Hey John, I get so few comments these days, I'm loathe to delete any! :) Thanks for throwing in here - that last sentence tripped me up many times when I re-read it, but every attempt to rewrite it only made it worse. In the end, I decided to run with it 'as is', but I'm not surprised it trips folks up. It reads rather odd. Now I'm back to freeforming on the blog, I get a lot fewer editing passes for each article (during the Magical Science campaign, most pieces were getting half a dozen editing passes before running, now it's down to one per piece) so it's not quite as polished as during the more 'formal' phases of the blog, but I quite enjoy going back to blogging in the old way, even if it is a little rougher around the edges. :) Thanks for reading! Chris.

Hi Rebekah, Thanks for your comment - it is greatly appreciated! About the reference - dang, I should have linked that in. I don't have the reference on hand, but I know that it was from an NPR interview about vaccine-derived polio. If you search NPR's transcripts for 'polio' and/or 'vaccine-derived polio', you should be able to find it. Sorry I am not able to provide any better guidance than this! And many, many thanks for commenting. Chris.

Hey Branden, There's a contact link at ihobo.com you can use to get a message to me. Thanks for your interest, Chris.

Hey Masked Sapient, You can cite as: Bateman, Chris (2006). "The Joy of Ilinx" [Online], https://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/05/the_joy_of_ilin.html Thanks! Chris.

Hi Cain, It seems 'Nothing is political' is the tragic consequence of insisting that 'everything is political'. Those of us who are open to the concept of free citizens are increasingly becoming an endangered species. Many thanks for your thoughtful comment here! This piece, now 12 years old, has been a hardy perennial, and I am always interested in new perspectives on it. The examples you give are interesting cases because every single one of them has been made into a political topic, and thus while I would concur with your claim that we do not necessarily do them for political reasons, it strikes me as relevant that they can be made political easily. Environmentalists and trans activists make toilets into political issues; environmentalists (again) and vegans make food into political issues... there are many other examples. In saying this, I don't want to suggest these aren't legitimate political topics. They are. But it still strikes me that the thrust of this piece remains accurate: that the infinite scope of political topics isn't enough to bankroll the claim 'everything is political'. Rereading this piece, I am struck by its insistence that for something to truly become political it must rise to the level of debate in the public spaces. After the last two years, we see that debate in the public spaces is being curtailed, with plans to institute further restrictions being layered on top. Rather than 'everything is political', we now face the worrying situation where soon 'nothing is political' because we are denied the freedom to discuss it in public. There is a real danger here: factional politics risks ending the political realm as it has been understood for at least the last century. It seems to me that those that so often say that everything is political tend to be more authoritarian and manipulative in nature. I've rarely heard anyone who doesn't have an agenda, some ulterior motive, say such a thing. Aye, and this is why I call it 'the activist's argument'... and over the time since this piece was written, activism has become increasingly authoritarian in its methods and justifications. The irony being, as these authoritarian-leaning activists take over the means of public discourse, or curtail them through influence of the legacy media and controlling propagation of ideas in the social media, they are ending the realm of the political, understood in Arendt's terms as the space of political discourse. As I said at the outset, it seems 'Nothing is political' now flows from the insistence that 'everything is political', and those of us who are open to the concept of free citizens who debate how to share power through democracy are becoming an endangered species. Many, many thanks for your thoughtful comment! Please note that I am starting my Spring Social Media Break this week, so if you reply further it will be at least a month before I can get back to you. With unlimited love and respect, Chris.

Hi David, Thanks for returning to continue our discussion. I seem solely to be aggravating your further, so I'm not sure there is much point in our continuing, but I'll make some short remarks. I've briefly reviewed your links... The two peer-reviewed papers are both metareviews of publications that do not compare data (only the general positions taken up), and all your other links are journalism. I was hoping for some key papers from within climate science around which the scientific case hinges. There must be some; a field does not usually take up agreement over an issue without common references. I must apologise, however, as I misread your original list: I thought you were singling out 'deniers', and then providing a second list of credible researchers. You meant the entire list as 'deniers'. I apologise for the misunderstanding. I also want to clarify that my claim about the accuracy of models was not meant to undermine the general claim of a warming effect, which is an implication from the physics known since at least the 1970s. My comment was rather a general claim about the limits of computer modelling in empirical topics. Freely do I confess that I have spent less time reading papers in climate science than in other scientific fields... I have however been interested in discovering which are the key papers that the issues hinge upon. I am still in the dark about this. As a result of our exchange, I am now reviewing Hausfather, Drake, Abbott, and Schmidt (2020) "Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 47... Hausfather et al seems to acknowledge the issue I was referring to when they talk about "comparing the relationship between forcing and temperatures in both model projections and observations" i.e. in validating the underlying physics in the models, irrespective of the actual predictions, allowing them to admit that the models they are reviewing have been superseded by new techniques which "have rendered virtually all of the models described here operationally obsolete". Again, the topic is still hinging around the modelling, and how one assesses the modelling. This is definitely not a field in the form of, say, optics, where there are no remaining research questions to investigate. It looks very much like a live research topic to me. Given the intensity of your response to my comments, I would suggest there is little to be gained by our continuing our discussion, such as it is. I don't think you'll ever be satisfied with my comparatively neutral position on this topic, and whatever views I have on climate science aren't going to be positively swayed by a 'flame war'. I am genuinely sorry that you find my views so offensive, and in that regard I can only suggest that you just stop reading me to avoid future aggravation, or else perhaps take a break from this discussion and return to it later. Either way, many thanks for engaging at all, Chris.

Hi David, Clearly the issue of 'AGW deniers' is an issue that means a great deal to you... I have nothing much to say to your specific examples; the people you name negatively aren't people I've come across, and the people you name positively are just a list of names, which is not much to go on. Feel free to choose some key articles and link them here, if you think it will be helpful, though. My position is merely this: that on all sides, the discussion of global warming/climate change/whatever the next branding might be has produced partisan political responses that have made it difficult for these topics to be pursued as an open scientific debate and, furthermore, that in terms of scientific process neither side on this issue can claim to have any kind of high ground at this point. I have a read a little on both sides... I find it an ugly political spat that has largely obscured debate of the ambiguities rather than pursuing a robust research programme. Honestly, I have yet to read anything from the space that has impressed me in terms of scientific rigour. I believe it entered the state of pseudoscience, whereby evidence was no longer persuasive and debate becomes impossible sometime in the last few decades. The moment consensus was claimed by one side, it became difficult to pursue as a scientific matter. This is a shame, as there clearly is an effect here, but the models produced have all proved (unsurprisingly) inaccurate over time, which has only served to accelerate partisanship on the issue. I don't doubt that you are correct that the people you have singled out have taken up a position and are no longer open to evidence. Openness to new evidence has become surprisingly scarce these days. I would still not deploy the term 'denier' in this context, in part because the term is now extremely politically charged (it became so because it gained currency from its use in 'Holocaust denier'). Provided the evidence for any phenomenon is robust, there is no need to gloss opposition as 'deniers', which is a political appellation. I will not say you cannot use the term, and I never will. Use your language as you wish, for anything short of inciting violence, which is our agreed limit to free speech. But I would warn you that you will not gain any ground on this topic by using this term... in that respect, it is largely counter-productive. If advocates for any variation on the climate change theme want to be persuasive on the scientific issues, they cannot afford to advertise themselves as politically partisan. Indeed, the important environmental issues (which in my view are in no way restricted to the composition of the atmosphere) are now being wholly obscured by the politicisation of climate change et al. The especial danger of demonising any given camp as 'deniers' is that once the finger-pointing begins, everyone who lands on the other side of the partisan divide can be conflated with the 'deniers' and thus dismissed. This hinders legitimate scientific debate. It is a sure sign that the state of pseudoscience has broken out that one side claims a consensus and then pushes to discredit opponents, instead of focussing on the evidence and its interpretation, which are the necessary components of scientific processes. From your description of the people you are flagging as 'deniers', they would seem to pose no threat to robust scientific research whatsoever, given that they are coming down the Intelligent Design path, which gets zero traction in journals or conferences, and as such I see no reason to pour vitriol on them. Evidently, you feel differently... but why? Is it just cognitive dissonance caused by the fact that you find ID offensive (rather than, say, amusing, or fringe etc.)? I don't see a threat to scientific practice here. My arguments against Intelligent Design can be found in my book The Mythology of Evolution, which largely views ID as unnecessary from the position of the religious motivations behind it, a view often obscured by the political ire it stirs up in its opponents. Clearly this topic matters to you, but the impression I get from reading you (which could be completely wrong) is that you are offended by Intelligent Design far more than you are interested in the scientific issues in climate science. But I could be entirely wrong! It may be that my comment simply riled you up, and if so I apologise. I never set out to aggravate people, although it is rather hard to avoid these days! I still believe, absurdly perhaps, that the hallmark of good scientific debate is that it hinges on discussion of the evidence. Truly, I would welcome from you a link to a piece by anyone on that list of yours that does this, and does not engage in political partisanship by trying to tar opponents rather than discuss the evidential basis for claims being made. The topic interests me, the political issues of the environment have mattered to me my entire life. But I do not see climate research operating in a scientific mode any more. And that concerns me far more than what the ID crowd are up to. Many thanks for continuing our discussion! Chris.

Hey Robert, Many thanks for the additional references! Appreciated. Chris.

Hi David, Thanks for your comment! Glad you found this piece of interest. While I'd be the first to admit that some strange claims are made about climate change in all its myriad forms, I would personally never use the term 'denier' in this context. To do so risks pretending that this is not a scientific research topic, which I hope and trust that it is. If I may play devil's advocate, atmospheric CO2 does dissolve in water, affecting the acidity of the oceans, so even with life entirely in the oceans there could still be significant implications. But I would not be invoking the Cambrian era in any way on the topic of climate change, for fear of making an already blurry topic even more out-of-focus. Many thanks for commenting! Chris.

Hey Ari, Thanks so much for leaving a comment! It's always nice to know I'm hitting the mark. All the very best!