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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Media requests for Professor Sachs should be directed to Kyu-Young Lee at klee@ei.columbia.edu.
If there was one thing that was clear in the climategate files, it was that Phil Jones was receiving millions of euros in funding from Big Government like the EU. That’s undeniable fact, yet somehow it is moral to receive money from big government politicians who mostly have an authoritarian agenda, and will use the CAGW scare to their benefit.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7113582/Amazongate-new-evidence-of-the-IPCCs-failures.html
It would appear the global warming propagandists are in fact part of the anti-smoking lobby too!
This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging
The Project Syndicate, distributing this article, is a George Soros pet project, pushing the internationalist agenda.
Internationalists view global warming as a tool for furthering global integration through the transfer of power from nation states to international institutions.
The “Global strategists” of the Project Syndicate are the following people: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Haass, Sergei Karaganov, and Kenichi Ohmae.
The three first names are affiliated with the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, the latter is author of books such as “A borderless world” and “Next Global Stage: The: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World”.
Skeptics are way down the totem pole. First Sachs has gone after Bush, then mainly Obama, then the developed countries, then…
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/article_0dc4fd4f-58b5-5192-94de-23f83bad0961.html
Well let’s see, Professor Jeffrey Sachs
And you have doubts these guys are going after your family’s food and water besides your energy, think again!
Source: Des Moines Register, Colombia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, 2009 Borlaug Dialogue
Seems Sachs is speaking much of carbon credit trading of late. Search and read his other articles, speeches.
Isn’t Columbia just a hop, skip and jump from Wall Street too, besides NASA’s GISS? Now where is the connection? Who is doing what to whom I wonder?
Sachs is a trained economist. I always love it when people have an arrogance so high that they feel they can speak loudly on issues when their knowledge is limited. Sachs also recommended free chemical fertilizer to african farmers as a development strategy. He has no knowledge of the best stratgies for soil fertility management on the fragile soils of Africa. As an agricultural scientist with experience working In Africa I can say his fertilizer advice is harmful to development. Similarly he has limited understanding of the climate change issue.
Tony Benn (on an entitely unrelated subject -google him) is famous for stating that “…an empire in decline is at it’s most dangerous.”
He was refering to the British Empre, but in the same way, I also see AGW as an empire in decline.
I skimmed through the comments on that article… and was left with a feeling of awe.
If it was MY pet theory, I sure wouldn’t want most of those guys as my vocal supporters.
Oh well… if ignorance is bliss, they seem very happy. Seems to me they should be more upset about the horrid consequences about to befall the planet, but no, they waste their time scoring “points” against anonymous people they disagree with.
By the way, the Ghandi quote is printed in the AGW alarmists guide to manipulating the rubes, they think it applies to them. (hint: it was a guidebook in the FOIA files)
All that hot air from Jeffrey Sachs he doesn’t manage to address the actual science and the perfectly valid questions that have been asked of it for years but now the volume has been turned up to eleven so everyone can hear them.
Well, except those with their fingers in their ears and their hands in our pockets.(Quite a trick, that.)
Sachs’ essay epitomizes the intellectual inbreeding and academic corruption that thoroughly permeates America’s Ivy League institutions today. Too few of the faculty of the most prestigious institutions have minds of their own; they are instead panderers to intellectual fashion and political correctness. It’s telling that the legitimate critics are disproportinately from outside of academe, and even more disportionately from outside of institutions like Columbia. Dr. Sachs, your superficial analyis would earn an F in any decent undergraduate course.
I support you whole heartedly Anthony. I am a climate change skeptic, with family who have suffered the effects of smoking. So I am an ardent anti smoker and to make this link is trawling the gutter. Another tactic they have tried is to paint themselves as victims of cyber bullying and define the debate along political lines. See here.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2826189.htm
CAGW proponents are coming under greater scrutiny lately, and to resort to this kind of response rather than present evidence, just reinforces my skepticism. I wonder how many people support CAGW simply because it aligns with their politics, rahter than looking for the evidence?
Slightly, OT: Take a look at this article about climategate.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climategate
Look at the bottom – you get “Related SourceWatch articles” – include “Philip Morris”
So look over the body, and the only appearance of Morris (actually this time spelled “Phillip Morris” with two Ls) is that American Freedom of Information, including a Shelby Amendment, in 1993 that was allegedly drafted by somebody who once did consultancy for Philip Morris.
There is no actual connection between Philip Morris to the University of East Anglia. Or to Phil Jones. Or to Climategate. Or even to any fact, debate, research or issue relating to climate change. Or anything in the body of the article. But they consider it Philip Morris one of the most relevant links. It’s bizarre.
IPCC has a credibility problem. In order to survive longer, they have to change the swinging public perception.
To protect their organization, they have to attack and disable the opposition.
It doesn’t matter what the content is as long as it takes the focus away from the IPCC organization itself.
Notice the content is focused away from the issue? Try to attack where the public is most gullible.
IPCC deniers are also baby killers.
Get my point?
He’s a troll. You addressed his lack of professionalism very well, Anthony. History will look back upon Sachs as an intolerant, unscholarly man who made his voice most well known to all the adorers of politically correct totalitarianism who read the Guardian and who ended up eating his own words like so many before him and to come.
Dawn Watson, If you would like to know how effective the low carbon energy alternative is, especially during a cold snap, lobby Glasgow council to allow the city’s energy to flow directly from Whitelee Wind Farm rather than from the high percentage fossil fuel based energy supplied by the national grid. If you succeed in persuading them I’ll warrant we’ll be able to hear the resulting bitching all over the UK.
Yes, we need a secure energy supply but new energy sources do not just pop out of a hat fully formed. Solar panels and windmills are not the answer. At best they provide a minor supplementary input. The only current real alternative to oil and gas is nuclear but due to laziness on the behalf of several governments we are about to see that source dwindle very shortly.
A critique of Jeffrey Sachs’s very expensive vanity project Millennium Villages
http://brasstacks.org.uk/africa/blog/2007/08/25/criticisms-of-the-millennium-villages-some-thoughts/
Key quote: “I don’t, bluntly, think Sachs has been entirely honest in this.”
It would seem that Jeffrey Sachs is not a man who can take criticism.
@BB
Why do you think that it goes without saying that a business because it sells products or services has to have no integrity?
Anyway because of the Guardians love of everything which is so called green then it should be renamed The Guardener?
Just a coward who’s got to do his part protecting Gavin and Jim.
Here is the Soros connection:
S O R O S F O U N D A T I O N S N E T W O R K R E P O R T (2005)
http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/annual_20060724/a_complete.pdf
Anthony, Project Syndicate is a Soros-backed org. Time to put that guy out of business.
Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levelsStudy claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/21/sea-level-geoscience-retract-siddall
ken cole (03:30:06)
The Ice Age hipe in the 70’s was due to cooling and science just trying to use the time frames between Ice Ages to calculate when this one is to occur.
All of science missed the boat in actually exploring into the cause and effect to an Ice Age.
Why does Mars not have water and we do?
What protects our water from evaporating away?
SALT
Has the next Ice Age started? Yes!
The salt in our oceans have changed dramatically on both being saltier in some areas and much less in others to increase evaporation and cloud cover.
You go Anthony. Ditto. Take them down. I’ll be right with you.
Anthony, I have a great respect and admiration for your relentless efforts to build bridges, produce the correct science and promote dialogue.
But there won’t be any honest discussion.
As we concluded many times this is not about science but politics.
Dirty politics!
All that really helps is to continue our path and present the best of the science and inform those open to the truth.
We will really get them when we trigger a political shift which puts us in a position to cut the funding of the institutions promoting the scare, stop the Government propaganda machine, role back the rulings and clean house.
That’s the only way to go.
That Jeffrey D. Sachs is the one who, with his leftist and populist economics, has broken down many countries that followed his apocalyptic advices.
This clearly shows that there is quite a well articulated liberal “staff”, in international institutions or near them, ready to advice in “convenient” policies, from fake climate change to suicidal economics.
Dawn Watson (03:58:56) :
Stop bitching, and think about how we want our future to be, support a large scale refurbishment of existing building stock, it’ll help eradicate fuel poverty, create local jobs and kick start the economy….
—————–
Reply:
Absolutely astounding.
First, gutting the current system won’t help make the transition. It should be market driven, not policy driven based on “creative science” as I view AGW. When market forces argue for the transition to something else for what you call “fuel poverty”, it should be done in the most logical, efficient procedure possible and in the correct direction. There are many promising technologies on the horizon right now that should be given the chance to mature before making a solid decision. (And no, we’re not just suddenly going to run out of nuclear fuel, coal, oil or gas.)
While your ultimate aim may be noble from your perspective, the economic hardships faced in getting there may be insurmountable.
Let me offer you some perspective as a mining engineer–one who has worked on projects w/ capital outlay of up to $1.5 Billion.
First of all, you must consider whether the technology you’re embracing (wind, solar, no nuclear, no carbon) even makes sense.
Then, if the capital doesn’t exist to make the transition, it won’t happen; it SHOULDN’T happen.
Do you want to think about that for a moment? Just where is all this money going to come from to jump from a system that’s working efficiently right now (and no, I don’t believe CO2 is anywhere near the main driver in “climate change”–if that is the reason for your position then you need to re-think it) to a system that entails untenable, unreliable components as a solution? Are you willing to just do without electricity when the winds don’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?
Would you personally finance such an approach? No you wouldn’t, and that’s why it’s is taking hair-brained governments to do the pushing. Well, group think on something like this by politicians is laughable. LAUGHABLE!
So dear mad’am, please take your fanciful attitude someplace else and get logical and real. What you’re dreaming up is all fine and dandy if you got a degree in Art History or Socialism, but it doesn’t work very well in the real world.
What you’re advocating could easily bankrupt nations, leaving them incapable to capitalize the very transition you’re so sure they need to make.
There is a far better way.