Update: A guest post response, along with a comment from me has been posted, please see A big (goose) step backwards
Guest Opinion: Dr.Tim Ball
Skeptics have done a reasonable job of explaining what and how the IPCC created bad climate science. Now, as more people understand what the skeptics are saying, the question that most skeptics have not, or do not want to address is being asked – why? What is the motive behind corrupting science to such an extent? Some skeptics seem to believe it is just poor quality scientists, who don’t understand physics, but that doesn’t explain the amount, and obviously deliberate nature, of what has been presented to the public. What motive would you give, when asked?
The first step in understanding, is knowledge about how easily large-scale deceptions are achieved. Here is an explanation from one of the best proponents in history.
“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”
————————–
Do these remarks explain the comments of Jonathan Gruber about legislation for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare? Do the remarks fit the machinations of the founders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the activities of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) disclosed in their 6000 leaked emails? It is instructive to know that Professor Gruber’s health care models are inaccessible, protected as proprietary.
The author of the quote was a leader whose lies and deceptions caused global disaster, including the deaths of millions of people. In a complex deception, the IPCC established a false result, the unproven hypothesis that human CO2 was causing global warming, then used it as the basis for a false premise that justifies the false result. It is a classic circular argument, but essential to perpetuate the phony results, which are the basis of all official climate change, energy, and environmental policies.
They successfully fooled the majority and even though many are starting to ask questions about contradictions, the central argument that CO2 is a demon gas destroying the planet through climate change, remains. There are three phases in countering what most people understand and convincing them of what was done. First, you have to explain the scientific method and the hypothesis they tried to prove, instead of the proper method of disproving it. Then you must identify the fundamental scientific flaws, in a way people understand. Third, you must anticipate the next question, because, as people grasp what is wrong and what was done, by understanding the first two stages, they inevitably ask the basic question skeptics have not answered effectively. Who did it and what was the motive? You have to overcome the technique so succinctly portrayed in the cartoon (Figure 1).
The response must counteract all the issues detailed in Adolf Hitler’s cynical comments, but also the extremely commendable motive of saving the planet, used by the IPCC and alarmists.
Figure 1
There are several roadblocks, beyond those Hitler identified. Some are inherent to individuals and others to society. People want to believe the best in people, especially if they have certain positions in society. Most can’t imagine scientists would do anything other than honest science. Most assume scientists avoid politics as much as possible because science is theoretically apolitical. One argument that is increasingly effective against this concern is funding. Follow the money is so basic, human greed, that even scientists are included.
Most find it hard to believe that a few people could fool the world. This is why the consensus argument was used from the start. Initially, it referred to the then approximately 6000 or so involved directly or indirectly in the IPCC. Later it was converted to the 97 percent figure concocted by Oreske, and later Cook. Most people don’t know consensus has no relevance to science. The consensus argument also marginalized the few scientists and others who dared to speak out.
There were also deliberate efforts to marginalize this small group with terminology. Skeptics has a different meaning for science and the public. For the former they are healthy and necessary, for the latter an irritating non-conformist. When the facts contradicted the hypothesis, namely that temperature stopped rising while CO2 continued to increase, a more egregious name was necessary. In the latter half of the 20th century, a denier was automatically associated with the holocaust.
Another form of marginalizing, applied to minority groups, is to give them a unique label. In climate, as in many other areas where people keep asking questions for which they receive inadequate answers, they are called conspiracy theorists. It is why I prefer the term cabal, a secretive political clique or faction, named after the initials of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale, ministers to Charles II. Maurice Strong referred to the cabal when he speculated in 1990,
What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?…In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?
The motive emerged from the cabal within the Club of Rome around the themes identified by their founder, scientist Alexander King, in the publication The First Global Revolution. They took the Malthusian argument that the population was outgrowing food resources and said it was outgrowing all resources. The problem overall was bad, but was exacerbated and accelerated by industrialized nations. They were later identified as the nations in Annex 1 of the Kyoto Accord. The objective to achieve the motive was to reduce industrialization by identifying CO2 as causing global warming. It had to be a human caused variable that transcended national boundaries and therefore could only be resolved by a world government, (the conspiracy theory). Two parallel paths required political control, supported by scientific “proof” that CO2 was the demon.
All this was achieved with the political and organizational skills of Maurice Strong. Neil Hrab explains how Strong achieved the goal.
How has Strong promoted concepts like sustainable development to consume the world’s attention? Mainly by using his prodigious skills as a networker. Over a lifetime of mixing private sector career success with stints in government and international groups, Strong has honed his networking abilities to perfection. He can bring presidents, prime ministers and potentates from the world’s four corners to big environmental conferences such as the 1992 Rio Summit, an environmental spectacle organized by Strong and attended by more than 100 heads of state.
Here is a simple flow chart of what happened at Rio.
The political structure of Agenda 21 included the environmental catch-all, the precautionary principle, as Principle 15.
In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
What reads like a deep concern for doing good, is actually a essentially a carte blanche to label anything as requiring government intervention. The excuse for action is the unassailable “protect the environment”. Who decides which State is capable? Who decides what is “serious” or “irreversible”? Who decides what “lack of full scientific certainty” means?
Maurice Strong set out the problem, as he saw it, in his keynote speech in Rio in 1992.
“Central to the issues we are going to have to deal with are: patterns of production and consumption in the industrial world that are undermining the Earth’s life-support systems; the explosive increase in population, largely in the developing world, that is adding a quarter of a million people daily; deepening disparities between rich and poor that leave 75 per cent of humanity struggling to live; and an economic system that takes no account of ecological costs or damage – one which views unfettered growth as progress. We have been the most successful species ever; we are now a species out of control. Our very success is leading us to a dangerous future.”
The motive was to protect the world from the people, particularly people in the industrial world. Measure of their damage was the amount of CO2 their industry produced. This was required as scientific proof that human CO2 was the cause.
From its inception, the IPCC focused on human production of CO2. It began with the definition of climate change, provided by the UNFCCC, as only those changes caused by humans. This effctively sidelined natural causes. The computer models produced the pre-programmed results and everything was amplified, and exaggerated through the IPCC Summary for Policymakers. The deception was very effective because of the cynical weaknesses Hitler identifies, the natural assumption that nobody could deceive, on such an important issue, and on such a scale, but also because most didn’t know what was being done.
People who knew, didn’t think to question what was going on for a variety of reasons. This situation makes the statement by German meteorologist and physicist Klaus-Eckert Puls even more important.
“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.”
Puls commented on the scientific implications of the deception when he said,
“There’s nothing we can do to stop it (climate change). Scientifically, it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob.”
Now, as more and more people learn what Puls identifies, they will start to ask, who did it and what was the motive. When you understand what Adolf Hitler is saying in the quote from “Mein Kampf” above, you realize how easy it was to create the political formula of Agenda 21 and the scientific formula of the IPCC. Those responsible for the formation, structure, research, and final Reports, easily convinced the world they were a scientific organization making valid scientific statements. They also quckly and easily marginalized skeptics, as the leaked CRU emails exposed.
Do you have another or better explanation of a motive?
=======================================================
Disclaimer [added]: This post is entirely the opinion of Dr. Tim Ball, it does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Anthony Watts or other authors who publish at WUWT. – Anthony Watts
Update: A guest post response, along with a comment from me has been posted, please see A big (goose) step backwards
At first it was noble cause. As the money and fame arrived they became the drivers. If you want to stop the gravy train you have to kill the engine. Proscecute.
Chris
November 23, 2014 at 10:25 pm
Read Orwell’s 1984. A disturbing yet prophetic blue print for the current CAGW crowd.
And don’t forget your two minutes of daily hate for the “dopers” and especially the hippies. It is not just the left who are deniers.
Power Grab
November 23, 2014 at 10:24 pm
The associations don’t exist to serve the members, they exist to stop competition and maintain their own power. Truth seekers need not apply.
Ah. The medical industrial complex.
http://classicalvalues.com/2014/11/how-the-medical-industry-works/
Now that we manufacture precious little in the US…
Not true. Manufacturing as a % of the economy has declined only slightly and even that trend is reversing. So much so that there is a skilled labor shortage.
What has happened is that machines have replaced labor. Thus the skills shortage.
Re my M Simon November 24, 2014 at 5:20 am
Interestingly enough even hobby machinists are going to computer controlled machines.
About Maurice Strong’s most telling statement was the following:
‘We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.’
He elaborated on the idea of sustainable development, which he said, can be implemented by deliberate ‘quest of poverty … reduced resource consumption … and set levels of mortality control’.
No thanks to Maurice Strong, we now have the UN pushing his AGENDA 21.
As one of the posts above asked, ‘This is a parody, isn’t it?”. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Instead it’s a display of the conspiracy thinking rampant among the anti-Science crowd. (Now citing Hitler!). Confirmation bias transformed into paranoia.
I don’t expect we’ll see any questioning of this idiocy anywhere on WUWT.
warrenlb,
Several of us have in fact pointed out that it is the climate kooks who are much better at conpsiracy theory and that Dr. Ball should leve it to the experts.
It should be fair game for both sides to question the other side’s motives, no?
Don’t the proponents of CAGW claim the skeptics are motivated by money from CO2 producing industry?
And identifying a motive does not mean one has proved a case. Investigators of crime look for motive as a possible indicator of guilt so they can focus their investigative effort to prove or disprove the person’s guilt.
If a skeptic scientist received funding from the coal industry this is a possible motive for the theory that he is bending science because he is paid to do so. It is not actual proof. Actual proof is almost impossible to find in that context. Do you scream “conspiracy” when CAGW proponents complain about the (very small) number of industry funded skeptic scientists?
Good point. Fun Guy,
“Alex, I’ll take libcult nonsense for $1000.00”
The question is:
Do you have another or better explanation of a motive?
A: What are – POWER & CONTROL, MONEY, PERSONAL AGGRANDIZEMENT and FEAR OF BEING ASSAULTED AND DENIGRATED BY FANATICS?
It is always interesting to see a Hitler quote, but never mentioning what he was discussing at the time of his quote. But the question of the day is motive, and I disagree with the “Club of Rome” theory.
The EU was a grand experiment designed for the purpose of seeing if you could take sovereign nations and turn them into subservient states. That is, that the once independent nations would willingly give up their sovereignty “for the greater good of the many.” It worked, at least up to now.
The UN. on the other hand, was designed to be a place where nations could take their inter-nation disputes to be solved through mediation. It craved to be, instead, a world government. Slowly it has been working towards that end. It is to be an unelected government, which the later EU would be modeled from, and therefore isn’t intended to be responsible for the people that it represents. It lacks two things, however. One is a true mechanism to collect revenue to support itself and the second is a military arm to enforce its decisions. There are those that would say the US has been using the UN to allow it to enforce its will, I believe the opposite is true. Nearly all those that aspire to high office can’t get enough power, thus the idea of a world government, with power over the entire planet creates a desire to enable that, as it increases their personal power to do so.
Two things stand in the way of world government, however, and those two things are strong national governments and the lack of “a cause.” With the creation of the EU, many of the strong national governments started to disappear. With the destruction of the Soviet Union and the attempt to make sure that no such nation could rise in its place, that opened the door to hope. It would take little more than to create “a cause” and proper application of that cause would bring about the downfall of the remaining sovereign nations and make the people of the world willingly subjugate themselves to the world government. And “the cause” chosen was “global warming,” and the method used to subjugate the people of the world was “deindustrializing” to save the world from becoming another Venus.
The IPCC figures centrally in the charade, and those that would work “for the cause” I am sure were to be well rewarded in the end. There really is no other choice. It isn’t about making an innocent mistake, It isn’t about making gobs of bullion. It’s about forwarding the UN agenda of world government and its obvious intent to enforce population control – look at its other programs. Global warming is that great world wide threat that was to enable it to become the world government, for only a powerful central government would be able to make all peoples on the Earth make the changes needed “to save the Earth for future generations.”
You may think otherwise. I might be wrong, but I doubt it.
” But the question of the day is motive, and I disagree with the “Club of Rome” theory.” And then you go on to support the theory. What makes you think the EU isn’t just one step in the process? Or the CoR isn’t just another step? The central point being made is AGW is an artifice of control and not climate.
I agree with your assessment of the EU. Sovereign nations gave up the fundamental sovereign power (the power to create and control its own currency). I’m sure many politicians were duped into neutering their power but I also suspect many other politicians were serving masters greater than their countries and duped their people into going along with the EU.
I am just as cynical about the UN. As you note, the UN is set up to seem more fair and democratic. But is a guise. Just like American democracy is a guise. The permanent members, and specifically the U.S., actually run the show and no real democratic movement that truly threatened the power elite would succeed in the U.N. It’s a show to make the world feel like they have a nice and caring supranational body looking out for them.
The U.N. was founded as a wartime tool. Even the history of its founding has been fuzzed to make it seem kinder and gentler than it really was.
Sadly, all sides will cherry pick data and corrupt science to support its agenda. Science and math are no longer respected, just pawns in a power struggle to corrupt and control the population’s minds
Manning doesn’t speak for conservatives
Preston Manning’s Reform Party was born in part as a reaction to Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Policy and its devastating carbon taxes.
Manning was to make fighting taxes, and the slippery political excuses for them, a hallmark of his political career. When Canada signed Kyoto Protocol, Manning was the leader of the opposition.
His 45-minute speech to Parliament on Nov. 26, 1997, remains the best articulation of why Canada should never have signed that treaty. He pointed out its constitutional and political problems. And he railed against taxes – he used the word 25 times in his speech.
That was classic Manning, the reason why true conservatives loved the Reform Party: It was unafraid to defy the politically correct consensus in Ottawa. Today, skepticism about the science and economics behind the theory of man-made global warming has been largely vindicated.
So it was shocking to read Manning’s editorial, in the Toronto Globe and Mail last week, announcing his support for carbon taxes.
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/11/22/manning-doesnt-speak-for-conservatives
Mosher,
Your’e being purposefully mendacious as usual.
Your “to save the planet ” pitch and petulant shot at Ball’s piece and the thread misses the target entirely.
As with all things there are exceptions and so some in the rank and file out there do believe there mission is too save the planet.
Unfortunately the bulk of the AGW disciples in sciences, government entities, NGOs and sub causes who continue to perpetually pitch falsehoods left any noble cause long ago.
There willingness to parrot the red herring and bromides while maintaining purposeful ignorance and deceit show their true colors.
Anyone genuinely aboard a noble cause would be deeply concerned about any flaws in their mission and it’s effectiveness to assure their efforts and resources were not wasted.
Hiding from answering simple and germane questions is the elephant in the mendacious room you conically reside.
Funny how skeptics who are so very careful when it comes
To evidence and data completely toss that critical thinking aside when someone tries to divine the motives of an organization and individuals.
Just hilarious.
Steven,
It is hilarious but it is also tragic. A climate catastrophe is by now clearly not happening. The evidence is not there. Jiggling around over tiny changes in surface temps over decades is never going to make a real world crisis. Sea level, pH, ocean heat – none are making a crisis. And the circular arguments that attribute cooling events to warming only make the climate obsessed look sillier than anything written by a skeptic here. If only someone of your stature would stand up to the consensus forums that regularly publish this sort of essay and much worse and tell them how out of line they are.
Not all of us, Steven Mosher.
See my comment at November 23, 2014 at 1:00 pm
I wrote, “Seriously, we can’t know why everyone does things. We can determine the motivations in individual cases (well, we can make a well justified guess). But we can’t tell why a whole wave of academics, politicians and charities took on this crusade to save the world. All we can do is look at who benefits and what suppresses the opposition.
We can find institutional pressures – we can’t find the actual motivations.”
And it’s worth looking at the dog that didn’t bark. There are a lot of WUWT regulars who have not commented on the thread. Search on Pamela or Tisdale, for example. Jimbo and Chip Javert have only one comment.
You are in danger of generalising.
Just a short pennyworth….
When proposing a giant conspiracy, please remember that you do not need a giant conspiracy. All you need is a minor conspiracy, backed by some influential people, and the masses will jump on the bandwagon.
Everyone like to hob-nob with the rich, famous and influential, and if these people have joined the bandwagon, you can be sure that millions of others will do so too. Especially if there is the tantalising prospect of lots of funding on the horizon – and a flashy public badge that says “I am saving the planet. …. I am a better person than you”.
One of my biggest disappointments in life, is the late realisation of how easily corruptable, and self-corruptable, many people are. I have seen so many who will say black is white, in order to join a club, society, movement or even a bar conversation – anything to stop themselves being marginalised and ostracised from the “in-club”.
These are the bandwagon followers, and they will follow the band unthinkingly and unflinchingly, until following the bandwagon impacts upon their little world. They don’t care what the bandwagon is or what it promotes, they are only following for their own benefit. And they will continue to follow, until it is no longer in their interest to do so — if following the band will invite ridicule, for instance. Only then, will the bandwagon finally disband.
Ralph
I thought it was obvious. The originators of the scare such as Carl Sagan and Jim Hanson did back-of-the-envelope calculations which frightened them. Then you get Club-of-Rome types jumping-on-the-band-wagon and forcibly explaining that nothing would be done unless you exaggerate the evidence – politicians are too short-term to bother about next century. There’s a famous quote of Carl Hanson’s that explains his thinking along those lines.
Once you’re into a deception like that, it’s hard to get out.
Besides, they still believe that the earth is gaining radiation energy which will manifest itself as increased surface temperatures in the future (as well as more violent storms). With the atmospheric lifetime of CO2 estimated at 30–95 years the calculations get quite scary. [ Archer, David (2009). “Atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel carbon dioxide”. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 37. pp. 117–134. doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206.]
So they feel they have to stop CO2 production. That’s also why they won’t think of diverting any activities towards adaptation – not even improving land-use (industrial farming creates approximaely 16% of emissions).
Personally, I want to play the Precautionary Principle Get-Out clause of ‘provided it cannot do worse harm’ which they haven’t proven – unintended consequences abound …
Dr. Ball’s articles are typically interesting and insghtful and present the skeptical case well.
This is not one of those articles.
Attribution of motive is difficult andseldom works. Look at how poorly the climate obsessed have done with skeptics: Their obsession with skeptical motives onoly makes them look sillier and sillier.
Invoking Godwin’s Law hurts the one who falls into it. choosing to make a quote by the most hated person of the last several hundred years an important part of the article only makes many otherwise open minded people shut out Dr. Ball.
Anything that relies on charts of relationships of bad guys is fraught with danger to the expositor.
Leave conspiracy speculation to thecliamte obsessed, they are the ones who depend on it.
Skeptics only need to stick to the facts: The climate is not in crisis, the data is not well handled, the oceans are not changing behavior in either slr or pH, storms, droughts, floods, heat and cold are not trending in any direction at all.
Wrestling with the climate kooks over the one thing they are good at: conspiracy thinking only gets skeptics muddy.
Preston Manning on reconciling economy and environment: ‘Canadians need a dose of realism’
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/preston-manningon-reconciling-economy-and-environment-canadians-need-a-dose-of-realism/article21577763/
Preston Manning, Paul Martin among advisers of new group on economy, environment
http://www.660news.com/2014/11/04/blue-chip-advisory-panel-says-putting-price-on-pollution-the-way-to-go/
Terence Corcoran: Canada’s Ecofiscal Commish gears up for Green Taxapalooza
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/11/04/terence-corcoran-the-ecofiscal-scheming-starts/
In socially-complex, large-scale, politicized, if nominally-scientific cases like so-called climate change, it is important not to let the field of debate become others’ motives. That path leads down Alice’s rabbit-hole; chases a Cheshire Cat.
It’s superficially a fool’s errand of course, but on deeper levels it plays more-pathetically into the opposition’s hand.
All social animals operate by “somehow” communicating & pursuing joint or common objectives. Motivation is the “somehow” hand-maiden of objectives. Dinosaurs were at least sometimes social; they had group-objectives, and they responded to motivational-drivers that assured & rewarded the attainment of goals.
Individuals then compete, to be the leader who signals objective & motivation cues, to the group. It becomes possible – and attractive – to fake or deceive, to obtain control. To better-perpetuate one’s own DNA … or social paradigm. This dynamic – manipulating perceptions & cues – goes way, way back.
Male dogs competing for the attention of a female in heat, can be observed to fake an alert-response, indicating say an intruder on the periphery. Other dogs then run barking in the direction of the bogus threat, while the cagey old dude saunters up to the comely gal.
There are those who try to interest us in the motives of murderers and child-abusers. “If we understand why this crime happened, we might learn how to help the offender!”
No: the Constitution and our Legal system make only weak acknowledgement of motives, and for tried-and-true reasons. We are well-advised to take this policy & principle as our guide, in the question of the motives of climate change activists & activism.
Motives exist; they are real, huge, powerful & important … but it’s a losing debate-gambit, to get drawn into the motives-swamp.
People Starting To Ask About Motive For Massive IPCC Deception?
The goal is a world government aka ‘globalization’ and CAGW is the method for destroying the first world and making that goal possible.
Here are some bits and pieces to add to the picture.
Paul Warburg, a European banker came to the USA to write the Federal Reserve Act that allowed the European bankers to siphon off the wealth of the USA. Warburg was considered one of the top authorities on central banking in Europe. Warburg was also a director of the Council on Foreign Relations (1921–32), a trustee of the Institute of Economics (1922–27), and a trustee of the Brookings Institution. Max Warburg, Paul’s brother was among those who sent Lenin with a train full of gold to overthrow the Russian government. We Americans helped pay for it. (See speech by Congressman Louis McFadden.)
James P. Warburg was Paul Warburg,s son and FDR’s chief advisor, during the 1930’s
Pascal Lamy in his essay Whither Globalization? point blank stated:
Here is James Warburg again in 1950:
I am surprised how many skeptics drop their guard and accept suspect methods of argument
“Do you have another or better explanation of a motive?”
you’ve see this form of argument before..
with regards to Oil money and Skeptics and with regard to C02 and the warming we’ve seen since 1850.
+1. Attribution of motive and conspiracy is something best left for the climate obsessed. Lewandowsky does it better than just about anyone. Leave him and his pals to the kookdom they work so hard to achieve.
Dr. Ball can do better..
What a pity. They came for my neighbor, the black, but I’m not black, I’m not concerned. The true reason behind what is happening SHOULD be the most important thing to you, but instead, “let’s play in our sand box and not be concerned with what is happening across the street.”
Tom O,
If the climate kooks start coming for anyone I will man the barricades. If you want to dwell in conspiracy world, you are only feeding the Lewandowsky’s and Sou’s.
What about climategate? Isn’t that the definition of a conspiracy? Conspiracy has a bad connotation but the fact is conspiracies exist in real life. Prosecutors charge conspiracies every day.
Isn’t the way the IPCC set up sort of a conspiracy? It is predesigned to achieve a certain result and a group of people work together to achieve that goal and will engage in underhanded tactics to achieve that goal.
Sure, point taken that calm debate of the science without impugning the motive of the other side is the high ground that should normally be taken on a site like this.
But there is a place for discussions about motive . . . especially when there is evidence of a compelling motive and actually conspiracies have been proven (climategate).
Climategate, if they were describing an investment bank hiding declines, suppressing audits, shaping media, etc. would be a criminal conspiracy. “criminal conspiracy” is a legal construct when it is not an obsession of Lewandowsky. Since the climate obsession is not an investment bank but a social mania legal rules did not and do not apply.
Leave the conspiracy accusations to the climate kooks. They do it much better and rely on it to sustain their obsessions. Skeptics only have to rely on reality: The climate is not in crisis, is not changing dangerously and is not going to do so because of CO2.
Dr. Ball is a brilliant scientist. He is not so good at playing in the home field of the climate obsessed. This essay of his will echo around longer than his good work and will be used to discredit his good work.
I’m not sure if others have mentioned this. I’m in the middle of something else, so my apologies in advance.
Bob, you are over analyzing. Why were there “flappers” in the 1920’s? How did the hippy movement become so large? Why did everyone listen to Nirvana? Simple. It was “cool”. Alarmed and concerned about climate change is the cool thing to be right now. Nothing more. And nothing less. Cool means that a politician can get votes, a researcher can get grants, a newspaper can get readers. Uncool doesn’t get anything. No one determines what is “cool”. It just, sort of . . . happens. I’m sure Carl Jung had an explanation, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
Does that mean the death camps in Hitler’s Germany were ‘cool?’ Or that banning DDT that caused the deaths of millions was ‘cool?’ Or that listening to misanthropic nut jobs like Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Erlich, Rachel Carson and Stephan Schneider are ‘cool?’ Or that when people die of the cold due to energy prices being too high we can just say, ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ Or when billions in Africa and Asia are consigned to energy poverty because of the stupidity of elite technocrats, that it’s just ‘cool’ working itself out. If you’re having to collect cow shit to warm your home or cook with I don’t think ‘cool’ would be how you’d describe it.
There is a helluva lot more to it than cool. No conspiracy theory is wanted or needed, however. The whole movement can be explained in terms of Group Think, or True Believers, or Phase Locking which I’m partial to as laid out in Christopher Essex’s book, Taken By Storm.
The concept presented is spot on but in typically brazen fashion, it’s projected against the science. The Big Lie is the fossil fuel and ideologically driven and funded denial industry of which WUWT is an integral part.
Kyle, I am a scientist (PhD theoretical physics) and I find blogs such as WUWT much more scientific than any other sources. If you have documented evidence that fossil fuels are funding the “denial industry” please pass them on – but please dig down to the root of them first (don’t just pass on a facebook comment). One signature of WUWT is that it constantly refers back to the original observational data. That’s what scientists value. That’s ALL that scientists value.
[Snip. Pejoratives like deniers, ‘the denial industry’, denialism, etc., violate site Policy. ~mod.]
Testing. WUWT appears to be censoring effective exposers of denial.
[Let’s see. WUWT is censoring (stopping) only the “effective” people who “expose” those who deny climate change?
What about those who less effectively censor those who are expounding those who deny the people who deny they are not changing the climate?
Now, how many double or quadruple negatives are you supposedly “testing”?
No writer, no reader here has ever denied climate changes. .mod]
continued –
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/27/environment.science
Oil firms fund climate change ‘denial’ by David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday 27 January 2005 11.56 EST
Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.
Bob May, president of the Royal Society, says that “a lobby of professional sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change” is turning its attention to Britain because of its high profile in the debate.
Writing in the Life section of today’s Guardian, Professor May says the government’s decision to make global warming a focus of its G8 presidency has made it a target. So has the high profile of its chief scientific adviser, David King, who described climate change as a bigger threat than terrorism.
Prof May’s warning coincides with a meeting of climate change sceptics today at the Royal Institution in London organised by a British group, the Scientific Alliance, which has links to US oil company ExxonMobil through a collaboration with a US institute.
Last month the Scientific Alliance published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute in Washington that claimed to “undermine” climate change claims. The Marshall institute received £51,000 from ExxonMobil for its “global climate change programme” in 2003 and an undisclosed sum this month.
Prof May’s warning comes as British scientists, in the journal Nature, show that emissions of carbon dioxide could have a more dramatic effect on climate than thought. They say the average temperature could rise 11C, even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were limited to the levels expected in 2050.
David Frame, who coordinated the climate prediction experiment, said: “If the real world response were anywhere near the upper end of our range, even today’s levels of greenhouse gases could already be dangerously high.”
Emission limits such as those in the Kyoto protocol would hit oil firms because the bulk of greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuel products.
Prof May writes that during the 1990s, parts of the US oil industry funded sceptics who opposed action to tackle climate change. A Scientific Alliance spokesman said today’s meeting was sponsored but funders did not influence policies. ExxonMobil said it was not involved.
One adviser is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, who is linked to the Marshall Institute. In 1998 Dr Baliunas co-wrote an article that argued for the release of more carbon dioxide. It was mass-mailed to US scientists with a petition asking them to reject Kyoto.
• Tony Blair yesterday attempted to urge George Bush to sign a climate change accord. At the World Economic Forum he said climate change was “not universally accepted”, but evidence of its danger had been “clearly and persuasively advocated” by a very large number of “independent voices”.
[So, the climate catastrophe academic-government complex IS censoring those who are funding renewable energy and paying billions in taxes and higher energy prices caused by the CAGW industry! .mod]
[Snip. Pejoratives like deniers, ‘the denial industry’, denialism, etc., violate site Policy. ~mod.]
continued –
http://www.newsweek.com/global-warming-deniers-well-funded-99775
Global Warming Deniers Well Funded
BY NEWSWEEK STAFF 8/12/07 AT 8:00 PM
Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”
If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. Yes, 19 million people watched the “Live Earth” concerts last month, titans of corporate America are calling for laws mandating greenhouse cuts, “green” magazines fill newsstands, and the film based on Al Gore’s best-selling book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Oscar. But outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”
Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was “a lot” of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was “mainly caused by things people do.” In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world’s economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is “a lot of disagreement among climate scientists” on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.
As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of actual action. Yes, last September Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark law committing California to reduce statewide emissions of carbon dioxide to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent more by 2050. And this year both Minnesota and New Jersey passed laws requiring their states to reduce greenhouse emissions 80 percent below recent levels by 2050. In January, nine leading corporations—including Alcoa, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Du Pont and General Electric—called on Congress to “enact strong national legislation” to reduce greenhouse gases. But although at least eight bills to require reductions in greenhouse gases have been introduced in Congress, their fate is decidedly murky. The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives decided last week not even to bring to a vote a requirement that automakers improve vehicle mileage, an obvious step toward reducing greenhouse emissions. Nor has there been much public pressure to do so. Instead, every time the scientific case got stronger, “the American public yawned and bought bigger cars,” Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey congressman and physicist, recently wrote in the journal Science; politicians “shrugged, said there is too much doubt among scientists, and did nothing.”
It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
The reaction from industries most responsible for greenhouse emissions was immediate. “As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began,” says historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. Individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance—formed lobbying groups with names like the Global Climate Coalition and the Information Council on the Environment. ICE’s game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research. ICE ads asked, “If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?” This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.
Shaping public opinion was only one goal of the industry groups, for soon after Hansen’s sweat-drenched testimony they faced a more tangible threat: international proposals to address global warming. The United Nations had scheduled an “Earth Summit” for 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and climate change was high on an agenda that included saving endangered species and rain forests. ICE and the Global Climate Coalition lobbied hard against a global treaty to curb greenhouse gases, and were joined by a central cog in the denial machine: the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank. Barely two months before Rio, it released a study concluding that models of the greenhouse effect had “substantially exaggerated its importance.” The small amount of global warming that might be occurring, it argued, actually reflected a simple fact: the Sun is putting out more energy. The idea of a “variable Sun” has remained a constant in the naysayers’ arsenal to this day, even though the tiny increase in solar output over recent decades falls far short of explaining the extent or details of the observed warming.
In what would become a key tactic of the denial machine—think tanks linking up with like-minded, contrarian researchers—the report was endorsed in a letter to President George H.W. Bush by MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. Lindzen, whose parents had fled Hitler’s Germany, is described by old friends as the kind of man who, if you’re in the minority, opts to be with you. “I thought it was important to make it clear that the science was at an early and primitive stage and that there was little basis for consensus and much reason for skepticism,” he told Scientific American magazine. “I did feel a moral obligation.”
Bush was torn. The head of his Environmental Protection Agency, William Reilly, supported binding cuts in greenhouse emissions. Political advisers insisted on nothing more than voluntary cuts. Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, had a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and “knew computers,” recalls Reilly. Sununu frequently logged on to a computer model of climate, Reilly says, and “vigorously critiqued” its assumptions and projections.
Sununu’s side won. The Rio treaty called for countries to voluntarily stabilize their greenhouse emissions by returning them to 1990 levels by 2000. (As it turned out, U.S. emissions in 2000 were 14 percent higher than in 1990.) Avoiding mandatory cuts was a huge victory for industry. But Rio was also a setback for climate contrarians, says UCSD’s Oreskes: “It was one thing when Al Gore said there’s global warming, but quite another when George Bush signed a convention saying so.” And the doubters faced a newly powerful nemesis. Just months after he signed the Rio pact, Bush lost to Bill Clinton—whose vice president, Gore, had made climate change his signature issue.
Groups that opposed greenhouse curbs ramped up. They “settled on the ‘science isn’t there’ argument because they didn’t believe they’d be able to convince the public to do nothing if climate change were real,” says David Goldston, who served as Republican chief of staff for the House of Representatives science committee until 2006. Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a reporter, is “anything severe.” Michaels had written several popular articles on climate change, including an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1989 warning of “apocalyptic environmentalism,” which he called “the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism.” The coal industry’s Western Fuels Association paid Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science. (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than $165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry funding, asking, “What is this, a hatchet job?”)
The road from Rio led to an international meeting in Kyoto, Japan, where more than 100 nations would negotiate a treaty on making Rio’s voluntary—and largely ignored—greenhouse curbs mandatory. The coal and oil industries, worried that Kyoto could lead to binding greenhouse cuts that would imperil their profits, ramped up their message that there was too much scientific uncertainty to justify any such cuts. There was just one little problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—the international body that periodically assesses climate research—had just issued its second report, and the conclusion of its 2,500 scientists looked devastating for greenhouse doubters. Although both natural swings and changes in the Sun’s output might be contributing to climate change, it concluded, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.”
Faced with this emerging consensus, the denial machine hardly blinked. There is too much “scientific uncertainty” to justify curbs on greenhouse emissions, William O’Keefe, then a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute and leader of the Global Climate Coalition, suggested in 1996. Virginia’s Michaels echoed that idea in a 1997 op-ed in The Washington Post, describing “a growing contingent of scientists who are increasingly unhappy with the glib forecasts of gloom and doom.” To reinforce the appearance of uncertainty and disagreement, the denial machine churned out white papers and “studies” (not empirical research, but critiques of others’ work). The Marshall Institute, for instance, issued reports by a Harvard University astrophysicist it supported pointing to satellite data showing “no significant warming” of the atmosphere, contrary to the surface warming. The predicted warming, she wrote, “simply isn’t happening according to the satellite[s].” At the time, there was a legitimate case that satellites were more accurate than ground stations, which might be skewed by the unusual warmth of cities where many are sited.
“There was an extraordinary campaign by the denial machine to find and hire scientists to sow dissent and make it appear that the research community was deeply divided,” says Dan Becker of the Sierra Club. Those recruits blitzed the media. Driven by notions of fairness and objectivity, the press “qualified every mention of human influence on climate change with ‘some scientists believe,’ where the reality is that the vast preponderance of scientific opinion accepts that human-caused [greenhouse] emissions are contributing to warming,” says Reilly, the former EPA chief. “The pursuit of balance has not done justice” to the science. Talk radio goes further, with Rush Limbaugh telling listeners this year that “more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not likely to significantly contribute to the greenhouse effect. It’s just all part of the hoax.” In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 42 percent said the press “exaggerates the threat of climate change.”
Now naysayers tried a new tactic: lists and petitions meant to portray science as hopelessly divided. Just before Kyoto, S. Fred Singer released the “Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change.” Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy, had run the U.S. weather-satellite program in the early 1960s. In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they “cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes.” Unfortunately, few of the Leipzig signers actually did climate research; they just kibitzed about other people’s. Scientific truth is not decided by majority vote, of course (ask Galileo), but the number of researchers whose empirical studies find that the world is warming and that human activity is partly responsible numbered in the thousands even then. The IPCC report issued this year, for instance, was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.
Although Clinton did not even try to get the Senate to ratify the Kyoto treaty (he knew a hopeless cause when he saw one), industry was taking no chances. In April 1998 a dozen people from the denial machine—including the Marshall Institute, Fred Singer’s group and Exxon—met at the American Petroleum Institute’s Washington headquarters. They proposed a $5 million campaign, according to a leaked eight-page memo, to convince the public that the science of global warming is riddled with controversy and uncertainty. The plan was to train up to 20 “respected climate scientists” on media—and public—outreach with the aim of “raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’ ” and, in particular, “the Kyoto treaty’s scientific underpinnings” so that elected officials “will seek to prevent progress toward implementation.” The plan, once exposed in the press, “was never implemented as policy,” says Marshall’s William O’Keefe, who was then at API.
The GOP control of Congress for six of Clinton’s eight years in office meant the denial machine had a receptive audience. Although Republicans such as Sens. John McCain, Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee spurned the denial camp, and Democrats such as Congressman John Dingell adamantly oppose greenhouse curbs that might hurt the auto and other industries, for the most part climate change has been a bitterly partisan issue. Republicans have also received significantly more campaign cash from the energy and other industries that dispute climate science. Every proposed climate bill “ran into a buzz saw of denialism,” says Manik Roy of the Pew Center on Climate Change, a research and advocacy group, who was a Senate staffer at the time. “There was no rational debate in Congress on climate change.”
The reason for the inaction was clear. “The questioning of the science made it to the Hill through senators who parroted reports funded by the American Petroleum Institute and other advocacy groups whose entire purpose was to confuse people on the science of global warming,” says Sen. John Kerry. “There would be ads challenging the science right around the time we were trying to pass legislation. It was pure, raw pressure combined with false facts.” Nor were states stepping where Washington feared to tread. “I did a lot of testifying before state legislatures—in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Alaska—that thought about taking action,” says Singer. “I said that the observed warming was and would be much, much less than climate models calculated, and therefore nothing to worry about.”
But the science was shifting under the denial machine. In January 2000, the National Academy of Sciences skewered its strongest argument. Contrary to the claim that satellites finding no warming are right and ground stations showing warming are wrong, it turns out that the satellites are off. (Basically, engineers failed to properly correct for changes in their orbit.) The planet is indeed warming, and at a rate since 1980 much greater than in the past.
Just months after the Academy report, Singer told a Senate panel that “the Earth’s atmosphere is not warming and fears about human-induced storms, sea-level rise and other disasters are misplaced.” And as studies fingering humans as a cause of climate change piled up, he had a new argument: a cabal was silencing good scientists who disagreed with the “alarmist” reports. “Global warming has become an article of faith for many, with its own theology and orthodoxy,” Singer wrote in The Washington Times. “Its believers are quite fearful of any scientific dissent.”
With the Inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001, the denial machine expected to have friends in the White House. But despite Bush’s oil-patch roots, naysayers weren’t sure they could count on him: as a candidate, he had pledged to cap carbon dioxide emissions. Just weeks into his term, the Competitive Enterprise Institute heard rumors that the draft of a speech Bush was preparing included a passage reiterating that pledge. CEI’s Myron Ebell called conservative pundit Robert Novak, who had booked Bush’s EPA chief, Christie Todd Whitman, on CNN’s “Crossfire.” He asked her about the line, and within hours the possibility of a carbon cap was the talk of the Beltway. “We alerted anyone we thought could have influence and get the line, if it was in the speech, out,” says CEI president Fred Smith, who counts this as another notch in CEI’s belt. The White House declines to comment.
Bush not only disavowed his campaign pledge. In March, he withdrew from the Kyoto treaty. After the about-face, MIT’s Lindzen told NEWSWEEK in 2001, he was summoned to the White House. He told Bush he’d done the right thing. Even if you accept the doomsday forecasts, Lindzen said, Kyoto would hardly touch the rise in temperatures. The treaty, he said, would “do nothing, at great expense.”
Bush’s reversal came just weeks after the IPCC released its third assessment of the burgeoning studies of climate change. Its conclusion: the 1990s were very likely the warmest decade on record, and recent climate change is partly “attributable to human activities.” The weather itself seemed to be conspiring against the skeptics. The early years of the new millennium were setting heat records. The summer of 2003 was especially brutal, with a heat wave in Europe killing tens of thousands of people. Consultant Frank Luntz, who had been instrumental in the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, suggested a solution to the PR mess. In a memo to his GOP clients, he advised them that to deal with global warming, “you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” They should “challenge the science,” he wrote, by “recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view.” Although few of the experts did empirical research of their own (MIT’s Lindzen was an exception), the public didn’t notice. To most civilians, a scientist is a scientist.
Challenging the science wasn’t a hard sell on Capitol Hill. “In the House, the leadership generally viewed it as impermissible to go along with anything that would even imply that climate change was genuine,” says Goldston, the former Republican staffer. “There was a belief on the part of many members that the science was fraudulent, even a Democratic fantasy. A lot of the information they got was from conservative think tanks and industry.” When in 2003 the Senate called for a national strategy to cut greenhouse gases, for instance, climate naysayers were “giving briefings and talking to staff,” says Goldston. “There was a constant flow of information—largely misinformation.” Since the House version of that bill included no climate provisions, the two had to be reconciled. “The House leadership staff basically said, ‘You know we’re not going to accept this,’ and [Senate staffers] said, ‘Yeah, we know,’ and the whole thing disappeared relatively jovially without much notice,” says Goldston. “It was such a foregone conclusion.”
Especially when the denial machine had a new friend in a powerful place. In 2003 James Inhofe of Oklahoma took over as chairman of the environment committee. That summer he took to the Senate floor and, in a two-hour speech, disputed the claim of scientific consensus on climate change. Despite the discovery that satellite data showing no warming were wrong, he argued that “satellites, widely considered the most accurate measure of global temperatures, have confirmed” the absence of atmospheric warming. Might global warming, he asked, be “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?” Inhofe made his mark holding hearing after hearing to suggest that the answer is yes. For one, on a study finding a dramatic increase in global temperatures unprecedented in the last 1,000 years, he invited a scientist who challenged that conclusion (in a study partly underwritten with $53,000 from the American Petroleum Institute), one other doubter and the scientist who concluded that recent global temperatures were spiking. Just as Luntz had suggested, the witness table presented a tableau of scientific disagreement.
Every effort to pass climate legislation during the George W. Bush years was stopped in its tracks. When Senators McCain and Joe Lieberman were fishing for votes for their bipartisan effort in 2003, a staff member for Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska explained to her counterpart in Lieberman’s office that Stevens “is aware there is warming in Alaska, but he’s not sure how much it’s caused by human activity or natural cycles,” recalls Tim Profeta, now director of an environmental-policy institute at Duke University. “I was hearing the basic argument of the skeptics—a brilliant strategy to go after the science. And it was working.” Stevens voted against the bill, which failed 43-55. When the bill came up again the next year, “we were contacted by a lot of lobbyists from API and Exxon-Mobil,” says Mark Helmke, the climate aide to GOP Sen. Richard Lugar. “They’d bring up how the science wasn’t certain, how there were a lot of skeptics out there.” It went down to defeat again.
Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine’s campaign. It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. “If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action,” says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995. By appointing former coal and oil lobbyists to key jobs overseeing climate policy, he found, the administration made sure that didn’t happen. Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial—and therefore no basis for making policy. Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney, working for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, edited a 2002 report on climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as “lack of understanding” and “considerable uncertainty.” A short section on climate in another report was cut entirely. The White House “directed us to remove all mentions of it,” says Piltz, who resigned in protest. An oil lobbyist faxed Cooney, “You are doing a great job.”
The response to the international climate panel’s latest report, in February, showed that greenhouse doubters have a lot of fight left in them. In addition to offering $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the report, which so angered Boxer, they are emphasizing a new theme. Even if the world is warming now, and even if that warming is due in part to the greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, there’s nothing to worry about. As Lindzen wrote in a guest editorial in NEWSWEEK International in April, “There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe.”
To some extent, greenhouse denial is now running on automatic pilot. “Some members of Congress have completely internalized this,” says Pew’s Roy, and therefore need no coaching from the think tanks and contrarian scientists who for 20 years kept them stoked with arguments. At a hearing last month on the Kyoto treaty, GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher asked whether “changes in the Earth’s temperature in the past—all of these glaciers moving back and forth—and the changes that we see now” might be “a natural occurrence.” (Hundreds of studies have ruled that out.) “I think it’s a bit grandiose for us to believe … that [human activities are] going to change some major climate cycle that’s going on.” Inhofe has told allies he will filibuster any climate bill that mandates greenhouse cuts.
Still, like a great beast that has been wounded, the denial machine is not what it once was. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 38 percent of those surveyed identified climate change as the nation’s gravest environmental threat, three times the number in 2000. After ExxonMobil was chastised by senators for giving $19 million over the years to the Competitive Enterprise Institute and others who are “producing very questionable data” on climate change, as Sen. Jay Rockefeller said, the company has cut back its support for such groups. In June, a spokesman said ExxonMobil did not doubt the risks posed by climate change, telling reporters, “We’re very much not a denier.” In yet another shock, Bush announced at the weekend that he would convene a global-warming summit next month, with a 2008 goal of cutting greenhouse emissions. That astonished the remaining naysayers. “I just can’t imagine the administration would look to mandatory [emissions caps] after what we had with Kyoto,” said a GOP Senate staffer, who did not want to be named criticizing the president. “I mean, what a disaster!”
With its change of heart, ExxonMobil is more likely to win a place at the negotiating table as Congress debates climate legislation. That will be crucially important to industry especially in 2009, when naysayers may no longer be able to count on a friend in the White House nixing man-datory greenhouse curbs. All the Democratic presidential contenders have called global warming a real threat, and promise to push for cuts similar to those being passed by California and other states. In the GOP field, only McCain—long a leader on the issue—supports that policy. Fred Thompson belittles findings that human activities are changing the climate, and Rudy Giuliani backs the all-volunteer greenhouse curbs of (both) Presidents Bush.
Look for the next round of debate to center on what Americans are willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings. No amount of white papers, reports and studies is likely to change that. If anything can, it will be the climate itself. This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It’s enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.
[Your copied words are seven years out of date. .mod]
You act like a troll. Not a shred of evidence in this posted comment. All innuendo, hearsay, and name calling. If the believers in AGW are so sure of their “science” why won’t/don’t they engage in debate instead of trumped up mud slinging? To date there hasn’t been a single significant “scientist” willing to debate pro AGW. Why is that (rhetorical)?
I posted only the first few of many well researched and supported articles. WUWT censored them because they inevitably contain the 100% accurate descriptor that a those to whom it applies reject. Nice gig you have here.
[No. Your lengthy posts – despite instructions and the site policy about using your favored “denier” curse – will always go directly into the moderation queue as long as you persist in YOUR choice of that language. Change YOUR words, and your copied text will display immediately. Fail to follow posted instructions, and you will continue to fail to get posted immediately. .mod]
Reposting copyright material from The Guardian or Newsweek is not a “comment”.
When The Guardian or Newsweek want to come here and have their say, they will abide by the rules that pertain here … just as we will abide by their rules, when we comment there.
People who show up at TG or NW to push their envelope are not welcome.
I see that the usual dishonest moderation has not changed at WUWT. At least it isn’t as slimy as over at “Goddard”‘s nest of crackpottery.
[Reply: All we ask is that you stay within site Policy. That means no name-calling using insults like ‘denier’, ‘denialist’, etc. ~mod.]
You would not believe the competition to fill dishonest moderator positions.
… But that is interesting, that your behavior encounters acceptance-problems, elsewhere as well.
Hey, Kyle thinks he is a effective exposer of ‘den!*l”.
No *that* is unny.
Kyle is a steady ource of unintended humor
Thanks, Kyle!
Kyle,
Thank you for the Daily Onion humor coment.
Kyle, Your ignorance is only matched by your spittle flecked stupidity. You show up at a discussion and basically call those who disagree with you names that proves Dr. Ball- however poor some parts of his essay- is basically right: You climate obsessed are truly breath taking in your resistance to facts and fear of critical thinking.
I’m not sure what will come of this. If you can prove what motivates the IPCC, will it make a difference? The rank and file are true believers. If a cabal exists, they are tools only and not part of a cabal.
Motive? How about the push to rename and re-brand the UN’s North-South Partnership of rich and poor countries?
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/25587/jahangir-amuzegar/the-north-south-dialogue-from-conflict-to-compromise
The “conspiracy” label is just a media/academic/propaganda construct. It’s not a conspiracy, which is done by a few in secret, but a culture — far worse. There was no real conspiracy by Lenin/Stalin/Mao — mostly done in the open (except for the gorey details). It was a manufactured/indoctrinated culture, rooted in government dependency & supported by threats, bribes & handouts.
Seem familiar?