“Failing to make his case, James Hansen uses children as legal pawns“(May 10, 2011). In case you’re wondering, Anthony Watts has no love for Dr. James Hansen. Hansen is a nasty man who shouldn’t be allowed to advocate for environmental protection. He’s also totally making all this CO2 stuff up and now he’s tricking children into being his “legal pawns”!
So what’s Anthony’s pretense for outrage (again) this time? Five of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, which alleges that the US Federal government has failed in its duty to protect the atmosphere, are teenagers. How could teenagers ever get involved in the environmental movement without coercion? Clearly they are being exploited!
In other news, Anthony demands that kids get off his lawn.
As for the science bit of his griping, Anthony declares that the “Earth has had higher CO2 concentrations several times in its history [that would be a 600 million years] and it didn’t head to runaway roasting”, which will be little comfort to the species that were extinguished by those events. Anthony also claims that “there doesn’t seem to be” conclusive evidence of positive temperature feedback from increasing CO2 levels. This is the ‘cross our fingers and roll the dice’ argument.
I think the prescription for Anthony is more Hallmark Channel viewing.
Wott's Up With That? 
Okay, so I don’t get the Hallmark Channel joke. Enlighten us please, o mighty one!
[If I have to ‘splain it then it wasn’t a (good) joke! Oh well. The Hallmark Channel specializes in inoffensive programming. – Ben]
I just watched a PBS documentary about the civil rights movement. One point they kept making is that it was the young people who made it happen.
And these “children” didn’t need any coercion.
Apparently Anthony doesn’t get that these youngsters are indeed the pawns in the game he and the fossil fuel industry deniers are playing with climate change.
[Indeed. – Ben]