Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain

It’s full of the kind of angry, baseless, stereotypical innuendo I’d expect Joe Romm to write. Instead, the writer is Jeffrey D Sachs. who is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, home to NASA GISS.

And it’s not just the Guardian. Apparently this article has been shopped around. It made it into The National in Abu Dhabi which you can read here. Apparently the article from Columbia’s Sachs was distributed by an outfit called The Project Syndicate.

A check of their website show the author list, some of the stories they are pushing to media, and they seem to be rather vague about where their money comes from. In their contact and support page all they offer is a PO box for their HQ in Prague:

Project Syndicate PO Box 130 120 00 Prague 2 Czech Republic

So much for transparency.

Back to the article. After reading it, one can see that Sachs is simply repeating the same sort of drivel we get from trolls every day on climate science discussions. Baseless accusations of being involved with deep pockets, connections to tobacco, denial of links to cancer, and other assorted decades old slimy talking points that have nothing to do with the real issue at hand: scientific integrity in climate science.

It is clear that professor Sachs didn’t do any original research for this article, he simply repeated these same slimy talking points we see being pushed by internet trolls and NGO’s like Greenpeace. He provided no basis for the claims, only the innuendo. It’s a pathetic job of journalism. It’s doubly pathetic that the Guardian allowed this to be printed at a time when they were reaching out to skeptics.

It seems incomprehensible to Sachs and others like him that people like myself, Steve McIntyre, Jeff Id,  Joe D’Aleo, John Coleman, and others who write about climate science issues might have original thoughts and do original research of our own. It seems impossible to him that an “army of Davids”, such as the readers and contributors to CA and WUWT, could shake the money bloated foundations of climate science today with daily blog posts, FOI requests, and commentary. No it had to be big money funding these skeptics somewhere.

Newsflash: It’s worse than you thought. It’s a growing revolution of like minded people worldwide that want to see the climate science done right and without the huge monied interests it has fallen prey to.. Tobacco, big oil, and other assorted contrived boogeymen haven’t anything to do with skeptics that question CRU, GISS, NOAA, etc.on these pages and the pages of other blogs.

Oh sure they’ll say “but you went to the Heartland convention, and they took money from Exxon once, they defended smokers rights,  that makes you complicit.” Bull. I’ve made my objections loudly known to Heartland on these issues, but the fact is that no other organizations stepped up to help skeptics with a conference to exchange information. While people like Sachs were denouncing “deniers”, and Al Gore was leading multimillion dollar media campaigns  saying we were “flat earthers” and “moon landing deniers”, no scientific organizations were stepping forward to ask the tough questions, or to even help regular people like you and me who were asking them. Had any such scientific organization had the courage, you can bet that skeptics would have flocked there. Instead these organizations all got on the consensus bandwagon.

The claims made that skeptics are connected to tobacco companies is ludicrous. It is especially ludicrous in my case.

So here’s my challenge to Professor Sachs. Give me ten minutes in a room with you. That’s all I need. I’ll tell you about my story related to tobacco. I’ll tell you how secondhand smoke most likely contributed to my profound hearing loss through a series of badly treated ear infections as a child, I’ll tell you about my efforts to get my parents to stop smoking , and then, I’ll tell you how I watched both of my parents die of tobacco related disease. I’ll tell you what I think of tobacco products and companies. I’ll tell you to your face. I promise you it won’t be pretty, I promise you that you’ll feel my pain caused by tobacco.

Finally, I’ll tell you what I think of you for writing this crap you market as journalism without asking leading skeptics any questions, but instead relying on this slimy innuendo that’s been repeated for years.

Professor Sachs, contact me by leaving a comment if you have personal integrity enough to hear it.

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Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs

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