Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Washington Times columnist Richard Rahn has noticed his name has been included in DeSmogBlog’s Global Warming “Disinformation Database” – and he’s not happy about it.
The return of pseudo-science
The global warming industry lashes out in defense of its funding.
This past month, I received an email from a European friend (who has a doctorate in chemistry) saying: “Dear Richard: Now you are a member of this illustrious club! I am beginning to be afraid! What is going on?” It seems my name had been put on a “Global Warming Disinformation Database.” This past Saturday, The Wall Street Journal in its lead editorial on the “climate police” noted that the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands has demanded that the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) “cough up a decade of emails and policy work, as well as a list of private donors” (as if the First Amendment did not exist), because the institute has had the audacity to question.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has invited more than a dozen state attorneys general to join him in investigating fossil fuel companies and their donations, because they raised questions about some of the “science” used by the global warming lobby. Al Gore joined him at the press conference. This is the same Al Gore who told us back in January 2006 that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gases, in only 10 years the earth would reach “a point of no return.” Mr. Gore also told us the Arctic Ocean would be largely free of sea ice by 2010 — but the sea ice is still there.
What is going on is nothing more than modern-day Lysenkoism, named after Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who had rejected Mendelian inheritance and the evolutionary theory of natural selection, and believed that acquired characteristics of a plant (like grafting of fruit trees) would be inherited by later generations. Lysenko was unable to win his arguments by the empirical evidence or sound theory but, since Stalin liked his ideas, it was made illegal to have any other opinion. Finally, after changes in Soviet leadership, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences in 1964: “He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firings, arrests, even deaths of many genuine scientists.”
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/2/richard-rahn-global-warming-and-the-return-of-pseu/
The following is a link to the database: http://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database
Naturally the first thing I did was look for my own name. Disappointingly I only rate a footnote in Anthony’s entry, which I guess is better than nothing.
On a serious note, it is disturbing that climate alarmists are compiling such ridiculously detailed “dossiers”, given the current US government attempt to revive the abuses of the McCarthy era, as climate advocates lose all sense of perspective in their increasingly desperate efforts to rally their dying cause.
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I read deSmog’s write-ups on five familiar people: Joe Bastardi, John Coleman, Anthony Watts, Roger Tattersall, and Willis Eschenbach.
In general, I saw no manipulative attitude or negative connotation given to these five hard-working men other than the usual ‘skeptics’ moniker. While the guys on the list could fairly and rightfully complain about being on the list at all or from possibly important omissions, I will say deSmog basically wrote neutral articles on those five, in what I consider to be their skeptic “wiki”.
In this case, we can’t complain that skeptical positions and opinions weren’t covered there, unlike the rest of the media. The old saying might go good here in this situation: ‘even bad press is good press’.
I thought that each of the five men’s basic points of views were highlighted without apparent embellishment or malice. That’s very important to me, that they appeared to have accurately portrayed at least a small but basic part of each of your individual many-faceted and informed positions.
As to the larger issue of deSmog’s database – they haven’t proven that anyone on their list spreads any disinformation. Where’s the evidence? Is just an accusation all that is needed anymore in today’s world?
The deSmog list is just another instrument of the green hydra, used like a scarecrow to shame and frighten anyone else from daring to stray off the warmist plantation into skepticism, scientifically, politically, or culturally. Don’t worry, they didn’t touch you guys, and someone may yet be drawn to skepticism from reading your write-ups.
The alarmists generally engage in “projection”, ie, they do what they accuse us of doing, ie the alarmist smokescreen is the real PR pollution, rendering deSmog’s byline a hypocritical joke – “Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science”.
Who put them up to this? Who told them to go out and ‘name and shame’ ‘the den__rs’?
Willis showed that their write up on him was a hatchet job.
“Willis showed that their write up on him was a hatchet job.” How would anyone know?
I wouldn’t put it past ’em.
It looks like Willis and the others have been over the target enough times that they’ve been noticed.
I checked one reference, #15, Mark Richardson, “Is Willis Wrong at WUWT? or Sensitivity and Sensibility I” from SkepticalScience, July 7, 2010, where Richardson said, “Willis’ 3 obvious mistakes are that he isn’t calculating any of the IPCC’s climate sensitivities (neither equilibrium, effective nor transient)…”
– Showing the prevailing warmist mentality of willful coercion in order to put those they deem off their script back into the alarmists’ teeny tiny little IPCC mental box. That was a hatchet job.
The alarmists and others are still insisting we follow their failed CO2 junk science.
I found this interesting, where deSmog says about Willis in the publications sections:
“According to SkepticalScience, Willis Eschenbach has not published any papers in peer-reviewed journals that take a negative or explicitly doubtful stance on man-made climate change.”
So what does that mean to them? Do they now lump him in with the 97% ‘consensus’? 😉
I wouldn’t put it past ’em.
I find it interesting that James Hoggan runs a business that does business with the following companies:
Air New Zealand
Alcoa
Canadian Pacific
Canadian Tire
Northwest Cruise Ship Association
Shell (???!!!????)
Linky http://www.hoggan.com/clients
http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/07/16/shell-proceed-arctic-drilling-ship-carrying-critical-emergency-gear-heads-portland-repairs
I wonder if his clients know that one of their vendors is publicly attacking the very same clients he is getting money from.
I was so proud when I found I had made the list , I posted it on my http://CoSy.com front page .
Nice of desmogblog to provide a list of preferred authors when I look for reading material on AGW.
Would this count as a variation on the Streisand effect?
If America is so hell bent on Global Warming why does it have the lowest gasoline prices in the western world?
This was true long before the AGW religion took off.
Careful, it’s only because they haven’t figured out a way to tax gas an additional $3-5/gallon and get away with it.
If America is so hell bent on Global Warming why does it have the lowest gasoline prices in the western world?
Democracy. (As it were.)
This the return to superstition and magical thinking that James Burnham warned of in his book “How Superstition Won and Science Lost” from 30 years ago. Superstition is functional and hard to stamp out. It gives the average person an explanation and something to believe in, and it keeps the elite on top.
Plus it saves all that tedious investigation of reality
DeSmog is so low on the Alexa database that it doesn’t even register. No doubt this article will give it more traffic than it’s had in the past year.
The Constitution is one of the genius works of all time. It’s right up there with the works of Plato and the other great thinkers.
The Constitution foresaw that untrammeled democracy might have pernicious effects. That’s why it protects anonymous pamphleteering.
The Constitution protects us from idiots like the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Constitution is why America isn’t just another banana republic.
and hopefully it will survive the next election and further progressive “evolution” …
Class Action.
Behind Desmog are Big Bucks. It’s time somebody went after THEM.
What I liked was for Willis, they used SkS as the source of the review for his work.
Mike,
SkS is “Unreliable”. They are not a credible source for Willis’ publications, or for any other skeptic’s.
I don’t rate them that high. That was my point really.
db, you could have stopped after the third word.
They aren’t a reliable source for warmist publications either.
I have contacted this desmog claimant seance site and politely requested he include my name as one of the non-gullible skeptics of catastrophic anthropomorphic weather change .. I suspect others will do similarly 🙂
Lois Lerner also kept lists at IRS.
I had a look at the list of folks in the “database” and decided it was a pretty august group. The group associated with desmogblog is likely to be pretty puny in comparison. More weight could be provided by scientists who have pass away, but who were skeptical about global warming while they were with us–such as Philip Abelson who said “… if the situation is analyzed applying the customary standards of scientific inquiry one must conclude there has been more hype than fact.” Science 31 March, 1990.
I hate to ask:
Does this low life benefit financially from these name searches? Just asking.
Regards,
Willis and other WUWT contributors, I have three ideas for future articles. 1) Comparative analysis of NOAA/GISS data/charts from the past and present exposing the massive “massaging” of data making the past cooler. 2) Comparative analysis of Micheal Chrictons “guess” of 0.82 degrees warming from 2000 to 2100 versus the UN models. 3) A discussion of why temp data from pre-1850 was “disappeared” from the NOAA GISS websites soon after the publication of “State of Fear” just as predicted by Chricton (no need to mention Chrichton).
Great suggestions!
For those willing to gamble, you can still get 80 to 1 odds on Joe Biden winning the Presidential election… If Hillary is indicted he will be a near shoo-in.
But… what are the odds ofHillary getting indicted?
Answer: a lot more than 80:1 against.
It hasn’t happened yet.
Why smear McCarthy by tying him to Gore?
I have just sent a respectful request to be added to the database. I’d love to use this on my CV.
What should have happened at this “event” is the power should have been disconnected from everything in that room, and someone should have then gone to the head idiot at the microphone and told him that they had just been switched over to “Clean Power.”
Is “Oregon Petition” the name of an “individual” now?
Logic isn’t their forte.
“revive the abuses of the McCarthy era”
Discredited the whole article by disparaging resistance to Communist infiltration. McCarthy was correct, Soviets infiltrated the State department. The only “abuse” was from the fellow Communist supporters of that infiltration.