So if Young got it so wrong, as Mooney and Kleiman point out, then why is Pielke over on his blog wetting his pants because she got it right?

It seems that whenever someone praises Pielke, or he praises them, they are always right-wingers. Yet, Pielke keeps up this "middle ground" dance and journalists keep falling for it.

Benny Big Eye

Nobody will deny that there are over-enthusiastic voices in the climate change coalition. But no sane assessment of the current political and climatological situation could conclude that they are the big problem.

I have to disagree with you, here.  There are plenty of progressives with extreme and unrealistic views of both the climate problem and the solution.  (I'm sure that the same is true on the right, but they are better at making their people shut up, toe the party line, and stay on message.)  There's no shortage of them here on Grist, proposing things like a complete and immediate end to all energy subsidies.  (Nice idea, but even if it were politically feasible, it would crash the world economy overnight.)

They are a problem, politically speaking, because they are loud, undisciplined, full of angst, and short of workable solutions.  They do color the public's perceptions of what a climate change activist is like, strongly.  They've done a great deal of damage.

As I see it, Revkin and Mooney are simply trying to do what you say Young is doing (albeit with a much greater level of integrity): claim the reasonable center.  They may have not done as good a job, and your point about their apparent naivete (or equally likely, generosity of spirit) is well taken.  But consider:

Now, the right wing is eager to cast the debate as having two equivalent sides, "alarmists and deniers." That way they use the marginalization of denialists to marginalize advocates.

This only works if you equate (or allow to be equated) the alarmists with the advocates.  And this equation has been made, I fear, in the public perception.  But it doesn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way.

For a long time, the position of reasonable progressives on climate change seemed to be: "It's OK to exagerate a little bit, because the situation really is dire (even if it's not that dire) and we need to get people's attention".

That may have been a legitimate tactic 2-5 years ago.  But the game has changed, and the denier's position has collapsed.  Public awareness and concern is at an all-time high.  Now is the time for progressives to establish themselves as the reasonable voices on climate change, before the Right does so in our stead.  That means that we need to distance ourselves from the hysterics on our own side of the debate, while maintaining, unflinchingly, the seriousness of the problem and the degree of change in our lifestyles that will be required to address it.

Distance, distance, distance. Everyone wants distance from everything they don't think is reasonable. It's like a gated community of opinion and politics.

But the game has changed, and the denier's position has collapsed.

Don't I wish! The denialists are just getting started. Their strategy may no longer be a static block, but the name of the game is still to deflect, obfuscate and minimize. Maybe at this point carbon control regulations can't be avoided, but they certainly can be eviscerated and made ineffective.

Now is the time for progressives to establish themselves as the reasonable voices on climate change, before the Right does so in our stead.

It just ain't gonna happen and we don't have to worry about it. What we do have to worry about is handing the other side free ammunition.

Also, who gets to decide what's reasonable? Is An Inconvenient Truth reasonable? Is James Hansen reasonable? I'm afraid the question of reasonableness is just as political as global climate change policy.

Now is the time for progressives to establish themselves as the reasonable voices on climate change, before the Right does so in our stead.

Please explain to me why it would be a problem if the Right became a reasonable voice on climate change.

  David is correct (except when he says forget about us goddamn dirty hippies!  makes me want to grow my hair long again!).

  One of the interesting things, though, is that the right never apologizes for people like Rush and Hannity and all the extremists who talk about weird things (do I need to make a list?).

  Only progressives seem to think they need to be "centrists".  The right says they are centrists no matter what they're saying!!  (Die penguins die! is a centrist opinion, see?)

   When we let them decide whether we are reasonable or not, we are still letting them frame the debate.  As long as we let them frame the debate and make the rules, we are gonna lose.

   Reasonable is what we say it is.  Personally, I am quite conservative (in a green marxist vegetarian sort of way).

   Seriously!!

patrick

Anyone looking to test this thesis need only look to the "liberal media" tag, which has been extraordinarily effective at forcing corporate-owned media (already preturnaturally conservative) to step even further to the right, marginalizing leftist views on Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), taxes, social security, budgets, education etc. etc. etc.

The media is both the abused and the abuser here -- it is the media that anoints the "reasonableness" that leads to invitations on some and denies it to others, even as it is constantly looking over its shoulders at the right wing enforcers to make sure that reporting a little reality doesn't draw too heated a charge of bias.  Meanwhile, the right understands the "working the ref" game and constantly works to keep the press dressing up its right flank.

I fear that my comments have been misunderstood.  Although I am personally very fond of reasoned debate, I'm not so foolish as to believe that it is what works in the public forum.  My point is not that that we need to be reasonable.  It is that, now particularly, we must frame our positions so that we LOOK reasonable in the public eye.  I am, essentially, suggesting that we adopt tactics very similar to the repulsive but oh-so-effective tactics used by the right.

Thing is, I think we're actually in a position of (potential) relative advantage for a change: the denier community is scrambling to do damage control because their position and their support is starting to unravel.  They're going to try to occupy the apparent center, because the extreme position is no longer tenable on their side of the argument.  But the distance from their extreme to a position of apparent reasonableness is much longer than the comparable distance on our side of the debate.

I'm suggesting that it does not do our cause a disservice to distance ourselves from those who make loud pronouncements of certain and impending catastrophe.  Doomerism is not helpful, especially now that the public is beginning to wake up, because it presents people with a hopeless future, and motivates them to stuff their heads back into the sand.  It also makes us easy targets for caricature by the right.

As to the question of who/where these people are: They're here (in relatively small numbers, thank the gods), on The Oil Drum (also in small numbers) , on the EnergyResources list (in sadly very large numbers), and lots of other places in the blogosphere and in real life.  If you don't believe me, get hooked in with the environmentalist community in Sebastopol, for example, where the dirty hippie stereotype is alive, well, and walking around.  (In fairness, some of those dirty hippies are my friends.  Some of them are also very effective and powerful activists.  But plenty of them are just pissed off and scared, and really haven't grappled with the problem in a meaningful way.)