I swear, I can’t make this stuff up. [8/10/15 Update at bottom]

I’ve been doing what I do ever since January 2008, first questioning why the work of skeptic climate scientists was routinely dismissed by policymakers / global warming promoters / enviro-activists, then focusing after October 2009 much more narrowly on the accusation which claims such scientists are corrupted by industry funding. The personal backlash I’ve received runs the gamut – despite linking to multiple science assessment papers in the first year or so, which I myself labored to read through, I was called an ignoramus by others having no more climate science expertise than I had, who proclaimed IPCC assessment papers were definitive proof of man-caused global warming. Regarding my narrower focus, my unbroken string of challenges inviting people to provide evidence proving skeptic climate scientists are involved in a pay-for-performance conspiracy with industry/illicit funders has been met with howls of protest of me being a shill spreading lies and misinformation for “denier” organizations. A “murderer” or “hatchet man”, in some cases.

And just recently, two guys went so far as to email me directly. The first one was in May, from a fellow reacting to my review of the  “Merchants of Doubt” movie. He straightaway called me a paid shill / propagandist while using the word “propaganda” twice more in an email only 129 words long, which also included the words “Big Oil companies” and “Koch Brothers” in a single sentence also containing “pays your salary”. You get the picture. I responded back with my usual overkill rebuttal, but then I asked him if I could reproduce his email verbatim with my unedited response to it right here. Long story short, we exchanged four more emails, with him sidestepping my challenges at every point, until he ultimately refused to allow me to put his first email in this blog.

Strange. If he was so confident in his beliefs, why would he not want to stand behind them right at the very place he insinuated to be a propagandist arm of the Heartland Institute?

Meanwhile, I got another email just two days ago from a different person, at first glance seemingly out-of-the-blue. His otherwise similar attack was even more straight to the point, just 22 words, with the solitary word “Honesty” as its subject line and its two sentences containing the words “honest work”, “propaganda”, and “working to mislead the public”. Long story short, I exchanged emails with this fellow over a much more compressed span of time, responding twelve more times to each incoming email when it landed in my inbox, and the last three are seen below in standard ‘reply-to’ sequence from previous to most recent on top. Click to the image to enlarge it. In a sense, this blog post itself serves as a response to that very last email, my assumption being that an email reply directly to it would only invite one more lame attack response.

I’ve politely put color boxes over his name, but I should note I did not ask permission to reproduce his emails since (as I discovered not long after I replied to his first email) his attack is also a basically public one carried out at a PBS NewsHour’s online comment section, where he responded directly to my 8/3 comment. As seen here as of this current time, his last comment is basically the same as what’s seen as his last email to me above.

Summary:  A person I’ve never heard of initiates twin attacks at me, can’t rise to any of my overkill rebuttal challenges (going so far as to admit as much in his response to it), but continues to hurl the accusation in subsequent incoming emails in the face of my repeated challenges for him to prove I’m dishonest, and then calls me a mentally unstable person who needs to stop harassing him.

I swear, I can’t make this stuff up. Are such attackers, with their demonstrable inability to engage in the arena of ideas or to employ critical thinking, truly oblivious to what kind of appearance they give to modern environmentalism?

——————————————————————————————————

[ 8/10/15 author’s addition: Cue the Twilight Zone theme. The individual above sent me one more email. I didn’t respond to his last one, so he had to send this new email last night as a reply to one that he had already replied to on almost a week earlier. Click to enlarge:

He links to another guy’s July 25, 2015 blog post which labels me as a harasser, but not once in all the time since I first landed at that blog a year ago has that blogger established that I put out anything which could be defined as harassment. My first comment (which is best seen after the blogger’s comment section is manually resorted from oldest-to-first) was no more than a simple challenge. However, that blogger quite bizarrely responded with truly one of the most bizarre sidesteps I’ve ever seen:

Very Interesting comment. It sounds like an attempt to intimidate me. Maybe even a veiled threat?…

Read through the remainder of the comment dialog I had with that blogger last year, and a clear picture emerges of his line of reasoning. Read through that blogger’s July 25, 2015 diatribe against me and this same fault is ever more solidified. The paranoia bit about “no mention of being paid on a free-lance basis” is too precious for words, and my email friend is only too quick to copy ‘n paste it into an email to me, ending on what is hard to not see as a veiled threat of ratting on me to my family…… who all have long been fully aware of what my research work involves.

You can’t make this up, an individual who suggests I’m harassing him sends me one more email looking every bit like a form of harassment which also contains a veiled threat, and links to a blogger who himself has neither proven I’ve threatened him (veiled or directly) nor that I’m a paid (freelance or otherwise) propagandist, or that my material actually is propaganda. ]