Opinion by Anthony Watts
There has never been a time at WUWT that I’ve used the word “slimy” in a headline. This is a special case. I thought of about a half dozen words I could have used and finally decided on this one. I chose it because of precedence in a similar situation where Steve McIntyre wrote his rebuttal to a similar piece of amateur journalism entitled Slimed by Bagpuss the Cat Reporter.
Last week, the Guardian invited me to participate in their new online story forum. They were seeking the input from climate sceptics on issues they were writing about. They especially wanted my input. I said I’d consider it, but was a bit hesitant given the Guardian’s reporting history. But, after some discussion with one of the reporters, it seemed like a genuine attempt at outreach. I suggested that if they really wanted to make a gesture that would make people take notice, they should consider banning the use of the word “denier” from climate discourse in their newspaper. Nobody I know of in the sceptic community denies that the earth has gotten warmer in the past century. I surely don’t. But we do question the measured magnitude, the cause, and the scientific methods.
Now, any progress that has been made in outreach by the Guardian has been dashed by the most despicably stupid newspaper article I’ve ever seen about climate skeptics. The Guardian for some reason thought it would be a good idea to print it while at the same time trying to reach across the aisle to climate skeptics for ideas. Needless to say, they’ve horribly botched that gesture with the printing of this article.
Here’s the headline and link to the Guardian article:
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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Anyone know who makes Horlicks?
Surely the time must be right to buy shares – how else are these, presumably intelligent (and hence deliberately lying and manipulative of the truth), types like Sachs to ever get to sleep?
Anthony
And another thing. CAGW has missed the boat as a scam. The Wall Street and the City of London scam beat them to it. They have together wrecked the economies of the Anglo-sphere as well as that of Europe. All these economies are literally stuffed. There isn’t any money to pay for the nonsense of Carbon credits.
Doug
We have libel laws in this country for a reason. I haven’t read the article (possibly mistaking this forum for Slashdot 🙂 but if the slights are nearly as misplaced as it sounds, you could and should bring suit against him.
Perhaps take some legal advice – are there grounds for a libel case? I’m not sure they do “class actions” in the UK, so he probably thinks he’s safe.
Andrew W -” While I agree that the ‘money from big oil’ meme is nonsense, so is the ’scientists exaggerate AGW to get grants’ meme, and that’s a claim often made in the comments here.”
It is a claim that bears considerable substance. If lucrative grants were not involved in promoting AGW how would you explain the behaviour of CRU’s Phil Jones? Did his drive to warp climate data arise from a sense of twisted intellectual masochism? Do I need to mention what has been going on with the IPCC scandals? How many government grants to disprove AGW have been made? AGW equates to money. The “science” underpinning the “consensus” is nonsensical so how come billions have been thrown in its direction?
The response from Sachs is that of a wounded animal or a human who has had his world-view grievously, or fatally falsified.
It is the lashing out in desperation of one who’s faith is threatened.
A discussion of facts and evidence is no good to people of this mind-set.
They know it only ends with the ruin of their ideas.
So a fulisade of invective and ad hominems is all they have left, which translates:
Pay no attention to these people, the facts, and evidence.
This is not the posture of someone truly committed to the empirical scientific method.
It’s a fulisade of rhetoric designed to intimidate rather
than inform.
Sadly, it is not the first time this tactic has been employed and it won’t be the last.
But it is the tactic of die-hards faced with the grim prospect of intellectual oblivion.
While we’re all individuals, there is without doubt many prominent lobbyists who have had an association with the coal industry in arguing against coals burnings link to acid rain or with the tobacco industry arguing against tobaccos link to lung cancer who now argue against AGW. Sachs was probably not referring specifically to you Anthony.
Project Syndicate is a Soros funded operation:
http://whois.net/whois/project-syndicate.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Syndicate
Jeffrey Sachs is a close personal friend of Soros and they’ve spoken together at numerous public events. Search for “Soros and Jeffrey Sachs” on youtube.
YEAH! YOU TELL ‘EM TONY! [snip]
PS I caught up with the latest KUSI TV show last night courtesy of Richard North over at EU Referendum.
Class!
Thank you for expressing your personal pain. From my own experiences I share your bone deep, honest and angry reactions to the tobacco insults. Ironically Al Gore’s own chequered past with the stuff is a more significant connection to tobacco than most sceptics.
However, I’m sorry to correct you but the Guardian article is going to be stunningly surpassed in sliminess by this series from ABC’s Clive Hamilton. I’m so offended by the first article, I can’t post because I run the risk of being almost as abusive as he paints sceptics.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2826189.htm
Tomorrow we find out who’s behind the cyber-bullying campaign. Grrrrr.
Why can’t the warming community understand that the level of reaction they get is a reflection of the huge number of people who disagree with them. The intensity is a measure of how angry we’re getting.
When global warmers decided that we were all going to have to restructure our lives, why did they never consider that the rest of us might want some rock solid proof? And get very vocal when we didn’t get it. Why do they think that a few insults will change our minds?
What little organisation that can be seen in the sceptic community is based on something warmers probably don’t recognise – earned trust. Sceptics very quickly come to know which sceptic sites to trust and which to merely tolerate. I don’t think I need to tell you which heading your site falls under 🙂
It’s all good.
Desperation has set in, relax and enjoy the spectacle.
Cheers
Michael
Director Jeffrey Sachs looks quite the swashbuckling figure in his dark suit and reddish tie with his hair jauntily parted thus so.
Too bad he didn’t have the courage to do a bit of honest research before writing his recycled and baseless attack article. I wonder if he will have the courage to leave a comment on this blog about Anthony Watts’ and his parents’ experiences with tobacco?
I wonder what he’d think of my experiences with that horribly evil drug, my parents’ usage of it, the breathing difficulties as a child, and other things I could relate. I’m a “climate denier” (ridiculous term: Climate exists and it even gets warmer — and cooler — and there are myriad causes for this, of which I am not all-knowing, but at the same time have a clue) so I suppose I must suppress all my personal experiences and encourage people to use the drug which kills more people than any other drug in the world, including alcohol.
Because
I’m evilRe J.Hansford (01:14:21) : and Anthony
I’ve found that in times like this one should think of the obvious response, and then usually do about the opposite.
This adds varitey and is not an expected response.
“Nobody I know of in the sceptic community denies that the earth has gotten warmer in the past century.”
You don’t know and nobody knows. There is enough missing data to not support that assertion.
At one time, I was rather strident in my advocacy that tobacco be banned. The reason was pretty simple. My Dad, who smoked from age 17 when he joined the army for WWII, died of tobacco induced lung cancer. My mother followed a few years later, also from cancer. She did not smoke, but lived in a home full of it, and I’m one of the many kids who had a smoking father and non-smoking mother and ended up highly allergic to tobacco.
To say I despised tobacco would be to vastly understate the “issue” I have with it. After “exposure” I must do a full shower and eye wash scrub down or the next day I will have bright red eyes and skin rashes. Oh, and I won’t breath very well.
With that said, I’ve since decided that if I’m for personal responsibility and liberty, it can’t be a selective thing. Like “freedom of speech”, you must advocate freedom of speech for the speech you find most reprehensible. Everyone is in favor of freedom of speech for views with which they agree… (A very rough paraphrase of Noam Chomsky). So if I would be free to eat a Whopper or ride a motorcycle or even just skip a vaccine that I think is a bit dodgy, I must also allow that others might want a short stimulated life over a longer more sedate one.
So I’ve reached a point where I must state that I think it is any individual’s right to smoke to death, should they wish to do so (though NOT in the presence of any kids that might not want to involuntarily suffer from it as I did for years…)
But the notion that someone like me is connected to tobacco companies in any way at all is so incredibly LUNATIC as to be worthy of the phrase “Bald Faced Lie”.
Oh, and I’m still looking for that paycheck from Big Oil (or anyone for that matter…). The “gravy train” is all on the AGW side, with billions. I’m doing my work on recycled 20 year old PC’s (though one is now only 10 years old and I’ve been offered a Mac G3 that I’m really looking forward to having.)
So here I am in “beggars making mulligan stew” land being accused of rich funding from powerful oil companies! Just nuts. (BTW, oil companies have been members of AGW promoting agencies and have spent lots of money on CO2 “sequestration”. They want and NEED CO2 sequestration to maximize profits. It is one of the best “strippers” for old oil wells. So just check out where they are spending their money. It is on the AGW side…)
So yeah, “Slimed” is just about right.
Lets see. On “their side” we have Soros with Billions plus more Billions from NSF and other government agencies (not to mention folks blogging while at work at government jobs…). On my side I’ve got an old x486 box from the garage that was upgraded to a 400 mHz AMD chip and the recent addition of a $75 recycled PC from Weird Stuff recyclers ( Pentium III with 250 MB memory and Windows Pro 2000) in a self funded operation and running free software. All done in my living room in my ‘spare time’.
Yeah, that’s sure a level playing field /sarcoff>
Chris Thorne (00:55:08) : “Sachs was part of the cadre of ivory-tower Western academic economists who in the 1990s advised the government of Russia […]”
I think that he was more than that. He was the central figure both in Poland and Russia. I was a grad student in Poland at the time Sachs’ ‘shock therapy’ scheme was implemented. I will admit that — at least, at the time — I thought that it was the right thing to do. Even in retrospect, it’s hard to imagine a better way to fix the systemic problems which existed at that time in Eastern Europe.
On the other hand, there is no question that the details of the plan could have been managed much better. For example, my landlord, who, the year before, had spent hours haggling over my rent (which ended up less than a hundred dollars per month), was able to steal a manufacturing plant that must be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, today.
What I am saying is that Sachs is a well-respected authority when it comes to the practical implementation of macroeconomic system-wide transformations. From this article, it sounds like he’s a bit like Noam Chomsky, i.e. an unquestioned international expert in his field, but a bit of of a dilettante in other fields.
The Guardian newspaper is basically bankrupt, financially, and kept afloat in its Green journalism by AutoTrader, a second hand car magazine. So, Monbiot works for AutoTrader!
What a sad little man.
Here comes “Big Coal” to get you.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/no_legal_option.pdf
Andrew30 (00:23:42) :
Don’t be too hard on Sci. Am.
Find a copy of Gale. N.H. and Stos-Gale, Z. (1981) Lead and silver in the ancient Aegean Sci. Amer. June 1981 pp142-152
and have a look at the photo on page 143 – and that shows the best cleavage I’ve ever seen in a scientific article.
On the day this article was printed, here in the Home Counties around London and East Anglia we are currently having a blast of global warming, it is snowing this morning and currently 2 – 3″ deep at the moment. As with Copenhagen I think that the Earth Goddess Gaia is just playing one of her little jokes.
Seriously though, I wonder if the main point of the article is just to generate interest for a a new book. After a general introduction he slips in a paragraph about a forthcoming book “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
Many of the readers will fervently agree with his views in the article so this book of course will be of interest to them.
Anthony, I am reminded of an observation by Lewis Carroll:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,’
But lo! The science is not settled …
‘One ,two! One two!And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.’
Keep on galumphing, Anthony, you’re getting results!
Anthony,
If you contact the Guardian, maybe you can get a right to reply. All newspapers publish provocative opinions, separate from their own editorials. In this case, they have definately crossed the line. A well thought out reply, especially one from somebody like yourself, who can show how ludicrous and offensive such assertions are, would quickly disabuse any readers of any such ideas.
If they don’t allow you to publish a reply, then they will be damning themselves.
That article reads like an attempt to placate a readership composed of pretentious pseudo-intellectuals who believe that man=bad.
Anthony,
The public are not dumb, they know very well what is going on and the vast majority are kind and your integrity is what draws them.
————————————————————–
Thanks again for WUWT.
Send your friends. Enlighten. An excess of knowledge will never harm an open mind.