I don’ t know what sort of world NYT reporters live in, but I am now convinced that some like Paul Krugman have no clue about the real world people live in elsewhere.
‘This Week” with George Stephanopoulos debates ClimateGate – more here
Noel Sheppard over at Newsbusters provides some video and transcript of a debate between Paul Krugman of the NYT and Washington Post columnist George Will.
When I read what Paul Krugman said, I laughed out loud. He’s truly clueless.
Here’s the context:
WILL: Speaking of the marketplace, the biggest industry in the world right now may be fighting climate change. There are billions, trillions of dollars on the table, and when you say, well, they are academics and they are scientists and they talk in funny ways — academics are human beings, and the enormous incentive to get on the bandwagon on global warming, the financial incentive, the market driving this, is huge.
KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter.
WILL: Hardly.
KRUGMAN: It’s so much easier, come on. You got the energy industry’s behind it. There are 20 times as many believers as there are skeptics in the scientific community. They get almost equal time in the media.
(CROSSTALK)
WILL: Is there a larger venture capital firm in this country than the Energy Department of this government, which right now is sending out billions and billions of dollars in speculation on green energy?
Noel Sheppard writes:
Skeptics get almost equal time in the media? Yeah, that’s why this appears to be the first time ABC addressed this ClimateGate issue.
As for there being more money in being a skeptic than there is in supporting this myth, the facts say otherwise.
The Science and Public Policy Institute issued a report on the money involved in funding the global warming debate in August concluding, “Over the last two decades, US taxpayers have subsidized the American climate change industry to the tune of $79 billion.”
By contrast, the same study found that the media bogeyman “Exxon Mobil gave a mere $23 million, spread over ten years, to climate sceptics.”
See the video and transcript at Newsbusters
UPDATE: Professor Don Easterbrook left this comment on the ABC news site:
I’ve spent 4 decades studying global climate change and as a scientist I am appalled at Krugman’s cavalier shrugging off the Hadley email scandal as ‘just the way scientists talk among themselves.’ That’s like saying it’s alright for politicians to be corrupt because that’s the way they are. Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don’t like, hide data they don’t want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data.
Posted by: Don Easterbrook | Nov 29, 2009 1:57:05 PM
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CodeTech-
You’re right, of course. Nobody is going to listen to a random knucklehead like me spewing on the internet. I could write a detailed post using documented evidence about the history of this movement, the players involved, the money flow, etc. and anyone who wasn’t predisposed to believe it would just call me a tool of the right. Amusing, as I am a registered Independent.
I would hope at some point those of good faith would begin to at least ask qui bono, who benefits? Yes, the perversion of the is science in this case is interesting but it is only a tool to a bigger cause. Implementing the suggestions of the IPCC based on this science would have radical and massive implications for people and governments around the world. You don’t need to be a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist to wonder who benefits with this type of change.
Incidentally, does anyone find it odd that both Maurice Strong and Al Gore were both founding memebers of the first two carbon trading exchanges in the world, Strong in Chicago and Gore in the UK? I’m sure that was just a coincidence springing from their natrual altruistic tendencies.
Does someone pay attention to Krazy K?
Fox just broke a story on their website that deals with a document that they found concerning the UNEP and what they want to do. Here is an excerpt from the document:
“The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity. To do that, however, it will have to make itself relevant well beyond the world of those already
concerned with the environment, including very prominently its own formal constituency. Indeed, unless UNEP succeeds in recasting the debate, it is
highly likely that the economic community will do it—badly, and on its own terms. It is already happening in the field of climate change.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,577827,00.html
Good old Krugman would probably love this idea
Re: ralph (08:30:05)
Allowing this “issue” to split along left/right lines is too much of a risk.
At least some of the MSM are playing straight. This article in yesterday’s UK Sunday Times – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936289.ece – made for a refreshing read.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Sunday Times Magazine – the entire thing was a bonus pre-Copenhagen AGW tract. It had clearly been weeks in the making. It began with an article by Brian Appleyard explaining his earlier mild scepticism and his Pauline revelation that AGW is real – and that we should all emulate his conversion. The remainder of the magazine was a selection of articles for new converts – from scare stories to home emission guilt tales to extravagant “green” Christmas presents for the Righteous. Gag reflex was on overtime!!
Shame the ST isn’t agile enough to allow its magazine to be a little more current and courageous enough for it to be a little less partial.
boballab-
Per your link:
>>The Swiss paper was written not by Scanlon but by Mark Halle, the Europe-based director of trade and investment for an influential environmental think-tank, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which originated in Canada and now operates in some 30 countries. IISD, which still has heavy Canadian government support, bills itself as a research institute promoting policies that are “simultaneously beneficial to the global economy, the global environment and to social well-being.”
Oh you mean the IISD where Maurice Strong is a Dinguished Fellow and Friend of the Institute after sitting on the board? That IISD?
Just another coincidence. Nothing to see here. Move along.
A Tsunami of Brainwashing from the British Media ahead of Copenhagen
Consider this output of just 20 minutes from British television tonight:
The ITN News at 6.30pm has a report from the Himalayas where “temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else in the world”. (Ha!). The reporter, who has no scientific credentials whatsoever, climbed inside an ice tunnel in a “dead and rotting” glacier on Everest to “prove climate change is happening” and that our leaders “must do something about climate change at Copenhagen”, etc.
This was followed by the infamous Carbon Trust’s propaganda advert with the little girl who’s dog and rabbit drowned “because of the grown-ups” turning on lights, etc.
Next up, was the Channel Four 7pm news, which all this week, we are informed, will be a “Countdown to Copenhagen Week”. Tonight’s menu was broadcast from a slum in Brazil, and the burning question was “Can we make some of the poorest people in the world better off without damaging the west’s economy?” Which was a bit rich considering they preceded the item with a description of just how the rich Brazilians travel about these days. It’s by helicopter, and that’s coined a new term “the Helicopteracy” to describe them. The real burning question from our end was why these obscenely rich people can’t pay some taxes to do the same thing, instead of bleeding us white with “carbon” taxes. Of course, this question was never asked -how dare we? This was followed by an interview with the Brazilian president who stated that the west “would pay” for their industrial progress at Copenhagen.
In this weird parallel universe, which is inhabited by all sections of the media, politicians, scientists, bureaucrats and tycoons, not one mention has been made of the biggest scientific fraud in history, and who stands to benefit from it. Most of the mainstream media journalists, like ours in Britain, are bone-idle and brain-dead zombies, only capable of swallowing and regurgitating prepackaged lying “Global Warming” propaganda pap and nothing else.
Expect more, much more…
Vincent:
I wish your words were true as to giving windmills to India while we go nuclear. Per this reference:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html
China has 18 large nuclear power plants under construction, India has 6, and the US has one. That one is a recent restart of a construction project abandoned decades ago. And for those of you who think nuclear is dangerous, I respond that a coal mine accident in China last month caused more fatalities than the Chernyobl screwup. The difference is that coal mining accidents aren’t news, and that Soviet nuke plants of that design have been mostly shut down.
Krugman is pretty much off the planet on everything that he speaks about, so it is no surprise that he is fantasising about AGW. The first few reads of his witterings are comical but thereafter it gets boringly repetitive…ignore!
Looks like finally Climategate is going to be discussed on US national TV by someone that is not a “Opinion” (Beck, Hannity) driven show. Britt Hume is supposed to talk about it on Special Report tonight. There is a huge difference between Beck and Hume. Hume was a long time Whitehouse correspondent for ABC before taking over Fox News. It will be interesting to see what he has to say.
I hope Fox puts Stossl on the case. e escaped from ABC just in time. They’d never let him have the time it will take to explore this issue thoroughly.
The Left is merely a misguided reaction to the misery and ENVIRONMENTAL damage caused by the government backed banking cartels. IT HAS A POINT but it is not pointed at the right institutions! The Right is merely a misguided reaction to the Left.
Let me ask a simple question of both the Left and the Right:
How can an economic system based on systematic, government enforced theft of purchasing power from all money holders including and ESPECIALLY the poor not be a disaster in the making?
Can we not all agree that theft is bad or is that too much to ask?
Here is a link to the transcript from Brit Hume on Climategate.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,578206,00.html
My take is Ow that will leave a scar Gav!
Still waiting for my first cheque…
Lets see, I’ve got a scrounged “white box PC” that started life about 20 years ago as a x486 box (since upgraded to a 400 MHz AMD chip) with 132 MB memory and an old 10 GB disk bought from a computer recycler. Free software via Linux. That’s my GIStemp build/ test machine.
I self fund my coffee budget and my “travel budget” consists of paying the gas to go to the post office to mail my bill payments. (No Copenhagen or Bali for me…)
Yup, sure does sound more lucrative to me.
I sure wish the media could peel a few reporters from the pool reporting on TigerGate to cover this story.
Bruce Cobb (09:28:24) :
Thanks for helping clarify for me, Bruce…and I agree with what you are saying.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Krugman is right, Will is dead wrong. Deal with it. Just because the oil-industry did not see fit to fund YOUR denialism does not mean they aren’t spending on better denialists, like the so-called “Science and Public Policy Institute”.