Tag Archives | Climate Denial

Rick Perry Believes Climate Change Can Be Solved With Prayer

Rick Perry. Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)

Rick Perry. Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)

That and more revelations from Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry via Rolling Stone:

No politician who aspires to the Oval Office has shown any courage when it comes to talking frankly about climate change – President Obama won’t even say the words. But Perry’s view that the consequences of a changing climate – such as the hot, dry weather that has devastated farmers and ranchers in Texas and driven wildfires that have burned up millions of acres – is best handled by praying to God for relief puts him in a category of his own. Craven political move or sign of a return of the Dark Ages? Either way, it’s safe to say that a man who believes he can solve drought with prayer is not going to be big on pushing any kind of government action to reduce carbon pollution. “If Perry was President, one of the things I’d not worry about is a carbon tax,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

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Scientists Vow To Fight Back Against Climate Skeptics

Neela Banerjee of the Tribune Washington Bureau reports that The American Geophysical Union plans to announce that 700 researchers have agreed to speak out on the issue. Other scientists plan a pushback against congressional conservatives who have vowed to kill regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Via the Los Angeles Times:

AmericanGeophysicalUnion

Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.

On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

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Tea Party Climate Change Deniers Funded by BP and Other Major Polluters

bpThe Guardian reports:

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe’s biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: “The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people.”

Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms by funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce and to conservative Tea Party groups.

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Yale University Poll Shows Americans Are Confused On Climate Change

climate change poll

Click image to download PDF of full report

I’m not sure which camp the results of this poll by Yale University helps the most, the climate change believers or their sworn enemies, the “deniers:”

Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change reports results from a national study of what Americans understand about how the climate system works, and the causes, impacts, and potential solutions to global warming. Among other findings, the study identifies a number of important gaps in public knowledge and common misconceptions about climate change.

Overall, we found that 63 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, but many do not understand why… These misconceptions lead some people to doubt that global warming is happening or that human activities are a major contributor, to misunderstand the causes and therefore the solutions, and to be unaware of the risks. Thus many Americans lack some of the knowledge needed for informed decision-making in a democratic society.

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Physics Professor: ‘Global Warming is the Greatest and Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud…’

The professor’s letter of resignation speaks for itself and deserves to be reproduced in full, so here it is:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists.

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Climate Change Lies Exposed

It’s certainly quite a sea change in media coverage of climate change issues in the UK! From the Daily Express:

The world’s leading climate change body has been accused of losing credibility after a damning report into its research practices.

A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.

The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

The panel was forced to admit its key claim in support of global warming was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed by research.

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Climate Change Wars Heating Up In Court

In the southern hemisphere the dueling camps of climate change believers and non-believers are starting to take their grievances to court, as reported by news.com.au:

Scientists have hit back at climate change sceptics, with a paper affirming the case that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause of warming.

The Australian Academy of Science yesterday went on the front foot to clear up confusion after challenges to warming theories.

It came as New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research faced a legal challenge by sceptics group Climate Science Coalition.

The coalition has launched high court action over the institute’s climate data.

Academy past president Kurt Lambeck said the scientific statement aimed to boost climate change understanding.

The role of CO2 in the atmosphere was well understood and unless greenhouse gas emissions were reduced, an upward trend in global temperatures would continue.

“The available evidence implies that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause (of warming),” Prof Lambeck said.

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A Handy iPhone App For Climate Change Skeptics

OurClimate

For all you climate change skeptics (who also happen to have an iPhone), The Hill reports that a new app will allow you to post stinging responses to any posts on disinfo.com that even hint of a belief in man-made global warming or other climate change:

Recent weeks have been up-and-down for climate skeptics: The “climate-gate” scandal fizzled as several probes cleared prominent scientists of faking warming data, but the big climate bill also died on Capitol Hill.

As the battle continues, climate skeptics now have a new tool: a recently launched iPhone app called “Our Climate.

“You have all the information at your fingertips, wherever you go, to help you get a more complete picture on what is happening to our climate!” states the app’s website.

The app notes that, “In the current debate on our climate, you often hear that the ‘debate is over’ or that the consensus of scientists is that global warming is definitely caused by human activity.

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Global Warming: Man or Nature?

Stanton Friedman

Stanton Friedman

Kathy Marden

Kathy Marden

[disinformation ed.'s note: The following is a chapter from the new book by Stanton T. Friedman & Kathleen Marden, Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions, courtesy of New Page Books.]

Rarely has a subject received so much attention as has the notion of “global warming,” especially since the publication of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize award received by him and the IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007, and the media hype. If one were to believe the propaganda, CO2 (carbon dioxide) is public enemy number-one. Its increasing production by the world is leading to disastrous consequences, and hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent as soon as possible to reduce the warming and all the damage that will be accompanying it. Use of fossil fuels must be reduced or eliminated. Countries must sign agreements to reduce their emission of carbon dioxide no matter what it costs.… Read the rest

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Catch 22 For Right Wing Conservatives: Support Climate Change Actions Or Suffer Mass Immigration From Mexico

You have to love the irony of this: right-wing conservatives in America tend towards the climate change denial camp and refuse to support measures to combat global warming, yet a new report suggests that if we don’t arrest the warming trend, there will be unprecedented mass migration from Mexico into the U.S. — another issue that drives this crowd crazy. Reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

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