“… if you are trying to argue that Joe’s approach is correct simply because he has many more page views than Nordhaus, then by that logic the National Enquirer’s approach is correct because it has more readers than, say, the New York Review of Books.”

Well, yeah.  If you’re trying to reach the people whose votes will add up, you have to reach them with what they read and recognize as resembling sincerity.

As in — a sincere decent person controls himself as long as he can, is polite, tolerates being pushed around and crapped on, until one day he just won’t take it any more — and whups some ass.

It’s exactly this kind of behavior that is _simulated_ so effectively by demagogues.  This kind of behavior from the PR industry works _very_ well.

Joe Romm?  Well, who else have we got who’s filling this behavioral profile — who acts the way the people who read the Enquirer think a really sincere person will act when he loses it and starts yelling?

I say it’s theater, and I say pass the popcorn and give Joe Romm credit — around the back at the stage door after the performance — and remind him that it’s _awful_ hard to use science as a basis for outrage.

See, the people on the other side, their take is entirely political.
They hear ANYTHING about this and they think politics, control, lies.  Vaccination? Phonics? no antibiotics for a sore throat?  No spray for the fleas? — remember it’s taken a generation or two to get past the folks who were happy to have lead additives they could buy in the auto store to put the lead back in their gasoline.

And it took catalytic converters, something that the lead would screw up, to make them give up believing they _needed_ that lead, and to heck with a few IQ points.  Of course they fell for the Ethyl Corp.’s full page ads in Scientific American (remember those?  Pictures of the three feet of grass beside the asphalt and the reassurance the lead only got that far before it got trapped in the dirt, so don’t ban it ….).  Scientific American ran those.  Probably National Geographic did too.

Without someone emoting “sincerely” a lot of people just won’t believe the sober worried talkative guy trying to explain the science.

I don’t like it.  I wish there were some better way.

But dagnabbit, if you want to reach the people who read the kind of stuff people read, you have to write the kind of stuff they read.

Joe does.

If only he didn’t enjoy it so.  But where is anyone willing to replace him?  It’s a nasty job.

Someone has to do it.

I hope Joe’s campaign to stop global warming kicks in soon.

On this note, I’m starting to wonder if Romm’s reliance on ad hominem, guilt-by-association tactics is revealing of more than Romm’s nature.  After all, I have to think that someone who had confidence in his own arguments wouldn’t sling so much mud.

As for my own views on S & N, in a broad sense I think they offer a constructive critique of contemporary environmentalism.  I have thought this since they crashed the party with their “Death of Environmentalism” essay. That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything they say. But I respect and welcome their perspective.  I don’t take kindly to anyone–on the right or left–that tries to stifle other voices in a debate.

1. Climate change is not happening.
2. If it is happening, it’s not our fault.
3. If it is our fault, it’s too late to stop it.
4. If it’s too late to stop it, there’s still time to get famous on  it.

They are somewhere between 3 and 4.

There is no magic wand, there are a number of small steps we can take RIGHT NOW which at worst will stop things from getting worse, and at best will help.

I realize that you questioning Romm’s mode of discourse is valid in itself — regardless of what you might think of his targets — but…. well, I’m curious