You just have to laugh. Mike, Dana, and some other guy named Rick Piltz, get face-time on Al Jazeera and the best they can do is cite “false balance” and “tobacco disinformation campaigns” to bolster their weak 97% argument? Of course, no skeptics were present, since even a 3% appearance time would be a “false balance” by their reckoning. Mann of course is famous for not debating skeptics, and running away when faced with the prospect of sharing TV time with a skeptic.
Mike and Dana, don’t you find it a bit hypocritical that you use an instrument of “big oil” (Al Jazeera is founded and funded by the government of Qatar, which owns the state controlled Qatar Petroleum with earnings of $51.6 billion in 2011) to push your ideas?
Video follows.
Some quotes from the broadcast
There is a false balance of media coverage where two or three percent of skeptics get close to 50 percent of the media coverage because the media feels that they have to show a balance where they are showing both sides of the issue. But in the process they are giving that two or three percent 50 percent of the coverage and actually creating a false balance and false perception that there is a big divide among climate experts about the cause of global warming. – Dana Nuccitelli
and…
“The disinformation campaign can only survive for so long. We saw, as in the case of tobacco, there was a similar disinformation campaign decades ago to obscure the science and the scientific link between the use of tobacco products and lung cancer. But eventually the truth of what the science had to say became accepted. There are some positive signs that we are moving in that direction; the rest of the world is moving increasingly towards renewable energy …. We are lagging behind but we are slowly making progress ourselves.” -Michael Mann
The premise of their 97% claim, when you inspect the data from their project, doesn’t even hold up, and thus they are perpetrating lies of omission in addition to these tired propagandized talking points.
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“… they are perpetrating lies of omission in addition to these tired propagandized talking points.”
We should be surprised by this because…
“I am shocked, shocked that” there is obfuscation occurring in the climate science community, just as I am shocked that there is interest in a carbon tax among politicians. NOT
“We are lagging behind but we are slowly making progress ourselves.” -Michael Mann
It’s the drugs talking again.
Many AGW alarmists seem obsessed with smoking and tobacco. Did many of them recently quit smoking? Or do they still smoke?
In any case the logic of their efforts as applied to the AGW issue would be along the lines of:
“Some of the people who disagree with us today were on the unpopular side of other issues in the past, therefore all of the people who disagree with us today must be wrong”
I’m not sure to what logical fallacy that corresponds.
There are probably a billion gullible people in the world ready to lap up Dana’s equating of CAGW with AGW-97, but it questionable how influential they are. Barack Obama, for example, tweetied the meme, but he hasn’t put forth any substantive legislation for review by the people’s representatives because he knows he will lose. In my estimation Dana’s free publicity in the 97% of the media that is utterly ignorant will change nothing.
There IS a connection between global warming and tobacco, namely the “what the hell have these guys been smoking?” when you try to follow the warmers’ arguments.
Ironic that Mann is spending his life in PR and not science. Guess his obviously feeble mentality
is not up to scientific pursuits.
“False balance” is basically a 20 year-old talking point, possibly invented by IPCC scientist Stephen Schneider ( http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/stephen-schneider-arguing-for-censorship-in-1992/ ). I dived deeper into that particular talking point in my article two years ago, ” ‘Media Too Fair to Climate Skeptics’, say reporters who’ve been unfair to skeptics” http://ow.ly/iWKi6
Since this infantile ‘don’t listen to corrupt skeptics’ narrative is their only fallback defense position they have, that’s all we will ever see out of AGW promoters.
Survey: xx% BELIEVE (!) …
Survey: xx% FEEL (!) …
Mickey Mann must consider himself happy to sit straight face-to-face in front of the camera, otherwise all viewers would have seen his nose grow and grow and grow…
Maybe Mann has finally realized that his Hockey Stick has gone up in smoke?
It appears to me that this is an interview with a bunch of crackpot conpiracy theorists. They also appear to be natural climate change deniers, at least when it comes to changes over the last decades.
Is this what today’s science has come to in academia?
Answer, yes!
False balance? If there is no sceptic to present their views, then the warmists are just talking to themselves. Considering the suspect mental state of some of them, this should not be unexpected.
I don’t know where they get the figure that 50% of interviews are with sceptics.
Not on British MSM anyway – more like 3% sceptics to 97% warmists.
(Now why do those numbers look familiar?)
I wonder if they convinced the viewer?
“…But eventually the truth of what the science had to say became accepted (re tobacco). There are some positive signs that we are moving in that direction…” – M. Mann
Yes, at last there are some signs we are moving in the right direction – and this is good news to Mann et al?
These guys use the same old gag: “There we were, two against a hundred. Boy, did we ever kick the s*** out of those two guys.” I’m getting to like this 97% consensus. It will become an object lesson to be delivered to future science students that they should not be complacent being part of a majority, especially an extremely large one. It should signal the need for special due diligence and questioning. Perhaps we can hope we will have a mandatory professorial position in each university teaching how to find the loose threads in an hypothesis. Teaching how to investigate if there might be alternative explanations – historical climate science, like historical astronomy is rich with course material. They would be taught to great advantage that the internet is watching what they do and is merciless in dissection of sloppy work. Bring it on.
And from Al Jazeera, the news corporation with an Eastern bias – we get The Onion, the satirical magazine with an Eastern bias.
Al Jazeera logo:
The Onion logo:
http://www.third-beat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/the-onion-logo.png
.
Bernie Madoff was respected, admired, and possessed “great integrity” for a solid thirty years . . . . then finally, the scheme was revealed. Check out: http://www.cftc.gov/ then put “foreign currency ponzi scheme” in the search box . . . there are plenty of “bad actors” out there.
All pyrimiding schemes fail when they run out of people (“suckers”) to join . . . . and yup, I mean ALL!
What’s the solution? . . . How many ever heard of Bernie Madoff before he was exposed? That was a start. . . . . In my annotated humble opinion, of course.
PS. Al Jazeera exists under a Monarchy, and that is a completely different subject on “subjects”.
People never stopped getting cancer from smoking, but it did stop getting warmer.
Makes one wonder … what is these folks stance on “420” (incl legal ization) issues? Even there I think there are ‘issues’ with the lungs taking in ‘smoke’ …
.
It’s amazing what some data cherry picking and manipulation can get you these days. It’s the golden age of science scams for money.
SCheesman says:
May 18, 2013 at 10:09 am
People never stopped getting cancer from smoking, but it did stop getting warmer.
========================================================================
Because BIG OIL is paying the sceptics to stop the warming.
It should surprise no one that the alarmists think 0.22 percent (the actual percentage of scientists who believe in AGW, as measured by the signers of the Oregon Petition vs. the originators of the hoax) is exactly equal to 97 percent. You would expect that from the command of statistics and math that these people have exhibited (devastatingly demonstrated, for instance, by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, as described in A. W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion).
One more add on: Our world “Justice System” is so busy trying to unwind the banking pryamid that it’s like their pants are on fire . . . let’s take Cyprus . . . http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/18/us-cyprus-parliament-idUSBRE92G03I20130318
Euro zone urges Cyprus to spare smaller savers from bank levy
“Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, . . . . said . . . the tax was an alternative to a disorderly bankruptcy. It was painful, but “will eventually stabilize the economy and lead it to recovery”.
But many legislators remain unconvinced.
“Essentially parliament is called to legalize a decision to rob depositors blind, against every written and unwritten law,” said Yiannakis Omirou”
The whole article is important to me as many think it’s fine to rob the others, but don’t touch what they “stole fair and square” and amassed in “private”.
It’s why the what ‘we’ do before during and after Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Floods, Droughts, Tsunamis, Tornado’s, Hurricanes, Blizzards, Mudslides, and even Asteroids . . . is an important subject and an ongoing subject, as they are not going to go away, no matter what the “Climate Controllers” say.
Our society and ‘our government’ has much more power to regulate our banking systems and our citizen’s well-being than ‘we’ will ever have in regulating the World Climate. . . . In my annotated humble opinion, of course.
I bet the video was seen by more people here than on Al-Jazeera network. If they subscribe to Nielsen’s TV ratings they rarely if ever make them public.
Laurie Bowen says:
May 18, 2013 at 10:52 am
“One more add on: Our world “Justice System” is so busy trying to unwind the banking pryamid that it’s like their pants are on fire . . . let’s take Cyprus . . . ”
What? The system IS the hierarchical system of banks. Besides, the article is two months longs, and I won’t give a spoiler, you’d be surprised what happened in the meantime.
correction: …two months OLD…