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