Peter Sinclair over at Climate Crock Of The Week has just released this video, which demonstrates how little fact or science the anti-science climate skeptics have to back them up. Yet just like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, who refused to admit defeat even when dismembered, they keep on shouting that they really are legitimate opponents!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WvasALL-hw]
A new report by Greenpeace shows that Koch Industries, one of America’s largest corporations, has become a “financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.” The report outlines how the company has spent over $48.5 million since 1997 to fund the climate denial machine.
Most Americans have never heard of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the country, because it has no Koch-branded consumer products, sells no shares on the stock market and has few of the disclosure requirements of a public company. Although Koch intentionally stays out of the public eye, it is now playing a quiet but dominant role in a high-profile national policy debate on global warming.
Greenpeace goes on to say:
This private, out-of-sight corporation is now a partner to ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other donors that support organizations and front-groups opposing progressive clean energy and climate policy. In fact, Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’.
This report focuses on activities by Koch Industries and its affiliates, as well as the family—and company—controlled foundations which fund organizations that spread inaccurate and misleading information about climate science and clean energy policies. Included is research on the company and the Koch brothers, two of the top ten richest people in the United States.
Check out this new “Polluter Harmony” video that shows the match between Koch industries and American Senator Blanche Lincoln:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtFN8MTjHd0&feature=player_embedded]
Click here to download the Greenpeace report.
Click here to read Brendan DeMelle’s article on The Huffington Post.
University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver was on the CBC radio show “The Current” yesterday to discuss the inaccurate predictions in the most recent IPCC report about the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers. Dr. Weaver has been involved in authoring 3 earlier IPCC reports. He noted that none of the scientists involved in writing the report get any financial compensation for their time and effort. This flies in the face of the wild accusations from the contrarians’ camp that scientists are profiting hand over fist from “advocating” global warming. How many oil and gas executives can assert that they don’t profit – and pretty richly – from their activities?
To hear the discussion, click here , and go to “Listen to Part I”.
The contrarians and deniers have got a lot of mileage out of the errors in the IPCC report – which, Dr.Weaver points out in the discussion mentioned above, is one page of a 4,000 page report – yet some interesting things are starting to come out about the anti-climate science bias in the U.S.Congress and Senate. Deniers particularly like to point out – over and over, as you will see if you check out the “comments” section on any on-line article on climate change – that Dr. Micheal Mann’s “hockey stick” analysis of warming trends in the Northern Hemisphere over the last millenia is inaccurate (for a quick summary of the “hockey stick” controversy, click here). Canadians Steve McIntyre, a retired mining executive with ties to oil and gas companies, and Ross McKitrick , an economist linked to the right-wing Fraser Institute, have been particularly vocal and active in “debunking” Mann’s analysis. As DeSmogBlog points out (“M & M” refers to McKitrick and McIntyre):
It becomes increasingly clear that while scientists have been building an undeniable case for the science of global warming, M&M have been working hand-in-hand with people like the denier PR guru Tom Harris to deny it all, anyway.
One of the things that has put wind in M & M’s hockey-stick-debunking sails is an “independent” investigation by the Republican-dominated U.S. Energy and Commerce Congressional Committee. The panel they assembled produced the Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction” (or “Wegman Report”). However,Canadian blogger Deep Climate has uncovered information that puts the independence and credibility of the Wegman panel, and the entire Energy and Commerce Committee, in doubt. He sums it up this way:
In short, the Energy and Commerce Committee refused the offer of a proper scientific review from the National Academy of Sciences in favour of an investigative process that was ad hoc, biased and unscientific. And the report resulting from that process is tainted with highly questionable scholarship.
Click here to read Deep Climate’s full report.
The late American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is quoted as saying “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” As I surfed the net this morning, I saw several climate change denier sites enthusiastically proclaiming that atmospheric Co2 has been steady for the last 150 years, that the CO2 scare has been debunked, and that global warming is all a scam, etc.
Somebody should make sure they let the glaciers know:
There is mounting evidence that climate change is triggering a shrinking and thinning of many glaciers world-wide which may eventually put at risk water supplies for hundreds of millions — if not billions — of people. Data gaps exist in some vulnerable parts of the globe undermining the ability to provide precise early warning for countries and populations at risk. If the trend continues and governments fail to agree on deep and decisive emission reductions at the crucial UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, it is possible that glaciers may completely disappear from many mountain ranges in the 21st century.
In a recent article in the October 30 edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, “Glacier loss on Kilimanjaro continues unabated” , researchers reported that 85% of the ice cover present in 1912 has disappeared and 26% of that present in 2000 is now gone. Similar changes are being reported on Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains in Africa and at glaciers in South America and the Himalayas.
And apparently no one sent a memo to the mosquitoes in Kenya, either, telling them that the weather isn’t changing. The Guardian newspaper recently reported that rising temperatures on the slopes of Mount Kenya have put an extra 4 million people at risk of malaria. This is according to research funded by the British government.
Click here to look at more pictures of melting glaciers, and read statistics collected by the World Glacier Monitoring Service.
Queen Elizabeth II addressed the Commonwealth leaders meeting in Trinidad and Tobago yesterday by urging the heads of state to lead on climate change. She told the delegates:
“The threat to our environment is not a new concern but it is now a global challenge that will continue to affect the security and stability of millions for years to come.”
Not known for her fanatical, unconventional ideas, it seems that even the Queen of England can be duped by the lefty, liberal, radical, nazi, communist, terrorist, world-wide conspiracy of scientists trying to fool everybody into believing that the burning of fossil fuels is affecting our environment, and that the window of opportunity we, as a global community, have to act is swiftly closing. Those lefty/liberal/nazi/communists/terrorist scientists are obviously in it for themselves. And the corporations that make money from all of us burning those same fossil fuels are pure as the driven snow, wanting nothing but to save us from these nasty people trying to gain financially from pulling the blinders over our eyes and getting us to swallow anthropogenic climate change whole. These corporations want to help us out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s not like they having anything – like billions of dollars in profits every year – to gain by continuing along this path that we are currently on. Nope, not them. It’s those nasty scientists getting rich off of us suckers.
Want to learn more? Check out James Hoggan’s book Climate Cover-Up – The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Or go to the DeSmogBlog website, whose mission is to clear “the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science“.
