In which the pond double dates with Dame Slap and Bret Stephens ...

Whenever climate denialists gather together for a gaggle and a giggle, the pond likes to begin proceedings with a reading from the holy works of Dame Slap ...

...Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty. Even after Monckton’s speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don’t need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. 
Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. 
Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true. So I read the draft treaty. The word government appears on page 18. Monckton says: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen any transnational treaty referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a government. But it’s the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected government that are so frightening.” ... Monckton became aware of the extraordinary powers to be vested in this new world government only when a friend of his found an obscure UN website and hacked his way through several layers of complications before coming across a document that isn’t even called the draft treaty. It’s called a “note by the secretariat”. 
The moment he saw it, he went public and said: “Look, this is an outrage ... they have kept the sheer scope of this treaty quiet.” Monckton says the aim of this new government is to have power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.

The pond's not sure why lawyers and paranoia fit so well together, but for those who like to Greg Hunt, here's Dame Slap's qualifications as a climate scientist ...

The daughter of Danish immigrants to Australia, Albrechtsen was born in Adelaide and attended Seacombe High School. She subsequently studied at University of Adelaide, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws with Honours. She subsequently attained a Doctor of Juridical Science from the University of Sydney. Her thesis was titled: 'The regulation of the fundraising process in Australia: searching for an optimal mix between legislative prescriptions and market forces'.

And while we're at it, here's what Bret Stephens did for an education, and training for his later work as an expert in climate science:

In his adolescence, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Massachusetts. Stephens received an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from the University of Chicago before earning a master's degree in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. 

Now before we get proceedings under way, why on earth should the pond, or anyone else care what either of them think about climate science, or worse, pay for their pleasure in writing climate denialist tosh and conspiracy theories about the UN using climate science to establish world government?

Sadly that still doesn't answer the pond's problem. 

Stephens is welcome to have an opinion on climate science. But he has even fewer qualifications in science than the pond. If the pond wants insights or even an informed opinion, including dissenting opinions, it'll head off to read someone who knows what they're talking about, not someone who thinks it's all about moral superiority and winning converts, as if it's some kind of religion that's being talked about ...

And if the NY Times wants to broaden its base by stealing a refugee from Chairman Rupert's la la land, the pond doesn't have a problem with that ... after all, there are all sorts of refugees in desperate circumstances. 

It's just that it means if thinking about a subscription, why not think about Scientific American, which at least reports the thinking and doing of actual scientists, or if that's too broad a scientific church, why not other scientific publications?

You see, it's not about flaying heretics, because it's not about the religious speak of heresy, faith, and converts ...

It's about having the first fucking clue what you're scribbling about, and writing about climate science isn't a matter of trolling ideological virgins ...

And if it's about the dying art of disagreement, then the first thing needed is actual observations and insights, as opposed to paranoid trolling ...

Now in that spirit of trolling science, Stephens did the usual with his first trolling column, which led to the usual ... and then to the odd comment on the odd science therein (here for the hot links).

But then Stephens, with his "modest", is actually just positioning himself at around stages three and four of climate denialism - deny it's a problem, and with any luck, why then we deny we can solve it, or even attempt to solve it...

This is the sort of dog whistling which helps explain why the paranoid Dame Slap was so eager to meet up with a like mind ...

Did Dame Slap confess to her new beau her own willingness to do the strip and go the MAGA?

Did she confess to Stephens?

Did Stephens have the first clue he was talking to a MAGA-cap wearing, barking mad, paranoid Donald lover about their shared belief that climate science had identified a modest, irrelevant issue, perhaps only of use in establishing a world government by Xmas?

Truth to tell, for all his trash talk of the Donald, Stephens isn't that far from the Donald when it comes to dismissing climate science, and it seems that Dame Slap is congenial company, which puts him not so far from Monckton howling at the UN moon.

As for the Donald, did Dame Slap don her MAGA cap and point out just how silly Stephens was sounding in relation to the Donald? Did the controversialists have a controversy about their differing points of view. Dream on, judging by the final gobbet, the pond assumes that Dame Slap kept her MAGA cap out of sight for the rest of the conversation ...

With respect, Stephens should shut up and listen, or at least learn something about Dame Slap ...

He really is a clueless twit, and NY Times' readers are welcome to him ...just as they're welcome to David Brooks, who has descended into some kind of bizarre new age speak, as exemplified by a meandering, mournful recent column, When Life Asks for Everything ...

It's funny, in a tragic kind of way, to see Republican minds and the GOP broken by the logical outcome of all they've written and done these past few decades ...

It's even funnier to see Stephens being snide about corporate lawyers and Clinton's unearned feminism, given that Dame Slap started her working life as a commercial solicitor at Freehills ...

The rich comedy put the pond in the mood for a papal pronouncement, and as usual, the Pope delivered, with more papal insights here ...

 

That .com address down in the bottom right corner is here ... and the actual Cory tweet produced a spectacular, wondrous display of Cory trolling. 

No wonder professional comedians constantly feel threatened by these expert amateurs dishing out their comedy stylings ...