Joseph Romm, Zealot Extraordinaire

My first, and evidently only, encounter with Dr. Joseph Romm of the Climate Progress blog ended on Sunday with my being banned. For the record, I ran across an old posting from last December where Dr Romm, in separate places, first proposed a $1000 bet that the second decade of the millenium would be warmer than the first and later said that it was "certainly likely" that the increase would be .25C. I challenged him to make the bet at .25 C rather than .1 C, which was his formulation.

When I realized that I had posted to something that nobody was watching any longer, I switched the comment to a current subject. Romm replies that I was making up his statement. I clarified several times but he just got angrier and finally banned me at the end of an irrational rant. You may still be able to read it. It's been there for two days so I guess it doesn't embarrass him.

Reading the blog extensively, I've been struck by how much Joe Romm sounds like the Reverend Billy Bob at the Saturday night tent revival. They have a book, which I can't remember, in which everything is explained. Anyone who doubts the absolute certainty of AGW should simply read The Book. Switch AGW for the Second Coming of Christ and there's an eerie parallel.

Ordinary people can make mistakes. Romm made a mistake by remarking that .25 C in the next decade is certainly likely. In the end, he effectively retracted the statement by criticizing it, but in such a way that it seemed as though I had made the claim rather than him.

Romm is plainly in the hysterical wing of AGW enthusiasts, and he's probably making a good living at it. He's a zealot. Zealotry isn't always bad. Zealots brought about the American Revolution. However, they also brought about the French, Russian and (perhaps first) Iranian revolutions, along with the Spanish Inquisition. On balance, they are to be feared.

Romm and his crowd need to start delivering, or the rabble will grow unruly. We are seeing very little actual warming, none for a few years. The oceans are rising but they have been rising on a geologic time scale and the current increase is minimal. There have been no tropical islands disappearing under the waves. There has been no outbreak of tropical disease in northern climes. Crops are not failing. Hurricanes are not becoming more common.

Maybe this will all happen. Most rational skeptics agree that the basic physics favors some degree of AGW, and since this is a poorly understood process, it's possible that everything claimed for it is true and the current slow progress is a long term trend masked by a short term anomaly. All this is possible.

But it's not certain, and it's bad science to claim that science knows more than it does. It's also bad for science to risk its long-established reputation for sober and non-political investigations. If in a few years, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk will be able to accurately portray the scientific community as having abandoned objectivity for activism, it will be a sad day.