Watt about the Neanderthals?

Watts Up With That (WUWT) is up in arms that James Hansen, in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, referred to the Canadian government as Neanderthals. To be fair, he was asked how he would describe the government with regards to its approach to climate change and his response was “the current government is a Neanderthal government on this issue”. If I was being pedantic, I would suggest that he isn’t actually calling them Neanderthals, he’s suggesting that their approach to climate change is “less evolved” than he thinks it should be.

Anyway, one could argue about what he meant for eons without getting anywhere. What I found most amusing was that those on WUWT would be so “upset” by what James Hansen has said. The rhetoric on WUWT can, quite often, be remarkably unpleasant and so, in my opinion, what James Hansen has said is pretty mild by comparison. There was quite a good illustration of this in the comments. Someone posting as DMarshall pointed out that

There have been no shortage of ugly remarks made in the pitched battle on climate change and given the things said about James Hansen on this very site, it’s amusing to see the fuss made over this.

The almost immediate response to this from someone posting as Perry was

Do you like sex and travel? It would be nice of you to sling your hook & f f f f f – fade away. Your opinions are nowt, but offal. Go self-abuse elsewhere.

So, WUWT has criticised James Hansen for, supposedly, calling those who disagree with him “Neanderthals” (I would argue that this isn’t strictly what he did, but lets not worry about that too much). During the course of the subsequent discussion someone points out that WUWT has been pretty rude about and to James Hansen in the past, to which the response is essentially “F*** Off”. It seems like some people need to be taught about the concept of self-awareness and maybe also need someone to explain what the word “irony” means.

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