Crazy in Copenhagen
<p>Two days before the deadline for an agreement at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, Mother Nature is demonstrating the same sly sense of humor that Al Gore, el jefe of the global-warming bloviators, often seems to elicit from the old gal. That is to say, it&#8217;s snowing like a a sonovabitch and there&#8217;s no hiding the decline in temperatures&#8230;</p>
<p>While the weather outside is frightful, the prospect inside is delightful: it looks as though  the negotiations are going to collapse in a welter of incompatible agendas, mutual finger-pointing, and much talk of high-handedness and betrayal.  If we are really lucky, the wreck will cause such lasting bitterness that nothing like this three-ring circus of purblind idiocy will ever be seriously attempted again.  </p>
<p>But wait&#8230;difficult though it may be to credit from the news coverage, there&#8217;s at least one person in Copenhagen today who sounds like neither an unctuous Orwellian gusher of transnational-progressive newspeak nor an outright spluttering loon.  And who might that be?</p>
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<p>Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to make known to you Christopher yeah-I&#8217;m-a-Viscount Monckton, who <a href="http://vimeo.com/8023097">delivers the smackdown</a> to AGW alarmists better than anyone else I&#8217;ve ever seen &mdash; specializes in it, the way I do in open-source advocacy.  He deftly weaves between devastating facts and figures about what the actual climate has actually been doing and an unflinching catalogue of the AGW promoters&#8217; wrongdoing.  </p>
<p>It&#8217;s nice to see someone who can get media attention calling out the high crimes and misdemeanors for what they are.  The only shot I wish he hadn&#8217;t taken is the jibe about a lot of the AGW cabal being of the &#8220;stoplight tendency&#8221;, that is &#8220;calling themselves Greens because they&#8217;re too yellow to admit they&#8217;re Reds.&#8221;  I laughed, and it&#8217;s true, but it wasn&#8217;t necessary to the rest of his argument and it will give a lot of people the excuse they want to ignore him.</p>
<p>I speak from successful experience when I say that the first necessity of a successful propagandist is to know exactly how far you can push your audience.  I&#8217;ve worked pretty hard at separating my politics from my open-source advocacy &#8211; I&#8217;m up-front about being a libertarian, and then I explain to my audiences exactly why buying my politics is <em>not</em> necessary to get good use out of my insights about software development.</p>
<p>Lord Monckton still needs to learn better tactics about this.  It&#8217;s much smarter to let your audience figure out some things for themselves than it is to overstimulate them with truths they&#8217;re not yet ready to hear.</p>
<p>But, other than that&#8230;go, Viscount baby, go!  Freedom needs more advocates with your ability to work an audience.  Because, well, I can&#8217;t be <em>everywhere</em> at once.</p>
