Insane reaction to the PBS interview with Anthony Watts

Three days ago, PBS did a piece on the climate change debate and featured Richard Muller as an alarmist (self-described converted ex-skeptic) and Anthony Watts as a skeptic (and later others such as Judith Curry):

Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message

If you listen to those 9.5 minutes, you may agree with me that Anthony Watts was speaking as a lukewarmer. It doesn't mean that I sharply disagreed with something; I didn't. (Well, I found Anthony's focus on the urban heat islands excessive and at one point, he almost denied that there exist any natural climate drivers – but I must have overinterpreted a sentence.) But he was surely not speaking as a partisan.

But the very fact that PBS dared to interview the man behind the world's most visited climate website caused an explosion of anger among the climate activists and, unfortunately, not only the climate activists.




Let me mention some of these reactions.

Get Energy Smart Now Dot Com thinks that the interview is "demonstrating the shallowness of mainstream modern American journalism". We learn that Watts suffers from an anti-science syndrome and wages a jihad against the actual climate science, among other things.

Media Matters, an outlet design to attack any deviation from the hard left orthodoxy in the media, thinks that the PBS News Hour propagated confusion on climate change. We learn that something must be really terrifying here because Watts may have some vague connections with the Heartland Institute. What a horror! The Heartland Institute is a rather important and respected think tank and it may have been their idea to convince PBS to do a somewhat balanced piece.

For Skeptical Science and Dana 1981, it was a "PBS false balance hour". The article uses this context to parrot all the mandatory alarmist talking points or prayers or how I should exactly call this amazing junk. Desmogblog uses a similar terminology, "balance trap by providing megaphone to Anthony Watts".

For Daily Kos, the program was a public disservice showing how bad journalism can get.

Joe Romm of Think Progress thinks it was the worst climate story of the year. Doug Craig screams: Shame on PBS!

The Huffington Post summarizes these and other reactions by saying that the program "raised eyebrows".

You may want to read some of the reactions in their full glory. Lots of activists have clearly written angry e-mails to PBS. PBS acknowledged them and it has de facto apologized for the piece, by referring to their previous (alarmist) programs on the climate. They don't even dare to try to suggest that it was legitimate for PBS to invite a meteorologist who runs the world's most influential climate blog. At least, they allowed the host of the program, Spencer Michels, to "defend" himself. Kind of.

The degree of intolerance and fascism among the climate alarmists is just striking – I apologize to less radical fascists for the comparison. Well, after all, Michael Mann, in an interview for Scientific American, was dreaming about a future in which it is illegal to deny "climate change".

These people simply don't belong to the Western civilization with its traditions of freedom, democracy, and enlightenment. They belong to a medieval civilization controlled by ultimate cults that can never be questioned, divine entities and beliefs that have the right to create a whole hierarchy of power here on Earth. The similarity to the Islamic fundamentalists is particularly hard to overlook in these days when we see how both of these groups are terrified that someone is even allowed to talk about something.

And both of these groups fail to appreciate (or want to deny, in front of themselves) that there exists a whole world – the genuine Western world – that has no problems to flourish despite its disbelief in Allah or climate change.