Climate Hustle 2: Showcasing a Thinning Roster of Climate Science Deniers (excerpt): DeSmog

 

 

Climate Hustle 2: Showcasing a Thinning Roster of Climate Science Deniers

— By Ben Jervey (11 min. read) —

When written histories remember 2020 as the year that America’s anti-science obsessions completed their evolution from dangerous to deadly, the premier of 'Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy', will be deserving of at least a footnote. 

The film, produced by CFACT, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and starring Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, was originally set to be released on April 21, before the coronavirus pandemic shut down theaters and much of American life. 

In the five months since, climate-fueled wildfires have torched the Western U.S., the World Meteorological Organization ran out of hurricane names in the overheated Atlantic, the Arctic ice cap contracted to a nearly unprecedented minimum, and polar scientists announced that Greenland’s ice sheet has melted “past the point of no return.”

Undeterred by these physical realities, tonight CFACT will release its paean to climate denial, pledging to “rock the climate change debate,” a debate that has long been settled by the 97% or more of actively publishing climate scientists who agree that current warming trends are manmade. 

Who is Funding CFACT's Climate Hustle?

The film is being released by CFACT, a free market organization with a history of taking corporate money to deploy its PR tactics against public interest and environmental advocates. When it launched in 1989, CFACT approached the Chemical Manufacturers Association for “corporate involvement and support.” The CMA described CFACT at the time as being “established to fight the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) and Ralph Nader-type organizations.” 

Go to complete DeSmog article READ MORE

 Related: Revealed: Most Popular Climate Story on Social Media Told Half a Million People the Science Was a Hoax (excerpts): DeSmog

 

 

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IPCC: the dirty tricks climate scientists faced in three decades since first report (excerpt): The Conversation

(Pics added by this blog)

Wildfire

..... "The path to the summit

The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, had been worrying scientists since the 1970s. The discovery of the “ozone hole” above Antarctica had given atmospheric scientists enormous credibility and clout among the public, and an international treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals causing the problem, was swiftly signed. 

Greenhouse gases

The Reagan White House worried that a treaty on CO₂ might happen as quickly, and set about ensuring the official scientific advice guiding leaders at the negotiations was under at least partial control. So emerged the intergovernmental – rather than international – panel on climate change, in 1988.

Already before Sundsvall, in 1989, figures in the automotive and fossil fuel industries of the US had set up the Global Climate Coalition to argue against rapid action and to cast doubt on the evidence. Alongside thinktanks, such as the George Marshall Institute, and trade bodies, such as the Western Fuels Association, it kept up a steady stream of publishing in the media – including a movie – to discredit the science.

But their efforts to discourage political commitment were only partially successful. The scientists held firm, and a climate treaty was agreed in 1992. And so attention turned to the scientists themselves.

The Serengeti strategy

In 1996, there were sustained attacks on climate scientist Ben Santer, who had been responsible for synthesising text in the IPCC’s second assessment report. He was accused of having “tampered with” wording and somehow “twisting” the intent of IPCC authors by Fred Seitz of the Global Climate Coalition.

Wildfire

In the late 1990s, Michael Mann, whose famous “hockey stick” diagram of global temperatures was a key part of the third assessment report, came under fire from right-wing thinktanks and even the Attorney General of Virginia. Mann called this attempt to pick on scientists perceived to be vulnerable to pressure “the Serengeti strategy”.

As Mann himself wrote

Vote for your children's future

By singling out a sole scientist, it is possible for the forces of “anti-science” to bring many more resources to bear on one individual, exerting enormous pressure from multiple directions at once, making defence difficult. It is similar to what happens when a group of lions on the Serengeti seek out a vulnerable individual zebra at the edge of a herd."

Go to complete The Conversation article
by
Marc Hudson

Research Associate in Social Movements, Keele University

Related:  2020 is a Warning That Our Civilization is Beginning to Fall Apart (excerpt): Medium

#bigbusiness, #bushfires, #carbonstorage, #climatecriminals, #criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel, #climateemergency, #jailclimatecriminals, #jail the climate criminals, anti-science, climate science,

Bill Nye's profanity-laced video goes viral: CNN "climate change deniers will be a thing of the past"

Science educator Bill Nye talks climate change with CNN's Brian Stelter and explains why he thinks climate change deniers will be a thing of the past. #CNN #News

 

Related: Australia's Climate Council- Worth Checking Out the Website

 

 

climate deniers, anti-science, scientific consensus, #jailclimatecriminals, 

 

#jailclimatecriminals

Now that climate change is irrefutable, denialists like Andrew Bolt insist it will be good for us : The Guardian

"Even as the fires roar at the gates of power, the Murdoch columnist and others argue climate change is ‘overall, a good thing’"

 .......

"What to make of Bolt’s most recent concession to the reality of

actual climate change is what his insistent “good thing, overall” messaging reveals of the new political reality facing the conservative movement. Unlike an election result that can be willed into existence through sheer force of persuasion, the planet is not actually persuadable. The ideological resistance among conservatives to address the source of climate crisis is so powerful, so historically entrenched, that flames literally surround the city in which the conservative Australian prime minister himself has announced that “resilience and adaptation” amid the fires will substitute for climate mitigation, prevention, action to make them stop. On cue, the megaphones insist this nightmare will be good for us.

Take it from one of the selectively misquoted credible scientists: global heating is not heralding a new agricultural prosperity, these forces are causing forests to burn, not to bloom. They can’t offer solutions. The propaganda of a new denial is all they’ve got."

Read the original the Guardian Van Badham article

See also: Prepare Australia's transport now for climate change or face costly transport chaos

How the Political Right Uses Fossil Fuels to Galvanize Opposition to Climate Action : Green Market Oracle

It is widely understood that in the main, conservative far-right political movements support fossil fuels and oppose the veracity of climate change and climate action. In the U.S. Republicans have worked with the old energy industry to subvert the facts for many years. Thanks to insidious disinformation campaigns 73 percent of Republican voters have been hoodwinked into believing that climate change is not a serious threat and 70 percent do not believe that humans are the cause. The resistance to climate action does not stop at disinformation. Republicans have actively thwarted the democratic process through redistricting (gerrymandering) and voter suppression. In Oregon Republican lawmakers refused to appear in the state legislature to avoid passing a sweeping climate change bill by the Democratic majority.
No individual has done more harm to global climate action that Donald Trump. He has dismissed climate change as a "hoax" and his administration's resistance to science is unprecedented. This president and his Republican minions actively support the expansion of fossil fuels and wanton deregulation. The Trump administration's raft of anti-environmental policy positions including withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Trump has helped to pave the way for climate denial from far-right politicians in Brazil, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands. They have stoked opposition to climate action to build support for anti-science policy.  The result is the right wing leaderships in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Estonia have all killed their net-zero emissions plans this year.
The key to resistance to science-based climate action can be found in marrying opposition to fossil fuel tax hikes and resistance to climate action. The so called yellow vest protests in France and other parts of Europe illustrate this point. Opposing increases in gas prices serves as both a mustering point of resistance and a segue to oppose climate action. However, this is a manufactured crisis as gas taxes were already high.
In a play on Trump's nationalistic "make America great again" French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to "make our planet great again". French right wing political leaders have seized on Macron's climate leadership to galvanize opposition to climate action. As one slogan put it, "Macron is concerned with the end of the world. We are concerned with the end of the month."
Similar contrarian sentiments can be found in other countries that support climate action including Sweden which is widely recognized as one of the most climate forward nations on the planet. Resistance to gas tax hikes in Sweden are called Bensinupproret. The leader of the movement's 600,000 Facebook members is Peder Blohm Bokenhielm he dismisses climate action as "hysteria". In climate friendly Finland, opposition to climate action is also being used by the right for partisan purposes. Finns Party chairman Jussi Halla-aho also dismisses climate action as "hysteria".
However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore climate science, even for right wing politicians whose policy agendas are commonly rooted in obfuscation and outright deception. The new center-right European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, placed climate policy at the top of her "agenda for Europe," ahead of even economic policy. "I want the European Green Deal to become Europe's hallmark," she explained.

From Green Market Oracle 

#jail climate criminals  #gaol climate criminals 

See also:

The Madrid climate talks failed spectacularly. Here's what went down: The Conversation

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me : The Guardian

Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident.

While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action that is shaped in large part by corporations.

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism.

The Guardian’s polluters series reports that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965. This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies pumped billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded thinktanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell and Exxon that create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25bn in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low-carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it.

Read The Guardian's George Monbiot article 

See also:

Climate change forcing millions out of homes: report: 9 NEWS

 

 

#criminales climáticos de la cárcel

#criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel

#jailclimatecriminals

#gaolclimatecriminals

There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one: ABC

"Last week, amid the cacophony of reactions to Greta Thunberg's appearance before the United Nations Climate Action Summit, a group of self-proclaimed "prominent scientists" sent a registered letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. 

The letter, headed "There is no climate emergency", urged Guterres to follow:

"…a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation."

The group, supported by 75 Australian business and industry figures, along with others around the world, obviously rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. 

But this missive displays remarkably different tactics to those

previously used to stymie climate action.

The language of climate change denial and inaction has transformed. 

Outright science denial has been replaced by efforts to reframe climate change as natural, and climate action as unwarranted.

However, this is just another way of rejecting the facts, and their implications for us. Denial can take many forms."

Read the complete ABC NEWS article 

See also:

How the Climate Kids Are Short-Circuiting Right-Wing Media: NYT

The ‘Historical Jigsaw of Climate Deception’: Private Notes Show How Big Oil Spread Climate Science Denial: DESMOG

EXXON & climate change

We’ve all heard the dodgy arguments: ‘the science is uncertain’, ‘climate change is natural, not down to humans’, ‘science has been hijacked by politics’… Now a new cache of documents sheds light on the origins of the disinformation.  

In another verse of a now familiar refrain, a fossil fuel industry group in the 1990s publicly promoted arguments to undermine confidence in climate science while internally acknowledging their products were driving up temperatures.  

• How Big Oil Tried to Capture the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Global Climate Coalition: Documents Reveal How Secretive Fossil Fuel Lobby Group Manipulated UN Climate Programs

A cache of meeting minutes, briefings, and emails uncovered by the Climate Investigations Center shows how industry group the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) used its financial clout and political connections to cast doubt on mainstream climate science until its disbandment in 2002. The GCC would for decades cast doubt on the veracity of climate science and strategically spread the message that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a politicised body, to discourage regulatory reform that would hit coalition members’ profits. 

Updated - Top 10 Worst Anti-Science Web Sites :Skeptoid

"You've seen it on Facebook or other places a million times: Someone makes some untrue medical or science or conspiracy claim, and to give it the appearance of authority, attach a web link to it. And where is that web link from? As often as not, it turns out to be a site that specializes in terrible misinformation; and such sites are, all too often, far more popular than sites dedicated to correcting the record or presenting data. Pseudoscience is, unfortunately, more sensational, compelling, and fun.

A few years ago on this show, I gave a list of the top ten websites that promoted the worst bad science, as a resource for those hoping to stand up to such web links. Times change, sites come and go, rise and ebb, and we're ready for an update. And so here are this year's winners, my picks for the worst sites on the Internet to which your friends are likely to link you, organized by their Alexa popularity rating, tweaked a bit by me for how bad their information really is. Let's begin with:


10. Heartland.org

The Heartland Institute is a free-market think tank, preparing research and reports for whatever clients want it. That's an important role in society and I respect the freedoms of every think tank no matter where they are on the political spectrum. Promoting the policies that support an ideology is a right, but denying hard science in support of that ideology is a no-no. And that's what you'll find on Heartland.org, one of the web's best funded and most comprehensive attacks on climate science. Resources like this are a very real problem for science, because they have the expertise and the means to change people's minds, but lack the ethics to change those minds for the better. This year they held their 10th annual "International Conference on Climate Change" in Washington DC, which they describe as the "the largest gathering of global warming 'skeptics' in the world," and strangely they put quotes around the word skeptics, which I would have done if they hadn't, since their process is certainly not one of skeptically interrogating the climate models. Instead, they start from their preferred conclusion, then work backwards collecting cherrypicked bits of information to build a path to get there.

For a healthy alternative to Heartland.org, try SkepticalScience.com, a site dedicated to combatting global warming misinformation. It will equip the layman with the tools needed to rebut the type of misinformation Heartland publishes."

Go to Skeptoid article

A Postmortem for Survival: on science, failure and action on climate change

CO2 Reading April 21, 2019

Failing to learn from past mistakes is the only truly unforgivable mistake in science. And on climate change, the scientific community (by and large) has been criminally negligent when it comes to observing — and especially learning from — its own track record. This blog post is a postmortem in 4 acts: an anatomy of failure, so that we can hopefully learn, act and change. Fast.

Act 1: Science as success

Let’s get one thing out of the way, shall we? The physical science of climate change has been a resounding, phenomenal, triumphant success. As a colleague from the University of Leeds recently put it, “We’ve been right for decades.” This makes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first Working Group (on the physical science) assessment reports an absolute dawdle to write up: “Still right!” [That’s a joke, by the way. There are always absolute stacks of new science to report on: just the large lines of it have not budged at all.] So there is not much to learn from there in terms of failure. Well done, physical scientists, you’ve observed & modeled external reality. You aced the case.

Read the article 

Apr 24

 Related:

DESMOG: Renewables Offset 35 Times More CO2 Every Year Than All Carbon Capture Projects Ever, New Analysis Finds

 

Climate Change perceptions

 

Climate Change Deniers have anti-science funding

Climate Science Denier says DESMOG

"In 2016, retired Princeton physicist Professor Will Happer accepted an invitation from conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin to give a keynote at his conference to talk about the “positive effects of CO2.”

Griffin thinks the science behind global warming is a scam. He also thinks there is “no such thing” as the HIV virus and that some plane contrails are part of a political plot to spray the population with poisons.