Anna Rose is the head of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. She visited us with Nick Minchin to film the doco “I can change your mind” and has produced a book called Madlands about the filming of the doco. Another author, David Mason Jones, has written a review and comes at this from a fairly neutral background. Anna’s approach, which is essentially an ad hom from beginning to end, punctuated with other fallacies, was evident when we met her, and sadly been amplified in her book. When they have no evidence, they attack the messenger. — Jo

[See our one-page version of this whole issue.]

Guest Post by David Mason-Jones

A review of ‘Madlands: a journey to change the mind of a climate sceptic’ by Anna Rose. Melbourne University Press. ISBN9780522861693

His site: www.journalist.com.au

Dare not peer into the forbidden room …

…. and dare not speak to the unspeakable people. Dare not test the nasty taboos and dare not open the Pandora’s box labelled ‘the nature of the scientific process’. Above all, do not admit the integrity of the people on the other side of the debate in which you are involved. Instead, smear and ridicule your opponents remorselessly before looking at their arguments.

These seem to be the guiding principles of Anna Rose’s somewhat less-than-intellectual approach in her book, ‘Madlands: a journey to change the mind of a climate sceptic.’ The approach Anna takes is to turn the sceptics we are about to meet into non-persons – or persons who are easy to hate, villains. The effect of doing this is to make it easy for the reader to dismiss their arguments with hardly a thought.

Anna carefully character assassinates all the sceptical people she is about to introduce. She then gives them a fairly cursory hearing,  ignores their arguments, and responds with personal attack and ridicule, appealing to the twin arguments of authority and consensus all the way.

The adjectives Anna assigns to adherents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are; eminent, highly respected, thorough, forward thinking, moderate and polite, intellectual, diplomatic, world-renowned, progressives and mainstream. Sceptics are described with derogatory words and terms like; attack dogs, more than a touch arrogant, fringe, wackiest, plays dirty, bizarre, contrarian, nutty, abrasive, notorious, bullying, dishonourable tactics, gang, cyber bullying, sexist, curious (in a derogatory context), petulant, bitter, web of denial, ideological warriors, generating hate towards climate scientists, and warped world vision. This sets the scene for the tone of her work.

“In the inquisitions the inquisitors had to climb up into every last village, high in the mountains of France and Spain, to track down every last heretic…”

After you are only part way through the book, the set-piece use of these descriptors starts to wear thin. If you have an honest desire to read Anna’s point of view, it becomes harder and harder to do so objectively as you become aware that the writer is endlessly outlining her ‘good-versus-evil’ view of the debate.

Special vilification is reserved by Anna to demolish the character of Professor Richard Lindzen who she implies is just a nutty professor. In her terms, he is a ‘used to be’. Anna tries to malign him as an old man with the evil habit of smoking, and makes out that she even struggled to breathe. I do not know Professor Lindzen, and I have never been to his house, but I understand that while he is a smoker, he doesn’t smoke in the area where Anna was. [Editors note: Anna’s attack is a measure of Lindzens influence. This is all so irrelevant to anything that matters except to note how far some people will go to vilify their opponents. It tells us all something about Anna, that when I asked Nick Minchin if Lindzen was a smoker, Minchin said he didn’t know, and couldn’t recall any clues from visiting his house. Nick Minchin is a non-smoker too, he’d notice. In an email, Lindzen remarked to me that Anna seemed to be perfectly comfortable while enjoying his hospitality and that the ABC tapes would show that. Message to skeptics: video everything. It means the activists have to stay closer to the truth — Jo].  This shameless attempt to  demonize Lindzen, based on his personal habits, has little to do with the question of whether or not he is raising valid scientific objections to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis? Why can’t the scientific issue be discussed without maligning his personal habits? Should we all, like Anna, feel free to dismantle the credibility of other people, with whom we disagree, based on their personal habits? How far should this license go? Would Anna approve if people on either side of the debate extended her technique to other personal aspects such as; gender, age, race, sexual orientation, body shape, disability, religious affiliation or any other irrelevant characteristic? What are the intellectual processes Anna is trying to set up here?

 [Editors note: Richard Lindzen is one of the top meteorologists in the world, with over 200 publications to his name, as well as awards, medals, prizes and is a member of the NAS, AAAS, AGU, AMS. He is The Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his work  includes major contributions to our understanding of the Hadley Circulation, small scale gravity waves on the mesosphere, as well as atmospheric tides and oscillations in the tropical stratosphere. That he should face this kind of petty and personal attack is disgraceful. What kind of message does this send to younger, less secure scientists who doubt the IPCC dictat? There is more science, insight and good manners in one article of Richard Lindzen’s than in Anna Rose’s life’s work.  – Jo]

Some pages after that she moves on to again to demolish another character. Before we even meet Marc in the book she is already maligning him. Maybe I’m not very widely read but I have not before heard of Marc Morano. I have never visited his blog and, at the time of writing this, still haven’t. So I had no preconceived ideas about him before I read what Anna had to say. After Anna’s onslaught, however, the attitude I had to Marc was that he must be a pretty bad person. This was irrational, I know, especially given the fact that I was already suspicious of her technique of character demolition. But it shows that character assassination works! It works even with the sceptical reader. It seems to be human nature to be swayed – at least in the first instance – by the rumors and insinuations made by others about someone you don’t even know.

[Editors note: I do know Marc Morano, who runs the excellent Climate Depot blog. He is ever the gentleman, polite, staunchly patriotic (without being over-the-top), has a wide grin and a warm optimistic nature. He’s a riot to be around, the life of the party, and genuinely considerate, always diplomatic, and not domineering in ways that smooth talking effusive people can sometimes be. In short,  — I’d work with him any day, he’s a delight to be around, and inspiring to watch in action. A hero in his relentless quest to get the true story told. — Jo]

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