How to Widen the Overton Window After the Dragons Have Left

Willard asks. and indeed the whole saga has taken some interesting twists and turns.  To see exactly how weird read the comments, Eli recommends that you always read the comments at Rabett Run.  Well at least some of them, not Dr. Jay's.  It may be that playing with the crazy to win hearts and minds has some, well, odd down sides.

Eli had some thoughts on this over at Bart's.   Bart is back, with joyous news, go over there and congratulate him and his expanded family.  Still to the matter at hand, Bart commented that he really want to  figure out how to get the disinterested public and the fence sitters to trust science over non-science/anti-science/nonsense.  This is a base question, but you have to realize that the ones denigrating science and scientists have been effectively playing the refs unopposed for years.
 
The refs realize a cost to being honest (listening to you dippsy uncle at dinner dumping on his flavor of the week) and therefore avoid confrontation, and uncle goes on an on and on (any examples here?).

Know what, after a number of years that nonsense gets absorbed at a deep level. The only way of fighting it is to be confrontational, politely or not. Yes folks, there is a fight going on in front of you and its outcome will determine much of the world’s future and the future of the people in it.

If you wish a more political example, consider Obama’s three years of trying to work with an opposition party that as a matter of principle refuses to cooperate. It does not work.

The Idiot Tracker spotted this in talking about what he calls the lukewarmers and what Eli calls the Pielkesphere, the wanna be "Honest Brokers", whose utmost desire is to control the conversation

 The real contrast here is not between “activists” and “skeptics” but between deniers and everybody else – between the science and the right-wing lunacy.

But lukewarmers are exploiting the shift in the Overton window brought about by voluble climate deniers to position their radical views as a sane middle ground.

So what is the lukewarmer's mission.  Oh the surface, very obvious, to establish themselves as the voice of the middle, but if you look carefully at their position, to be in the middle they have to help shift the Overton window so that the real middle, the Barts and the MTs are on one fringe and the Sky Dragons on the other.  As Richard Alley said to the US Congress

You have now had a discussion or a debate here between people who are giving you the blue one and people giving you the green one. This is certainly not both sides. If you want both sides, we would have to have somebody in here screaming a conniption fit on the red end, because you are hearing a very optimistic side

and shifting the Overton window back towards reality is what Eli is trying to do. If you have a world only with the Sky Dragons, the Lucias and the Barts out there, make no mistake about it, in spite of the pretty words, the middle of the window is denial and the lukewarmers know that their first goal has to be to destroy any opposing shift of the argument back to reality, which explains the unrelenting attacks against Joe Romm, Mann, and Hansen.  A good example of this is RP Jr.'s current jihad against Justin Gillis.  Roger is sending a clear message. 


Bart and James and Eli and whoever else is the flavor of the day (Stoat appears to be having a run) have different POV about how to deal with the day to day denialist pettifoggery.  Of the climate scientists, only Mann, and Ben Santer have fully engaged, but that is because they have suffered the most under direct, deceitful and unrelenting attack.

While Eli is not a climate scientist, he has worked with many and in fields that are closely related. If Rabett Run has a message it is to point out that keeping your head down has not really been an option for climate scientists for a decade or more. They are coming for you in the Niemoeller sense, sooner or later.  The Sky Dragons may have given Judy Curry a taste.