Energy driven

On ABC TV’s Media Watch last night, Jonathan Holmes made a sterling attempt to unravel the controversy over alleged death threats to climate scientists in Australia.

It’s much as I suspected: A concatenation and endless loop of misreporting, claim, counter-claim, self-righteous indignation, partisan posturing, etc.

From the material presented by Holmes and the Media Watch team there can be no doubt that a number of climate scientists in Australia have been subjected to abusive and threatening approaches — whether by email or other means — by some of the more unhinged exponents of climate ‘scepticism’.

Yet some prominent and even not-so-prominent mass-bloggers are still in denial on that point. Andrew Bolt still wants the story to be about who said what to whom and when. He simply can’t let it go because he has for many weeks now invested so much of his credibility into ratchetting up the invective to the nth.

Meanwhile, Bolt’s stablemate at News £td, Tim Blair has summed up Holmes' efforts thus:

In the short term, yep, a win for Holmes. But in the long term, warmies have never understood how much energy these evidence-avoiding tactics drive into the climate debate.

That’s kind of an interesting formulation: Abuse and threats resolved as “energy driven into the climate debate.”

Well, after all, this is the guy whose response to an actor’s public fantasising about shooting a journalist was to entertain the actor over drinky-poos.