The End is Near for Faith in AGW

When the public learns about huge faults in the skeptic scientist accusation, combined with the faults in the IPCC, the result may send AGW into total collapse.

Guest post submitted by Russell Cook

I’m preaching to the choir here when I say appearances of people hiding AGW’s problems beg for clichés – the emperor has no clothes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, nothing to see here, move along. But I’m not a scientist, nor do I have a scintilla of expertise to say with any authority that the IPCC is wrong and skeptic scientists are right.

The one thing I can do is offer an ordinary citizen’s informed view of what the barrier is preventing skeptics’ viewpoints from being heard, and how that barrier can turn from the paper-thin success story it is into a cancer that has the potential to wipe out the entire ideology of AGW.

Notice that I said ‘informed view’. I watch the mainstream media, but I also read sites like this one, while a large chunk of the public does not. Therein lies the problem, as evidenced by this example: On October 12, 2007, the PBS NewsHour aired a glowing broadcast about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize, in which IPCC scientist Michael Oppenheimer offered scary scenarios rivaling those in Gore’s movie. Two days prior, a UK judge ruled there were nine errors in the movie and it could only be shown in UK schools “with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination”. Yet, I defy anybody to locate a solitary mention of this in any NewsHour broadcast.

See the problem? From my extensive digging through the NewsHour’s broadcast archives, Michael Oppenheimer has appeared on the program eight times and three other IPCC scientists have appeared there on six occasions collectively, all speaking at length about AGW with no rebuttal. How many times have skeptic scientists been allowed a similar opportunity there? Zero. Our friend Pat Michaels appeared once briefly in a taped segment to give his thoughts about ClimateGate…. four months after that event was breaking news.

The nothing to see here, move along tactic works fine as long as the bulk of the audience doesn’t know legitimate skeptic scientists exist.

The keyword is ‘legitimate’, and that’s where the barrier comes in. When a large portion of people around the world learn about global warming through Al Gore’s movie and through internet repetitions of its details, or from viral regurgitated details from anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 The Heat is On and 2004 Boiling Point, then the perception is there are no legitimate skeptic scientists.

The Gore / Gelbspan / internet repetitions are one-and-the-same. Skeptic scientists are accused of being in a fossil fuel-funded conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“, and this mimics the old tobacco industry conspiracy. Everybody remembers how well that one turned out.

The key to the whole accusation is the “reposition global warming” sentence – it’s in Gore’s movie, it’s in two of the three global warming nuisance lawsuits, and was spread out as far as the eye could see on the internet beginning largely in 1996. When I first stumbled onto the phrase in late 2009, my google searches yielded seemingly endless amounts of accusers using the phrase, though lately all of my online articles about it have ‘tainted’ the search results rather noticeably.

Here’s the big problem I found:  That accusation is based on a 1991 memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, but Gore had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier.

And just days ago, Gore mysteriously contradicts himself again in Rolling Stone about who found the memo. He also slams the mainstream media, who’ve been largely responsible for creating and maintaining the barrier keeping the public unaware about skeptic scientists. But, that’s a rather old ruse to to prompt left-leaning journalists to say to themselves, “I’m not going to be duped into diluting the importance of this issue by giving equal time to skeptic scientists”. None of the current media people are insulted because they say, “I’m not that guy.” It’s been a very clever tactic, of course dependent on reporters intuitively knowing all skeptic scientists must be accepting fossil fuel money. Seventeen+ months of research on this allows me to point out these problems in my latest article, “Pt II: Is Gore’s Accusation of Skeptic Climate Scientists Still a Hoax?”

The thing to consider here is that AGW promoters absolutely, positively do not want to see the kind of debate that occurred at last November’s US House testimony between Richard Lindzen and Ralph Cicerone. Otherwise, it becomes abundantly obvious that Lindzen’s level of expertise is not something that would be paid for and pre-scripted in an Exxon conference room. And most critical of all, no reporter must ask in response to such an accusation, “There is proof that he’s literally paid to make that stuff up, right?”

Their mantra is ‘settled science’ / ‘corrupt skeptics’ / ‘the media dilutes the issue by talking to skeptics’. This only works when there is faith in that whole system, as in the US investment banks circa 2007 and Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme.

Wipe out the faith in this mantra and what happens?