5/7 Taking umbrage at the abuse of our Free Speech Rights. The Jim Steele files.

The Situation:

The disconnected-from-physical-reality GOP attacks on climate science (a.i.) have reached horrifying levels with the Trump Administration.  Yet science loving rationalists, pluralists, progressives, liberals, Democrats still haven’t developed effective messaging for directly confronting the most childish of Republican arguments.  Why?  Seems to me, mainly because rationalists rather sidestep that Me First driven willful ignorance.  This acquiescence to nonsense has been a fatal error for the national dialogue.

Always remember the onlookers, and appreciate by making the effort to explain some of the science, you’re doing homework that invigorates your own understanding.  (continued at ...) 

In this segment I share the summary of my couple years of actively dogging Jim Steele and his game of deception and crazy-making which I wrote up for my Four Corners Free Press column.  Steele never could engage in an upfront constructive debate, still won't.  Yet, he's first to demand that serious scientists debate with rhetorical clowns.  Why do we keep letting them get away with such nonsense?

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(Sd7) Abuse of Our Free Speech Rights (LandscapesAndCycles - Jim Steele) (FCFP)

https://confrontingsciencecontrarians.blogspot.com/2018/08/abuse-free-speech-rights-steele.html

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Abuse of Our Free Speech Rights (LandscapesandCycles-Steele)

August 2018, Four Corners Free Press, Cortez, Colorado 

    

   

Back in January, my Four Corner Free Press column was built around a talk by climate scientist Dr. Trenberth, an authority on our planet’s global heat and moisture distribution engine. In March there was a Letter to the FCFP Editor offering an alternative. 

The writer offhandedly dismissed the scientific “consensus” as though it were just another opinion, while lamenting the politicization of science (Apparently oblivious to the reality that his letter was nothing but a gross politicization). 

Ironically to underscore his legitimacy the writer encouraged us to read Jim Steele’s “LandscapesAndCycles” collection for a second opinion. As it happens, I’ll bet there are few who have studied Steels’s collection more than I have and I welcome this challenge to write about it.

You see, from my first introduction it seemed to me that what Steele was doing was a perfect example of “malicious abuse of our free speech rights,” though I didn’t have the words for it then. 

That started me on his trail.  I did a detailed review of Steele’s 2014 talk to the International Electrical and Electronic Engineers, I also transcribed his January 27, 2015 interview with Heartland’s Sterling Burnett in order to dissect his method. That one required fourteen topic-specific posts to do his torrent of misinformation justice. 

All told, I have some fifty posts unraveling Jim Steele’s deceitfulness over at my ConfrontingScienceContrarians.blogspot. 

In a nutshell, Jim Steele proposes that landscapes and natural cycles are more powerful drivers of global warming than our insulating atmosphere. 

(Sd7) Abuse of Our Free Speech Rights (LandscapesandCycles-Steele)

August 2018, Four Corners Free Press, Cortez, Colorado 

    

   

Back in January, my Four Corner Free Press column was built around a talk by climate scientist Dr. Trenberth, an authority on our planet’s global heat and moisture distribution engine. In March there was a Letter to the FCFP Editor offering an alternative. 

The writer offhandedly dismissed the scientific “consensus” as though it were just another opinion, while lamenting the politicization of science (Apparently oblivious to the reality that his letter was nothing but a gross politicization). 

Ironically to underscore his legitimacy the writer encouraged us to read Jim Steele’s “LandscapesAndCycles” collection for a second opinion. As it happens, I’ll bet there are few who have studied Steels’s collection more than I have and I welcome this challenge to write about it.

You see, from my first introduction it seemed to me that what Steele was doing was a perfect example of “malicious abuse of our free speech rights,” though I didn’t have the words for it then. 

That started me on his trail.  I did a detailed review of Steele’s 2014 talk to the International Electrical and Electronic Engineers, I also transcribed his January 27, 2015 interview with Heartland’s Sterling Burnett in order to dissect his method. That one required fourteen topic-specific posts to do his torrent of misinformation justice.