Character assassination…
Anna Rose is a co-founder of the hopelessly naive Australian Youth Climate Coalition, and also featured in the recent ABC documentary “I can change your mind” (see ACM’s post on it here) during which it became painfully obvious that no amount of logic, facts, persuasion or argument would ever change her mind.
Not content with that, she has now produced a book entitled: “Madlands: A journey into the climate fight” detailing her experiences on the “dark side”. However, rather than expose the evil motivations of sceptics, she has succeeded only in throwing into sharp relief her own zealotry.
Over at Jo Nova’s site, there is a fascinating review of the book, which you must read in full, but there are some excellent quotes which I will share here.
A constantly recurring theme of the climate debate is the manner in which the alarmists, rather than address the arguments, seek to impugn the reputations of sceptics (think Lewandowsky, for example). Rose is an expert at this:
Anna carefully character assassinates all the sceptical people she is about to introduce. She then gives them a fairly cursory hearing, ignores their arguments, and responds with personal attack and ridicule, appealing to the twin arguments of authority and consensus all the way.
The adjectives Anna assigns to adherents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are; eminent, highly respected, thorough, forward thinking, moderate and polite, intellectual, diplomatic, world-renowned, progressives and mainstream. Sceptics are described with derogatory words and terms like; attack dogs, more than a touch arrogant, fringe, wackiest, plays dirty, bizarre, contrarian, nutty, abrasive, notorious, bullying, dishonourable tactics, gang, cyber bullying, sexist, curious (in a derogatory context), petulant, bitter, web of denial, ideological warriors, generating hate towards climate scientists, and warped world vision. This sets the scene for the tone of her work.
Internal inconsistency is another hallmark of any quasi-religious belief system, which is revealed in her attitude to some fundamental climate issues:
She concedes on several occasions that the degree to which feedbacks occur, the climate sensitivity, is not known with certainty. And yet, when sceptics point out the same fact, she labels them as deniers of science. It’s a contradiction I find hard to fathom. There is another contradictory element in which Anna shows that she does not have a consistent line. When discussing aerosols, she virtually admits that the current climate models upon which the IPCC relies, do not include all the potential variables, specifically the effect of aerosols. How then can she point the finger at sceptics who decry the failures of the models and call them deniers of science? It’s just a contradiction I find glaring and mystifying. Anna can apparently point out a deficiency in a model and still believe in ‘the science’ but woe betide any sceptic who does the same thing.
And the review highlights the obvious point that has been made on this blog many times, namely, if the sceptics are so insignificant and their arguments so weak, why the need to devote such attention and effort to eliminating them?
Early on, Anna describes Nick Minchin as one of the ‘remaining few high profile climate-sceptics in Australia’. In other parts of the book she uses terms like ‘tiny’ to describe the group of people who are still sceptical. Based on this I ask myself a hypothetical question. If it is true that there are only a ‘remaining few’ and that the group is ‘tiny’, why is it then so necessary for her, and others, to go out with such zeal to convert every last disbeliever into a believer? If these sceptics are in such a small minority, then surely their argument must be lost already. Why can’t they just be left to wither on the vine? Why can’t they just be by-passed and ignored?
The conclusion follows straightforwardly:
Could it be that Anna’s zeal to track down and convert even the ‘few remaining’ doubters and heretics could actually be a marker of her own insecurity about the veracity and resilience of her own belief.
Madlands is available on Amazon on 1 October 2012.
Australian Climate Madness 
Anna Rose aged 29 years.
The universe aged 13.7 billion years, extending 46 billion light years from earth that is 4.54 billion years old …So man is going to shut down surviving earth in a hundred years or so? Geez, we know nothing of what is out in the never, never universe that could have a gravitational pull to change our tilt and orbit and hence climate change.
Now to ponder my tag… “attack dogs, more than a touch arrogant, fringe, wackiest, plays dirty, bizarre, contrarian, nutty, abrasive, notorious, bullying, dishonourable tactics, gang, cyber bullying, sexist, curious (in a derogatory context), petulant, bitter, web of denial, ideological warriors, generating hate towards climate scientists, and warped world vision.
I swear the poleybear on the rapidly melting floe is licking its chops.
I have lefty friends just like her. Facts, to them, are irrelevant. You can assail them with all the facts, reason & logic in the world but it will never trump their ideology. They just go on believing.
Like Simon, I too HAD friends like this zealot. They are the mean greens and yes, you can present all the well documented evidence by highly credible , INDEPENDENT people and it will be utterly ignored.
Radical Greenie Anna visited my town of Castlemaine Vic on a propaganda tour recently. She’s also been overseas preaching the Gospel According to Pope Al to the gullible youth of the world – a very worrying practice. One wonders where the AYCC obtains funding. Their Annual “Reports” on the AYCC web site do not contain any financial data; this is an Annual Report?
I encourage people to read Rose’s trashy publication, but don’t contribute any money to her cause by buying it; borrow it from a library as I did. I then wrote a review of it too at http://www.castlemainian.com/new2/madlands-by-anna-rose-book-review/
[REPLY – Thanks for the link!]
One question spings to mind. Who would actually buy this book.? Who ,even on the warmist side, cares enough about the warmist girl’s opinion on anything to actually go out and spend their hard earned cash on it.
Oh, I run into this all the time – the opposition is hateful, disrespectful, and does not want to think about what one says – the ad hominem attacks are quite extraordinary – I also think they’re getting worse; they’re completely blind to reason or logic.
A two word description that 100% accurate would be “paranoid delusional”
Proof of enemies if proof of worth, as in business, where nobody sues you if you have nothing to give them (including your reputation).
The Unique Solution Syndrome strikes again: she has come to a conclusion, and since she suffers from the USS, believing that all disputes have only one, true, best explanation, by definition her detractors must be wrong. Completely wrong.
The climate debate has the same problem as religious ones. As in, a true Islamist cannot tolerate Christianity, and a true Christian cannot tolerate Islamism. One precludes the other. Skeptics see middle ground, though weighted towards non-CO2 endangerment, but alarmists see only the end position.
One day devote warmists are going to be the worst of the Gore-bashers. They’ll still be stuck in the USS, but it will now be of the they-scammed-me, very angry variety.
For a while now I’ve been having a bit of fun with the alarmists on the Amazon site at the books review page. They can get pretty rude. I got my first positive response today. Probably thanks to you Simon.
Correction, probably thanks to Jo.
Again & again confirmed: Environmentalism is a mental disorder.
Anna Rose needs to be starved of attention by not responding to any of her silly claims or statements. So that means do not respond to anything she writes or utters. At the same time it is very important to not lapse into ad hominems.
Thus she will more quickly arrive at her inevitable destination – the annals of history as an irrelevancy.
‘Madlands’; you’d be mad to even contemplate buying it but if you did you’d surely be certified insane.
“The adjectives Anna should assign to questioners of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are; eminent, highly respected, thorough, forward thinking, moderate and polite, intellectual, diplomatic, world-renowned, progressives and mainstream. Warmists are described with derogatory words and terms like; attack dogs, more than a touch arrogant, fringe, wackiest, plays dirty, bizarre, contrarian, nutty, abrasive, notorious, bullying, dishonourable tactics, gang, cyber bullying, sexist, curious (in a derogatory context), petulant, bitter, web of denial, ideological warriors, generating hate towards neutral climate scientists, and justified world vision. This sets the scene for the tone of her work.”
Now that sounds better.