Miranda Devine, and another fine bout of neo-open-mindedness and objective scientific discussion ...

(Above: one of the more poignant messages you can find when twits get atwittering. And if you don't twitter, why not head off here to read the relevant twit messages, though remember twitter rots your brain, and no more poignant signs of brain rot exists than those exhibited by Miranda the Devine. Original twit screen cap captured here).

There's a peculiar paranoid delusional grandeur, along with a quaint triumphalism at work in the best of Miranda the Devine, and it's given fine spittled voice in Climate alarmists out in the cold.

What better way to start off a bout of triumphalism than this?

As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it's suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends.

A fair weather friend to the Devine? I'd rather lick moss on a rock 24/7. Or push the rock uphill so I can watch it roll down again, 365/12.

And what better way to evoke the dark days when the lights went out in Europe and only the voice of Churchill could be heard, as a few British bulldogs fought the good fight?

But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the "Big Polluters", bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.

Of the kind Devine practices when she labels anyone and everyone greenies, lefties, ABC viewers and socialist rabble, not to mention lyrcra clad louts (how can we ever forgive her for being so cruel about Tony Abbott?) Can we at some point remember that McCarthyism was a right wing crusade against Communism in the United States? And that morphing the word into a general term for a persecution complex is a kind of inverse breaching of Godwin's Law, sub-section McCarthyist.

There are of course still outcasts and heretics, vile and objectionable:

But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls.

You mean agreeing with the Devine makes you a wise owl? So much for the wisdom of fuckwit owls.

They still think it's acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton's protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms.

Some even mock his Nobel laureate laden, with pin, as featured in his CV, not to mention a few of his more silly and outrageous ideas, but what would they know.

But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in "sexing up" climate change science, it's clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.

Even The Guardian? Perhaps that's why Fred Pearce scribbled Climate emails cannot destroy proof that humans are warming the planet, for The Guardian.

I guess it's extraordinary for the Devine to see a newspaper actually investigating a news story - it's so much easier when you can just blather and blither and froth and foam and fleck spittle at the mouth and confuse an investigation with an outcome.

I guess if you followed her rule, you wouldn't bother to investigate anything. Not when the worm has turned, the fair weather friends flocked to your side, and your lofty tone of righteousness is justified to the lord.

But stay, what's that? The Guardian is still littered with heresy and heretics. How else to explain Tibet temperatures 'highest since records began' say Chinese climatologists?

Oh well, not that we're McCarthyist (throw another dollar in the jar), but they're communists, so what would they know, except how to be part of the vast international UN conspiracy.

"Average temperatures recorded at 29 observatories reached record highs," Zhang Hezhen, a Lhasa resident and specialist at the regional weather bureau told the newspaper. "It's high time for all of us to take global warming seriously and think about what we can do to save the earth."

Not down under where the men and women thunder, commie climatologist.

Meantime, if you want to follow The Guardian's survey of the emails affairs, you can start with Climate emails: were they really hacked or just sitting in cyberspace? It might come as a refreshing tonic to read an actual newspaper doing the actual work of a newspaper, rather than reading the Devine in the Herald.

Oh and while you're at it, why not drop in Indian prime minister backs IPCC boss Rajendra Pachauri:

The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said the error did not change the facts regarding the harmful impact of greenhouse gases on the planet.

"This debate does not challenge the core projections of the IPCC about the impact of greenhouse gas accumulations on temperature, rainfall and sea-level rise," Singh told an international summit on sustainable development.

Oh dear, he's in on the conspiracy too. The Indian PM. Whoever thought it went that far up the top. What a fair weather friend he is.

By golly, if I keep reading The Guardian, I might end up believing that humans are warming the planet. Why on earth did the Devine suggest I give it a quick read? Quick, let's scuttle back to her.

We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance.

Oh I just love the use of neo. It's so Matrix, and it brings back such fond memories of neo Michael Costa, now departed from the ranks of commentariat columnists. And so amusing coming from a scribbler who never ever brooks a nuance when a piece of two by four can be swung hard into the moosh (stead, in Australia, that's slang for 'mouth' - keep your vile Urban Dictionary minds elsewhere).

The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism." Hallelujah.

Well there's a knock down argument against climate change. Hallelujah. And there I was thinking that science should be conducted as a matter of faith and opinionated unverifiable aggressive assertiveness. Like a Miranda the Devine column.

But wait, it gets better:

Australia's Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days.

On ABC television's 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about "a confusion" between the science and the politics of climate change.

Here's what was said a little bit further down from the gobbet quoted by the Devine:

PENNY SACKETT: Honest scepticism is actually required in science. Scientists are generally their own worst sceptics. And so scepticism is frankly something that science is founded on.

TRACY BOWDEN: Australia's chief scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, encourages debate about climate change but worries that the lines are blurring between the science and the politics.

PENNY SACKETT: This is what I meant about polarising society. We're beginning to describe people as sceptics or denialists or alarmist, warmist, all of these words that I'm beginning to hear. And I think that is very unhelpful, because when we're doing that we're actually playing the man and not ball. We should be discussing the science, not labelling people.

You can find the transcript here. Now how can the Devine help. How about a column headed "Climate alarmists". That should help no end in resolving the blurring of lines between science and politics and playing the man,not the ball. I wonder what silly old Sackett would say about a column headed "climate alarmists"? So little does she understand that labelling people is a form of science? Devineology.

Funny, you know, proponents bashing scientific theories never expressed concerns about their confusions, inattention to details, willingness to slag off everyone as "alarmists" and "warmists" and greenies needing to be hung from the nearest lamp post when they first experienced the joy and power of wielding a baseball bat, and felt the surge from the flesh and splattered blood and crunched bones as they swung the politicisation of science and the debate their way.

Oops, I think that sounds a little like the Devine. I wonder why?

Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the "confusion", aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way.

Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.

Could it be that a combative aggressive permanently indignant righteous paranoid triumphalism can reveal signs of extraordinary aggrandisement and righteous exaggeration?

As with the worst of exaggerated global warming claims, so marches the Devine to the same drum.

Out with the baby along with the bathwater? Out with the soap, out with the towel, out with the tub, out with the bathroom, out with the whole bloody house. It's the Devine, no mercy, no quarter, no comprehension, no subtlety, no nuance, no understanding, no way.

The rest of the column? The usual litany of errors and nit pickings designed to determine that one way traffic is the only kind of traffic acceptable to Devine.

It's utterly tedious and ineffable. If you want an alternative view of the world, why not head off to a transcript of Kerry O'Brien's interview with Michael Oppenheimer, here.

Here's what he had to say about the IPCC process:

MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Yes, in fact I think IPCC has bent over backwards to be cautious, to not state things as known that were very uncertain and to be quite clear about what the risks are about how much we know and how much we don't know. I don't know of any other assessment process on any other problem that's nearly this complex, where the scientists lean over backwards quite so much to not overstate the case. If anything, IPCC is conservative, as we saw with the last assessment, where IPCC got a lot of criticism for being too cautious about its statements on sea level rise. Well, if you have to err on a problem like this, it's better to err in the direction of caution, and that's exactly what IPCC has done.

By way of contrast, the Devine is blessed with absolute certainty and resolute insight, as she smashes the infidel alarmist warmists around her, and welcomes with disdain fair weather friends into her once beleaguered, now seemingly victorious camp.

And naturally it wouldn't be a Devine piece if she didn't finish with a fine flurry of domestic political wit:

Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. ''Boycott [America] to save yourselves … and your children from climate change", he said in an audiotape released last week.

Can anyone get any lower in a debate? Can anyone slither in the gutter with the snakes than the Devine? Is this as clear an indication of moral and intellectual bankrupty that you can get? To quote a terrorist as a high profile champion of a cause as a way of rejecting the cause?

Where does that leave Christians who want to reject immoral acts of fornication and homosexuality, not to mention opponents of intoxicants, gambling and usury (here). Well off in bed with bin Laden. As if that's got anything to do with anything.

Well let it be stated quite clearly that this column rejects bin Laden's opposition to chilled water! And we're in favour of music, but share bin Laden's interest in earth-moving machinery and the genetic engineering of plants.

But back to the Devine's final rhetorical flourish:

Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that "carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas" and "these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on''.

But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.

Hmmn, Barnaby Joyce as shadow minister for finance, and Miranda the Devine as Abbott's ideological climate change adviser.

Pity, I was holding out some hope for Abbott, but getting the approval of the Devine is like a bit like being blessed by a hysteric in the hope that you'll smite the unbelievers. Time for Abbott to get out the garlic and the holy water. I know it's only superstition, but whenever anyone quotes bin Laden in an argument, it's like Godwin's Law on acid!

At least with this piece of gutter trawling, the Devine reminds me why The Guardian is worth a read - long may it continue its free online policies - and why I wouldn't cross the road in search of toilet paper if I saw the Saturday Herald littering the sidewalk.

(Below: and while we're on the subject of neo-open-mindedness and face saving, why not take a look at Opinion or Hate-Mongering? Well if the Devine can watch the ABC and use it for political point scoring, why not others?)