Topic
Start with big oil companies, and the money and connections flow.
Who got pumped up? Fraser Institute for one.
A leading environmental scientist says it is time for the international law to target climate culprit countries like his own, Canada.
Will Plane Stupid's stomach-churning video convince you to change your flying habits?
[Editor's note: This is excerpted from Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy by Donald Gutstein, just published by Key Porter.]
Here's how it fits together. Sallie Baliunas is a Harvard-Smithsonian Institution astrophysicist who has been providing scientific cover for global-warming deniers since the mid-nineties. She is a senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute (received $310,000 from ExxonMobil), where Marshall CEO William O'Keefe was a former ExxonMobil lobbyist, senior official of the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition. Baliunas co-wrote (with colleague Willie Soon) the Fraser Institute pamphlet Global warming: A guide to the science (receives $60,000 a year from ExxonMobil). Baliunas is "enviro-sci host" of TechCentralStation.com (received $95,000 from ExxonMobil) and is on science advisory boards for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy ($427,500). She has given speeches before the American Enterprise Institute ($960,000) and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). The Heartland Institute ($312,000) publishes her op-ed pieces. She is not lying when she says she receives no direct funding from ExxonMobil, but the money surrounds her.
Why might the oil giant be so taken with Baliunas? With colleague Willie Soon, she first claimed that solar effects could account for the earth's warming. When that theory was discredited, they then wrote a paper that claims the twentieth century hasn't been all that warm. This paper was published in an obscure journal, Climate Research, and partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute. It became a mini-bible for deniers. But the editor-in-chief and two other editors of Climate Research resigned, saying the paper should not have been published because of methodological errors in the research and a deficient peer-review process at the journal.
Green days at the Fraser Institute
After Kyoto's ratification by Parliament in 2002, [Fraser Institute environmental director Laura] Jones became an "adjunct scholar" at the institute and then chief lobbyist for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in British Columbia, where she carried on her anti-regulation work. Her position at the institute was filled by Kenneth Green, director of the environmental health and safety program at the Reason Institute, a Los Angeles-based libertarian think-tank that specializes in fighting environmental regulation, claiming it is an affront to liberty.
Reason's anti-global warming propaganda is based on the claim that "climate change has been a natural phenomena [sic] throughout the course of time." Do man's activities affect climate? "That is still open to debate," Reason's web site informs us in a reasonably sounding way. "Some would say none at all while others will say that it is dramatic ". Reason is funded by a number of conservative foundations, the American Petroleum Institute, Arco, BP Amoco, Chevron, Koch Industries, Shell Oil, Western States Petroleum, the Big Three auto companies, and carbon dioxide-spewing airlines. ExxonMobil provided $381,000 between 1998 and 2005.
Green promoted the same fossil-fuel interests during his three years at the Fraser. The month after Canada ratified Kyoto, Green coordinated an issue of Fraser Forum, featuring six articles about climate change. Green's contribution is an article titled "Kyoto Krazy." He claimed, amazingly, that the science of global warming was still unsettled (in 2003!). There are two sides to the debate, he wrote. On one side are "environmental pressure groups" like the David Suzuki Foundation, which believes "the law is on their side, that they've been terribly conscientious about consultation and cooperation, that there really is a free lunch and Canadians can achieve draconian reductions in energy use at low cost." On the other side, he says, are "more pragmatic researchers in the private sector and academia" who have shown that "Kyoto Protocol ratification will provide little benefit and will likely lead to real and wrenching economic impacts that will negatively affect the well being of Canadians." Green, however, cites only one such pragmatic researcher in the private sector and academia, his Fraser Institute colleague, Ross McKitrick.
Green continues his bizarre comparisons. On one side is a group "such as the United Nation's [sic] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has published reports suggesting that a warmer climate would cause major ecological disruption necessitating urgent action." But other scientists, he goes on, "have shown that the threat of global warming is overstated by the United Nations." Here too, Green cites only one source, McKitrick, who is an economist, not a scientist. In Green's world, one economist with an agenda negates 2,000 climatologists who have fashioned a difficult consensus. Green also refers to the work of Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, who "explain" that global warming is a "natural and largely beneficent phenomenon," due primarily to sunspot activity. His reference is Soon and Baliunas's 2001 Fraser Institute pamphlet, which was based on their 1995 book, which had been discredited by then.
Green left in 2005 to become executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Literacy Council, which provides industry-friendly learning materials for American schoolchildren. This organization receives funding from many of the same sources as Reason: the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Green also became a "visiting fellow" at the American Enterprise Institute, which had launched its National Research Initiative to "support, publish and disseminate" research by academics and other intellectuals on pressing public policy issues. Yet Green went beyond the activities of supporting, publishing and disseminating research while at the AEI. Just before the IPCC's Fourth Summary Report was due to be released in February 2007, Green authored a letter on AEI letterhead offering $10,000 each to scientists and economists to write articles disputing the IPCC findings. Perhaps the AEI used some of the $960,000 it received from ExxonMobil, and perhaps ExxonMobil's CEO, who was vice-chairman of the AEI's board of trustees, played a role in this gambit. It's not known how many scientists took the money.
National Post's crusade
For many citizens, their understanding of global warming derives from what they read or watch in the media, not from an extensive knowledge of science. So whoever has access to the media will have more opportunity to persuade public opinion. Consider the case of a researcher with science council funding who works at a Canadian university and discovers a new piece of evidence that global warming is occurring. The evidence and the argument of the research are likely abstract and difficult for him to explain to a general-assignment reporter writing the story, so the research receives little, if any, coverage. Consider next the case of an economist who does little original research herself, but is funded in part by the fossil-fuel industry to spread the word that global warming is not occurring, and if it is, we don't need to do anything about it, especially cut back on our use of fossil fuels. She is associated with a right-wing think-tank with a staff of media specialists and government lobbyists, whose primary function is to get pro-industry messages into the media.
Add to that the predisposition of corporate-controlled media to filter out news or views critical of business. The result is a news system largely devoid of stories describing the links between business activity and environmental degradation. Very few stories were published in Canadian or American papers about ExxonMobil's funding of the deniers. Add the further predisposition of reporters to present news in a balanced fashion, looking for two sides to a story. If the 2,000 climatologists of the IPCC release a study stating that the evidence for human causes of global warming just became stronger, a conscientious reporter will seek out a statement from a denier such as Tim Ball or Ross McKitrick, for the sake of balance.
In contrast with most news organizations, the National Post makes little pretence of being balanced, in its opinions or even in its news. In April 2006, the Post published a letter addressed to Stephen Harper and signed by 60 "accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines," as they described themselves. They wanted Harper to begin a debate on the Kyoto Protocol. This was an odd request given that the theory of climate change had been debated since 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen declared global warming was here. That statement has been subjected to extensive, prolonged and worldwide scrutiny, especially after the fossil-fuel industry set up the Global Climate Coalition. The 60 experts denied "alarmist forecasts" of global warming and attacked "the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups," whose goal was to capture "sensational headlines."
Only 19 of the "accredited experts in climate and related disciplines" were Canadian. Some were experts in paleoclimatology, which looks at climate changes over millions of years, so an increase of one or two degrees in the past 100 years would not be worthy of their consideration. Some still seemed to believe that sunspots could account for warming, even though that theory had been discredited. Signatories of the published letter included Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer, Tim Ball and Sallie Baliunas. They included non-climatologists like economist Ross McKitrick. Geographer Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, editor of Energy & Environment, signed on too.
The deniers' letter was followed two weeks later by one from 90 supporters of Kyoto. This group called itself "climate-science leaders from the academic, public and private sectors across Canada." Unlike the deniers, they were all Canadian and they were all climate scientists; no weasel phrases like "related scientific disciplines" were included. Their point was simple. The evidence was conclusive that warming has occurred and most of it was attributable to human activity. These conclusions, they wrote, were supported by the vast majority of the world's climate scientists. Harper's assignment was to get on with developing an "effective national strategy" to deal with climate change.
Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran seemed to think debate rather than action was required. He ran the letter from the Kyoto supporters, but accompanied it with an editorial attacking their credibility. Their crime was that some were federal government scientists and some had received peer-reviewed government grants. Therefore, what they had to say must be socialist-inspired rubbish. The pro-Kyoto scientists were subjected to another blistering attack the following week, this time by Reuven Brenner, a McGill University economist and adjunct fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, who had done studies for the Howe and Fraser institutes and Shell Oil. Brenner's point was that the 90 scientists were actually taxpayer-funded "activists and lobbyists who masquerade as scientists."
The 60-expert letter was organized by a group called the Friends of Science, a Calgary-based coalition of oil-patch geologists, Conservatives, prominent climate-change deniers and public relations practitioners. The president is an oil and gas consultant. The vice-president worked as a geologist for major petroleum producers in Canada and the North Sea. The society was organized in 2002, as the Chrétien government was preparing to ratify Kyoto. Its first action was to bring prominent deniers to Ottawa in a last-ditch effort to sideline Kyoto ratification. That exercise was paid for by Imperial Oil and Talisman Energy and choreographed by the APCO public relations firm, as reported earlier in this chapter.
Glare of the spotlight
With Harper's victory, APCO and the Friends of Science believed they had a second chance to get rid of Kyoto and adopt the phantom made-in-Canada solution. But they had to ensure their oil-industry funding would remain hidden. Otherwise, they would not be credible with the public. How they did this was the subject of a 4,200-word story in the Globe and Mail in 2006 by Charles Montgomery.
According to Montgomery, [Fraser Institute Calgary office director] Barry Cooper set up a fund at the university called the Science Education Fund. Donors could give to the fund through the Calgary Foundation, which administers much charitable giving in Calgary. Its policy is to guard the identities of donors. The Science Education Fund then provides money for the Friends of Science. Thanks to this clever scheme, oil-industry backing was rendered invisible.
In 2004, the society pumped $400,000 into a 25-minute video entitled Climate Catastrophe Cancelled, which promoted the relatively minor uncertainties around global warming while ignoring the widely accepted certainties. Between 2004 and 2006, the Science Education Fund received an additional $200,000. In the run-up to the 2006 election, Friends aired 30-second radio spots that attacked Kyoto, targeting 200,000 Ontario residents in ridings where the Liberals were thought to be vulnerable. Were they effective? After the ads were aired, the Friends' web site reported receiving 300,000 visitors and the Tories did win several of the seats. After Harper's victory, Friends distributed thousands of copies of Climate Catastrophe Cancelled to politicians and news organizations across the country. In April they wrote the letter to Harper urging him to pull out of Kyoto. In May he did.
Meanwhile, Charles Montgomery's lengthy Globe and Mail feature about the Friends of Science was picked up by SourceWatch, a directory of propagandists created by public relations industry critics John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The spotlight beamed on Friends' dubious funding arrangements led the University of Calgary to conduct an internal audit, which concluded that its trust account had been used to "support a partisan viewpoint on climate change." The university shut down the account and contacted Elections Canada about an apparent violation of the Elections Act. Elections Canada ruled that the ads didn't violate the law. They were not "election advertising" because they attacked the Kyoto Protocol and the science of climate change, and not specific candidates or parties.
The spotlight also revealed that Morten Paulsen, Preston Manning's former communications director, had received a one-year contract to promote Friends' anti-Kyoto message. Paulsen was also working for oil giant ConocoPhillips at the time and had worked on the 2006 Conservative election campaign. The National Post did not report these developments, but had gone on an attack-dog rampage when Montgomery's exposé first appeared in the Globe. Montgomery wrote his article, Post resident enforcer Terence Corcoran charged, because "Mr. Montgomery comes from the same ideological school" as Noam Chomsky. There, that'll teach ya, don't mess with us global-warming deniers. It was a rare insight into the intersection of interests by the oil industry, industry-funded front groups, radical-conservative academics, corporate media and Conservative Party apparatchiks.
And while the National Post, the Friends of Science, Calgary Schooler Barry Cooper and their allies continued to muddy the waters, action on global warming was delayed for nearly two decades. ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond retired at the end of 2005. His shareholders showered him with a $400-million retirement package, the use of an Exxon jet, car and driver and a million-dollar consulting deal. They had a lot to be thankful for. After taking over Mobil for $82 billion, Raymond guided the combined oil giant to the largest profit in human history, US$36 billion. (And profits kept going up after his retirement, reaching $45.2 billion in 2008.) Shareholders were happy with shares that had risen 500 per cent in value during the years he was doing everything he could to prevent action on global warming. Retired Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan, author of the best-seller Boiling Point, however, sees things differently than ExxonMobil shareholders. For him, the deniers and their corporate sponsors were "criminals against humanity." ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
Science vs PR
First of all, thanks, Tyee staff, for including this article in your ongoing compendium of articles on the topic of climate change. It speaks clearly to the true nature of the anti-global warming sect. I've always understood this sect to be more PR and big oil driven than science driven.
This following passage is important:
"For many citizens, their understanding of global warming derives from what they read or watch in the media, not from an extensive knowledge of science. So whoever has access to the media will have more opportunity to persuade public opinion."
Scientists are not trained in public relations, which is why they've had a hard time winning over public opinion in the mass media. The climate deniers have little to no science, and the little they have is marked by flawed, selective (cherry-picking) methodology. But, the deniers have the best PR spin doctors money can buy, and they know how the media works and how to use it.
I really encourage people to review James Hoggan's book on the PR machinery behind the climate denial movement. In fact, the Tyee published a review of Hoggan's book (by Bill Tieleman), so here it is: http://thetyee.ca/Books/2009/10/20/BigOilBigBuy/
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Prof. Gutstein, you very clearly point out how oil money
can play a role in funding those that are skeptical about the theory that humans are causing global warming.
As we have seen by the emails from Hadley CRU (aka ClimateGate), perhaps an explanation of why Jones et al were actively pursuing money from the Oil Industry would be in order as this contradicts the implied premise that you are presenting?
Would Jones and his colleagues be just another bunch of shills for the oil industry, except, paradoxically in this case, promoting the AGW theory?
In its essence, you have indicated that the Oil Industry has funded some scientists and underwritten a number of P.R. groups that disagree with the AGW theory and serve to spread information around that you don't like.
However, you have not proven that these scientists are wrong as a result of their funding. It is a false logic. It is like saying that publicly-funded scientists are right because they are not beholding to oil interests. Using that logic, scientists who collect no funding from oil interests and dispute the theory of AGW are also right.
Now, it is understood that money greases the wheels. As does career progression and going what ever way the wind blows. Both the pro-AGW and the AGW skeptics have to deal with these influences and they both have their advocates, P.R. companies, Foundations, Societies, industries and shills.
I mean, let's face it. Have you written any articles critical of how these same influences have an effect on the pro-AGW scientists?
If you have, then I tip my hat to you. If you have not, well, then you are just flogging a book.
OilbertaRedTory
3 years ago
Running on Empty
The Western Fuels Association in 1991 helped create ICE [Information Council on Environment] to 'reposition global warming as a theory not a fact' modelled after the evolution-denier strategy by creationists.
They targetted "older less educated males" who were 'receptive to messages describing motivations and vested interests of those making pronouncements on global warming'
[ICE report AMS archives p4]
For those unconvinced that the globe's scientists are in a 185 year conspiracy by the Knights Carbonic :
http://royalsociety.org/Climate-Science-Statement/
http://www.ametsoc.org/sss/documents/climateletter.pdf
ReeferMadness
3 years ago
Dr. Alexander, is that all you've got?
Donald Gutstein has done an admirable job of documenting how oil companies are surreptitiously funding climate denying scientists. Surely, we can all agree it's on the public interest for people to know who is producing this information and why.
In response, you offer smears without substantiation. Is that the best you can do?
OilbertaRedTory
3 years ago
Denial
... ain't just a river in Egypt:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art34/
Connecting the Climate Change Denial with Death Denial.
Some happy thoughts for the older readers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPiFhjCxXpk
ME2
3 years ago
It's an ill wind.........
These days provide easy pickins for the conspiracy theorists. And those who like to get all riled up have a near endless variety of baddies to choose from on either side of the global "change" issue.
My personal favourite is that Suzuki and Gore are funded by people who are looking to make a bundle in the Carbon Trading Game. Aleady I've read that JP Morgan Co is touting Carbon Credits as the next very profitable Derivatives Market.
We must enjoy having our pockets picked.
make_up_another...
3 years ago
The Denialists
The deniers are a paranoid lot. Comment sections on various sites are always peppered with diatribes about the coming 'Socialist New World Order', a supposed new world government led by Obama, The UN and the EU. I guess something had to replace the cold war to occupy the minds of libertarian conspiracy theorists.
The sad thing is that their side is winning and they don't even realize it. They rant on and on and on and on about Copenhagen. Look at Kyoto, emissions actually increased since then. I'd call that a failure.
Personally, I think climate talks are mostly that. Talk. Nothing meaningful ever happens. Harper's environmental policy, big shocker, is a carbon copy of the one put forth by the former Bush Administration.
I'm a skeptic...that the US will ever lead any real change. No US President will ever go against the corporate status quo. It's politics, you get what you pay for, literally.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
ReeferMadness... Is that all that Prof. Gutstein has got?
Prof. Gutstein has documented what any accountant can do. The oil industry among others, are funding scientists, PR companies and Foundations favourable to their cause.
Well, not exactly Earth-Shattering is it?
As someone who specializes in "communications", Prof. Gutstein get a fail. He is preaching to the converted and he is using loaded language that turns off any skeptic and thus prevents any message that he may be conveying to provide meaningful access to the thinking process of any skeptic.
In the advertising world, that is a fail if you want to increase your market share.
I reiterate, in the absence of any material being presented by Prof. Gutstein that documents the flow of money from various industries and foundations that are funding, underwriting, providing honouria or speaking fees to pro-AGW scientists, then this is just a PR job itself to the already converted.
C'mon ReeferMadness. Did Prof. Gutstein actually tell you something that you already didn't know?
Oh Gosh! The Fraser Institute gets money from the Oil Industry! What are we ever going to do?!
I am not impressed.
bowenmark
3 years ago
ice age coming
I'm old enough to remember that in the 1970's the boogie man was a global ice age is upon us. 40 years later we are expected to believe the opposite is true, perhaps there is a lot of money to be made no matter what side of the fence you stand on.
Jeffrey J.
3 years ago
Kudo's to Prof. Gutstein
Not a Conspiracy Theory is a GREAT read. Well organized and packed with nuggets of information that are chilling. It is only through this kind of research that citizens will learn how our society is being shaped and influenced by financial and corporate interests. Which have little concern for democratic decision making.
Do we wish to retain our democracy? In the end, that is the real issue. If we don't, history provides a wide variety of the kinds of authoritarian regimes that will replace democracy. Take your pick. Each regime, from European royal rule to third world dictators, all benefited the tiny number of elites at the expense of the majority of citizens.
Democratic self government by the majority of citizens has been opposed by elites from the outset. That's why it take courage and effort and authors like Prof. Gutstein for us to keep what we have fought for.
Great article.
Fiat lux
3 years ago
The main point is how the
The main point is how the Flat Earth Society of so called "economists" have been and are misleading the public into environmental and self destruction.
Neoclassical market economics is not a "science", as they claim, but the biggest crime wave in human history and unless humanity starts questioning the pseudo religious, purely faith based crap being taught in our universities as "economics" we'll be going downhill into oblivion at an accelerating pace.
This has nothing to do with any faith, or ideology, we can watch the effects of this crime wave, everywhere, in our daily lives.
The most amazing part is that the public is willingly going along with the crimes committed by these fools and crooks.
Ed Deak.
Iscott
3 years ago
Fossils
...and here, kids, we have the fossilized remains of the less intelligent
homo sapien sub species 'denier' that died off at the beginning of the 21st century, rather quickly I might add.
Fiat lux
3 years ago
PS to my previous..... We
PS to my previous.....
We should also remember that the monies the multinational corporate mafia are spending to mislead the public, are "tax deductible business expenses"
In other words, ultimately it all comes out of the victimized public's pockets either in stolen profits, or tax deductions and so, we're paying them to lead up the garden path.
And the so called "economists" must know all this, but classify it as "growth of the GDP" in their fraudulent accounting systems.
Ed Deak.
crh
3 years ago
all that pollution
A mountain of garbage is a bad thing for the environment. Contaminates groundwater and looks gross as well. Put pollution into the 'air' and you can deny it is there. You can't see it so what is the problem? Suits just want to keep on keeping on. More money honey.
Will one of them convince me that trickle down, free market, privatization and globalizion is making us all wealthy. These are all theories that need to be questioned with more ferocity. I know I don't believe it.
Tangler
3 years ago
On Missing the Point ...
Dr. Alexander: In your haste to cast aspersions, you miss the entire point. Perhaps I can make the point more simply for you:
Is it wrong for institutions and organizations to accept funding from industry? No. Is it wrong for those organizations to mask the identity of funders? Yes.
Is it wrong for an organization or individual to express an opinion about global warming? No. Is it wrong for an organization or individual to falsely imply that they have special expertise or knowledge to support their opinion? Yes.
The reality is that an organization which hides key facts about its operation (like the sources of its funding) can't be trusted to tell the truth. Similarly, an individual who uses academic credentials in support of an opinion, should be required to tell the whole truth ... like, the nature of those credentials.
Do I really care about the climate change opinion of "Dr.Smith" of the "Climate Science Foundation" if Dr. Smith is a podiatrist and the Climate Science Foundation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Exxon Mobile? Nope.
seth
3 years ago
Big Oil hates nukes too
James Hoggan's book on how Big Coal/Oil finances global warming deniers inadvertEntly shows how they also finance antinuclear front organizations. That almost no nuclear plants have been built since the oil crisis they engineered in the seventies, is evidence of their success.
Mass produced nuclear power is expected to cost $1 billion a gigawatt and 10000 gigawatts would end the world's fossil fuel purchases wiping out Big Coal/Oil and their odious products and doing it with a three year payback. "Renewables" are so expensive, unreliable unpredictable, and needful of fossil fuel backup, that they will have no effect ever on their business.
Recently the Intl Energy Agency was found to be suppressing the urgency of an imminent peak oil disaster. This is a strategy designed by Big Oil to lull us into a peak oil crisis with silly renewable schemes, suppressing the nuclear power option and making a monstrous profit for IEA's Big Oil sponsors when the crisis hits.
Suzuki and Pembina recently produced a climate change solution paper rejecting nuclear power but embracing thoroughly discredited “clean” coal technology, recommending the same dirty old coal power plants already killing hundreds of millions of people worldwide with radioactive dust, mercury, and arsenic wastes, just burying the CO2 output for a few years.
Since these studies are generally done under Big Oil's sponsorship it is a requirement for funding that nuclear power be excluded from consideration.
Big Oil/Coal uses campaign donations to corrupt our politicians who work for them not us.
For example, Atomic Energy Canada's recent problem's stem from Harpo - 100% owned by Big Oil. These scum buckets know AECL could with mass produced nuclear power, put them out of business and have Harper on task using time tested Neocon tactics to destroy government institutions. Read Thomas Franks - The Wrecking Crew for details. Harpo sure has. The technique used here is to target the Crown Corporation with budget cuts then when uckfups happen trot out the usual privatization government bad/inefficient hooey.
Or is it just possible that Harpo's belief in the Tim LaHaye scenario where Global warming hastens the Apocalypse making any effort to reduce greenhouse gases a very bad thing..
Earl_E
3 years ago
Captain on the Bridge
I remember the series Star Trek always having the same plot. The Enterprise would be in orbit around some world and Spock would be talking to Bones about how the scientists discovered that their world was doomed and they were unable to leave the planet in time, so they perished.
Today, looking at all of the text above from this war on science, it is easy to understand how homo sapiens will be unable to stop the wheels we have set in motion.
It is OK to be ignorant in youth. I always told my kids you just have to survive the stupidity of youth, and in Mankind's case, we just might not.
Too bad, we had such promise.
ursus
3 years ago
Oops
I see safari is still not working.
Noggy
3 years ago
So very much DECEIT in the world!
I feel like crying, my heart is filled with the greatest sadness imaginable, deceit robs us of our possibilities.
So just as long as we keep on bickering, the world will continue with degradation, now that is realness.
Brought to you by a decaying relic of the industrial revolution.
soleprobe
3 years ago
"and he is using loaded language that turns off any skeptic..."
Precisely Doc,
I just saw the words “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists” and I didn’t bother reading the article. It’s like these minions are just reading from the same script created in some marketing think tank and are void of any original thought. Anyone who disagrees with the highly funded and promoted establishment view is equivalent to a “holocaust denier” or some “tinfoil hat crackpot” who believes Santa and his little helpers run the world
snert
3 years ago
Iscott
Hate to disillusion you but the deniers will probably not be the ones that die out. You are making a serious mistake if you think they are all illiterate bumpkins that have no clue as to what is going on.
More than likely they will be prepared to act on any climate change that may affect as opposed the alarmists who will still be trying to attach blame.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Tangler and ursus
I have no real disagreement with you. If all groups don't come clean with their funding and associations, then we cannot trust what they say.
One of my contentions is that many of the "Green Foundations" and AGW-mitigating/benefiting businesses have grown to the kind of size that has allowed them to morph into the same monstrosities that we see with Big Oil, Big Pharma, and the Fraser Institute for example. The foundations, for example, now exist to serve themselves, and people, including researchers, have become addicted to the monies and perqs that they get from these relationships. With that in mind, I would invite adj. Prof. Gutstein to put as much effort into describing the kind of financial transactions that take place between Pro-AGW industries and foundations and the researchers that they underwrite as he has done in this article. In the absence of that, then he is just shilling and flogging a book and I take as much value out of the article as I would from anyone else shilling and book flogging.
ursus: With regards to the ability of corporations and special interests to buy politicians, that would be one step closer to a more democratic society. As far as me having an agenda. Of course I do. Just like you, I want more people to use Mac computers!
Tangler
3 years ago
Logic Dr. Alexander??
Dr.Alexander: Now who is engaging in flawed logic?
What you are essentially saying is that unless the author exposes similar, shady practices on the "green" side, then his evidence of shady practices on the denial side is somehow suspect; that he is simply a shill for the enviro-freaks. That makes no sense at all.
Followed to its illogical conclusion, your reasoning means that if a writer chooses to expose one fraud, then he must expose every fraud that's ever been perpetrated; if a journalist exposes one corrupt politician, he must expose all of them; if TMZ "outs" Tiger Woods, then they must reveal the philandering of every sports figure ever born.
The topic of the book in question, clearly revealed by the title, is how business quietly uses propaganda techniques to muddy the waters of public and scientific debate. If you, or anyone else, wants to write a book on how environmental organizations and researchers are manipulated by other groups, have at 'er.
As long as you provide factual evidence, as Gutstein has done, then your work would deserve to be taken seriously - not dismissed, as you have done.
soleprobe
3 years ago
As far as I’m concerned...
....those who promote and cover-up this climate fraud are committing a crime on the scale of global genocide that even dwarfs the holocaust.
Excerpts from article:
“The implementation of policies arising out of fraudulent fearmongering and biased studies on global warming is already devastating the third world, with a doubling in food prices causing mass starvation and death – a primary reason why the climategate crooks and their allies should be criminally investigated and hit with the strongest charges possible.”
“Poor people around the world, ‘Are being killed in large numbers by starvation as a result of (climate change) policy,’ said Monckton, due to huge areas of agricultural land being turned over to the growth of biofuels.
“‘Take Haiti where they live on mud pie with real mud costing 3 cents each….that’s what they’re living or rather what they’re dying on,’ said Monckton, relating how when he gave a speech on this subject, a lady in the front row burst into tears and told him, ‘I’ve just come back from Haiti – now because of the doubling in world food prices, they can’t even afford the price of a mud pie and they’re dying of starvation all over the place.’”
“’That’s how serious this is, these people, by their scientific fraud and financial fraud, they’re profiting enormously….while people die of starvation in a dozen regions of the world….it is a scandal of the worst proportion – our own fellow creatures are being killed by starvation because these people have lied and made up the science and hidden it so nobody else could check,’ said Monckton.”
http://www.infowars.com/third-world-under-attack-from-genocidal-climate-change-policy/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6bXxC1d_rE&feature=player_embedded
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Soleprobe has the eyes on the ball
Quite frankly, all the doom and gloom and end-of-the-Earthism going on in Copenhagen is perverse when the real elephant in the room is this:
http://thesecretlifeofkat.com/images/uploads/kat_blog_images/famine.jpg
If only the same effort was being put in to dealing with this.
worldofplenty
3 years ago
Climate Change is not caused by Humans
The real money is on the side of the climate change promoters. The fact that you are still using the term "deniers" shows you bias, the correct term is skeptics. You do not even mention climategate in the article. The master of fraud professor at the centre of the 'Climategate' affair has successfully received more than £13 million ($19 million) in research funding. This is far more than the pittance of funding that the skeptics have gotten as your numbers show. And this is only one climate change researcher. The amount of money spent on false research worldwide to promote climate change is staggering. The skeptic side gets only a tiny fraction, if any at all.
Tangler
3 years ago
Mincing Words Soleprobe?
Soleprobe:
If those who deny that mankind's activities are accelerating global climate change should not be called "deniers", then what should they be called?
If those who are skeptical of climate science can't be called "skeptics", then what should they be called?
Do you have more pleasing, politically correct euphemisms that we could use? Perhaps we could substitute "shrub" for "skeptic" (as in, "Professor Smith is an outspoken shrub on the issue of climate change"). Or maybe we could call them all "Friends of Science" ... no wait, that's already been done.
Looking forward to your recommendations on how we should modify the English language to suit your bias.
(PS - Santa doesn't "run the world". That's just silly. But he does run the North Pole. At this time of year, you'd be wise to remember that.)
soleprobe
3 years ago
I really have to be honest with myself
After looking into this very closely over the last little while I have to draw the line.
Political debate or environmental debate is one thing.
But global genocide resulting from fraud that has been clearly exposed is another thing altogether.
To debate with those who I sincerely believe to be the worst sort of criminals to ever walk the planet (now people may take offense to my views but I’m only being truthful, for this is what I firmly believe) would be to elevate those who commit genocide to the status of those with average moral conduct.
I can’t do that. The truth in this matter is clear and exposed for all to see. The people involved in this scam and those who are trying to cover it up are responsible for the starvation and deaths of millions of children around the world. Yes, this is even worse than what the Nazis did to the millions during WWII. And the Nazis were some of the greatest orators and the cleverest of debaters but it didn’t change who they were. If I were a German citizen living in those days and I knew what crimes the ruling establishment were committing against humanity how could I expect to have rational debate with such creatures of no conscience? And now finally history has come full circle.
All I can do is post truth: not for those who are perpetuating this horrendous wickedness but for those who desire to be on the right side of history.
MichaelC
3 years ago
Godwin's Law
Soleprobe, you just invoked Godwin's Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
As per standard internet debating protocol, the first person to invoke Godwin's Law loses.
Thanks for trying.
Tangler
3 years ago
I've Been Had!
Good job Soleprobe! I missed it initially, but now I can see that your posts here have been completely tongue-in-cheek.
You might have been able to sustain the ruse, but the stuff about the deaths of millions of children and Nazi atrocities went just an inch too far, into pure satire. The phrase "horrendous wickedness" was the final tip off.
Two thumbs up for a masterful fraud. You have played us all like a maestro. :
dorothy
3 years ago
Boohoo!
"Scientists are not trained in public relations, which is why they've had a hard time winning over public opinion in the mass media. "
But then they are supposedly trained in Science, and that's all they need. I have never had insight into a scientific matter , real insight, solidly founded and not been able to convey the principles or insight to soemone who would qualify as a 'member of the public'.
This has got to be the lamest rationalization that has come up yet, for not being able to make a case. What are we paying these people for? Not sitting in their ivory tower and talking to each other, that's for sure...
Maybe the world is getting hotter; maybe it isn't. Maybe it's our doing; maybe it isn't. Truth is, we don't know. It's all in the graphics program. There are some things we could do that would serve us well in any case, as someone said, like taking out an insurance. However, that does not justify the holier-than-thou attitudes that's been belted around here, nor any kind of name-calling or venom. So, I suggest you drop the names. "Denier' is an active predicate. Many just do not buy your wares, and that is merely a neutral position, not a negative one. It is a neat trick to use rhetoric that tries to define it as negative, for that sort of places the buying-in position as the defining one, as all other things then are measured relative to that, ergo not buying in becomes negative. It is, however, not justified by the nature of things. You would not call people who prefer blue shopping bags or no shopping bags 'yellow-deniers', would you? The same logic applies here.
Quite aside from that, it is a cheap-shot usage of the parallel to 'holocaust-denier'. Bad taste all around.
If I had never heard about 'global warming' or 'climate control' before, but was from outer space and came here to try to form an opinion based only on what I had read in the Tyee, my vote would go to those you call 'deniers', simply based on relative likeability. I have said before that the humorless, acrimonious tone used by the 'saved' types is just offputting, and you win no proselytes. You claim that the people on your side have a deficit in PR training, and I'm telling you that you're right, but I don't know if training is all there is to it. I think it could be lack of will to act in an inclusive way and refrain from being self-righteous. Based on how you reacted to my friendly advice before, I don't expect other than invectives or contempt back for this, but I am writing for those on the sidelines, who are maybe wishing for a better tone, to support their thinking as valid.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
Sarah Palin
Well, it's official. CanWest, in following the Fraser Institute's hopes for Canada to meld with with uber-rightwing USA Republicans, has published a Sarah Palin opinion piece on page 18 A of today's Province. For those who had any doubts, Palin is a climate change denier. I can now lump her in with the deniers I find on The Tyee. Yep, you betcha, that Sarah Palin is one deep thinker. Let's you 'n me read it whilst we join hands for a big oil big ole round'ah KumBayah. Someone's drillin', Lord, Kumbaya...." You get the drift.
But really, don'tcha think it's bad enough we get some of our own politicians lying and denying to us? Do we really need CanWest to import more insanity than we already have?
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Von Rompuy: 2009 is First Year of Global Governance
By using the word "denier" to describe people who have been able to see through the global warming fraud since well before the Climategate scandal, AGWarmers invoke Nazi analogies right from the getgo.
And for those of you who don't believe that Copenhagen is about emopowering global governance mechanisms here it is straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxwsRN-wNFQ&feature=related
soleprobe
3 years ago
"horrendous wickedness" was the final tip off.
To the wicked, wickedness does not exist.
Regarding Godwin, I don't obey his laws.
Booker
3 years ago
Tyee
It's nice to see some sanity in the comments of the Tyee (excepting Dr. Alexander). Recent articles in the Globe and the cbc.ca had a majority of comments from denialists and it was very discouraging reading.
The PR campaign against dealing with AGW has been amazing to watch, and it's fantastic that there are people like Gutstein taking the denialists on. We just have to keep on plugging away at this issue and eventually people will see through the BS.
dorothy
3 years ago
Why didn't anyone tell me
'a majority of comments from denialists'
Why didn't anyone tell me we had shifted from English to....some other language, one where 'denialists' is an actual word? Please identify, so I can get my translator ap started. Maybe this is why I seem to catch sight of so much gobbledegook?
ursus
3 years ago
Ppfff
Went from nine posts to no post, I am quite happy with my Apple computers, been using them since 95 the only regret I have is not buying stock when it hit 10 dollars.
Oh well hind site is wonderful and I suspect there might be a lot of people thinking that in a few years if the deniars are wrong.
I do feel these hired hacks should be held accountable, when I talk to people about this issue few seem aware of who is financing who, most don't have time to inform themselves.
frank2
3 years ago
It's about time that laws
It's about time that laws were changed to prevent corporations for making donations to any bodies with tax free privileges (as well as political parties). Otherwise, why be surprised that corporate "persons" will make their views known in the most effective ways possible, and at a level simply unaffordable to 99% of humanity.
ursus
3 years ago
Global Conspiracies
I prefer these sites for Global Conspiracies
zeitgeistmovie.com
or
http://ohcanadamovie.com/
Booker
3 years ago
Denialists, Dorothy
"Why didn't anyone tell me we had shifted from English to....some other language"
Yes, Dorothy, "denialist" is not a word. It's a cabbage.
"Denialist" is, in fact, a very widely used, and appropriate term, meaning someone practiced in the fine art of denial (of AGW, HIV, etc., etc.)
You can also use the term "denier", but "denialist" connotes a certain level of intention and professionalism that "denier" does not convey.
BTW, app has two "p"s.
Pedantically yours,
Booker
Janie Jones
3 years ago
"Recent articles in the
"Recent articles in the Globe and the cbc.ca had a majority of comments from denialists and it was very discouraging reading."
Could that be that the majority of Canadians are not as taken in by the theory of global warming that PR greenwashing hacks like James Hoggan are pushing?
"In 1990, PR consultant James Hoggan (who had worked for Western Forest Products) told a meeting of forest executives that the industry was wasting millions on ineffective PR. He said he and Patrick Moore had designed a 'green audit' program to sell to industry. Subsequently, Moore and two others formed Greenspirit to help business and government ‘incorporate the environmental agenda.' In 1991, the year Moore created Greenspirit, he became a member of the Board of Directors of the timber industry created Forest Alliance of B.C."
Source:
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/newnukes/articles.cfm?ID=17718
Booker
3 years ago
Janie
Hoggan's book is not about the science of climate change, it is an expose of PR firms who are trying to create doubt in the public mind about the science. They are using exactly the same deceitful tactics that the tobacco industry used to cover up the dangers of tobacco use.
A majority of Canadians are not taken in by the climate change deniers, but there has been a certain frenzy of late, as reflected in the response to the Globe article, and the CBC's. I have no idea what you are trying to prove with the quote you give.
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
Dorothy's "truth"
You replied:
This has got to be the lamest rationalization that has come up yet, for not being able to make a case. What are we paying these people for? Not sitting in their ivory tower and talking to each other, that's for sure...
Did you read the book review above, Dorothy? If you did, you'd begin to comprehend how powerful the PR lobby is behind the anti-climate change movement, and how well oiled (pun intended) and financed it is. It's not that the scientists have not made a definitive case to the public. It's more that the deniers have conducted a well orchestrated strategy of spin and confusion - to PR perfection. The climate change science is sound, definitive and the case has and continues to be made. But the denier movement has no shortage of corporate funding to launch a series PR counter-campaigns, headed up by PR professionals and the odd token scientist. And even most of these token scientists have no expertise in climate science. There's nothing lame about this explanation. It's simply the fact.
But I think we need to cut to the chase and get to the root of our disagreement. You say:
Maybe the world is getting hotter; maybe it isn't. Maybe it's our doing; maybe it isn't. Truth is, we don't know.
Wrong. We do know, via rigorous peer reviewed scientific data via the IPCC, that the planet is warming, but you seem oblivious to this science, preferring to simply dismiss and deny. And your dismissal is based on what, exactly? I have no idea, certainly nothing of a scientific argument or nature. Were you even paying attention a couple days ago when the World Meteorological Organisation data was released, reinforcing existing data that the climate continues to warm? Or is this part of a dark, nefarious Ivory Tower conspiracy, too?
How do you expect to be taken seriously with claims like, "maybe yes, maybe no, truth is we don't know." ?? The "truth"? According to Dorothy? You've exhibited zero scientific backup for your "truth"; you've not even attempted to critique the science. Where is your peer reviewed body of science that proves the prevailing scientific consensus (IPCC) to be wrong?
If I had never heard about 'global warming' or 'climate control' before, but was from outer space and came here to try to form an opinion based only on what I had read in the Tyee, my vote would go to those you call 'deniers', simply based on relative likeability.
You realize how ridiculous you sound here? I do agree with one thing, if an alien intelligence based its opinion only on the Tyee, it would be lacking. I urge you and your imaginary alien compatriots to bypass the Tyee, go directly to the source, the IPCC and the bona fide scientists who have worked and researched extensively in the field of climate science and reached a consensus that the planet is, in fact, warming due to human-caused emissions. Don't take my word for it! Do your own research. Then come back and let's talk.
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
Booker's point on Hoggan
Hoggan's book is not about the science of climate change, it is an expose of PR firms who are trying to create doubt in the public mind about the science. They are using exactly the same deceitful tactics that the tobacco industry used to cover up the dangers of tobacco use.
Precisely. Hoggan, himself a skilled PR practitioner who has done his share of spinning, understands the business as well as anyone, thus offers a valuable insider's view of what's happening with the climate change issue now on the PR front.
Remember, the science on tobacco's link to cancer was clear and damning as early as 1964, when the US Surgeon General issued the scientific findings on the link. But big tobacco was having none of this science and set their PR pit bulls loose for a thirty-year run on spinning the science into a tangled web of confusion and doubt, effectively convincing the public that smokes did not cause cancer. How many smokers, who might have been saved by the Surgeon General's scientific advice, were instead killed in those 30 years following due to the powerful spin produced by PR? The industry's PR machine was only brought down by the weight of the law, not by anything of an ethical motivation. They still have their PR hacks out there claiming second-hand smoke does no harm!
Many of PR professionals and firms once raking in huge profits by tobacco clients, have since moved on to the greener pastures of climate change denial, paid equally rich contracts by a new client - big oil.
Donald Gutstein obviously get it, and he offers a brilliant expose of the deceit and denial. Hoggan's book is focused exclusively on the PR angle, and serves as an equally brilliant companion book on this topic.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Tangler: Yup Logic
If all you do is run hit-pieces on the anti-AGW crowd. Well that's fine, that is your focus.
Now, if you are getting any funding from the pro-AGW crowd while you are writing these, then you are just shilling.
So, if adj. Prof. Gutstein is getting any funding from the pro-AGW crowd, he is no different than the anti-AGW scientists who are getting funding from the oil or similar industries and then it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Adj. Prof. Gutstein has not given full disclosure on whether or not he is receiving any money from any AGW-promoting entities.
In other words, he does not himself meet the standards that he calls upon others to meet.
On the other hand, if adj. Prof. Gutstein wrote some articles describing how some of the pro-AGW foundations/industries are funding various pro-AGW researchers, then I would cut the guy some slack as he is demonstrating some element of impartiality and thus his personal funding is not so much of an issue.
In the absence of said articles, and full disclosure of funding sources, I have to give adj. Prof. Gutstein's musings about as much mind as I do anything that comes out of the Fraser Institute.
To do otherwise would be illogical.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik: To paraphrase your own comment
If I may quote your previous comment:
"Were you even paying attention a couple days ago when the World Meteorological Organisation data was released, reinforcing existing data that the climate continues to warm"
bakoonin_mik, were you even paying attention to the emails and data from Hadely CRU of a couple of weeks ago indicating that principal contributors to the IPCC were engaged in data manipulation and corruption of the peer-review process and admitting that there has been no warming in the last decade.
And the funny thing is, that Jones et al of Hadely CRU inasmuch indicated that there has been no warming in the last decade and World Meteorological Organisation says that it has.
Oh! Who are we to believe? They cannot even get their stories straight these days.
RickW
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik
It was discovered a lot earlier than that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_Germany
After German doctors became the first to identify the link between smoking and lung cancer, Nazi Germany initiated a strong anti-tobacco movement and led the first public anti-smoking campaign in modern history
However, Nazi Germany is not to be credited with anything inconvenient to the oligarchs of today.
Oops! Have I inadvertently invoked Godwin's Law?
Fii
3 years ago
A while back I ordered a
A while back I ordered a bunch of books from Amazon and one that I chose (and was not quite what I expected) is called "Food and Population: The World in Crisis". This 'Great Contemporary Issues' series is a compilation of New York Times articles dating from the 20s-70s It's intense, hard to read at times (god they used bad font back then) and thoroughly fascinating. Climate change was barely on the radar and already it was clear we were heading to doom and beyond.
An example:
"World Overcrowding: Saturation point for earth's population soon will be in sight, with the safety limit for US estimated at 200,000,000 people"
--Nov 8, 1929
Dozens of articles on birth control and booming populations. Another one:
"Marx vs Malthus: Ideas stir rancor at Population Meeting" ---August 26, 1974
A UN World Population Conference?! Do we still have these? Or do we just give it another name now and pretend it's not all the same thing?
Frank
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik
Hoggan? I doubt many of us will want to purchase a book by a guy that donates big money to the BC Liberals. By donating to them Hoggan is endorsing Campbell policies such as more fish farms, reducing the flow of hundreds of rivers, cutting way back on forest rangers, building "Gateway", a pipeline to Kitimat and trying to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling.
Oh sure, Hoggan must really love the environment.
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
The science is our judge
Dr Alexander,
Let's stick to the facts and the science of climate change. Email leaks do not alter these scientific facts.
If these emails were as damning as you suggest, the UK science community would be split and in chaos. They are not, and the fact they are not I think puts to rest any suggestion that the existing science is unsound or tainted.
From the Met Office web site issued today:
We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.
The science of climate change draws on fundamental research from an increasing number of disciplines, many of which are represented here. As professional scientists, from students to senior professors, we uphold the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which concludes that 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal' and that 'Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations’.
Link to statement: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/uk-science-statement.html
There are 1,700 UK scientists who signed this petition.
As supporters of science, we here have to ask whether we take their professional, scientific opinion on the matter, or take the view in a comments section of a blog from some anonymous pseudonym, 'Dr Alexander.'
I know who I go with here.
The bottom line is that the science is bigger than any questions raised by the hacked emails.
2,500 scientists were involved in the evaluating the research. You'd have us believe they are all colluding to do bad science?
The leaked emails - embarrassing affair for those involved, and a public relations nightmare. Yes. But do these emails add up to much more. No.
I'd much prefer to read your arguments citing the body of peer reviewed research that definitively contradicts the IPCC's findings accumulated over the years. At this point, Dr. A., you're seem little more than a purveyor of sophistry, gossip and non-sequitur than you are of actual science.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Climategate is not a PR campaign
Funny, I'm not seeing a well-oiled campaign against the notion of AGM. I'm seeing a well-oiled campaign in favor of it.
And Climategate clearly shows that the East Anglia CRU:
1. Cooked the data
2. Controlled the IPCC
3. Blocked opposing research
4. Threatened and damaged opponents
5. Peer reviewed their own papers
6. Misused unalike data
7. Colluded together
8. Mocked contrary science
9. Took huge amounts of public money
10. Destroyed evidence
11. Refused FOI requests
And this just in:
Europol: $7.4 Billion Lost from Carbon Trading Fraud in Europe
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/europol-74-billion-lost-from-carbon-trading-fraud-in-europe/
mopled
3 years ago
The Tides Foundation, Tides Canada
"In practice, “Tides” behaves less like a philanthropy than a money-laundering enterprise (apologies to Procter & Gamble), taking money from other foundations and spending it as the donor requires. Called donor-advised giving, this pass-through funding vehicle provides public-relations insulation for the money’s original donors. By using Tides to funnel its capital, a large public charity can indirectly fund a project with which it would prefer not to be directly identified in public. Drummond Pike has reinforced this view, telling The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.”
In order to get an idea of the massive scale on which the Tides Foundation plays its shell game, consider that Tides has collected over $200 million since 1997, most of it from other foundations. The list of grantees who eventually received these funds includes many of the most notorious anti-consumer groups in U.S. history: Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Media Services, Environmental Working Group, and even fringe groups like the now-defunct Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet (which used actress Meryl Streep to “front” the 1989 Alar-on-apples health scare fraud for NRDC).For corporations and other organizations that eventually find themselves in these grantees’ crosshairs, there is practically no way to find out where their money originated. For the general public, the money trail ends at Tides’ front door. In many cases, even the eventual recipient of the funding has no idea how Tides got it in the first place."
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/225
Look at who Tides Canada gets its money from:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tides_Canada_Foundation
The "oil money" smear of skeptics is a pillar of Warmist propaganda while their own funding is hidden behind a foundation that takes money from other foundations and gives it not only to"green" causes, but to yet other foundations.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderProfile.asp?fndid=5184
About that Met Office petition... "One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.
“The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/10/the-met-office-making-a-list-tries-to-prop-up-the-image-of-the-cru/
ME2
3 years ago
There's some good in everyone.
Sarah Palin's a Denier? Geez, she's not a total write-off after all !!
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Good post mopled
This is from the comments section of the mopled's last link:
“We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of…
Complete the sentence. OK, I’ll complete it for you “…this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist [Nazi] thought.” Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934, pp. 10-11. Lehmann was a professor of botany who characterized National Socialism as “politically applied biology.”
Scratch beneath a committed environmentalist and you will certainly find a fascist. The romantic ideals of the Nazis went hand in hand with environmentalism, out of which emerged the eugenics, euthanasia and Final Solution policies of National Socialism. The ideals of environmentalism are all found in the writings of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party and have simply been recycled by modern ‘Greens’.
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
mopled desperately grabbing at straws
In your twisted spin, you somehow expect us to believe that (1) Donald Gutstein's thesis of oil money to deniers is a "a pillar of Warmist propaganda" and that (2) Tides funding of various non-profit causes is part of a "notorious anti-consumer" conspiracy. Hahaha! This is reaching at straws that aren't aren't even there.
Again, this nonsense is a classic diversion strategy aimed at confusing and muddying what are very clear climate change waters.
Rather than cutting and pasting your favourite conspiracy theorists, mopled, tell me in your scientific words how the current climate change science, which 1,700 UK have signed on to, again, in recent days, is a hoax or part of "Warmist propaganga." Show me your body of peer reviewed science that proves the IPCC data is anything but a result of the most rigorous, decades-long scientific research process. Let's see your hard data.
The strategy of climate deniers is to talk about anything EXCEPT the existing scientific data, because even they know they haven't snowball's hope in hell of effectively discounting that science. So instead, we get bizarre conspiracy theories about stolen emails, about non-profit philanthropy groups, about sun spots and volcanoes, and so on... anything to distract public attention from the real science and data.
realisticman
3 years ago
Janie Jones
"In 1990, PR consultant James Hoggan (who had worked for Western Forest Products) ..."
Good one Janie!
Your list of the East Anglia CRU ten admissions is the best concise summary I have so far seen. The list nullifies the IPCC report, yet it still accepted by some as gospel. I find it extremely troubling that so many people seem quite happy to tolerate wholesale underhanded fraud, deception and obfuscation, irrespective of the damaging consequences, as they blindly cling to nothing more than an ideological belief. Science has been hijacked and will suffer for a long time. A new inquisition has begun.
Many prominent physicists are concerned. Particularly about Robert H. Socolow, Professor, Co-Director, The Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, who has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from British Petroleum and still more from the federal government.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/10/taking_liberties/entry5964504.shtml
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Correction
The quote on Nazi environmentalism actually comes from a link posted in the comments section of mopled's last link:
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/eco-imperialism-every-environmentalists-dream/
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Thanks realisticman although
Thanks realisticman although I can't take all of the credit for it.
The reality is that big oil is on board with the carbon credit fraud schemes and are big investors in alternate energies and, as mopled's links show, launder money through the Tides Foundation to support the global warming global government agenda.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik: The ClimateGate emails are facts and science
And documentation of methodology applied, strategies used and data alteration & destruction via electronic communication is no less scientific documentation than what may be recorded on a hardcover or data tape.
Jones et al self-documented their acts of scientific chicanery.
If you are not of an inclination to see that they have "wronged" and thus the imperative that their work must be re-examined, well then, I welcome you to my side of the pub as you would be now a full-fledge "Denier".
I am sticking to science on this. I have seen colleagues torpedo their careers on this very sort of thing. If they are of high stature in which the Department or University has built some of their strength or cache around, then there is first a "Circle the Wagons". Then there is a quiet bums-rush. Then it is as if the guy never existed and the mention of his name give a farting in in church response from everyone.
As far as me being a "purveyor of sophistry, gossip and non-sequitur than of actual science", I an tempted to consider that you are at the effect of the old axiom "we see in others what we fear the most in ourselves"
Brushing off emails from scientist that document their manipulation of scientific data as simply an "embarrassment and P.R. nightmare" is not scientific. It is a P.R. pitch. To document scientifically how their malfeasance has NO effect on the models and IPCC documentation that they themselves were principal contributers to, that would be scientific.
To say that Jones, Mann et al did no real wrong because their peers, including the Met Office via their press release, are supporting them and their conclusions. That is not scientific. That's PR. Where all 1700 privy to all the experiments, model building, discussions, data analysis, and manuscript development that Jones and Mann et al were engaged in?
You say that as a supporter of science you know where to go. I'm with you on that.
Once the all the data and code that Jones, Mann and their colleagues becomes completely and freely available, including raw data, and subsequently gets re-examined by any and all scientists capable of doing so, then, I would consider buying in if their assertions are the same as what Jones, Mann and their colleagues assert.
Sweeping contentious science under the carpet and ignoring it isn't good science in my books.
But it is a good PR technique. Hoggan-brand of PR technique. And seening the PR goind on in Copenhagen, it is clear that the "Klimate Kult" is looking no different from the "Deniers"
Oh, as far as my non-sequiturs are concerned.
It's a BLOG we are writing to. I am not looking for a Pulitzer.
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik "Grabbing at Straws"
"The strategy of climate deniers is to talk about anything EXCEPT the existing scientific data,"
Ok bakoonin_mik. You would call me a "climate denier".
Lets talk about the existing scientific data that Jones and Mann and their colleagues manipulated so that natural observations would be suitably altered and presented such that they could be portrayed as being consistent with their theories and models rather than adjusting their theories and models to fit into what was happening in nature.
So far, the AGW community has been brushing it off. It is data that helps make their case for AGW.
Different group. Same tactic. Pot. Kettle. Black.
G West
3 years ago
soleprobe
I thought you didn't read the article!
G West
3 years ago
$7.4 Billion Lost from Carbon Trading Fraud in Europe
Hmm! Sounds like chicken feed to me. Apparently some readers were off the planet during the past 14 months or so....wake me when you have a real point.
Fact is, the last 10 years have been the hottest years ever - anyone who thinks this bodes well for the future of the planet and its poorest inhabitants is smoking some pretty good drugs.
But, as I've said before, keep fighting over the chairs - but don't blame me when you realize the Titanic isn't unsinkable.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
It's true, the banksters got even more.
Go back to sleep then G. West because you don't want to be reading this:
1998 No Longer the Hottest Year on Record:
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
jimorsheryl
3 years ago
Just the Truth
If you listen ONLY to one side, you will never hear just the truth. There are thousands upon thousands of 'researchers' who only keep their grants coming if they have a cause to research. Oil company execs want to sell oil, and care about nothing else.
That said, there is much credible discussion coming from real scientists who do not believe the global warming hype.
Simply trying to shout down this voice, with cries of 'DENIER' does nothing for the credibility of the bunch who has not trouble cooking date to aid their agenda.
And the DO have an agenda.
In the middle is the truth .... try to find it!
ursus
3 years ago
PR
We seem to have a few PR types on here spinning their rhetoric. Paid to deny the science of global warming, getting a little more obvious.
ursus
3 years ago
blogs
janie why would I believe a blogger who quotes an economist who seems to think he is smarter then NASA? That they are wrong and he is right, better paid maybe then the scientists at NASA.
Lots of arm chair scientists with blogs opposing AGW whats up with that don't want to park your hummer?
As supplies dwindle we will eventually have to pay more for fuel which will drive up the price of consumables and food so the more we use now the sooner we will be paying more.
Thanks to NAFTA we have given control of our resources to a foreign country and can not keep reserves for our own future or charge more then we pay for our OWN RESOURCES!
Spin all you want but this sounds pretty dumb to me, Mulroney knew dam well that oil reserves are finite and in my opinion sold us out, we do no and did not need foreign capital to develop a finite resource, stupidity or sell out, I am opting for the latter.
Water is next!
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
bakoon_mik & ursus
bakoon_mik, Met Office press releases and petitions are P.R. They are not science.
ursus, getting paid to do PR on this blog would be a waste of money for any camp willing to do so. It is an interesting and engaging place for what I believe to be mostly local folk. But, as the nexus of the Global Warming debate?
Perhaps Hoggan thinks so, but I would doubt that the Oil/Coal/Gas/etc etc industry thinks so.
I might say that spending time on this blog cuts into the time of the work that many of us actually get paid to do.
So, urus, if you know of any folks who get paid to comment on the tyee, do let us know. Perhaps adj. Prof. Gutstein could be set to take on this task.
As for myself, I do own shares in Shell and some gold mining juniors, but I also have shares in Siemens and a piece of the action on a torrefied wood operation in Europe. So take that for what it is worth.
Based on the comments that I have read, for the most part, this particular thread seems to have been beat to death and RickW has invoked Godwin's Law, so I'll leave it at that.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
I work in "green energy."
For the record, I do not own any shares in any companies at all, do not own a Hummer and am currently working for a company that is under contract to BC Hydro i.e. "green energy" although as I can surf and post online when I'm at work when things are slack, a case could be made that I sometimes get paid for doing so.
soleprobe
3 years ago
G West: "I thought you didn't read the article!"
Yep.... The only thing more torturous than watching and listening to lies and propaganda is reading it.
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
Science Matters
By David Suzuki With Faisal Moola (link at bottom)
People who deny the reality of human-caused global warming are wetting their pants over the illegal theft and release of emails from scientists at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit. In their desperation, the deniers claim the emails point to a global conspiracy by the world's scientists and government leaders... Well, it's hard to say what they believe the conspiracy is about. A letter to a Vancouver newspaper some time ago indicates the way many of them think. The writer claimed that people working to address global warming "are ideological zealots pursuing a quasi-religious socialist agenda to command and control western economies".
It would be funny if it didn't echo the thinking of so many people - even some in influential positions in government and industry - and if the situation weren't so critical.
Sadly for the deniers and for all of us, the emails don't show that global warming is a grand hoax or conspiracy. They do nothing to diminish the decades of overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is not only warming largely because of emissions from burning fossil fuels but that it's worse than we thought. Recently, 26 scientists from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, the U.S., and Australia released a report showing that the impacts of global warming are occurring faster and are more widespread than other reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had projected.
[...]
It's astounding that those who deny that climate change exists or that it is human-caused, either out of self-interest or ignorance, are willing to see some grand conspiracy in a handful of stolen emails but are unwilling to see the undeniably clear evidence of the impacts of climate change already occurring around the world.
Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, world leaders are dragging their heels in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate summit this month. As University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver notes, in abandoning the idea of reaching a binding agreement in Copenhagen, world leaders are essentially saying that they don't believe they owe anything to our children and grandchildren....
Full article: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/life/sci_tech/78316102.html
mopled
3 years ago
Global governance has always been the goal
The $79 Billion spent on "climate studies" is a very expensive fig leaf. Compare that with Exxon's $22 million over 20 years.
The Global Warming Science Machine: $79 Billion and Counting
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2167
"The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
- Club of Rome,
premier environmental think-tank,
consultants to the United Nations
"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift
will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."
- UN Agenda 21
"We are on the verge of a global transformation.
All we need is the right major crisis..."
- David Rockefeller,
Club of Rome executive member
"We've got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy."
- Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation, bankrolled by Ted Turner which funds the IPCC. Wirth helped stage Hansen's 1988 appearance before Congress by turning off the air conditioning and opening the windows the night before in the meeting room so everyone was sweating.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/wirth.html
“The models are convenient fictions
that provide something very useful.”
- Dr David Frame,
climate modeler, Oxford University
"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony...
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world."
- Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
“The data doesn't matter. We're not basing our recommendations on the data. We're basing them on the climate models.”
- Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
http://green-agenda.com/
People who continue to support this fraud need to re-think their positions.Does global governance by the World Bank at the cost of 2% of national GDP make any sense given what we know about the Banksters and the faked science?
Frank
3 years ago
Janie Jones
"Go back to sleep then G. West because you don't want to be reading this:
1998 No Longer the Hottest Year on Record:"
Your own link says that 4 of the hottest years on record were in the 1990-2006 timeframe. A timeframe that only the 1930s seem to challenge for top spot. And let's recall the 1930's saw a terrible drought across the entire middle of this continent as anyone from Saskatchewan or Oklahoma knows.
Frank
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik
First it was Jaccard and now its Weaver and Suzuki?
Do you not find it kinda hypocritical of Jaccard to talk about no one thinking of the future of "the children" when he supports a government that has led Canada in child poverty for most of this decade?
One can only assume that besides wanting the planet's CO2 levels to stop increasing he wants children to be poor and unable to afford energy. Not much of a future for them either way.
As for Suzuki, he backed child poverty and the Liberal attacks on the environment too.
Frank
3 years ago
mopled
"Does global governance by the World Bank at the cost of 2% of national GDP make any sense given what we know about the Banksters and the faked science?"
The Banks will make money either way. If your side wins then we can all go on consuming like there's no tomorrow, with plasma tvs in every room and dams on every river.
If bakoonin_mik's side wins then a right-wing wet dream will come to pass where decreased living standards for the already marginalized will be hailed as a necessary evil leaving capitalism to go on with even less restraints.
Tangler
3 years ago
Whither Common Sense?
There are dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of angles to attack in a debate on climate change. Many are intellectually intriguing, many are densely academic, many are simply emotional and a lot are just dumb.
Most are a waste of breath and bandwidth, because they are unconvincing to either "side".
So, what I always come back to is the simple (and perhaps simplistic):
Does it make sense, to a reasonably intelligent adult, that mankind could fill our atmosphere with toxic chemicals - day after year after decade after century - and there would be no effect? Does it make sense that we could fill our oceans with waste products, chemicals and plastic shopping bags, and there would be no effect? That we could smoke two packs a day in an average suburban home and have no effect on the other residents of the home?
Be honest now. Do any of these scenarios make the slightest bit of sense? Of course not. A reasonably intelligent adult understands cause and effect - even if the effect isn't easy to see.
To me, a person who rejects the notion that mankind has had (and is having) a negative effect on our atmosphere - and that this negative effect will have negative, long-term consequences - is a fool. Science aside, politics aside, your position is nonsensical and indefensible.
If you are not a fool, then stop wasting everyone's time trying to "prove" that man-made global warming and climate change is a weird, global conspiracy. Simple common sense - the kind your mom and dad tried to instill in you - indicates otherwise.
You don't have to become an "enviro-freak". You don't have to join Greenpeace. But you do have to stop the relentless, pointless, counter-productive attacks on the unassailable logic of global warming and climate change.
My last word on the subject (unless somebody says something so incredibly stupid - again - that I'm unable to restrain myself).
North of Hope
3 years ago
"deniers"
Dr. Alexander, you refer to your comments as "non-sequiturs" implying since this is a blog, no consistancy is required. This comment sparked memories of a set of cartoons called "Political Animals" from Non-sequitur. Which one are you, Preconclusive Sheep, Meandering Panda, Couching tiger, Venomous Blotoad or whatever?
http://professorpoliticorants.blogspot.com/2008/04/political-zoology.html
North of Hope
3 years ago
deniers 2
Janie Jones, your comments comparing environmentalists and those who accept the reality of greenhouse gases as Nazis is beyond belief. For you to be working for an energy company hired by BC Hydro demonstrates a waste of my payments for hydro electricity.
soleprobe
3 years ago
Carbon Eugenics: Genocide in the name of the environment....
...is till genocide
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTbyjUnYmMs&feature=player_embedded
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
Tangler's voice of reason
You do reach a point in these discussions where you come full circle, and arrive back to the most base, most important question, which does indeed seem like one of common sense: are we humans contributing to the warming of our climate? Or as Tangler puts it: can we really expect our spewing of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and oceans to have no impact?
One would think and hope common sense would prevail, but unfortunately humans tend to acknowledge danger only when it is immediate and tangible.
We are like that frog in the pot of water. If the frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it jumps quickly back out, realizing the immediate, tangible effects of boiling water. If, however, the frog jumps into the pot when water is cool, and then we turn the heat up slowly, the frog will stay in right to and beyond the boiling point.
Humans only began quitting smoking in large numbers when they had a good two or three generations to see the death toll on their loved ones (tangible results), long after the science had warned of the cancer risks.
Unfortunately, as optimistic as I am about human nature, I think it's gonna take many more Katrina-like disasters in our own backyard, more raging Australian wildfires, and more massive tracts of pine-beetle killed forests before we really start to see and feel the immediate, tangible effects of climate change.
In the meantime, the massively-funded PR machinery behind climate denial is going to do its damnedest to to ensure common sense and science are beaten down and drowned out for as long as it takes to pull the last few remaining barrels of oil out of the sand.
G West
3 years ago
ZZZZZZZZZZZZ just for you Janie
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/science/earth/09climate.html?_r=2&hp
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Strange Bedfellows Indeed
Shocking isn't it? But those are not my comments, I was merely quoting them as the entry heading clearly states.
Oops . . . I see I forget to put quotation marks at the end of the last paragraph but I did not write a single word of it. Nor is it something I believe. I believe in the sanctity of human life. My maternal grandparents were survivors of the Communist genocide of the Russian people that many laud to this day.
We keep hearing how the earth's population must be reduced. How do you suppose this is going to be accomplished?
Carbon Eugenics: Genocide in the name of the environment is still genocide:
http://www.infowars.com/carbon-eugenics-genocide-in-the-name-of-the-environment-is-still-genocide/
mopled
3 years ago
CO2 is not toxic and not a "pollutant"
So why do the Warmists, who are also "carbon based life forms" continue to equate real pollution with the "gas of life"? It is what plants use to make carbo-hydrates. I'm so tired of the flim-flam arguments.
There is no reason to ration the amount of COI2 produced by humans. NONE!
"Physics professor William Happer GS ’64 has some tough words for scientists who believe that carbon dioxide is causing global warming.
“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, said in an interview. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”
Happer served as director of the Office of Energy Research in the U.S. Department of Energy under President George H.W. Bush and was subsequently fired by Vice President Al Gore, reportedly for his refusal to support Gore’s views on climate change. He asked last month to be added to a list of global warming dissenters in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report. The list includes more than 650 experts who challenge the belief that human activity is contributing to global warming"
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/01/12/22506/
Frank,"The banks win anyway" is a pretty defeatist attitude when being robbed in yet another way by them is being prepared with the connivance of government....as usual. But when do we draw a line?
Hitler Youth in Denmark – again
"A thoughtful, quietly-spoken German was almost in tears.“I never thought I would see this in my lifetime,” he said,“The last time young people politicized and indoctrinated by the State broke up a meeting of their opponents here in Copenhagen by chanting mindless, repetitive slogans was during the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the Second World War.”
Americans for Prosperity had booked a meeting-room in a canal-side hotel, with a live satellite link-up to well-attended chapter meetings all over the United States. As their President was speaking, the Hitler-Jugend, part of a very large, lavishly-funded delegation of jack-trainered, eco-Fascist goons probably paid for by taxpayers somewhere, leapt up to the podium and began a zombie-like, keening chant."
~~~~
"A Danish lady who had been in the audience at the meeting broken up by the Nazi thugs said that her father had told her that such displays had been a feature of Copenhagen during the German occupation. She, too, was shaken and saddened by the Hitler-Jugend’s attempted disruption of what we had all hoped was now the unchallengeable right of free speech."
http://sppiblog.org/news/hitler-youth-in-denmark-again
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Thanks for the backup soleprobe!
I see soleprobe beat me to it while I was composing the above message.
As James Corbett concludes, "It is not always popular to stand against great injustice, but it is always right.'
Janie Jones
3 years ago
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
I see G. West's link is sponsored by Shell who have just been awarded "the right" to Iraq's largest oilfield.
Frank
3 years ago
mopled
"Frank,"The banks win anyway" is a pretty defeatist attitude"
How so? Just because I don't support your view that global warming is a sham? Or because I don't support the hypocrites among the enviros?
Like Diane Francis I think overpopulation is the big problem.
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=342e1874-cf39-4c23-b5e5-1e684033817a
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Keep it coming
Another great post Mopled!
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Giant vegetables.
"The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures."
Eugenics, environmentalism and facism all in one sentence.
Diane Francis. Didn't she once defend clearcut logging and its attendant destruction of forest ecosystems on the grounds that trees were merely "giant vegetables?"
Frank
3 years ago
Janie Jones
Diane Francis is certainly not among those I call my political allies. Irregardless, even a disciple of capitalism like herself can see the writing on the wall.
Unfortunately you can't. You seem to believe space travel will save us and we can all just go to a new planet. When you've constructed your first prototype call me, but until then you have no answer for the world's environmental problems.
soleprobe
3 years ago
Janie
you're welcome
mopled
3 years ago
Frank...taxing CO2 on a global level doesn't solve pollution
It produces it....by diverting needed resources to a non-problem.If the $79 Billion the US government poured into the newly made-up "science of climate change" could have gone to cleaning up sewage and run-off, there would not be a dead zone in the middle of the Caribbean.
Gutstein makes me gag when he attacks reputable scientists like Sallie Baliunas for receiving grant money from Exxon, when CRU WAS FOUNDED BY MONEY FROM SHELL AND BRITISH PETROLEUM.....along with help from the DOE (which started out as the Atomic bomb program). Lots of US government money flowed in from other agencies too.
http://www.uea.ac.uk/menu/acad_depts/env/cru/\
"Climate Money also highlights the vilification of “Big Oil” and, in particular, the “Exxon Blame-Game.” Nova’s report reveals that while Exxon Mobil gave a mere $23 million, spread over ten years, to climate sceptics, climate alarmism was funded to the tune of $2 billion by the US Government. Yet as stark as the funding difference is, it is Exxon that has, and still is, been attacked mercilessly for allegedly “distorting the debate.”
Nova, however, draws the ironic conclusion that those who attack Exxon “are inadvertently drawing attention away from the real power play and acting as unpaid agents for giant trading houses and large banks.” Something she notes “could sit a little uncomfortably with greenies and environmentalists.” As Nova says, “The side show of blaming Big Oil hides the truth: that the real issue is whether there is any evidence, and that the sceptics are a grassroots movement that consists of well respected scientists and a growing group of unpaid volunteers.”
Describing the culture of ad hominem attacks as a “form of censorship”, the report identifies that: “Not many fields of science have dedicated smear sites for scientists. Money talks.” So it seems. And the point is underlined when we learn that scientist-smearing Desmog is a funded wing of the PR group Hoggan and associates, which acts on behalf of groups with a vested climate interest. ExxonSecrets turns out to be funded by Greenpeace, an organization that “lives off donations to ‘save the planet’.“
Citing the World Bank, the report notes that turnover of carbon trading has doubled from $63 billion in 2007 to $126 billion in 2008. “Not surprisingly,” comments the report’s author, “banks are doing what banks should do: they’re following the promise of profits, and hence urging government to adopt carbon trading.”
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2167
There are many angles to the biggest swindle in the history of the world. If Gutstein were not a propagandist, he would have looked into them.
Instead he gives us the usual twaddle that has been making the rounds for years now.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Gorwellian carbon credit indulgences are not the answer either.
"You seem to believe space travel will save us and we can all just go to a new planet."
You're getting a little desperate there Frank. You seem to believe that global government will save us and we can just depopulate the planet to save it.
"Like Diane Francis I think overpopulation is the big problem."
If you really feel that way, why don't you just kill yourself?
anarcho
3 years ago
Wackos and wingnuts!
This one sure brought the psychos out. Paranoia of the "Obama is a communist" variety. Environmentalists as Nazis, Climate science as a fraud etc. Where are the folks in the white coats?
dorothy
3 years ago
bakoonin_mik
"..Were you even paying attention a couple days ago when the World Meteorological Organisation data was released,.."
Do you have a link you could share? I mean, you're the one who is trying to convince others of something. You could be a bit helpful, couldn't you? You keep harping on all the work I have to do if I want people to 'take me seriously'. They can take me any way they want, as I am not peddling anything. You're in a different situation.
"You realize how ridiculous you sound here?"
Well as I said, I'm not trying to please anyone, but to cast light from a new angle. If people who try to sell me opinions do so by ranting about what kind of a dope I am, since I don't work hard to get in a position to see it their way, I don't assign them much credibility. Trying to bully your opinions through detracts from said credibility. Sure enough, it all ends up with these people wanting my money, and everybody's money, so they can hopefully get the data to prove their case. I don't see that as being much different from the Yankees invading Iraq to secure the proof that they were right to do so. So, I really think considering the means by which people try to 'win battles' does have a bearing on their credibility. You think it's ridiculous, but you aren't convincing anyone, are you? you are all the way behind the whining about the propaganda machine, which I don't give credit to either. I simply don't buy from anybody who stands on my doorstep to sell. If I need something, I'll go out and look for it. There's something wrong with people who come looking for you at home. they are too eager to prevent you from looking at all the options, and therefore not entirely credible.
I don't hold with people who try to boost their own crediblity through attacking that of their detractors. That cuts no ice with me. I have a sneaking suspicion it cuts no ice with most people. Therefore, it's not a question of believeing the other guys, it's a question of not believing you, due to your own behaviour.
I think this isue of credibility is at least as important and fundamental and interesting as global warming/non-warming. As for the 'strictly peer-reviewed' stuff, I haven't sen anything that wasn't strictly non-committal. It bursts with wording such as 'very likey', 'unlikely', 'higly probable', 'substantive evidence', or even 'new evidence', which is never quite depicted in specific terms, or even at all, just referred to in these vague terms. Couple that with the nature of the research people want money for, it seems to me they are wanting us to buy the cat in the bag. I have seen and heard, even on occasion generated, scientific evidence that was irrefutable. I know what it looks and sounds like, and I am not seeing that here. So show me your sources, instead of sending me on some stupid treasure-hunt. This isn't a game.
G West
3 years ago
world meteorological assn report....
"The period from 2000 through 2009 has been “warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, and so on,” Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, said at a news conference here.
The unauthorized release last month of e-mail messages between climate scientists in Britain and the United States has provided new ammunition to global warming skeptics. Some of the messages seemed to suggest that some data be withheld from the public. Mr. Jarraud said the release of the climate analysis was moved up from year’s end to coincide with the international conference on climate change.
The data also indicates that 2009 was also the fifth warmest year on record, he said, although he noted that the figures for the year were incomplete.
The international assessment on temperatures from 2000 to 2009 largely meshes with an interim analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, which independently estimates global and regional temperature and other weather trends."
quoted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/science/earth/09climate.html?_r=3&hp
Andrew Revkin and James Kanter...
just for you dorothy...cheers
bakoonin_mik
3 years ago
Dorothy, redux
I posted a couple key links in my previous posts, so the fact you are asking for evidence and links only tells me you weren't really reading, just reacting.
I'm not going to spoon-feed you the data. You're a smart person, you can find it if you really want to find it. You could try Googling "IPCC climate science data" or "WMO warming data" or anything along these lines. The data is there, go look for yourself. Stop being lazy and expecting all the answers to pop on the Tyee comments section, or to be handed to you on a silver plate.
The sources are there, they are not hidden, there are no secret handshakes, you just need to go look at them.
I'm done, on to more important pursuits. Even being in the same thread of discussion as someone of the flat-earth wingnuts in this thread, like molped and friends, is a signal that it's time to move on to the real world.
Frank
3 years ago
mopled
"Frank...taxing CO2 on a global level doesn't solve pollution"
I know. You may also recall that I knew that several years ago when Truman was still here too.
But although both sides here seem to find it impossible to be against both pollution and carbon taxes, I assure you its possible.
Holocene
3 years ago
Enough with the coincidence theories
Personally, I don’t have much patience anymore with the coincidence theorists on climate change. As the famous Deep Throat said, “Follow the money”. Unlike people, it never lies. An intelligent twelve year-old can appreciate the dishonesty of the energy cartel and its financial beneficiaries.
Tangle has expressed my own feelings about this whole issue perfectly. How irrational do we have to be to think we could continue indefinitely to poison the environment without it coming back to bite us in the ass? Even if there is room for doubt about Global Warming, and thinking people should always leave room for doubt, what would we lose by reigning in the pollution that’s sickening and killing species, including us, and the wholesale plundering of the planet?
The absurdly named Climategate is a tempest in a teapot. The deniers of Global Warming have gotten a lot more mileage from their contrarian argument than they had any right to, due mostly to an excess of money backing them, and an unfortunate habit in modern journalism of defining balance as giving equal time and weight to opposing arguments, even when one has the preponderance of evidence on its side.
Edward Bernays, the father of PR, would nod appreciatively at how much power his children wield in this debate, but then, the bastard was pretty well amoral.
Frank
3 years ago
Janie Jones
"You seem to believe that global government will save us"
Depends who the government would be. I'd certainly fear any of your right-wing choices but that's neither here nor there.
"and we can just depopulate the planet to save it."
Yes, exactly. Why do we limit the seating at events like the Stanley Cup or the Grey Cup? Its because we understand the very simple concept that you can't fit unlimited amounts of people into a given space. The planet is no different. There's a limit to how many animals can live on it.
"If you really feel that way, why don't you just kill yourself?"
I am, I'll be dead in a few decades. And what really warms the cockels of my heart is you will be too.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
This one's for you anarcho
An inspired post by one iysun777 on one of the CBC threads Booker was no doubt complaining about:
Sockeye decline linked to climate change:
"This is true!
Climate change causes salmon decline! It has nothing to do with over fishing assuming their is even a decline!
War is peace! Nobamas peace prize proves that!
Ignorance is bliss! Rats can have fun in a cage if they don't think anything else exists
Being healthy means your a nut! You silly health nut!
Conspiracy theorists are whack jobs! 2 planes really did make 3 buildings come down at free fall speed with the precision of controlled demolition!
Cancer is incurable! Royal Rife never existed!
That is right everyone! We should stay in our little box, after all we wouldn't want to become a crazy person! Now where is my prozac?"
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
Thanks Frank and G West
You know, fellows, I have been coming here for 4 or 5 years now. I think you have been here for as long as I have; certainly you have been publishing here longer. However long it’s been, I offer my public thank you.
Thank you for your unwavering patience with hard-core selfish-minded wingnuts' attempts to move this province and this country further toward those egocentric/selfish ideals adherred to by both, our current prime minister and our current premier. Time and again, I witness your attempts to educate these selfish people while often employing enjoyable amounts humour for fellow readers.
It is my belief that if the wealthy and the powerful were to allow themselves to experience a personal paradigm shift whereby they grasped that they would become many times more powerful if they were to turn their vast resources toward helping others, they would also experience more joy. If they would just become role models of sharing and doing what is most right for the planet, we could solve many of the world's problems of hunger, illiteracy, disease, pollution, resource depletion and overpopulation. Countries (like Canada) that are well-educated and well-fed tend to have fewer children and less disease. G West and Frank, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe I often read your advocating for policies and politicians that are most likely going to create a kinder more caring, less-destructive world - a world where Canadians and other wealthy peoples learn to be happy with less material stuff while continually striving to educate themselves and do good works.
25 years ago, I read a book called Models of Doom wherein it listed a number of scenarios for the planet as envisioned by pre-eminent economists, demographers and biologists etc. It was an eye-opener for me. It spoke of energy and resource depletion, the rapid spread of anti-biotic resistant diseases and the end of our ability to use "green revolution" techniques on soil that had become exhausted through use of fertilizers and pesticides. Some scenarios listed the present time as the beginning of the decline others pegged it as starting 10-20 years from now. I don't recall climate change as having been examined as a factor - but it certainly is. We have over-populated and we are poisoning our planet far faster than it can heal from what we do.
I am not wont to be a doomsayer, but I believe that it is time for all of us to get our collective heads out of our asses for the sake of our grandchildren. I believe Frank and GWest believe this too, and they are doing their best to counter the insanity that advocates for more of the status quo. Thanks, guys!
alive
3 years ago
Is there a GOD?
I find it amazing that people who claim to believe in God, have difficulties believing in climate change!
I have yet to see one bit of evidence that a God exists, but people do their worships, maybe just in case there is a God ( so they will be saved?)
In that case why not believe in climate change and hope to be saved on that front as well?
What have you got to loose by acting more responsibly?
mopled
3 years ago
I just love the totally irrational guilt trips Warmists try out
My grandchildren will fair much better if they are not pushed around by green nazis who can't count.
"From all the studies produced by billions of dollars of research in the last two decades, the only thing that has been learned for sure is that climate change is a natural function that the human race has not begun to comprehend. Science has barely scratched the surface. It is the height of arrogance to think that we can enact laws that nature will obey. As it always has, the climate will change according to the dictates of the architect of the universe, not according to the dictates of Barack Obama, Al Gore or the International Panel on Climate Change.
The climate change movement is, indeed, quite similar to the eugenics movement. In a generation or two, people will look back and wonder what on Earth was wrong with this generation to get caught up in such foolishness."
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2382
Now for all of you who can't understand what the human "carbon footprint" amounts to....watch this
CO2 Contributed by Human Activity: 12 to 15ppmv /
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYLmLW4k4aI&feature=player_embedded
Just how much lunatic fantasy are the rest of us supposed to put up with so you all can feel smug and self satisfied while we all get ripped off by the same old Banksters and scam artists?
Frank
3 years ago
mopled
If you want to spend your time going after enviros playing silly bugger like Jaccard, Hoggan, Berman et al, then I want to be on your side.
But if you want to instead ignore the realities this planet is facing due to massive over fishing, destruction of forests, using 4 barrels of water to produce one barrel of tar sand oil and driving species to extinction and so on all because of over population and excess consumption by the few (a ski resort in the Persian Gulf?) then you shouldn't mind me pointing out you're the last person that should try claiming the moral high ground.
You may wish to shrug off my concerns as lunatic fantasy but I call it simple mathematics. As any realtor will tell you, the world is not getting bigger and regardless of your side's declarations that everything is wine and roses, global habitat loss over just the last two hundred years, is staggering.
And as far as global warming goes, Janie's own link claiming 1998 wasn't the hottest year ever, doesn't help your case. Although I think the problems caused by too many people far outweigh that issue in importance.
ursus
3 years ago
wow
who turned the wing nuts loose on us, the right wing christian types are opposed to AGW because they think they can rape and mistreat this planet to their hearts content.
Until their pocket books are full with excess cash at the expense of the poor cause Jesus is going to show up just in time to save their sorry asses.
They call themselves Christians but really are as Christlike as Attila the Hun as long as someone else is doing the dirty work since they are to important to risk their lives! In their minds at least. Rant over!
Janie my family came to the Northern Interior of this Province in 1905, they used to fill a wagon with Sockeye in a weekend of fishing in a creek no more then 5 feet wide and two feet deep.
I remember the Sockeye runs up there and believe me they are nothing like they used to be, we used to get 40lb char and 6 lb lake trout, not now. Moose used to winter in our back yard and we would see them and most of the other large animals almost every day, not now!
Anyone who thinks we are not destroying our environment is seriously deluded!
ursus
3 years ago
Mopled
you really go for the conspiracy theories don't you! Thanks mostly to religions we have to many people on this planet and eventually we will pay the price!
The old timers in Northern B.C. always told me that if you take care of the Earth it will take care of you, made sense to me! Very few of them would support clear cutting!
One name I don't hear brought up to often in the discussions on Salmon is Pattison and he is I suspect a major player in their demise.
Many resource extraction companies rape then move on to something else and in the case of mining the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill for cleaning up their mess when by rights it should be the company and shareholders who are held accountable.
dorothy
3 years ago
Reply to mike Bakunin, even if he won't see it (?)
"I posted a couple key links in my previous posts, so the fact you are asking for evidence and links only tells me you weren't really reading, just reacting."
Yeah, I have read the stuff that was posted there and most of it would not pass for science in the places where I use to encounter that entity. I found one massive 'report', no stated purpose, no materials and method section, no conclusion, but a massive jumble of all sorts of data, most of them compiled rather than generated by any of the authors...and then the peculiar section at the end, a set of admonitions on how to present the goods, strategy so to speak, contradicting your claim that scientists are untrained in PR. This kind of section I have never seen in any scientific paper I have previously read, and I have read quite a number. I would expect scientific results to stand on their merit, not have to be 'presented' carefully so there were no liabilities incurred. Absolutely surreal. If that is the kind of stuff you base your convictions on, we have little if any common ground... maybe you're right when you say "it's time to move on to the real world." And here I thought you were the ambassador coming from there - just goes to show how little I know, doesn't it?
Just one word in parting. If i wanted to convince people of something I felt strongly about - and that has been the case on occasion, you won't find me not supplying them with sources and real information, nor will you find me calling them names and denigrating them for asking of me the basis for my convictions. It isn't even relevant whether I have respect for people or not - but you don't get anyone to do anything, much less revise their paradigm, without putting yourself out. So, I will do you one better. I will tell you my source for this. It is a classic, Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you haven't read it, you should. It can teach you how not to have to go out with a whimper after not having gained any headway with people like myself.
Frank
3 years ago
Sharing
Thanks, I never read the book you mentioned although it sounds interesting and I can see why some think its too pessimistic. Of course there are those who think there are no limits to growth.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
sites to educate oneself
Denialists and believers alike might learn something to help them make rational and informed choices if they educate themselves.
Note these sites include data links and their findings are are peer-reviewed:
http://climate.nasa.gov/
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/
http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm
http://www.nature.com/climate/index.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
Not sure about peer review, but material seems to clearly say in layman's terms what I have read in other more technical reports (engineering/biology background, & masters in psychology):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=special-report-climate-change
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18238-why-theres-no-sign-of-a-climate-conspiracy-in-hacked-emails.html?full=true
http://www.newscientist.com/topic/climate-change
To find recommended books from "Nature":
http://www.nature.com/climate/archive/subject.html
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
Amazon Link to Models of Doom
Models of Doom: A Critique of the Limits to Growth (1973)
http://www.amazon.com/Models-Doom-Critique-Limits-Growth/dp/0876639058
ME2
3 years ago
The GW circus / religion.
You Warmists seem to be grasping ever more wildly in your search for evils to label us Deniers with.
Congratulations. In this age of irreligion, you've found a convenient stand-in for your need for witch-burnings with which to coerce non-believers.
Did you know that we Deniers have secret ceremonies
in which we sacrifice babies? Thats even more fun than doing it with bio-oils.
Oh yes, I forgot. You've finally caught on to that one.
It's too bad you had to switch from Global Warming to Global Change, but I notice that most of you diehards still refer to GW. Yeah, it's pretty hard to frigten people with something as indeterminate as Global Change, isnt it?
And I now notice that Global Doom has been pushed ahead from 2030 to 2050. I guess you've finally noticed the problems the JWs have bad when their due-dates for Armageddon keep being stale-dated.
It's pretty hard running a religion when you're critically short on facts, isn't it?
realisticman
3 years ago
Sharing
Re: removing heads from asses, for the sake of the grandchildren (and not too many please, by the way. Remember; overpopulation and all that jazz, as some of your beloved posters have said.)
Perhaps some sanity will edge itself into this fear-driven warming Inquisition crusade.
Some considered thoughts regarding sharing the information sensibly:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/10/climategate-reaches-the-british-house-of-lords/#more-13969
Do you prefer homogenized or pasteurized?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/11/would-you-like-your-temperature-data-homogenized-or-pasteurized/
willy
3 years ago
Part one Follow the money
Dec 02, 2009
Climategate: Follow the Money
Wall Street Journal
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called - without irony - the climate change “consensus.”
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts - amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion - you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data - facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries? Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California - apparently not feeling bankrupt enough - devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
willy
3 years ago
Part 2 follow the money
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus” - largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes - of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate-change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent - including the thousands of jobs they provide - vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU’s temperature database: “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
KWD
3 years ago
No options ... ?? Begining to like it.
If the link doesn't work go to
www.therealnews.com and search for 'Copenhagen and capitalism',
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4582
KWD
3 years ago
oooops
insert 'look' between 'to' and 'like'
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Sockeye Decline Linked to Climate Change
Sockeye Decline Linked to Climate Change
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/12/09/bc-scientists-sockeye-climate-change.html
Haven't your heard ursus, the salmon decline is the fault of all-around bugaboo global warming and all we have to do bring the fish and the animals and the trees back is sign onto Copenhagen and willingly submit to global government.
I would be the first to agree that the earth faces massive environmental problems but, remember, that's the old war.
Might I suggest that it is the very best intentions that people have that are being harnessed to bring about global dictatorship.
And we all know where the best intentions lead.
Wise up. Wake up. Let's deal with real environmental issues not sell our planet out to Malthusian dictators.
Which way to the GULAG ladies and gentlemen?
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
realisticman
Firstly, I wish to thank you for sharing one of your sources from which you derive your denialist point of view. It is nice to have a frame of reference from which to measure your thoughts. I have visited your two links to the same person's writings.
Having fully investigated your source, I must be up front with you: your source is highly suspect at best. It is bogus.
Anthony Watts is a TV and radio "meteorologist" and blogger. On his own blog site he does not offer where he learned to be a meteorologist or if he has a degree. My own research (online) lists Watts to have attended Purdue but it is unclear if he obtained a degree. He holds no certification that qualifies him to be called a practicing meteorologist.
Further, his "science" is sponsored/published by the Heartland Institute, a Libertarian public policy think tank that pays people to write reports that deny global warming/climate change. The Heartland Institute has also sponsored reports denying the dangers of tobacco smoking and second hand smoke. The Heartland Institute has executives from ExxonMobile and Phillip Morris on its board of directors and in its public relations department.
As the number one goal of corporations is to amass capital for shareholders, the reports which they sponsor cannot be viewed as nonbiased. Any Heartland Institute "science" that deals with climate change must, at best, be considered highly suspect; at worst, their published reports could be considered as propaganda bordering on criminal in intent.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Anthony_Watts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts_(blogger)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute
Phillip Morris is world famous for its disinformation and propaganda tactics, but in case you can't remember the string of litigation against Phillip Morris, here is a BBC newspaper article that compiles some of that corporation's infamous history:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1443087.stm
The Union of Concerned Scientists is highly critical of ExxonMobil's disinformation tactics with respect to global warming / climate change.
http://www.ucsusa.org/about/
http://www.ucsusa.org/about/board.html
ursus
3 years ago
willy
there are opportunists every where and the wall street journal is hardly unbiased, they represent business and have their own agenda!
This reporter is preaching to the converted look at the advertisers and see who is paying his wages, asking the WSJ for a unbiased report on an issue like GW is like asking the same of Vaughn Palmer when it comes to gordo.
Won't happen, Palmer knows who he works for, if I was a trader I might read the WSJ for stock info and no more.
Bobby Peru
3 years ago
The Man Behind The Man
Look, every one on each side of the climate war has some sort of vested interest if you stretch the net of definition wide enough. Whether it's a WSJ writer or the scientists. It's a question of who is more likely to be corrupted by the vested interest and if what they are stating is factual. To nullify someone's argument purely on the basis of vested interest without clear examination would mean that no argument makes sense.
Clearly, the WSJ writer receives a paycheck and wants to keep is job, but what he is stating is true. Plus, the East Anglia study also receives oil money. The scientists benefit more from these massive grants than the journalist who only gets a paycheque.
The climate zealots can do whatever they want to downplay climategate, but the fact is the actions of these leading scientists have been corrupt, irresponsible and most of all unscientific.
Of course, the climate zealots cannot climb down from or recant their positions now, can they? The loss of credibility would be fatal.
mopled
3 years ago
The climate scam has fallen apart
Sociopaths always go too far.
"In the wake of COP15’s infamous Danish Text Leak this week, politicians are now showing their true dictatorial colours. The leak detailed a backroom deal between political elites, including officials from the US, UK and Denmark, which has sought to reverse the original Kyoto agreement where the first world nations had to pick up the bill for alleged climate reparations, and instead raising their own emissions restrictions and make the developing countries cap theirs. A classic ‘bait-and-switch’ at the eleventh hour, evidently at the expense of the developing nations.
Yet, many international delegates here appear to be under no illusions that any meaningful long-term agreement draft next week will be of little consequence if the US cannot sell it back to their constituents at home. US Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson appeared yesterday at the UN Climate Change Summit to assure the international community that the EPA will not let democracy get in the way of regulating the deadly toxic gas known as carbon dioxide at home. Her “endangerment” declaration means that CO2 will still be subject to intense regulation under the Clean Air Act, giving the White House executive power to limit CO2 emissions- even if Congress does not pass a definitive climate bill in 2010.
EPA’s Jackson received applause from the audience, but critics and opponents of carbon emissions trading schemes, see it as just the latest episode in what has become a systematic failure of the World’s Developed economies to convince the Third World that a Copenhagen agreement will be in their long term interests.
Barun Mitra, Director of The Liberty Institute in New Delhi, India explains, “Developing countries are naturally sceptical about how much will really come out of this conference. Many people characterise this political divide as one of ‘rich countries vs poor countries’, but in reality what we have is a section of the elite in rich countries colluding with a section of the elite in poor countries making policy decisions that have a negative effect on the average person.”
Mitra adds, “There is a classic divide about what gets talked about at these type of international conferences and what can actually be implemented once leaders of go back to their respective countries. In actuality, Climate Change is not really a key domestic issue for China and India, but economic growth is. Economic growth is still the top priority for developing countries.”
http://21stcenturywire.com/2009/12/11/copenhagen’s-climate-change-titanic-heading-for-an-iceberg/
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Came back to see what I missed.
Hmmmm.
It's degenerated to people being called fools and idiots.
Bye!
(actually, as soon as I saw somebody say that Diane Francis was a disciple of capitalism, I knew it was getting time to split. the name calling finished it)
willy
3 years ago
sharingisgoo, so what are
sharingisgoo, so what are Gore's and Suziky's qualifications
Ursus is guess your comment can also be applied to big green.
Not very many people on this site have an open mind. Every cent going to chasing the false premise of man caused globull warming is money being taken away from real problems. I followed the AGW fad until I started questioning some of the information, then started poking around and with out much work decovered what a scam AGW is.
So folks if you want to be taxed into oblivian without question, keep on believing.
About the leaked emails, the real smokin gun is in the included code
Ya all have a happy sheep day.
ursus
3 years ago
Janie
You seem very sure that you are right in this debate, I do not have the time or expertise to be so certain, having said that I think we owe it to future generations to try and curb our consumption of fossil fuels without turning it into a war of finances and personal gain on all sides.
There is a lot at stake here and if those who oppose AGW are wrong they should be held accountable, very accountable!
Nothing will happen as long as corporations are able to buy politicians and the politicians themselves are able to hide behind their office even into retirement!
Until we stand up and demand changes to the lobby act and eliminate political contributions we are all whistling in the dark. We have too many special interest groups and the deepest pockets usually win.
If you doubt this take a look at who has financed gordo and then investigate how well their investment has worked for them! The Guides and Outfitters union for example donated to gordo and as soon as he got into power he lifted the Grizzly Moratorium. Good for that union but how bad for the Grizzlies, do we really know?
As far as the Salmon go, I personally think it is the human illness of greed(fear) causing their demise and yes warmer waters do affect the population. Deforestation farming eurasion milfoil industrial pollution development over fishing industrial gravel extraction in the Fraser and fish farms to mention a few are all destroying the Salmon.
Special interest groups with enough cash, a corrupt political system and greed are killing our environment!
I work in the tar sands, believe me when I say you have to see it for yourself! We can do it the right way or the wrong way but doing it the right way takes political courage and will which I really doubt will happen in my lifetime, or yours!
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
Bobby Peru, certainly, even you can see
As a general rule:
1. spring has been coming earlier on most places on the planet on most years and fall comes later. Winters are shorter and growing seasons are longer.
2. average daily temperatures across the planet have been increasing.
3. glaciers are shrinking at alarming rates for people who depend upon them for survival.
4. polar ice caps are melting - and the depth of this ice is far more important than the surface area (which may vary year to year).
5. deserts are growing and droughts have been increasing in Africa, Asia, North America and Australia. The increased areas of desert are greater than formerly arid areas receiving more rain.
6. the Omnitrax rails on their way to Churchill Manitoba are sinking into soil due to the melting of permafrost for as long as we have had records of that permafrost.
7. pine beetles have ravaged forests from the mountains of New Mexico to Northern BC: there has not been sustained periods of extreme cold to kill them off as there had been in decades past.
8. there has been overall increased cyclonic action in the world's oceans as the temperatures have been increasing. It is noted that weather is weather, and the local effects of ongoing large disturbances like El Nino/La Nina will cause various localities to show some annual variability. This year, the Caribbean/Atlantic was spared, but boy didn't the Southern/Western Pacific take a beating.
You don't need to believe me, Bobby Peru; do some reading at the sites I listed 9 or 10 hours ago. Educate yourself with more than what is published by corporate entities, or "non-profits" that are largely supported by such entities.
You know that the first rule of a corporation is to make money for the shareholders. Corporate goals are normally fairly short-term (5-10 years max.) Corporations don't care about our grandchildren. They don't even care about the individual - you (even should you be a minority holder and sit on the BOD): it is all about the bottom line. Saving the planet falls outside the scope of corporate goals. Profit in as short a period of time as is possible is within the realm of corporate goals. If avoiding/defeating pollution/environmental legislation and paying fines for getting caught for breaking existing legislation seems cheaper than actually making changes to benefit the planet, it falls within corporate goals to opt out of being environmentally responsible.
realisticman
3 years ago
Sharing
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
The link I posted shows that the blogger is:
"While I have a skeptical view of certain climate issues, I consider myself “green” in many ways, and I promote the idea of energy savings and alternate energy generation. Unlike many who just talk about it, I’ve put a 10KW solar array on my home, plus a 125 KW solar array on one of our local schools when I was a school trustee. I’ve retrofitted my home with CFL’s and better insulation, as well as installed timer switches on many of our most commonly used lights.
I also drive an electric car for my daily around town routine.
I encourage others to do the same when it comes to efficient use of energy and energy conservation."
He also has another site that looks quite objective:
http://www.surfacestations.org/
As for your suggestion that is sponsored/published by the Heartland Institute, please explain how you arrived at this conclusion.
Don't forget that the guy that is heading the American Physics Group calling for an immediate reduction on CO2 emissions, The Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from British Petroleum. Pot. Kettle....
One other thing Mr. Sharing, I have never said that I am a denier, as you say. What I do know is that this whole shebang has been taken away from scientists by sociologists, some masquerading as scientists, who have infiltrated and taken over the discussion. Data has been ignored. Data has been corrupted and changed to suit viewpoints and wild guesses have been made and set in stone, with the unqualified Al Gore as the major spokesman. I doubt that anyone really has any accurate idea either way. Just a casual look at some of the IPCC working papers and comments from their published web site shows clearly where some objections from qualified reviewers in working papers have been simply rejected.
Ther are thousands of papges to flip through.
http://www.ipcc-wg3.de/activity/assessment-reports/ar4/forth-assessment-review-comments
What is going to happen is that platitudes will come forth from Copenhagen and money will be promised. The poorer countries will ignore any restrictions on themselves developing and powering the lives of their people, and scientists will try and take back science from the scaremongering ideologues. For science's sake may they succeed.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
willy
My reading and learning goes far deeper than what has been produced by Gore and Suzuki. If you go back about 10 hours "sites to educate oneself", you can find some of the peer reviewed data and reports that I have read from sources I trust. Although both Suzuki and Gore seem to have the general good of the environemnt at heart, they are both do as I say and not as I do sorts of guys. They consume far too many resources in their daily lives for me to consider them as true stewards of the planet. Willy, whether you believe it or not, I am on your side. I am not wanting to compete with you. I wish to work with you and others to save this planet for my grandchildren and your grandchildren. I do not want one of Dorothy's "pissing contests" where there are winners and losers - we must quit competing over and allowing people to hoard and waste the limitied resources of the planet, or we will have no planet. It is that simple.
ursus
3 years ago
I meant both sides and
I meant both sides and having said that if you look at the big picture, the industries contributing to GW are also poisoning our environment so a curb on one curbs the other. Any idea what flair stacks are doing to our environment? Water is also a finite resource and how many barrels does it take to produce a barrel of oil in the tarsands?
Why are we extracting the resources we will need in the future and sending these finite resources to a foreign country, why are we allowing this foreign state to fix our oil prices on their exchange, is this not long term stupidity? There are those who argue that the U.S. is sitting on a huge oil reserve and that they are using up our reserves and saving theirs, this concerns me and it should concern every Canadian! Why do we allow gordo to sell off our pipelines and railroads to foreign companies, doesn't make sense in the long term!
I don't expect anyone to agree with me and don't really care, I have time right now to get involved in this debate which to me is not just about GW but the politics behind the scene and until we address that nothing will change, as far as taxes go I don't mind paying taxes, what annoys me is the way gordo is reducing taxes for the rich and corporations and off loading onto our children, the poor and less fortunate in our society. This will be his legacy, not the olympics.
How many schools requiring upgrades to protect children from earth quakes have actually had these upgrades completed? Why are we reducing taxes like the bank tax which may have cost us 500 million and got taylor a board position when our schools are still unsafe? Not trying to hijack this thread just making my point about changes required in the political system!
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
Realisticman
I am happy to ready that you have not laid claim to be a denier.
In the last 45 minutes, I had put together measured and accurate responses to virtually all of your questions about the validity of my assertions. Regrettably, I just scrolled up the page and clicked on one of my former sources when I wanted to retrieve the following bit of info for you.
Watts, Anthony (2009). Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?. Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute. ISBN 1-934791-26-6. found at http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf.
Sadly, I am now shortening my response to you as I have Christmas activities to attend to.
In a nutshell:
I believe ExxxonMobile to be a far less diversified company than BP which now bills itself as an energy company. ExxonMobile is world famous for avoiding taking responsibility for their environmental mishaps and for sponsoring the publishing of unsubstantiated science if it adds to confusion about the people's need to change. New Orleans is a prime example of how people will often discount danger if it is not knocking down their door even if that danger is well-known and well-understood. Public belief and behaviour has inertia and it costs little in terms of propaganda to keep people doing what they have always done, even if it is wrong.
Note that I read great gobs of info published on Watt's site and I provided a link in my previous post to you showing that I had read the very page you quoted about his being energy efficient at his home. I imagine he has a large home and that he flies to do his interviews with Fox TV's Beck etc. Just because he knows how to save money and does not wish to appear to be a polluter does not mean he doesn't pollute. He may be a nice guy to be around, but I firmly believe him to be either misguided or capitalizing on being a naysayer. He is in the extreme minority as to his beliefs and his findings. His findings are highly suspect and he is not involved with highly certified organizations that are working hard, doing real climate science.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
R-man (continued)
Like many others at the Tyee, I believe that global warming is a symptom of the much larger issue of over-population and over-consumption. Just because the issue is bigger than Global Warming does not mean that global warming does not warrant our attention. There are many things that corporations will try to do to sway deals in Copenhagen that are more for their benefit than for the common good of the planet. I believe it is prudent that we pay attention to global warming and to put our energies in places where we can do the most good/least harm. I am not sold on many of the initiative brought forward by many politicians - particularly Libertarian/Republican/Democrat/Conservative/Liberal/BCLiberal politicians. By the time those politicians get their hands on things, we find that they have been engaged in a circle jerk with their powerful corporate buddies who pay into their party's coffers.
willy
3 years ago
Watts
How about trying to refute anything about Anthony Watts blog, Steve McIntyre.
Al Gore worth over 200 million. Suzuki with a big grin on his face collecting $100,000 from Gore. Maybe just maybe a little bias from those two.
Peer review is not some mystical nirvana to truth. Peer review is what any group of like minded individuals want it to be. My proof is in the emails.
ursus
3 years ago
willy
what if you are wrong and we could be doing something about it today, what about all the pollution and environmental damage caused in the pursuit of profits?
Who is going to pay for the long term affects, certainly not those responsible when all they have to do is buy a few politicians and bloggers. Look at the tar pits in Cape Breton or gary lunn when he had a real portfolio, didn't he approve a mining companies application to use a pristine wilderness lake as a tailings pond! Classic!
Or the people in southern Alberta who can't use their wells because of Coal Bed Methane Extraction, why should the few be allowed to profit at the expense of the majority.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
willy
Do you have an advanced degree in a scientific discipline from an accredited university? If you did, perhaps you would not treat peer-reviewed scientific publications with such disdain. The science and the findings in a peer-reviewed journal or publication can be replicated. Further, the reputations (and hence the futures) of the those perfoming the peer review are on the line when such an article or book is published. The science within a study is scruitinized and rescruitinized by intelligent and learned people. It is no light thing to seek and be granted peer review in the scientific community.
http://www.ryerson.ca/library/ref/peer.html
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
willy and watts
Willy,
I can't refute Watts' findings because I am not in the USA and I am not part of a peer review team that was compiled at the beginning of his study. Par of peer review is making sure your methodology and design meet the rigors of good science before a study begins. I will not say that Watts' findings are incorrect, as even nonaccreditated people can perform good science; but I will say that his findings are inconclusive unless subjected to peer review.
Even if his findings are correct, it appears the planet is warming none-the-less. (see my previous posts or visit NASA etc. to find the proof you require).
Watts' findings on data collection in a small number of places is inconclusive regarding the overall findings of the data.
Note that my uncle has had a US meteorlogical data box (like those studied by Watts) on his farm for more than 60 years. It is sitting in the same piece of treeless meadow 100' SE of his house that it has always sat. The last I saw it, it was still white-washed just as it was when he first got it. He is proud of his taking daily measurements as part of his chores on his dairy farm. My uncle has been meticulous in his recording and in his making sure that the conditions around his box have not changed. I suspect that a good number of folks doing what my uncle has been doing have been equally forthright.
mopled
3 years ago
CONFLATION is yourbiggest problem, SIG
Never start out a sentence about science with,"I believe", as in "I believe global warming is a symptom, etc"
Nobody denies the 150 year trend is up. What is questioned is CO2s role in it. Even Warmists have acknowledged the temperatures have plateaued. The IPCC expected continual warming due to more CO2 and that correlation no longer holds.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17742-worlds-climate-could-cool-first-warm-later.html
Warmists keep overlooking the fact that the hypothesis that CO2 is capable of changing the climate has not been proven. What we got instead of proof was the declaration "the science is settled".
The cheerleader for this was Al Gore, whose dodgy business connections with Maurice Strong, (Earth Summit)go way back and even include Obama.see:
Obama, Maurice Strong, Al Gore key players cashing in on Chicago Climate Exchange
http://warofillusions.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/obama-maurice-strong-al-gore-key-players-cashing-in-on-chicago-climate-exchange/
More conflict of interest:
U.N. climate chief cashes in on carbon
Tied to conglomerate that stands to make hundreds of millions in emissions scheme
"A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs. "
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=118659
Nice trade, 1700 jobs for "carbon credits"
Climategate exposed the way the science fakers were able to use their prestige to alter peer-review. You just pointed out what it is supposed to be, not how it actually was practiced within "climate science".
Warmists seem to be able to avert their eyes from the sleazy underbelly of the movement and concentrate only on emotional blackmail and then drag in irrelevancies. Censorship has been a big issue and continues to be.
"A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book."
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/11/un-security-stops-journalists-questions-about-climategate/
Dr Alexander
3 years ago
Overcome by temptation: SharingIsGood, willy is not far off...
on peer review.
I have an advanced degree and I have/do publish peer-reviewed literature.
One sends their manuscripts to the journal that permits the most favourable combination of "friendly" peer environment, readership suitablility, and journal ranking.
It is also, completely understood that, should anyone want to review your data, or methods, including computer code, you are obliged (this is not an option) to provide said data to anyone who has demonstrated scientific ability (in other words, published in peer reviewed)
With regards to one's own scientific path. You do what you like if the money is there. If the money is not there due to new or changing priorities of the government/institution/foundation/charity/etc, then you alter your directions to something more suitable to the new priorities. Otherwise, your scientific career will starve. As will you.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
willy and Dr Alexander
Note, I have been published in scholarly journals myself; and I guarantee to you, that it was blindly refereed, and I was fully supervised while I worked to the very best of my ability to publish only the most truthful results. I would expect the same of you Dr. if you are truly deserving of your handle.
Here is an interesting book with good articles about peer review and the IPCC
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=htulve5KkQMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA219&dq=MIT+peer+review&ots=r4Ql7Axnuk&sig=_KTg3qs5AMp3_XeCfc06dTq8gi0#v=onepage&q=MIT%20peer%20review&f=false
willy
3 years ago
Corrupted peer review results
"The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims - plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish -evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State’s Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.
For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton’s Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.
Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as “the precautionary principle.” As defined by one official version: “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The global-warming establishment says we know “enough” to impose new rules on the world’s use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science’s traditional standards of evidence."
mopled
3 years ago
SIG...your experience is both irrelevent and unprovable.
As to peer-view and the IPCC...forget it. The IPCC is a artificial construct run by a former railroad engineer turned oil economist who ran the Indian State Oil Company, who has just been shown in my last post to have a conflict of interest.
Ben Santer from Climategate and Lawrence Livermore Labs,(nuclear) was the guy who threw out 5 committee reports saying there was no "human footprint" and substituted his own opinion that there was.
When questioned about it, he just said....there was no rule saying he couldn't do that.
A Major Deception on Global Warming
Op-Ed by Frederick Seitz
Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996
Excerpt:
"This IPCC report, like all others, is held in such high regard largely because it has been peer-reviewed. That is, it has been read, discussed, modified and approved by an international body of experts. These scientists have laid their reputations on the line. But this report is not what it appears to be--it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.
A comparison between the report approved by the contributing scientists and the published version reveals that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version. The scientists were assuming that the IPCC would obey the IPCC Rules--a body of regulations that is supposed to govern the panel's actions. Nothing in the IPCC Rules permits anyone to change a scientific report after it has been accepted by the panel of scientific contributors and the full IPCC.
The participating scientists accepted "The Science of Climate Change" in Madrid last November; the full IPCC accepted it the following month in Rome. But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report--the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate--were changed or deleted after the scientists charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text.
Few of these changes were merely cosmetic; nearly all worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular."
http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/ipcccont/Item05.htm
willy
3 years ago
Peer review! By James Delingpole, UK Telegraph
"What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions - capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) - and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.
Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists - 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal - and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails."
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
mopled - enthalpy
I believe on another thread, I have posited an hypothesis, Mopled. It is unproven, just as many things in science with relation to the climate are not 100% proven. However, it may have some merit with respect to global warming. (Please note that conflagration is not my goal; it is my hope that you will find the following as plausible and requiring further study.)
Enthalpy and Ice: heat of fusion/melting and the possibility that we may have reached a temperature plateau.
As it takes 80 times as much energy to raise the temperature of ice from 0 C. to 1 C. as it does to raise the temperature of water at 0 C to 1 C., I hypothesize that much of the work that is currently being done by thermal energy on our planet is involved in the melting of ice. As soon as the total surface area of ice has substantially declined, then we may quite likely see global warming happening at an even higher rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion
It is also my belief that wise people who understand global warming and the the associated changes in climate and sea levels etc. (while living in a capitalist system) will use their knowledge to make investments that will secure stability for their families. I suspect that Gore and Suzuki have done no less. Do I suspect them of being capitalists who capitalize on the future misfortunes of others, you bet. Understanding a phenomenom generally causes successful capitalists to use their knowledge to improve their capital. In the case of Suzuki and Gore, they are generally taking small amounts of capital from many fairly well-off North American and European people in their speaking and book tours, TV specials etc. Everytime someone watches the Nature of Things, some amount of capital gets transferred to David Suzuki either directly or in the form of goodwill toward future lucrative network contracts.
ursus
3 years ago
willy
Your comment
"(pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say)"
Are you working for a newspaper and if so which one, why the anonymity if you are a member of the press?
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
mopled
You state: "your experience is both irrelevent and unprovable."
My response was to Dr. Alexander who said he had published peer reviewed results of some sort. I was only responding to him with the same personal justification he had for his statement on peer review. Mopled, you have removed my commentary from its context. I have note that denialists of carbon caused climate change have used this tactic to refute the findings of good science. Ah yes, reductionism, the method of capitalists - as if they carry on with their objectivist objectives without causing harm to other inhabitants when they extract resources from the earth or convert long-buried coal to CO2 and electricity.
mopled
3 years ago
It's not about resource extraction, it's about CO2
You desperately keep trying to shift the focus of attention.
There is no proof CO2 can cause the climate to change.
First you have to prove a hypothesis before you go about implementing policy based on it....and don't give me the precautionary principle. It doesn't apply here anymore.
You can't have causation without correlation. Correlation is gone...CO2 is still up and temperatures down.
"It is also worth pointing out that for nine full years, since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001, there has been rapid and statistically-significant global cooling. This cooling follows a very sharp upward step-change in global temperatures between 1997 and 2000, which may have something to do with the Great El Nino of 1998, the first in the instrumental-temperature era. Of this cooling, one of the key players in the Climategate email scandal had this to say -
"The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August 2009 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
So the conspirators are privately admitting we’ve been right all along about global cooling, and that it’s a travesty they can’t explain it, while publicly proclaiming that this decade’s temperatures are the warmest in 150 years and that this is because of “global warming”.
~~~~~~
http://sppiblog.org/news/climate-science-qa-warmest-decade-on-record
That's why they had to HIDE THE DECLINE
http://minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2009/11/hide-the-decline.html
ursus
3 years ago
so mopled
I went and looked at your sppi blog, what do we care what a republican and one of thatchers people have to say about GW?
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
this artcle
The denialists postings on this thread are proof that the title of this article, "This Is How You Fuel a Community of Climate Deniers", is most appropriate.
I think that the capitalists believe that they can follow their money God and they will have a free pass from what the Earth will be like when the resources really begin to disappear and the planet is dying due to GHG overheating and other pollution. Their money will mean nothing to me as I maintain my self-sufficient homestead. Good luck in the over-crowded city, boys.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Who will win in the end?
So who will win in the end? Who else but Wall Street, if a mandatory carbon-trading system designed to "save the planet" ever sees the light of day. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley would make an absolute killing on a carbon trading market revolving around derivatives.
Be ready for a deluge of derivatives contracts and carbon-related financial products. Wall Street will attract key investors from hedge funds and pension funds - as it has already spent a fortune hiring lobbyists and making deals with companies that can supply "carbon offsets" to be sold to clients. Speculators will have a ball. Wall Street banks are bound to turn climate change into a new commodities market - and sell it as an investment product. Everyone has seen this movie before, but what the hell; welcome to the new trillion-dollar bubble - the still virtual carbon "cap and trade" market.
Big Oil - from Exxon Mobil to Shell and BP - along with a Fortune 500 cast of global corporations, many directly linked with Big Oil, will also make a killing. They want a direct global carbon tax - as ExxonMobil has called for, on the record. This carbon trading system will link national "cap-and-trade" markets; the "caps" will be in line with the targets for emission reduction. This explains the "paradox" of Big Oil actually being in favor of fighting global warming.
It's hard to be astonished by the sight of Wall Street and Big Oil profiting handsomely from everything post-Copenhagen. Their proposed global carbon tax will hit everyone on the planet; but the beauty is that Wall Street and Big Oil won't have to pay for it
Source:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KL10Ad01.html
North of Hope
3 years ago
Global warming from Wikipedia 1
Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written
“One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.”
However, he has argued that existing simulation models of climate fail to account for some important factors, and hence the results will contain too much error to reliably predict future trends.
“The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world we live in.”
He is among signatories of a letter to the UN criticizing the IPCC and has also argued against the ostracization of scientists whose views depart from the acknowledged mainstream of scientific opinion on climate change, stating that "heretics" have historically been an important force in driving scientific progress.
“heretics who question the dogmas are needed... I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies.”
More recently, he has endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change, referring to recent
“measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science.”
North of Hope
3 years ago
Global warming from Wikipedia 2
But has argued that political efforts to reduce the causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority.
“I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.”
Dyson's views on global warming have been criticized as failing to understand the amount of carbon sequestration needed. Dyson has proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. His caveat is that if CO2 levels soar too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees". He calculates that it would take a trillion trees to remove all carbon from the atmosphere, which he believes in principle is quite feasible.
Dyson is well-aware that his "heresy" on global warming has been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that:
“My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.,..those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
not about money for me Janie jones
For me, it is not about money. It is about survival of our species and many of the other things that are trying to live with us. I have never been in favour of cap -n- trade. It is bad tasting baloney that may have once had merit as an idea but now it is going to be served up by big business.
Carbon taxes, subways, new bridges/Gateway projects are are not the answer either. Giving away our railway was also not the answer. As truck, bus and plane traffic becomes less affordable we will have to pay whatever CN will want to gouge from us. We are such fools to elect such fools.
Holocene
3 years ago
Sure hope the anti-AGW camp are right
The sheer paranoia seething through cyberspace today is stunning. Newspaper comment threads are full of it. Fear of a world government. Fear of eugenics. Fear of jackbooted green police. Fear of…taxes. Which is when the real objection of many becomes clear and you know that science has bugger-all to do with their resistance, no matter how many data points they throw out as a smokescreen.
From day one, the AGW camp has admitted that the science isn’t unequivocal, before going on to say that if they’re right, we can’t afford to wait for it to be unequivocal before we do something about our GHG emissions. If we act now and it turns out they were wrong, we get a cleaner environment that’s healthier for us and for other life on the planet. What a tragedy. If we fail to act and it turns out they were right, every living thing on the planet will pay for the mistake.
I guess we’ll see, since Copenhagen isn’t going to end with an agreement that isn’t both an affront to every citizen of a developing nation and a formula perverted to serve the greed of the usual suspects. Too bad. Maybe if we’d acted on Kyoto we could have made some progress before they got their tentacles into everything.
p.s. Has James Delingpole been asleep for the past decade? Science has been doing a lot of soul-searching over the many scandals that have come to light involving everything from peer review, which many scientists consider broken, to ghost writing and editing, conflicts of interest involving researchers taking hefty consulting fees from companies while conducting clinical trials for them, many instances of research fraud, scientists who sit on editorial boards of science journals blocking publication of papers from other scientists, etc., etc. Google Bayh-Dole and you’ll find much of the explanation.
realisticman
3 years ago
Some say there are too many people...
Some say millions will die.
http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article33395
Has this been peer reviewed?
Who is right? Who should we save?
North of Hope
3 years ago
Mansbridge One on One
I just saw the last part of this show this evening (Saturday.) He interviewed David Barber from the University of Manitoba. David Barber is a scientist who studies ice and he has spent quite a bit of time in the Arctic studying the ice from ships that travel around the area. He also speaks to the Inuit of the area. This show will repeat 12:30-1:00 AM, 3:30-4:00 AM on Sunday on CBC News. Again 1:30 -2:00PM on CBC local and 1:00 - 1:30 PM on CBC-O (whatever that is.) It is very interesting and well worth the watch, esp. for those who need evidence of climate change.
willy
3 years ago
More on peer review act 1
Next you say: “Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.”
Your understanding of statistics is as poor as your understanding of chronology. The statistics used by GHCN are average college level tools. You are dazzled by the fact that you don’t understand them, so you make the incredibly foolish assumption that no one without “a PhD in a related field” can understand them either. Some of us actually paid attention in class, you know.
Finally, you use your closing arguments to cheerlead for peer review. Curiously, I agree with you in theory … but the peer review system in climate science is badly broken. First, as the CRU emails clearly show, it has been subjected to enormous ”old-boy” pressures to pass through bad studies without a second glance, and to deny opposing papers a fair hearing. How do you think we got the Hockeystick and its cousins? Here’s Phil Jones from the emails, talking about keeping peer-reviewed papers out of the IPCC report:
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
And you give your article the URL “trust_scientists”???
willy
3 years ago
More on peer review act 2 with author
Second, the peer-review system is ripe for abuse. This is because the reviewers often know who the author is, while the reviewers (like you) hide in anonymity. This invites malfeasance. The system needs to be changed so that after the review, the [authors] sign their names to the paper as well as reviewers. At present, we have no way of knowing whether the paper was seriously reviewed by inquiring scientists, or simply passed through by the authors friends.
So I, like you, support peer review. I just want a peer review system that works. It must be double blind during the review period, with neither the reviewers nor the author knowing the others’ names. And the reviewers should reveal their names at the end, so that we know it wasn’t just the author’s best mates doing the author a favor.
Since we have an easily manipulated system instead of a real peer review system, I opt for public peer review by putting my work on the web. This lets anyone, even anonymous innumerates like yourself, register your objections.
Finally, the Economist did not contact me before publishing an article full of false accusations, incorrect assumptions and wrong statements … looks like peer review is not the only system in trouble here. I thought journalists were under an obligation to check their facts before making accusations …
Willis Eschenbach
ME2
3 years ago
Slow learners
Well, you Warmists screwed uo with the regresive "carbon taxation" idea, and now you're realizing that the "cap and trade" is also a scam.
So far guys, you're batting .000. When will the light begin to dawn that you'e being had?
alive
3 years ago
Do you have solutions?
"Warmists screwed uo with the regresive "carbon taxation" idea, and now you're realizing that the "cap and trade" is also a scam."
Well ME2, one thing is to recognize danger, another is to find solutions!
For instance, I live in an earthquake zone and realize the potential danger, given that scenario, what sort of prevention can I take that will guarantee my safety?
To simply deny that an earthquake will happen some day is not a sensible response.
Like wise I am aware that we are slowly poisoning ourselves, but I do not have a solution that would make my fellow citizens change their habits in order to stop this from happening.
You may be looking for constructive critisism, and that is the typical attitude, but this situation does not have any obvious answer.
Given a world-wide dictatorship, by some sensible body, perhaps everybody could be forced to take the steps required to reverse this trend; unfortunately the only strong leaders we have are also tied to the oil industry and do not worry about the planets future.
willy
3 years ago
found this in a blog part 1
“And why on Earth do you think 192 governments are represented in Copenhagen right now? A scam?”
The tone of your reply suggest you are not interested in seeking the truth, but have only come here to attack those who are.. The reasons why
governments are in Copenhagen have nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. First the science.
The AGW hypothesis is predicated on 4 main pillars. Firstly, they attempt to show that the current warm period is unprecedented and secondly
that there is no known natural mechanism that can count for this warming. Thirdly, the levels of CO2 have increased due to man. Fourthly CO2
is a gas that has the properties of absorbing and emitting infrared radiation. If premise 1, 2 and 3 are true, then, they argue that the
current warming is due to CO2.
Before 1998, it was the CONSENSUS of researchers that there is nothing unprecedented about the current warming. A wealth of evidence had been
quietly accumulating for many decades testifying to a period known as the “medieval warm period” during which, Vikings settled in Greenland and
grapes grew in the British Isles. This was based on historical records, archeological digs, and pollen and sendiment studies, and covers over
200 scientific papers from all corners of the world. Later still, it was backed up by Greenland ice core data that goes back tens of thousands
of years, which revealed not just a medieval warm period, but Roman and Minoan warm periods (the ice core temperature data is posted on a
previous thread).
Then came Mann’s hockey stick graph that at a stroke, purported to erase decades of accumulated evidence of the medieval warm period.
willy
3 years ago
found this in a blog part 2
An open
mind would say that “extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence.” Yet this study was accepted uncritically by the IPCC and it took
several years of freedom of information requests until McIntyre and McItrick could get the data. What was revealed was 1) Mann used a cherry
picked sample of trees 2) He used a weighting of 390 for one particular tree that showed a prominent hockey stick shape 3) Mann used an
algorithm that produced a hockey stick shape when red noise was fed into it. McIntyre and McItricks debunking was upheld by Wegmen.
There have been several more recent Hockey stick attempts, such as the Briffa 2009 study but they all show the same “cooking the books.” To
date, there has been no convincing study, no whatsoever, that refutes decades of research that the medieval warm period was real, global and at
least as warm as today. Thus, one of the legs of the AGW hypothesis is surely falsified.
For the AGW hypothesis to be correct, there needs to be evidence that the current warming is not due to natural variations. We have already shown that the climate moves in cycles – we are now emerging from the “little ice age.” The reason given by AGW proponents is that climate models are unable to hindcast recent trends without the rising CO2 levels. And this is given as empircal evidence? It is no more than a tautology. The models can’t hindcast without increasing CO2 levels, not because the CO2 levels are responsible for the warming, but because they do not understand all the climate mechanisms.
One of the predicitions made by AGW proponents, is that due to a “radiative imbalance”, the climate should be accumuling heat measured in joules and that a significant component should appear in the ocean heat anomaly. Unfortunately, this has been refuted by observations: the Argo network has not detected any heat accumulation in the oceans since being deployed in 2003. Another prediction is the “fingerprint” of a hotspot in the tropical mid troposphere. This too has not shown up in satellite data.
KWD
3 years ago
alive
The solution to “this situation does not have any obvious answer.”
Given the basic survival technique of all things living … avoid pain and seek pleasure … the solution ... though many will not like it ... is obvious. Those that have the means will survive this situtation, and maybe the next; those that don’t won’t. In this situation … if climate change is taken to its worst case scenario … it could be that cockroaches will inherit the earth.
If I’m not mistaken a world-wide dictatorship already exists: it’s called evolution and it’s armed with the forces of nature. Unfortunately, the pleas made by humanity armed with its biblical canons and those of anthropocentric “sensible” bodies seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Like yourself, I’m not sure that humanity can find a solution. Particularly one that is “sensible”.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
willy
It seems obvious to me, Willy, as a denialist, you probably have not visited the sites I provided for you, nor have you read much of the information found there had you done so. So, to help you understand the issue even if you believe that natural thermal variation accounts for most of the rise in temperature, I give you the following simple analogies.
While taking a carefree Las Vegas vacation, on the hotest day of the year, the air conditioning on your rented classic gas guzzling black '64 Lincoln breaks down right in the middle of a noon hour day trip out to view the Mohave Desert. On the hour's drive back to civilization, do you leave your windows up or roll them down?
If that didn't get your neurons firing in a cogent manner, here's an analogy closer to home:
SAy you are living in Abbotsford and it is the hottest day of the summer. You've heard all of the reports that H1N1 vaccines are a doctor-driven government conspiracy, so, like a good self-directed person, you opted out. Darn it all, as the afternoon wears on, you come down with a case of the swine flu. You drag your sorry but home from work hoping looking forward to some recouperative rest. Your temperature pushes up to 39.5 (about 102 F) just as you enter the house. Your stay at home wife (and mother to your children) augments your family income by baking bread twice a week. Today, she baked her usual 12 loaves for the neighbors who buy her bread. The bread baking has added to the sweltering heat of the day because, wouldn't you know it, your air conditioner just crapped out and there is nobody who will come to fix it. It is hot, you are sick and you just want some restful sleep. Do you don your flannel PJs and your comforter and keep your windows closed or do you open them?
If you need more analogies, willy, I can go willy nilly with more of the same to help you understand the state of the planet for many of its inhabitants and how green house gases work to hold in unwanted heat thereby adding to their misery. You make the call.
mopled
3 years ago
The Big Oil Thingy
Give me a break with the "denialist" smear when everything about the arguments put forth by Warmists is BS. Warmists are in denial about everything from CO2 follows warming in the historical record by 800-1500 years and humans only produce 12-15 ppmv of the CO2 content of the atmosphere to the fact that Big Oil has funded the climate scam too.
"The thrust is that greens use the ‘Big Oil’ accusation to smear the opposition, when, in fact, they also take money from the same source. On the part of oil companies, by the way, it is a win-win situation, because they can control all colours of the spectrum.
BP, several British government pro-green departments interested in taking money off voters, the infamously fascist EU, Greenpeace, the very biased Royal Society, Shell, the US Department of Energy and the US EPA (which shows their complicity in fraud), and the equally infamous WWF, are amongst funders of CRU. Inevitably, they will want results that suit their causes. The WWF and Greenpeace want green results. Governmental agencies and departments (and there are many) all want the power that comes from green results. No wonder Jones fell for the lie and gave them what they wanted.
But one question: why on earth does the UK’s Department of Health fund the CRU, when hospitals and healthcare are desperate for money? What has green research got to do with delivering healthcare? Government is simply being clever, diverting much-needed cash from a variety of its own departments, so that the true amount being wasted on the CRU is not discovered."
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17860
"As Vice-President, Al Gore signed away the oil drilling rights of Kitanemuk Indians, to Occidental Petroleum. I wonder why greenies don’t advertise this? The same thing happened to the U’wa tribe in Colombia. And Gore’s interest in oil is more than administrative: his father was into oil, and so is Gore. He received a handsome annual royalty from Occidental for mining rights, right up until he was found-out; then he sold the mine. If you want more on Gore’s duplicity,go to:
Al Gore: The Other Oil Candidate
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468
"The reason both Clinton and Gore gave away Indian land to ‘Big Oil’ was that Occidental gave huge funds to the Democrats. Nothing to do with being green! Simple really."
soleprobe
3 years ago
all scripts come from the same source
I'm not surprised at the loyalty displayed on every mainstream establishment scam on every major issue.
"... all of the reports that H1N1 vaccines are a doctor-driven government conspiracy,"
I've never heard of such reports: that the doctors were in collusion with the government to shove vaccines down peoples' throats.
It's easy to see the loyalty displayed to the ultimate source of the today’s tapestry of deceptions. In the above example, the post exhibits loyalty to the major players of the vaccine hoax: the drug companies.
Perhaps a less revealing post would have been to pretend to deviate from the establishment tapestry of deceptions by at least being truthful about the reports exposing big pharma and government collusion regarding the H1N1 vaccines. The post exhibits an undying loyalty to the establishment tapestry of deceptions by supplanting big pharma driven with “doctor-driven”. As if doctors were at the top driving the H1N1 vaccine hoax when they have the least to gain compared to increased governmental powers and increased profits for drug companies.
As I mentioned earlier, they are simply reading from a prepared script. The script that defends the H1N1 vaccine scam comes from the same source as the script that defends the climategate scam. And since the source of the prepared scripts is the same, those who read from the prepared scripts are also the same.
That’s why all their views contain the same repetitive and boring think tank drivel.
SicPreFix
3 years ago
Like lions and tigers, and bears ...
conspiracies are everywhere.
Right?
;)
Hmm.
Do you suppose that Janie Jones, mopled, realisticman, soleprobe, and ME2, to name just a few, believe the Americans did not fly to the moon; did blow up their own Twin Trade Towers; and did hide aliens at Roswell?
Inquring minds want to know!
____________
As Schiller said: Against stupidity ....
Ya'll can track down the rest on your own dime.
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
soleprobe
I gave willy 2 analogies to choose from.
If you wish to join in and can't get your head around either of them, you can modify the second analogy. Suppose it was just a common run-of-the-mill flu that the hapless fellow who never got a flu shot happened to contract. The poor guy made it home from work to his safe haven where he could be sick with a fever only to find that it is not so safe. He presented with the options of bundling up and keeping the windows closed or putting on lightweight attire and opening the windows. In the case of green house gases and global warming, we are hot, but we no longer have the option of shedding the blanket.
mopled
3 years ago
The biggest GHG is WATER VAPOUR
Are you going to deny that too, SIG?
Greenhouse theory smashed by biggest stone
"However, the most potent greenhouse gas is water, explains Shaidurov and it is this compound on which his study focuses. According to Shaidurov, only small changes in the atmospheric levels of water, in the form of vapour and ice crystals can contribute to significant changes to the temperature of the earth's surface, which far outweighs the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activities. Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth's surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.
The role of water vapour in controlling our planet's temperature was hinted at almost 150 years ago by Irish scientist John Tyndall. Tyndall, who also provided an explanation as to why the sky is blue, explained the problem: "The strongest radiant heat absorber, is the most important gas controlling Earth's temperature. Without water vapour, he wrote, the Earth's surface would be 'held fast in the iron grip of frost'." Thin clouds at high altitude allow sunlight to reach the earth's surface, but reflect back radiated heat, acting as an insulating greenhouse layer.
Water vapour levels are even less within our control than CO2 levels. According to Andrew E. Dessler of the Texas A & M University writing in 'The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change', "Human activities do not control all greenhouse gases, however. The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour, he says, "Human activities have little direct control over its atmospheric abundance, which is controlled instead by the worldwide balance between evaporation from the oceans and precipitation."
http://www.physorg.com/news11710.html
soleprobe
3 years ago
Another excellent example...
".... did not fly to the moon; did blow up their own Twin Trade Towers; and did hide aliens at Roswell?"
of reading from the same prepared script. Also had the more extreme option of "lizard men," "space beams" and the "Loch Ness Monster."
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
mopled, you are not reading my links
Earlier, I published links that had you visited and studied, you would have read that water vapour is accounted for by all of the worl's leading scientists. You seem to be in such a hurry to find info for me to refute that you are neglecting to study what I have already published to help you gain a clearer perspective. You forget, mopled that I have an engineering/science/math background. I am a critical thinker; and continually I look for all the variables, not just the ones that support a specific point of view that I may currently hold. After all, the goal of all true science is truth, is it not?
Here are a couple of links that could have been found by reading and researching within the links I published earlier in this thread; these links discuss water vapour as a greenhouse gas:
http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0905/full/climate.2009.41.html
http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0711/full/climate.2007.63.html
http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0709/full/climate.2007.40.html
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Conspiracy Theory
That's right soleprobe. Al Gore responded to his critics of his pseudo-science by comparing them to moon-landing deniers.
But what about it SicPreFix, I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.
Do you really think that nineteen Muslims armed with boxcutters made two airplanes cause three buildings to collapse at the speed of free fall with the precision of a controlled demolition while getting NORAD to stand down and that the proof of this is a passport that miraculously survived the inferno intact to be plucked from atop a pile of rubble by a passing policeman?
Now that's a conspiracy theory!
soleprobe
3 years ago
"I have an engineering/science/math background..."
And I'm the tooth fairy
alive
3 years ago
No soleprobe, you are a
No soleprobe, you are a shitdisturber
SharingIsGood
3 years ago
soleprobe
"And I'm the tooth fairy"
Now I get it. Thanks for explaining your lack of brain power, and inability to follow all but the simplest lines of reason. Good with being a fairy.
Frank
3 years ago
mopled, Janie, et al
We've been doing it your way and the results have not been good. The environment and the poor have taken a pretty good kicking.
One could say that the environment is in crisis but of course you'd consider such a statement to be "alarmist".
You don't want anything to change, no reductions in population, no lessening of consumption.
Since we're already losing species and habitat and yet its had no effect on you I'm just curious if there's a single change you're willing to make or will you always support the status quo?
Frank
3 years ago
Dr Alexander
I'[m sorry you were offended by me not referring to Diane Francis as a socialist. I will let the National Post know they've been duped and she's really been speaking in code all these years as a big supporter of the NDP.
Frank
3 years ago
Janie
Fair to say that being as you work on a run-of-river project you're a tad biased about wanting more people on the grid?
ME2
3 years ago
More grist for the mill
Thanks for your excellent efforts, Willy. Slowly but surely the Warmist's faux "science" becomes ever more untenable. Re one of your statements re the Warmist's credo :
quote
"The AGW hypothesis is predicated on 4 main pillars. Firstly, they attempt to show that the current warm period is unprecedented....."
Above and beyond the warm periods well up the handle of the "hockey stick" there are also the warming-up periods between the Glaciations, of which there have been about 17 in the last two million years.
These glaciations occur approx every 100,000 years and form part of a larger cycle that lasts approx 10 million years, called an Ice Age. We are living in the third Ice Age, the first of which happened around 750MYA and the second about 450 MYA. They are the result of plate tectonics - the constant shifting of the continental plates - and occur when continental masses block ocean circulation of warm water around the North Pole.(Hence today's Gulf Current)
The Milankovitch Cycle explains why the amount of the Sun's radiation varies thrughout the 100,000 year cycle. This variation is mediated by three different processes which modify the Earth's relationship to the Sun, all on different time-scales which coincide only once every 100,000 years.
This site gives a fair explanation of it :
http://www.bbm.me.uk/portsdown/PH_731_Milank.htm
And offers comments which both contradict (“natural causes are irelevant’) and affirm (“GW is CO2 driven”) the standard Warmist arguments.
Quote
“According to the precession cycles, we should presently be entering into an extended period of ice sheet growth - were we not adding vast quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and upsetting the natural climatic variations.”
We’re approx 20,000 years from the depths of the last Glaciation, and now face an approx 20.000 year ride down to the depths of the next one. No one knows for sure just where we now sit relative to the apogee, whether we’re just beginning it or just leaving it, as just suggested above.
And Wiki opines contrarily :
Quote
“The Milankovitch theory of climate change is not perfectly worked out; in particular, the largest observed response is at the 100,000-year timescale, but the forcing is apparently small at this scale, in regard to the ice ages.[1] The frequency modulation[2] or various feedbacks (from carbon dioxide, cosmic rays or from ice sheet dynamics) explain this discrepancy.” (Oh? who donated the greenhouse gases for the last glaciation?)
But nobody cares to comment upon the regularity and predictability of the current Glaciations, nor of the relative rarity of Ice Ages, nor of Continental Drift explaining their occurrence. If it wasn’t so, minor glaciations would have been an obvious occurrence every 100, 000 years throughout time, instead of being a relative rarity,
Oh well, I guess everybody has the right to make a buck somehow.
Frank
3 years ago
The Ice Age theory
So apparently, according to Janie's data on the warmest years, willy's ice age started in 1939 and ended in 1992.
I didn't realize plate tectonic caused ice ages came and went so quickly.
Am I allowed to say "cool!" ?
North of Hope
3 years ago
water
mopled, you found that water is a greenhouse gas. Very good! In fact there are many greenhouse gases besides CO2. When petroleum products or hydrocarbons or wood burn, CO2 and water are both produced. Maybe other products are as well like carbon monoxide when gasoline burns. So we get more than just CO2 produced and some of them will, as well contribute to global warming.
ME2
3 years ago
Who's the "Denier" now, Frank?
You still have'nt caught on to the fact that you'll be spending Billions, probably Trillions, on this CO2 scam, even though you've absolutely NO proof it will work - none at all, not even a shred of it. You can't even prove CO2 is the cause.
Why not apply the Precautionary Principle another way? What if it DOESN'T work?
Just think of how much could be done with all that wasted money if it was spent on the REAL environental and social problems of today.
Maybe you could convince Suzuki et al to put the same effort into a system of Poverty Trading Credits ??
mopled
3 years ago
You Warmists all refuse to see the point
I doubt whether you will until the scam collapses entirely.You have all invested too much time, effort and ego in a the biggest swindle ever attempted.
Water vapour is the main "GHG", but even in aggregate, they aren't responsible for climate change. If they were, we wouldn't be cooling.
Beside the Milankovitch cycle there are also shorter ones involving ocean currents.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-background-articles/the-pacific-decadal-oscillation/
We have only just begun to understand what goes on and what changes what. One thing is sure...CO2 is a very minor player. The only reason it has been given so much attention is because it can be taxed.
Just like the old folks used to say..."Some day they will figure out a way to tax breathing".
Maurice Strong and Al Gore are laughing at all the suckers who have helped enrich them.
ME2
3 years ago
Are you well?
I've never seen you write anything as childish as that before, Frank.
Frank
3 years ago
ME2
I think it was clear. If you're going to say that because 2005 wasn't as hot as 1993 or 1938 and therefore global warming is a hoax then I can use the same logic on willy's theories concerning ice ages.
Frank
3 years ago
mopled
Do you ever run out of strawmen or do you buy them by the busload? I don't support carbon taxes because I think the poor deserve just as much energy as the rich.
"Just think of how much could be done with all that wasted money if it was spent on the REAL environental and social problems of today."
Zero. That's how much more money would be spent on the environment. How do I know that? Because you've already got the situation you want and its already a failure.
Campbell has cut the environment ministry to the bone. We have 24 forest rangers to cover all of BC and that was before his carbon tax and Copenhagen and in spite of Al Gore's video.
Again, I hope Copenhagen fails for the same reason you do. The difference is I still want to see societal change whereas you and Janie (in her RoR job) prefer the status quo.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
Don't get fooled again
For the record, although I was employed on an ROR project a number of years ago I am currently employed by a company that is under contract to BC Hydro.
I do not support the privatization of our watersheds by international corporations and their first nations "partners." Period.
The whole global warming scam has left BC's environmental movement in a shambles and yes, there are huge environmental issues facing us but they have all been sidetracked by this global government strategy.
Wish I had more time to continue this conversation but at the moment, I don't. Duty calls!
mopled
3 years ago
Copenhagen failed
Breaking: Copenhagen climate summit negotiations ’suspended’14 12 2009
From the BBC, apparently Copenhagen is falling apart
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Copenhagen
Excerpts:
The African delegation is unhappy over moves by the Danish government
Negotiations at the UN climate summit have been suspended after developing countries withdrew their co-operation.
Delegations were angry at what they saw as moves by the Danish host government to sideline talks on more emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.
As news spread around the conference centre, activists chanted “We stand with Africa – Kyoto targets now”.
Informal talks continue, and the UN climate convention head said the formal agenda should resume in the afternoon.
Blocs representing poor countries vulnerable to climate change have been adamant that rich nations must commit to emission cuts beyond 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol.
But the EU and the developed world in general has promoted the idea of an entirely new agreement, replacing the protocol.
"Last week, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu forced a suspension after insisting that proposals to amend the UN climate convention and Kyoto Protocol be debated in full.
“The point is being made very loudly that African countries and the wider G77 bloc will not accept non-action on the Kyoto Protocol, and they’re really afraid that a deal has been stitched up behind their backs,” he told BBC News.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/14/breaking-copenhagen-climate-summit-negotiations-suspended/
"However, the media has completely failed to highlight the real reason behind the walk out – the fact that funds from climate financing, originally allocated to go to the UN and then be doled out piecemeal to third world nations, would instead be paid directly into the coffers of the World Bank and IMF, organizations that have made a habit out of looting poorer countries with crippling debts that cannot be paid back, forcing such countries to hand over their entire infrastructure to globalist loan sharks.
In the leaked Copenhagen text that emerged last week, leaders of third world countries were horrified to discover that developed nations would take on less of a burden than anticipated and that more would be demanded of poorer countries despite the fact that any further cuts in CO2 emissions would further cripple their flimsy economies and poverty-stricken people.
Billionaire elitist George Soros subsequently told Copenhagen delegates how poorer nations would be forced to take on what he described as “green loans” in the name of combating climate change, a policy that would land the already financially devastated third world with even more debt, payable to globalist institutions such as the IMF."
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-real-reason-behind-the-copenhagen-walk-out.html
SicPreFix
3 years ago
mopled ...
Can you maybe give it a bit of a break?
Your ludicrous, paranoid, unsubstantiated conspiracy-around-every-corner freakshow is getting really exhausting.
You do not want discussion. You do not want debate.
You are a walking example of cognitive dissonance, incapable of accepting anything even approaching meaningful evidence, research, or reality.
You're just a hysterical, perhaps slightly insane, ideologue with the most vacuous "data" I've yet seen coming from the neodumb numpties on the Internet.
Please, take a break away from your neuroses and give sanity a chance to find root.
Janie Jones
3 years ago
More bafflegab from SicPreFix
Getting a little desperate there are we SicPreFix?
"However, the media has completely failed to highlight the real reason behind the walk out – the fact that funds from climate financing, originally allocated to go to the UN and then be doled out piecemeal to third world nations, would instead be paid directly into the coffers of the World Bank and IMF, organizations that have made a habit out of looting poorer countries with crippling debts that cannot be paid back, forcing such countries to hand over their entire infrastructure to globalist loan sharks."
Bang on!
mopled
3 years ago
What?
All I'm doing is posting stories from reputable sources. I'm not making them up. The BBC is hardly a tin-foil hatter site.
Your attack on me is pure projection and is symptomatic of the real lunacy that has been driving this scam from the beginning.
I fit right in with the majority of Canadians who say they want to see proof that will stand up to scrutiny before investments are made
73% of Canadians want delay for either economic reasons or doubts over scientific certainty;
* Most Canadians “in the middle” on the issue with a minority on both sides
Canada-Wide Public Opinion Poll on Climate Change
Public Wants Copenhagen Treaty Delayed to Allow Recovery from Recession and Stronger Scientific Confirmation
http://www.fcpp.org/files/1/Postpone Copenhagen Treaty.pdf
North of Hope
3 years ago
This article
This article, " This Is How You Fuel a Community of Climate Deniers" sure hit the nail on the head. It was almost like a surge of deniers cresting against the shore. Well done, you succeeded.
ME2
3 years ago
Mopled
You have to understand, Mopled, that the MSM is to be quoted or linked ONLY when supportive of Warmist theories.
Now you've gotten SPF so upset, he almost ran out of invective. If you're into making amends, I'll go halfers with you on a Thesaurus for him.
SicPreFix
3 years ago
...
sigh.
ursus
3 years ago
it seems
mopled has a vested interest in this topic, what other reason would drive such determination?
Janie Jones
3 years ago
The truth is the highest religion
I guess you don't understand how some people feel about the truth.