Watson vs. Morano

Shadowjack, Well, how far back do you want to go?
There's Arrhenius's research around 1900 where he predicted warming due to CO2 from burning fossil fuels (but failed to comprehend how quickly it would occur because he didn't realize energy use increases exponentially) or even Tyndall's paper in the 1850s where he demonstrated that CO2 was a greenhouse gas. Or even Charles Fourier's 1824 work where he discovered greenhouse gasses.

I would start here:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/

I know I'm a bit late to the debate and I'm sure this'll sit at the very end of the comments for this article, but as someone who saw the utterly repugnant Mr. Morano's performance on BBC's Newsnight as it broadcast (I've only just stopped laughing at Professor Watson's parting comment - it was fantastic to behold, and can I just share with you that when Professor Watson made his truly exasperated "What an asshole" comment at the very end, we could hear cheers coming from several other apartments across the road), can I humbly bring the following to the table:

Get A Brian, Morano!

What I saw in Mr. Morano was a braying, smirking, mocking bully, who had not the slightest interest in listening to what was being said to him, even though now, several days later, even the right-biased AP, having set a group of hand-picked journalists to analyse every single one of the hacked emails for a single sign of data fabrication, couldn't find a single shred of evidence:

AP: Emails do not show climate hoax

Morano attempted to rudely bray and mock over almost every sentence that Professor Watson uttered, proving his game plan was to behave as insultingly and ignorantly on the BBC as he is used to being allowed to behave in his home country. At one point Watson actually had to say "For God's sake, will you just shut up!".

I know you've got this thing about so-called free speech in the USA, but when did free speech just mean shouting rubbish and falsehoods every time the other person opens their mouth as a means to physiacally stop the other opinion being heard by the audience? If this is how serious debates are treated in the USA, you almost deserve the consequences that will come from it.

If Marc Morano was so sure that he was right, then why could he not calmly and intelligently debate the points being made one by one without shouting and sneering? That he was truly incapable of a rational grown-up to grown-up TV debate with Professor Watson belies the naked, unavoidable truth of Morano's credentials in all this.

Morano displayed the manners and intellectual gravitas of a cheap street thug, which politically is exactly what he is; the hired hoodlum used by the Robber Barons to beat down the starving strikers at the factory gates, the seedy Cosa Nostra foot-soldier blindly serving the Don in the shallow hope of financial gain and advancement at the cost of his own mortal (albeit noodly) soul.

Mr Morano is a professional Wrecker. He is not on your side, any of you, regardless of which side of the fence you sit. He is in this just for himself and his huge, bloated ego.

Mr Morano is deeply in the pockets of precisely those in the USA in whose personal financial interest it is to let the Earth go to Hell in a Handcart.

Understand this: The Petrochemical industry is ultimately your enemy, and like Big Tobacco and the Arms Industry and the Medical Insurance Industry to name but a few gems of American "Free" Enterprise, there is no depths to which they will not sink in order to kill this debate, even if they have to rip apart the very civil fabric of the American nation by setting neighbour against neighbour purely to keep the Bottom Line increasing year-on-year.

We are just dust to them, make no mistake about this.

These Corporations' hired mouthpieces (both visible and hidden) have found a truly rich vein of agitprop recently in the whipping up of the mentally unhinged Teabaggers into what is clearly going to end in deaths unless someone manages to do something truly extraordinary to cool the offensive rhetoric down, and reintroduce these people to the concept of Civilised Debate, which would involve them actually arming themselves with actual facts, not the latest Glen Beck slogan.

A tall order, I know, but how else is there going to be intelligence injected back into the conversation? At the point of guns? Cudgels? Fists? It's up to all of us how this resolves.

There are already instances of the elderly and the disabled being assaulted at public meetings by these pigs, and bereaved parents being openly and viciously mocked, then stalked online by people who are so deranged and dangerously stupid that they actually believe that they're saving the 'soul' of the American Republic by spewing the most unbelievable poison at anyone who dares to stand up to them. What other proof do you need that the lunatics have not only taken over your asylum, but have got the keys to the gun cupboard?

His previous relationship to the equally absurd Mr. Inhofe proves that Mr. Morano is so deeply, genetically imprinted with the pattern on the bottom of his Master's boot that he is beyond redemption. He is on your televisions because he is is very good at beating people down like a schoolyard bully, not because he is good at forming a provocative, intelligent counterpoint.

Morano is probabaly an idiot Christian, too.