Uh oh. I’m sure this will cause brain explosions over at Joe Romm’s place and also at his politically bought and paid for ex-buddy Brad Johnson’s “Forecast the Facts” propaganda outlet. Maybe Brad will start another petition to keep us off PBS altogether this time.
Here’s the Press Release from PBS, followed by the preview video below.
Coming October 23, 2012. FRONTLINE explores the massive shift in public opinion on climate change.
Four years ago, climate change was hot. Politicians from both parties, pressed by an anxious public, seemed poised to act. But that was then.
Today, public opinion about the climate issue has cooled, and politicians either ignore the issue or loudly proclaim their skepticism of scientific evidence that human activity is imperiling the planet. What’s behind this reversal? FRONTLINE correspondent John Hockenberry of PRI’s The Takeaway goes inside the organizations that fought the scientific establishment, environmental groups, and lawmakers to shift the direction of debate on climate issues and redefined the politics of global warming.
Watch on air and online beginning October 23 at 10 pm ET on PBS.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/
I expect by about mid-November, after yet another skeptic media event following this PBS Frontline report (no, I’m not telling you who’s airing it) both Joe and Brad won’t have any brains left to explode. This time it isn’t just one climate skeptic they’ll have to start a campaign against.
Of course, they may like it, since you can see in the video that they are using the usual iconic visuals. Unfortunately, the Frontline editors won’t listen to people who tell them that steam being vented from power plant cooling towers has nothing to do with CO2 and its AGW effects, but that’s another story.
Let the games begin.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
This looks like another of those “We go inside the climate skeptic organisations and reveal how they have attacked honest climate scientists, misrepresented their work and spread misinformation,” or something like that.
Hardly something to make Romms head explode. Quite the reverse I imagine (whatever the reversal of a cerebral explosion looks like).
The change in opinion is not all due to climate contrarian’s efforts:
Climategate had an effect on public opinion.
Ditto glaciergate and Patchy’s behavior regarding it and other controversies.
China’s refusal to go along at Copenhagen put a damper on the bandwagon, because partial mitigation efforts are useless.
Various scientific papers have cast doubt on some of the case for alarm and the IPCC’s reasoning.
Wind and solar projects haven’t lived up to expectations after being subjected to scrutiny–and accordingly European governments are cutting back on subsidies for them.
Fracking has provided low-cost, low-CO2 natural gas in the US, making wind and solar uncompetitive even with subsidies.
Biofuel has come in for criticism that has tarnished the concept of “green” solutions.
Electric cars have been a flop.
China’s subsidized solar panel manufacturing has driven Western producers out of business and weakened the case for green jobs.
Consumers of electric power are starting to grouse about higher prices and suffer from fuel poverty in the winter (mostly in Europe).
Post-Copenhagen conferences have been unable to achieve a consensus and get China & India to buy in.
Global temperatures have stayed flat. US temperatures have declined.
Hurricanes & tornados haven’t increased.
Sea level rise hasn’t accelerated.
Australia’s greenies have made fools of themselves with their drought predictions and mothballed desalinization plants.
Labour looks set to lose the Australian election in Feb. Skeptic Harper won the Canadian election. Labour lost the UK election. This has cooled the bandwagon effect among politicians.
PS: The global financial crisis has made governments less willing to subsidize uneconomic wind and solar power.
PPS: The Inter-Academy’s (IAC’s) critique of the IPCC has taken the shine off its halo.
As time goes on and the trend continues it’s going to be really funny watching Warmists call huge swathes of the population “deniers”. Very soon the minority ‘quacks’ are going to be seen as the Warmists.
@ur momisugly Speed says:
October 4, 2012 at 3:49 am …. “Do any WUWT readers know of anyone interviewed?”
Joe Bast at the Heartland Institute told me the Frontline crew interviewed Heartland’s James Taylor and Fred Singer while both were at the Heartland skeptic conference in Chicago in May. Lord Monckton tole me that no one directly identified with Frontline contacted him, but he did speak at length with a person at that same conference that he speculates might have been involved with the Frontline program. Marc Morano told me he saw some of their people doing interviews at the Heartland conference.
Frontline was at a prior Heartland conference and had used the briefest of snippets of it in their 2008 2-hour “Heat” program, you can see those near the beginning of the 2nd hour where they show Fred Singer without identifying him: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/
Is it possible PBS is seeking an opportunity to begin the glibbering climb down, necessary for all alarmist organizations, in an attempt to save their ass?After all how safe is their income as the contributing public clues in to PBS’s complicity in the biggest scam in modern history? Independent free press indeed.As awareness of the media’s failure to investigate grows their influence falls and their revenues shrink.The fear of WUWT shown by the screamers, over Mr Watts appearance on PBS might have been a clue to their management.
NB Frontline:
In my Notes From Skull Island I list nearly 20 things that we climate contrarians (“skeptic” is too mild a term) would be doing differently if we were in fact well organized and well funded:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/05/out-manned-but-what-happened-to-the-science/#comment-760039
PPPS: The newfound availability of a century’s worth of cheap natural gas from fracking has also undercut the argument that, because fossil fuels will become scarce and expensive in a decade or two, we must start now to transition away from them and to renewable sources of supply.
My guess is they’ll put the spotlight on the least credible “sceptics” they can find. Or probably not even actually talk to any real sceptics, but cherry pick a bunch of made up strawman arguments as they are fond of doing. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it’ll be a flagrant hit piece against the sceptics using all their normal deceptive journalism techniques. I would be absolutely gobsmacked, to borrow a British saying, if they actually gave the sceptics an even remotely fair shake. Sigh… I can’t help but be exceedingly suspicious about PBS. I would expect them to try to undo the “damage” they allowed to happen on Newshour. Oh how I wish for the days before I became such a suspicious cynic.
When the first domino falls into the next, I am always amazed at: how quickly thousands of others fall within a matter of seconds. GK
There is one thing the computers cannot beat, and that is good honest people taking their own detailed recordings using, Stevenson Screens, where they live, on the propper site and ground. The minuites every day spent taking true reading will be worth far more than watching or listening to lies fantastic of the MSM.
The paradigm is being de-skilled in every corner of life and we are not seeing it, we have to re-skill and return in our millions. Millions versus a single department using computers is no contest towards the truth.
There used to be a program of such weather recording, all done by voulanteers for free, using a phone in model, back to basics is the way to destroy the thieves in our midst.
Go gather, get recordings, our sanity depends upon it and save us all billions.
I forgot to mention, All the public recordings can be kept on gold quality CD’s for hundreds of years for our chikdren to see, the truth in many hands is an arrow that not only flies true, but cannot be broken so easily.