I love Climate Depot's Marc Morano's headline on this story: "From King of the World to Chicken of the sea..." Apropos of the gigantic ego of this man who apparently thought that retreat was the better part of valor.
Without any reference to his own cowardice, Cameron went on to smear skeptics, referring to them as 'swine." Well, I can think of worse animals to which one might be likened - say, chicken for example.
The whole story, as told by Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, is incredible. Here, he quotes Ann McElhinney of the website Not Evil Just Wrong, who was to be one of skeptics to appear with Cameron and two pro-climate change scientists at an environmental conference:
Ahead of this conference, Cameron challenged three noted global warming skeptics to a public debate where he was going to personally "call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.
[...]But then as the debate approached James Cameron's side started changing the rules.
They wanted to change their team. We agreed.
They wanted to change the format to less of a debate-to "a roundtable". We agreed.
Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.
Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds [sic] most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed [sic]
Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he "wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out," decided to ban the media from the shoot out.
He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.
No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.
We all agreed to that.
And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. "shoot it out " Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was canceled.
Sheppard speculates that Cameron was told that it would be fruitless to engage the skeptics in debate and he probably convinced himself that was the case.
I am happy that Cameron has gotten rich off his advocacy. In a free market system, he has succeeded because the message he was delivering was packaged as beautifully as any propaganda has ever been. "Avatar" is a triumph of technical film making, utilizing the most extraordinary advances in imaging and photography as well as computer generated graphics that science and Hollywood have been able to come up with. His success is the market's success. His innovative techniques has set a new standard of excellence that other directors must now strive to match.
But as a human being, he is a despicable coward, a liar, a charlatan, and an unthinking lout. I will boycott his sequel to Avatar that is to come out in 2014 for the simple reason I have no wish to enrich a gutless flim flam man whose creations have done nothing to add to the climate change debate and everything to obscure reality.
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