Monty turns the Unabomber ads Upside-down

"Is there one rule for upholders of the climate orthodoxy and another for dissenters?" asks blogger Andrew Montford. Since Monty routinely deletes any comment I post on his blog and even attempts to block me from viewing it I'll have to offer my answer here.

Monty's gripe today is that Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is a climate denier.  No, to be more precise Monty's gripe is that Graham Readfearn's blog supporting the consensus has noted Breivik's manifesto actually cites the work of Lord Christopher Monckton, Alex Jones and Steve McIntyre and echoes the beliefs of many climate change deniers. Whilst what Graham Readfearn writes in DeSmogBlog happens to be perfectly true Monty isn't shy to argue for it to be censored.

This is of course in response to, and to detract from,  Heartland's notorious Unabomber ads splashed over the Eisenhower Expressway Illinois.

But there are four important differences between Readfearn's commentary and Heartland's ads which have passed Montford by:

• The Breivik story is contemporary. The minutiae of his 'personality' are being picked over by the mass media. Whereas the Unabomber has been on the inside of a Federal Penitentiary for 16 years now.
• Breivik's climate denial leanings are co-incidental to his crimes . Readfearn is careful not to imply that  a trait of mass murder is to be on the wrong side of the climate debate.
• By contrast Heartland make exactly that claim in their commentary . The ads put forward no science whatsoever so they can't really be called skepticism. Heartland say in their press release:  "The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen" 
• The Unabomber ad intends to make an empirical argument to the public, whereas this particular blogpost by Readfearn is largely preaching to the choir and is confined to commentary not scientific argument.

Advertising in a public context requires standards of decency, half the story here is how Heartland lack that. The other half is not the overlap between a mass murderer's views and Montford's; it's Montford's demand that other bloggers should recoil from noting that.




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