In 2011, Daily Kos writer G2geek wrote a dairy titled Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters. The diarist defined Stochastic Terrorism as “Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” Little did we know at the time, that the Alt-Right would use these same tactics along with the help of Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange and James Comey to throw the election just enough for Donald Trump to win the electoral vote (Trump lost the popular vote by approximately 3 million votes).
Eco Watch reported on the threats to climate scientists in 2014.
According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall, thousands of abusive emails—including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family”—were received by climate scientist Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.
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Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary microbiology work on disease prevention never resulted in him having to think about how to use a gun. Jonas Salk never needed to fortify his house as result of working on the development of a polio vaccine.
Other scientists are trusted and respected. But the way climate scientists are now treated, Marshall argues, is without parallel in the history of science: “They have been set up to play that role in a climate storyline that, it would seem, cannot refute climate change without demonising the people who warn us about it.”
Dan Gilbert, a psychologist who won the Royal Society’s science book prize in 2007 with an examination of the puzzles of happiness, says that climate change is something unlikely to strike fear in the human heart anyway. It is impersonal, it is gradual, it is amoral and it isn’t—or doesn’t seem to be—happening now.
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Other researchers have pointed out the alarming tendency, shared by all humans, to believe what they want to believe. Furthermore, climate change is not (death threats and public flogging fantasies aside) an immediate or an emotional issue. “A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilising public opinion,” says the Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman.
The hacked Emails as explained at the time by The Guardian when the story of Climate Gate first broke in 2009.
Two of the scientists involved in "Climategate" – the e-mail hacking incident at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK– have been emailed death threats since the contents of their private e-mails were leaked to the world. No further information can be revealed about these particular threats at present because they are currently under investigation with the FBI in the United States.
Many other CRU scientists and their colleagues have received torrents of abusive and threatening e-mails since the leaks first began in mid-November 2009. Tom Wigley, previous Director of CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, US, has been horrified by the e-mails he and other colleagues have received. "They are truly stomach-turning and show what sort of venomous monsters we are up against," he told environmentalresearchweb.
The scandal, dubbed "Climategate", broke on 19 November this year when hundreds of messages between scientists from CRU and their colleagues around the world were posted onto websites. Since then, segments of the messages have been used by climate-change sceptics to undermine the scientific case for climate change being caused by humanity's greenhouse-gas emissions.
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Many of the accusations being made by climate-change sceptics are based on fragments and selected phrases from e-mails sent by eminent climate scientists, dating back to 1996. The scientists involved are confident that they can counter all of the claims against them. "None of it affects the science one iota," said Wigley. "Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to do so."
Coincidence on what we have been seeing recently with the Republican party? I think not. We will be seeing these tactics of innuendos, threats and smears continuing as Standard Operation Procedure from the GOP. Just ask the CIA. Or ask, the millions of Federal workers who are now being threatened and intimidated by an obscure rule that will cut their salary down to $1.00. House Republicans even empowered congressional staffers to question federal workers under oath. Be vigilant and resist, it is all the power that we have at the moment.
First they came for the Climate scientists……...
x YouTube Videoh/t Peter Sinclair