I’m pleased to offer some essays and letters with links that have recently appeared in The Australian newspaper. One of them is an essay from my friend and fellow skeptic, Jo Nova, in Perth, who does a superb job with her rebuttal to an attempt to shut down debate on climate change.
Here’s a short timeline of events:
It seems to have started with this editorial piece: Climate debate no place for hotheads, by Graham Lloyd, Environment editor, The Australian, December 04, 2010
Then there were responses, a lot of them, in this summary of letters: Long may The Oz promote open debat, The Australia, December 07, 2010. plus there has been a flurry of related coverage:
Then there was this essay, by David McKnight, which brought out the ridiculous old “tobacco and big oil” arguments to use in smearing skeptics. Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths.
Followed by Jo Nova’s rebuttal to that essay: Newspapers should lead the country
Here’s McKnight’s essay:
Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths
- David McKnight From: The Australian December 11, 201
A response to The Weekend Australian’s summary of its editorial position on climate change
THE Australian is undoubtedly the most serious newspaper in Australia and its record on climate change matters because of this. More importantly, its stance matters because of the civilisational challenge that climate change presents to Australia and the world.
This was recognised by the chief executive officer of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, who warned in 2007 that climate change posed “clear catastrophic threats”. Murdoch also pledged that News Corporation would “weave this issue into our content” and “tell the story in a new way”.
I happen to agree with Murdoch’s description of the seriousness of the threat.
But there is a puzzle. In recent years The Australian campaigned in favour of objective facts in the teaching of Australian history against “political” interpretations.
By contrast, its attitude to the science of climate change has zig-zagged from a grudging acceptance of the facts to simple denial and back again.
In all modes, its stance is invariably dominated by old ideological obsessions that are tangential to this profound issue.
Last weekend in Focus, The Australian’s new environment editor, Graham Lloyd, defended his newspaper’s stance on climate change. It is healthy for a newspaper to publicly debate its stance on such an issue but Lloyd’s article was highly selective and, I believe, misleading.
Lloyd argues that there has been a “longstanding misrepresentation of this newspaper’s editorial position on climate science and its longstanding support for a global response to limit greenhouse gas emissions”.
Really? How longstanding? Editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Crikey last week that “for several years the paper has accepted man-made climate change as fact”. “Several years” is hardly longstanding. But Mitchell’s statement is also disingenuous because it omits vital facts.
As Lloyd showed, it is possible to find editorials in 1997 in The Australian under then editor-in-chief David Armstrong that accepted the science on climate change. But after that period, The Australian took a different direction. This is paradoxical. As the scientific evidence for climate change strengthened, the newspaper’s attitude went in the opposite direction.
At the beginning of 2006 an editorial agreed that the world was warming but claimed “no one knows . . . why it is happening” (January 14, 2006).
At the same time the newspaper described itself as “healthily sceptical about the possible causes of and solutions to global warming” (November 4, 2006). No wonder Mitchell confined himself to the phrase “several years”.
A couple of months after this, an editorial made the extraordinary suggestion that “the real debate on climate change is only now getting started”.
The editorial’s contribution to this debate was to disparage the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and proffer the long discarded sceptical claim that there was “a link between cyclical sunspot activity and the climate here on earth”.
Shortly after its “sunspot” editorial, The Australian published a feature article (“Rebels of the Sun”, March 17, 2007) recycling this discredited theory and lamenting that the debate “has become increasingly stifling and intolerant to dissenting voices”, citing fossil industry-funded sceptics, and attacking Al Gore, whose campaign on climate change was documented in An Inconvenient Truth.
For many years The Australian has been unable to see climate issues except through a distorted ideological lens. For example, an editorial on January 14, 2006, argued that the environment movement was about “more theology than meteorology” and “[S]upport for Kyoto cloaks the green movement’s real desire: to see capitalism stop succeeding”.
Later, an editorial accused “deep green Luddites” of believing that “the only way to avert the coming apocalypse is to close down all the power plants, take all cars off the road and return to a pre-industrial Arcadia” (June 8, 2007). Lloyd’s article last Saturday ignored these editorials.
He failed to mention that just before the 2007 federal election an editorial characterised an environmental approach in politics as wanting to “transform the nation into a wind-powered, mung bean-eating Arcadia” (October 27, 2007). This kind of unrestrained invective suggested the newspaper itself could be accused of hysteria and alarmism, a charge it regularly threw at those who disagreed with it.
Such rhetoric meant that genuine debate on climate in the pages of The Australian was simply not possible.
The newspaper continually framed the debate as one between, on the one hand, sensible sceptics and, on the other, “deep green Luddites”. By implication, the political and business leaders of Europe, plus Gore and Tony Blair, were in the latter category.
A newspaper’s columnists have access to valuable journalistic real estate under the sponsorship of the editor. Instead, The Australian’s columnists have largely repeated the paper’s dominant editorial line.
The former economics editor, Alan Wood, over many years characterised concern about climate change as “green hysteria”. Another occasional columnist, Alan Oxley, chaired the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation study centre that sponsored a conference of fossil fuel companies and climate deniers in Canberra in April 2005.
At the conference, he said, “Leading scientists also explained how the science on which Kyoto is based was unravelling and argued that the cataclysmic threat of global warming is oversold.”
Shortly afterward Oxley argued, “There is no reasonable certainty that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide from human activity cause significant global warming.” (August 2, 2005).
When the Howard government began to acknowledge that carbon emissions were linked to dangerous climate change, another regular columnist, Christopher Pearson, said he felt “bitter disappointment” about curbs on “what will turn out to be, in all probability, a perfectly harmless gas” (November 18, 2006).
Unsurprisingly, this column, as with many others from The Australian, was recycled on denialist websites around the world.
Lloyd reported that The Australian has defended the right of climate sceptics “to have a voice”. This is curious. Does it defend the right of tobacco sceptics to have a voice? Of course not, for the simple reason that all intelligent people recognised long ago that such sceptics were fronts for the tobacco industry and that the medical science of smoking was settled.
On climate issues The Australian still gives voice to a global PR campaign largely originated by the oil and coal companies of the US. On this score genuinely sceptical journalism is missing in action. Instead, an ideological sympathy with climate sceptics has been concealed behind a fig leaf of supposed balance.
But what shines through in the attitude of the newspaper is its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in dealing with the consequences of climate change. Climate issues are always taken as an opportunity for cheap shots about what The Australian calls “the Left” or “deep greens”. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the deep seriousness of the newspaper’s endlessly re-affirmed belief in free markets, competition and privatisation.
The Australian’s editorials and columns on climate change raise questions about its own standards of evidence.
For example, the newspaper never questioned the so-called evidence cobbled together to confirm Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
This was deemed adequate enough to support an invasion at a terrible cost in lives.
But the overwhelming evidence on climate change accumulated over more than 25 years by the best minds in the field was dismissed for many years by The Australian and is now only grudgingly accepted. This is what alarms many of Australia’s leading climate scientists.
The challenge posed by climate change to our economy and society is profound. Most Australian political leaders who are locked into the 24-hour news cycle see it as merely another issue. For a long time the newspaper has characterised climate change as an issue with a political, not scientific basis. It bears some responsibility for the impasse we have reached as a nation.
The role of a serious national newspaper is to give leadership on such issues. It could do this by asking hard questions on the future of the coal industry and on Tony Abbott’s comment that the science is “absolute crap”.
This is especially so given that climate change poses “clear catastrophic threats”, in the words of the newspaper’s publisher in 2007. On that score, I’m with Rupert Murdoch.
David McKnight is the author of several books on politics and history. He works in the arts faculty at the University of NSW.
==========================================================
Here is Jo Nova’s red hot rebuttal:
Newspapers should lead the country
A REPLY to a critic of The Australian’s coverage of the debate about climate change.
- Joanne Nova The Australian December 18, 2010
DAVID McKnight’s criticism of The Australian over climate change (“Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths”, Inquirer, December 11) makes for a good case study of Australian universities’ intellectual collapse.
Here’s a University of NSW senior research fellow in journalism who contradicts himself, fails by his own reasoning, does little research, breaks at least three laws of logic, and rests his entire argument on an assumption for which he provides no evidence.
Most disturbingly – like a crack through the facade of Western intellectual vigour – he asserts that the role of a national newspaper is to “give leadership”.
Bask for a moment in the inanity of this declaration that newspapers “are our leaders”. Last time I looked at our ballot papers, none of the people running to lead our nation had a name such as The Sydney Morning Herald. Didn’t he notice we live in a country that chooses its leaders through elections? The role of a newspaper is to report all the substantiated arguments and filter out the poorly reasoned ones, so readers can make up their own minds.
The point of a free press is surely for the press to be free to ask the most searching questions on any topic. Yet here is an authority on journalism attacking The Australian for printing views of scientists who have degrees of doubt about global warming and/or any human component in it.
And these scientists that McKnight wants to silence are not just the odd rare heretic.
The swelling ranks of sceptical scientists is now the largest whistle-blowing cohort in science ever seen. It includes some of the brightest: two with Nobel prizes in physics, four NASA astronauts, 9000 PhDs in science, and another 20,000 science graduates to cap it off. A recent US Senate minority report contained 1000 names of eminent scientists who are sceptical, and the term professor pops up more than 500 times in that list. These, McKnight, an arts PhD, calls deniers.
Just because thousands of scientists support the sceptical view doesn’t prove they’re right, but it proves their opinions are nothing like the tobacco sceptics campaign that McKnight compares them with in a transparent attempt to smear commentators with whom he disagrees.
Ponder the irony that McKnight, the journalism lecturer, is demanding The Australian adopt the policy espoused by the dominant paradigm, the establishment, and censor the views of independent whistleblowers.
He thinks repeating government PR is journalism; the rest of us know it as propaganda.
McKnight doesn’t name any scientific paper that any sceptic denies. Instead, he seems to use a pre-emptive technique designed to stop people even discussing the evidence about the climate.
McKnight’s research starts with the assumption that a UN committee, which was funded to find a crisis, has really found one, and that it is above question. His investigation appears to amount to comparing articles in Fairfax versus Murdoch papers, as if the key to radiative transfer and cumulative atmospheric feedbacks lies in counting op-ed pieces. If he had made the most basic inquiry, McKnight might also have found out that the entire case for the man-made threat to the climate rests on just the word of 60 scientists who reviewed chapter nine of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report.
He’d also know that the people he calls deniers, far from being recipients of thousands of regular Exxon cheques, are mostly self-funded – many are retirees – and that Exxon’s paltry $US23 million for 1990-2007 was outdone by more than 3000 to one by the US government alone, which paid $US79 billion to the climate industry during 1989-2009.
So “sharp” is McKnight’s analysis that he calls the independent unfunded scientists “a global PR campaign originating from coal and oil companies”, but all while he is oblivious to the real billion-dollar PR campaign that is waged from government departments, a UN agency, financial houses such as Deutsche Bank, the renewable energy industry, the nuclear industry and multi-hundred-million-dollar corporations such as the WWF.
The job of a newspaper, he indicates, is to decide which scientist is right about atmospheric physics. Is Phil Jones from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit right, or is Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist, right? Add that to the duties for aspiring national editors. Tough job, eh?
McKnight’s main error in his article – accepting an argument from authority – has been known in logic for 2000 years, and his entire synopsis is built around this fallacy.
Just suppose, hypothetically, that the government employed many scientists on one side of a theory and none from the other. McKnight’s method of “knowing” who is right involves counting the institutions and authorities who support the grants – I mean, the theory. If science were exploited this way, McKnight would fall victim every time, blindly supporting the establishment.
That doesn’t prove he’s wrong but his analysis is confused at every level. He claims The Australian has zig-zagged from acceptance to denial but then later accuses The Australian’s columnists of repeating “the dominant editorial line”. But which editorial line would be dominant: the zig type or the zag? In science, evidence is the only thing that counts, not opinion. McKnight, the follower of funded opinions, has the gall to question The Australian’s standards of evidence but the only evidence he offers is a collection of opinions. McKnight paints himself as an authority on journalism yet fails to investigate his base assumption, research the targets of his scorn or understand the role of the free press: he is his own best example of why argument from authority is a fallacy.
If our journalism lecturers are feeding students with ideas of leadership roles, how decrepit is the institution where students are not even taught that the highest aim of a journalist is to ask the most penetrating questions and leave no stone unturned, so the people they serve might have the best information?
Such is the modern delusion of the activist-journo: McKnight wants to be the leader, to dictate what the public can think and to direct where public spending goes, but he doesn’t want to bother running for office or to expose his claim to open debate. He’s nothing more than a totalitarian in disguise.
Joanne Nova is a commentator and the author of The Skeptics Handbook. She is a former associate lecturer in science communication at the Australian National University.
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Go Jo! Her rebuttal reminds me that we all should be speaking out vigorously against the CAGW cabal and the misuse of our tax dollars to fund the climate industry.
My favorite line:
Bask for a moment in the inanity of this declaration that newspapers “are our leaders”. Last time I looked at our ballot papers, none of the people running to lead our nation had a name such as The Sydney Morning Herald.
Right on! And you can substitute New York Times, Washington Post, etc. for the Sydney Morning Herald…
Game! Set! Match! JoNova
Sense Seeker says:
December 17, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Here is a quick quiz for you Sense seeker.
Which of the following errors in the IPCC AR4 report were found by the NAS or the “wider scientific community” who “thoroughly examined” the report, and which were found by unpaid amateurs and sceptics.
* Himalayan Glaciers
* African crop yields
* Amazon rainforest
* Disappearing mountain ice
* Dutch sea level error
* Trends in disaster losses
* Bangladesh Land Loss
* Potential of wave power to produce electricity
* Antarctic sea ice expanse
No point seeking something with eyes wide shut.
“I seek it here, I seek it there, I seek it everywhere, that elusive sense and sensibility”
David McNight says:
The jury is still out on a possible link between the periodicity
of sunspots (one measure of solar activity among others) and
the influx of unblocked cosmic rays gradually impacting
certain types of cloud formation.
————————————————————————
David McNight says:
Sadly, some of us knew as it progressed that the specious WMD
allegations put forth against Iraq were the product of American
anger after 9/11 and the urge to be seen as “doing something”
about global terrorism.
The push for a secure source of oil for Europe and points west
not dependent on Arabia or Russia focused great attention on
enhanced development of Iraq’s petroleum resources.
Iraq had aggressively sought to take away part of Kuwait’s oil
fields… and might do so again in the future.
Several nations in the immediate area, Iran, Turkey, and Israel
had vested strategic interests in having the sixth largest military
establishment in the world taken off the map as a threat… and
in not having their hands soiled by their taking direct action.
This tainted a great deal of intelligence the west got from local
sources.
One of the UN inspectors about to go to Iran to confirm or
deny the presence of WMD was murdered on British soil, and
the MoD made sure there wasn’t even a full, official inquest.
A CIA operative was “outed” by members of the Bush/Cheney
administration in order to somehow silence her spouse, who
had information discrediting the “they’re buying yellow cake”
allegations.
From my perspective:
There seems very little difference between the creation
and collation of spurious and speculative information that
brought us a nasty little multi-purpose war in Iraq and
the effort to incite people to “do something” about the
soft science ”facts” cobbled together to fight global
warming.
McKnight was shot down in flames. By Jo Nova!
Even up here, in the far far North, in Norway, we notice the voice of reason from Australia.
O/T – Steve Goddard has resurrected John Daly’s old chart showing how USHCN temps were adjusted back in 2000 to hide the fact that 1930’s temps were higher than the 1990’s.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/cooking-the-books-at-ushcn/
I always understood from John + also Steve McIntyre that the original graphs + data were deleted at GISS.
However I have found them on the GISS website.
The graph is on the PDF, last page (Plate A2)
Paul
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1999/Hansen_etal.html
Jo Nova says “He’s nothing more than a totalitarian in disguise.”
I didn’t see any disguise!
Thanks for this article….It’s always refreshing to see a great mind such as Jo Nova tackle a prejudiced little brain. I was puzzled that McKnight cited Rupert Murdoch as promoting pro-AGW bias; yet Murdoch’s Fox News is the only television organization with fair and balanced reporting, including their coverage of AGW. Unfortunately, McKnight did not provide a verifiable reference for his claim.
The media (IE journalists because they all work for the media) are after the all mighty advertising dollar as much as researchers are after whatever grants are available, even if they have to spew chunks to get those dollars. Notice that ratings are all the rage between news programs. Why? Because top ratings get to charge more for commercial time. If you make a splash in research, you get a leg up on the next round of grants. No matter that your splash is partly made of or entirely made of whole cloth.
There is no other type of journalism today. Whoever you work for lives or dies by the commercials and advertising you can get. Factual, well researched, or investigative journalism, IE boring dry stuff, are way down the list of priorities. Journalists these days have to bleed one way or the other, else their words won’t see the light of day.
In cased you missed it, here is Crowder at the Cancun con-con. Nice inside view … Question, will Al Gore become the Bernie Madoff of environmentalism?
abc aus , science show sat 18th dec had suzuki waffling, he will be featured again as will that woman?orzbach? ??/
while as always NO other views or research is allowed to be heard.
gee I wish I wish I wish that Jo Nova would have a floor wipe with R williams and co!
Bravo Joanne Nova. Piqued, repiqued and capotted McKnight.
As a Forensic Investigator in real life all I can say is that nothing yet produced by the AGW/Climate Change minority would pass the basic tests of acceptability as “evidence” in any court of law. As for the demand that action be taken to “silence the skeptics” that is the last resort of every would be dictator – silence the opposition. It probably says far more about the real agenda of the Green minority than anything else.
At 11:33 PM on 17 December, Sense Seeker had closed a post with:
.
The same old “global warming” panicker putzelry I’ve been seeing for the past decade and more. Endless argumentum ad populum and appeal to authority but never pertinent factually supported response to reasoned critique or requests for confirmation of data or expatiation upon methodology.
The fact that there are credentialed charlatans professionally and financially (especially financially) invesed in the great “man-made climate disruption” fraud is not disputed. Counting their brown noses tells us nothing whatsoever about the validity of this preposterous ghost of an illusion of an unproven hypothesis.
The continuing whine of the warmist fellahin that only those “Cargo Cult Science” practitioners who’ve been sucking down literally billions of dollars in research funding over the past ten or twelve years on the basis of frenetic squealing about climate catastrophe are entitled to an opinion on this subject has gotten beyond the point at which it can be taken with any response other than pure contempt.
There is no need for any scientifically trained and practiced individual to defer to the card-carrying snake oil salesmen who have polluted the mainstream of climatology. Those of us with such backgrounds – whether in chemistry, physics, biology, or any subsidiary discipline thereof – have more than sufficient capability to discern when sound methods are being pursued, and when pure fraud is being perpetrated.
As the homely old saying goes: “You don’t have to be a chicken to tell when an egg is rotten.”
—
The Left waxes nostalgic for the tobacco debate. They just cannot understand why that model is not working now for the climate debate. Lo and behold, a journalism professor is taking a newspaper to task because it will not play the sweet pooch and roll over as it did in the tobacco debate. Clearly, he is just another Kommissar who would have all of us bow and scrape to his scientific idols. Thank God for the clear and logical argument of Jo Nova. She is another individual hero, like McIntyre and others, who will deserve much credit if free people survive this latest assault on their freedoms. Clearly, our institutions have failed us. Academia no longer understands its tasks and the professors are just communist windbags who lack the basic skills, especially in reasoning, that once characterized their disciplines. Jo Nova and other heroes are fighting for our liberties and the very existence of these heroes depends on the tradition of independent thought that remains strong among the populations of America, Australia, and a few other places.
Sense Seeker says:
December 17, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Sense Seeker quotes:
“Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”
I have a standing challenge to anyone who can produce the hypotheses which are necessary to explain the so-called “forcings” that would take the warming effects of CO2 from the harmless one degree that Lindzen accepts to the harmful three or four degrees that Warmista need for their outrageous hunches of Armageddon. Can you produce those hypotheses, in your own words? I did not think so. In “The Great Global Warming Blunder,” Roy Spencer explains brilliantly why they do not exist. Science works with hypotheses, not computer models, yet Warmista produce only runs of computer models and no hypotheses.
Oh, by the way, in case you are seduced by folks claiming that “the science is settled,” you can find on the internet today discussions of the fact that the Periodic Table is being revised. Yes, that Periodic Table. Also, Pluto is no longer a planet. Who could have known that science changes?
I assume the Green Aussies have recognised the elephant in the room. Australia exports about 200 million tonnes of coal each year. If these guys are really committed then it would be hypocritical not to close down the national coal industry altogether.
Keep it comin’, Jo. Love it!
Nova nailed the problem with journalism and news agencies today, that being journalists see themselves as leaders, opinion makers and activists rather than chroniclers of events. That is a far cry from the purpose of their industry.
I like reading JoNova…. She adroitly pulls the stuffing out of other Journalist’s tripe and lays bare the guts of their pointless point…..
She certainly gave David McKnight a flogging. The guy is clueless, and JoNova is chillingly correct in her assumption….. If McKnight is the academic standard of modern Journalism. The “activist Journo”….. Then the free press is dead. It no longer exists as we knew it. But then again…….. Perhaps it’s been dead for a long time now? Perhaps the Internet is showing us it’s rotting corpse, crawling with McKnights and other fetid creatures?…..;-)
Because of all this crap, people are dying………….
Stupid glorified weathermen/climatologists predicting warm winters,
stupid governments believed them and were not prepared.
Fuel prices doubling, and people can not even afford heat.
People are dying because of this crap.
Why isn’t everyone raising hell about it?
Why are people not laying blame where it belongs?
Why is no one holding them accountable?
Sense Seeker writes:
“I agree that shutting up dissenters is not elegant, but if they try to block measures that protect other people from the effect of smoking or getting malaria by arguing the causality is not established, they may be sent back to provide proof before being allowed to speak. They certainly do not deserve equal attention to the consensus view.”
My hat is off to you, Sir. You are that unheard-of-bird, the honest Kommissar. You see, Sir, you just said that you will control debate for the good of the masses. At best, you are an extreme Utilitarian of the Peter Singer variety who places no value on individual liberty whatsoever. Neither you nor any form of government has a right to end debate among free people. And please notice that if we follow your principle then science becomes a handmaiden to policy; that is, scientific truth takes a back seat to your view of what is good for the masses. You would deprive all of us of free exercise of our intelligence for the purpose of achieving your social aims. Do you have a position in a communist government?
Sense Seeker writes:
“Added to that, the estimates have large uncertainty margins. In sum, the observations by Riva et al did not invalidate the climate models.”
Sir, no observation can invalidate a model run. Models are analytical tools only. One cannot make predictions from models. If the scientists had hypotheses, which are necessary to make predictions, you can bet that they would present them, assuming that they are reasonably confirmed. To say that models can be invalidated by observations is roughly the same as saying that a computer chess model “predicts” its moves. Nonsense.
Sense Seeker; Yes there is consensus in science, but you need to distinguish between that and “consensus science”, which is completely different, and which is exceedingly dangerous. Specifically, read about the “science” of eugenics. Today, it is in fact the pseudoscientific alarm over manmade warming/climate change/disruption/chaos which has fallen into the very same trap.
I am shocked at how out of touch McKnight seems to be. I know people who could not care less about the AGW argument and they would tear this guy apart. If this is a representation of the best the pro-AGW’s can do, the end will be a whimper, not a bang. Now the politicians just have get a clue as to which way the wind is blowin’, and Anthony will have to start another blog on a different subject. Actually that is not true. Most skeptics that I know were fascinated by the weather (a function of climate) long before someone said “the debate is over”and will continue to enjoy Anthony’s WUWT? long after the AGW horse has been sent to the glue factory. It was an overwhelming interest in the weather ( did I mention it is a function of climate ) that drew me to Anthony’s site many moons ago. My experience with alarmists has been that they have no knowledge base to draw from when forming their opinions. A few informed questions will usually cause them to fly off the handle. Very few have researched any deeper than what they are spoon-fed. McKnight is a case in point.
Wow, the old “big oil” meme, which usually gets tied to the thought that evil capitalist corporations are funding the skepticism. I recently addressed this on Steve Goddard’s site, here.
Most of us can recall this story, where BP, Conoco, and Catepiller withdrew from USCAP earlier this year.
For an explanation of who and what is USCAP, go here, http://www.us-cap.org/
“United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) is a group of businesses and leading environmental organizations that have come together to call on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”
The membership list,
* AES
* Alcoa
* Alstom
* Boston Scientific Corporation
* Chrysler
* The Dow Chemical Company
* Duke Energy
* DuPont
* Environmental Defense Fund
* Exelon Corporation
* Ford Motor Company
* General Electric
* General Motors Company
* Honeywell
* Johnson & Johnson
* Natural Resources Defense Council
* NextEra Energy
* NRG Energy
* PepsiCo
* Pew Center on Global Climate Change
* PG&E Corporation
* PNM Resources
* Rio Tinto
* Shell
* Siemens Corporation
* The Nature Conservancy
* Weyerhaeuser
* World Resources Institute
Understanding that BP and Conoco were members until last Feb, and Shell’s current membership in this group, it appears that contrary to the lie of skepticism being funded by “big oil”, that alarmists are indeed the true shills for not only large conglomerate oil companies, but global corporations in general. This isn’t some money, it is the money.
Yes, there is a lot of corporate money being thrown at Climate Science research, but it doesn’t go to the skeptic camp. There’s a couple of old sayings about following the money and strange bedfellows. Indeed. For people suddenly confused about what team you’re on and who you’re playing for, I highly encourage going to the us-cap link provided and reading about each entity. Please note, some of these companies go by different monikers depending on the country they’re in.
Enjoy.