Climate change Denial – The stupid, it burns!

BPSDB

• 100 reasons to be appalled
• Plimer exposed as a fraud
• Gored out of our minds
• Two peas in a fraud
• Stupidity, is it natural?
• Polluter Watch
  

100 reasons to be appalled

Appalled that anything so transparently stupid as the Daily Express article “Climate change is natural: 100 reasons why” would appear anywhere other than as a failed junior high school paper.  Michael Le Page at New Scientist has kindly dealt with the first 50 in “50 reasons why global warming isn’t natural“, undoubtedly having gotten ill reading so many.

Liberal Conspiracy picks up some of the slack by debunking #s 88-100 in Con Home’s Climate Crock Rundown (88-100). They also provide some background on the European Foundation “think tank” (think ‘Heartland Institute’ with tea) that put this drivel together in Revealed: Top Tories linked to climate change denialism report.

Seriously, this such an unbelievable collection of basic logical errors and pure idiocy it defies belief, for eg:

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs.

97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.

Apparently someone, presumably older than 12, actually thought that these were evidence that climate change is natural.  That alone would be shocking, but that apparently many others agree? The whole list is like that, from your standard Climate Denier dumb to colossally stupid as per above. It clearly shows that the problem goes well beyond simple scientific illiteracy.

That New Scientist is clearly on the right track can be seen in that Joanne Nova singles them out for the usual Denier critique by distortion, innuendo, flawed logic, and lying, including and appeal to stupidity popularity fallacy:

The comments below the article are 90% skeptics, 2% believers, and the rest are presumably so angry their’s were deleted.

Obvious alert – what matters is the facts, not that the Deniers have mastered Twitter.

Plimer exposed as a fraud

I’m going to quibble with Tim Lambert on this one, because the debate is not over! Plimer is exposed as still a fraud, an important distinction. Tim does a sampling of some of Plimer’s more recent idiocies, from the recent actual debate with Monbiot to Plimer on Copenhagen.

What I particularly like about Lambert’s piece is his calling Plimer out for academic misconduct. That is exactly right, and what we need to be doing more of, naming names for blatant acts of academic misconduct, malpractice, incompetence and fraud. That is what we are dealing with in many cases of Denierism as practiced by those with some academic credential. Not all, but certainly most of them. (hat tip to The Ville)

Gored out of our minds

It seems that Mr Gore carelessly used a “ballpark figure” from an old conversation with Dr. Maslowski to say that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. Dr. Maslowski in turn denied that the research supports that kind of certainty. An insignificant slip up of no particular consequence, quickly acknowledged, corrected and forgotten.

Not. Or at least according to the Denier media and the Denialosphere. Predictably the Deniers use Gore’s gaff as an excuse to pretend that the actual science is flawed. Try again:  A final warning from the Arctic

Arctric sea ice 101

And as Blaise Zerega notes “Lost in the uproar is the fact that Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, on whose work Gore based his prediction, doesn’t seem to be refutingif of the Arctic ice’s disappearance the .”

Impressively, having made no case whatsoever to question the legitimacy of the climate science with respect to the Arctic, some go on to suggest that this casts doubt on all of climate change science. Apparently some of the people responsible for the alleged thinking behind these claims are actually able to feed themselves unaided and live independently.

Two peas in a fraud

The British National Party has released “Debunking Global Warming: A Briefing Paper.” Apparently climate science Denierism and BNP politics appeal to the same demographic.

The briefing paper is an amateurish jumble of Denier fables, poorly written, badly formatted, the citations are all to popular media and Denier blogs, etc. Really it’s a more of a bad high school project than a briefing paper from a political party.

Here is the table of contents with links to debunkings where it was fast and easy to do so. It’s nonsense all the way through, but it isn’t worth any more effort than that.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Summary of Case Against
• 3. Professor Plimer’s Killer Statistics
• 4. Lord Monckton of Brenchley on the Medieval Warm Period
• 5. The Ozone Layer – Recovering!
• 6. More on the Ozone
• 7. The Earth cooled 0.7c in 2007
• 8. President Vaclav Klaus on Global Warming
• 9. Global Warming on Mars – and elsewhere – as the Sun Warms Up!
• 10. What they said about global cooling 1979-94
• 11. The Cost of Carbon Capture to the Consumer
• 12. Dangers of Leaking CO2 from Storage
• 13. Meanwhile, the Earth Continues to Absorb CO2 Naturally
• 14. Copenhagen Summit Promotes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
• 15. UK Government Strategy
• 16. Devastating Findings by Dr Richard Lindzen Disproves Global Warming (Portand Civil Rights Examiner)
• 17. Scientists Against ‘Global Warming’ Hypothesis
• 18. German Scientists Reject Global Warming (Spero News)
• 19. Some More Deniers
• 20. Explanation of Carbon Credits
• 21. The Vast Cost of Inefficient, Subsidised Wind Power
• 22. Cost of the Climate Change Act to British Taxpayers
• 23. Booker on Climate Change
• 24. The Times Reports of Panic Warnings from Gordon Brown:
• 25. Sunday Times Warns of Colossal Tax Rise
• 26. More from Monckton
• 27. Some Brief Facts
• 27.1 Correlation between CO2 and Temperature Erroneous
• 27.2 U. S. Senate Minority Report: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
• 28. Some Interesting Thoughts
• 29. Research employed in this paper

See what I mean? Unbelievable.

Stupidity, is it natural?

No, not at all. This is all according to plan; Unintelligent by Design as it were.

This blog has already discussed the overlap between tobacco lobbying and the climate change Deniers, and how they are using the same playbook that they helped write.

OK, you’ll probably need your google translator on for the next one, but it’s a nice treatment of the tobacco/climate change lobbying link:

Ilmastohuijaus on täyttä totta! (Climate Scam is a reality!)

From the American Petroleum Institute dis-information campaign:

Victory Will Be When achieved

• Average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”
• Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
• Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current “conventional wisdom”
• Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties in climate science, making them stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy

Smoke Screen: How Bush Insiders Distorted – And Still Influence – America’s Debate Over Climate Change,

From the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Key findings:

• 22 former officials with CEQ, OSTP, and EPA have gone onto lobbying or government relations
• 14 of these former officials have been registered lobbyists
• 7 of these former officials work for companies or trade associations involved in the energy production industry
• 3 of these former officials founded their own lobbying or government relations firms (tip of the hat to Mother Jones)

But it’s not just us who have noticed the nicotine stained fingerprints all over the climate change Denial campaigns, anti-tobacco groups have noticed it too:

• More CO2 for a Greener World: One From the Tobacco Advertiser’s Playbook
• Climate change reflects CO2 imbalance

So no, the stupidity is not natural, it’s bought and paid for, and it burns.

Polluter Watch

Freedom of Information Requests

Today we sent Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the home institutions of several prominent global warming skeptics.  The request letters were sent to various state governors’ offices and state universities, as well as to the Smithsonian Institute, seeking information on scientists who are employees or former employees of these institutions.

The FOIA requests were sent to:

• Dr. Patrick Micheals, recently retired from University of Virginia
• Dr. David Legates, University of Delaware and Delaware State Climatologist
• Dr. John Christy and Roy Spencer, University of Alabama in Huntsville
• Dr. Willie Soon and Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysics Research Center
• Dr. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia (Tip of the Hat to Deborah Dupre’)

See also: The Legacy of Corporate Polluters and Denial

Ahhhhhh …. cool relief!

“Over the 20th century, ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic main development region warmed during peak hurricane season, with the most pronounced warming occurring over the last four decades.”  Earth Gauge

We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.

IMAGE CREDITS:

Mt. San Miguel continues to burn by slworking2

Mt. San Miguel on fire by slworking2

Mt. San Miguel continues to burn by slworking2

Comment Policy

Comments that are not relevant to the post that they appear under or the evolving discussion will simply be deleted, as will links to Denier spam known to be scientific gibberish

• The “Mostly” Open Thread” is for general climate discussion that is not relevant to a particular post. Spam and abuse rules still apply;
• The “Challenging the Core Science” Comment Thread is for comments that purport to challenge the core science of anthropogenic climate change.

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