THE RED STATE SHIFT

Anthony Watts wants you to believe Scott Adams is on his side. He says that what the cartoonist has to say is:

Scott Adams: ‘The hockey stick is literally a symbol of lying’

Anthony Watts / 23 hours ago 

That’s direct quote from Scott Adams in this video he posted yesterday.

But Watts nine word quote is only a third of a tweet long, and Adams often articulates thoughts too large to fit in a single cartoon balloon. So ellipsis aside, what pray did Adams say, and more to the point, what was he talking about? 

Was Adams calling scientists liars as Watts implies, or was he adressing the political necessity of what French scientists (as opposed to literary theorists) candidly call vulgarisation scientifique-- if you seek popular understanding,  don't go talking Hilbert space in Dilbert space. 

While Climateball's rhetorical excesses may have driven Adams back to fence sitting,  Heller & Rotter  have failed in their eforts to tweet him back into the denialst fold, but though Scott isn't exactly Henry Adams, his commonsense point about exponential graphs that rocket to infinity is one soi disant  climate communicators ignore at their peril.

The We're All Gonna Die species extinction curve in Al Gore's 1992 best seller, The Earth In The Balance was  wisely redacted from later printings after  it was pointed out that a vertical rate of extinction means all species of bookbuyers are already dead.   Best let Adams speak for himself: