So if our own Minocqua mini-Donald is gonna sue me for libel

So if our own Minocqua mini-Donald is gonna sue me for libel (read the email exchange with Walker’s lawyer below) I might as well gain some campaign mileage off it, right?

My real opponent Rob Swearingen can wait. Even he’d agree that Gregg Walker’s thin skin is helping to get my candidacy noticed way more than me posting about him profiteering off of the Covid.

So in the interest of saving my neck and standing up to this town’s biggest misogynistic bully, I’m going to once again explain that Gregg Walker is a “crook” in the “dishonest” sense, which is a common definition of the word I used to bring on this potential libel lawsuit.

Walker and his henchman Richard Moore have long been opponents of climate science and policies that address it. But in making their case, they are super dishonest about it.

BTW, there’s a lot of science below, but bear with me, I finish strong;)

In a May 29, 2020 editorial, “The Models Aren’t The Problem,” they claim that “the data and science the experts used to project the deadly threat of climate change … were all wrong.” This statement implies that models presented by climate scientists have been shown to be completely unreliable, further implying that science is unable to show that we are in a climate crisis.

That’s just plain dishonest.

If Walker and Moore are reading reports about climate science – and we have to assume they are since they make assertions on the subject – they will know that models have been shown to have been largely accurate. A report released last December showed that even 50-year-old models have been largely accurate.

There is one caveat about the accuracy of models: they often UNDERESTIMATE the severity of climate change. As reported by BBC on August 3 of last year, “One problem that the researchers keep encountering when they carry out these rapid attribution studies is the fact that the climate models they are using underestimate the high temperature observations that are being made in the real world.” One scientist added, "Everybody now agrees that this needs to be figured out, because the trend in heatwaves is just so much higher than the model trend."

Prof. Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, said in a BBC article on Sept. 16, 2019: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.” Over the past 12 months, there have been studies that show that Antarctica, Europe, glaciers, and the oceans (among other areas) are heating up faster than expected.

Worth noting is that, using different methodologies, NASA, NOAA, and the WMO determined that the five warmest years on record are the last five years. The situation led over 11,000 climate scientists to publish a letter in November of 2019 affirming that we are now in a “climate emergency.” We can assume that Walker and Moore know these facts.

So is it dishonest of Walker and Moore to claim that scientific projections of climate change are “all wrong?”

HELL YES!!!

In addition to “dishonest,” dictionaries also include another meaning to the word “crook”: “bad person” (Cambridge Dictionary), “scoundrel” (Thesaurus.com), “malefactor” (Miriam-Webster thesaurus). Is it reasonable to have the opinion that these terms fit Walker? Yes, because we are, in fact, living in a climate emergency, the greatest crisis humans have faced, and Walker and Moore are falsely trying to convince people there is no serious threat.

I readily admit that Walker is not a criminal, but to my mind he is dishonest and a bad person. It seems to me that one has the right to express that opinion. What’s your opinion?

Written by Kirk Bangstad on 06/16/20