Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
From Climate Science Watch (March 18, 2010): To the libertarians, the widely-shared scientific assessment that human-caused climate change will likely produce major harmful consequences — and the communication of this evidence to the public by the leading climate scientists — poses a particularly serious threat. An informed public concerned about the likelihood of harmful impacts of unchecked global climatic disruption is more likely to call for significant government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In order to block proactive government policymaking and keep corporate interests unregulated, libertarian groups have focused a significant part of their efforts on climate change on distorting the science to confuse public opinion, denying the seriousness of the problem, and, most recently, impugning the integrity of the climate science community. The Koch brothers have stepped forward with deep pockets to bankroll such efforts.
Many people have already heard about the libertarian billionaire businessmen brothers Charles and David Koch who have helped to found and/or fund a number of non-profit organizations and think tanks—including the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the Federalist Society, the Reason Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation—whose aim seems to be the advancement of the Kochs’ agenda “that government taxes and regulations impinge on prosperity.”
What many people may not be aware of is the number of academic centers/institutions that the Kochs are also helping to fund at both public and private colleges and universities—including Florida State University, West Virginia University, Brown University, Troy University, and Utah State University.
I’m going to focus on just one of these Koch-funded academic centers in this post—the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank located at George Mason University in Virginia—and on Susan B. Dudley, a woman who worked at Mercatus and was then appointed to a regulatory position at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2007.
THE MERCATUS CENTER
In a 2004 Wall Street Journal article, the Mercatus Center was described as “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.” Previously known as the Center for the Study of Free Market Processes, the Mercatus Center was founded by Richard Fink—with a grant from Charles Koch. Koch currently serves on the center’s Board of Directors—as does Fink who is also an executive vice president and a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries, Inc.
Jane Mayer wrote the following in Covert Operations, an article that appeared in the New Yorker in 2010: The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.
Public Citizen, a group founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, has called the Mercatus Center “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries and other corporate interests.” Richard Fink claims, however, that the center does not actively promote the Koch company’s private interests. He said that Koch “has other means of fighting its battles” in Washington and that they never had a nonprofit advance their agenda. Some people would disagree.
Thomas McGarity, a University of Texas law professor who specializes in environmental issues, told Mayer that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” Another environmental lawyer who spoke to Mayer said that Mercatus was “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer described the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”
Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist, told Mayer that the relationship between George Mason University and Mercatus is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds. Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.” Stein claimed that Mercatus was “ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”
According to Sourcewatch, Mercatus “has engaged in campaigns involving deregulation, especially environmental deregulation.” It has been reported that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that George W. Bush put on his hit list were first suggested by academics who worked at the Mercatus Center.
In 2010, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute released a study that named Koch Industries as one of this country’s top ten polluters. That same year, Greenpeace released a report titled Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine. In the report’s executive summary, Greenpeace stated that Koch Industries had “become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.” (Greenpeace also reported that Koch foundations have contributed more than $48 million in grants to “climate opposition groups” since 1997—and that more than half of that has been donated since 2005.)
MEET SUSAN B. DUDLEY
Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, wrote in 2007 about George W. Bush’s re-nomination of “a veritable rogues’ gallery of anti-environmental figures to key posts in federal agencies.” O’Donnell said that Susan B. Dudley, one of the nominees, was “a true anti-regulatory zealot. As director of regulatory studies at the industry-funded Mercatus Center, Dudley was like a wrecking ball out to smash key safeguards.” He added, “Putting Dudley in this key federal post would be like naming comedian Michael Richards to head the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.”
According to Lee Fang of Think Progress, George W. Bush appointed Susan B. Dudley, the director of the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center, to head the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—after the center had attacked the “EPA regulation of tailpipe greenhouse gases by challenging the science of climate change.” (Dudley’s was a recess appointment in 2007.)
O’Donnell said that as head of OIRA Dudley would have one “of the most obscure yet powerful jobs in Washington. The person in this position can, largely without public scrutiny, interfere with actions of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and become a conduit for industries seeking to avoid federal health, environmental and safety standards.”
The Cost is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections, a report produced by Public Citizen and OMB Watch in 2006, said that while Dudley worked at Mercatus, she “attacked proposed regulations in formal submissions to government agencies and orchestrated campaigns to derail other safeguards already on the books.” The report also claimed that Dudley displayed “an extreme anti-regulatory ideology” and “questioned the merit of regulation altogether in congressional testimony and regulatory comments, and she has urged weakening, if not eliminating entirely, public safeguards.”
Dudley worked to oppose public health regulations as a “hidden tax” that hinders profits when she was at Mercatus. She opposed all of the following: EPA plans that would have set tougher standards for smog; lower-polluting cars and SUVs—as well as cleaner gasoline; air bags in cars; stronger regulations for arsenic in drinking water; measures that could help curb global warming. (Think Progress)
Dudley has been quoted as stating that the “evidence regarding global warming and human contribution to it is mixed, and…if a slight warming does occur, historical evidence suggests it is likely to be beneficial, occurring at night, in the winter, and at the poles.” In her testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety/Committee on Environment and Public on April 24, 1997, Dudley said: “Ozone in the troposphere, like ozone in the stratosphere, has the beneficial effect of screening ultraviolet radiation, which is known to have various health and welfare effects including melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer, cataracts, and crop and fishery damage.”
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a nonprofit consortium of more than seventy universities that offer Ph.D.s in atmospheric and related sciences, doesn’t see it the same way Dudley does. UCAR has said the following about ozone in the troposphere:
Ozone occurs naturally at ground-level in low concentrations. The two major sources of natural ground-level ozone are hydrocarbons, which are released by plants and soil, and small amounts of stratospheric ozone, which occasionally migrate down to the earth’s surface. Neither of these sources contributes enough ozone to be considered a threat to the health of humans or the environment.
But the ozone that is a byproduct of certain human activities does become a problem at ground level and this is what we think of as ‘bad’ ozone. With increasing populations, more automobiles, and more industry, there’s more ozone in the lower atmosphere. Since 1900 the amount of ozone near the earth’s surface has more than doubled. Unlike most other air pollutants, ozone is not directly emitted from any one source. Tropospheric ozone is formed by the interaction of sunlight, particularly ultraviolet light, with hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, which are emitted by automobiles, gasoline vapors, fossil fuel power plants, refineries, and certain other industries.
And this is what UCAR said about the negative impacts of tropospheric ozone:
While stratospheric ozone shields us from ultraviolet radiation, in the troposphere this irritating, reactive molecule damages forests and crops; destroys nylon, rubber, and other materials; and injures or destroys living tissue. It is a particular threat to people who exercise outdoors or who already have respiratory problems.
Ozone affects plants in several ways. High concentrations of ozone cause plants to close their stomata. These are the cells on the underside of the plant that allow carbon dioxide and water to diffuse into the plant tissue. This slows down photosynthesis and plant growth. Ozone may also enter the plants through the stomata and directly damage internal cells.
Rubber, textile dyes, fibers, and certain paints may be weakened or damaged by exposure to ozone. Some elastic materials can become brittle and crack, while paints and fabric dyes may fade more quickly.
When ozone pollution reaches high levels, pollution alerts are issued urging people with respiratory problems to take extra precautions or to remain indoors. Smog can damage respiratory tissues through inhalation. Ozone has been linked to tissue decay, the promotion of scar tissue formation, and cell damage by oxidation. It can impair an athlete’s performance, create more frequent attacks for individuals with asthma, cause eye irritation, chest pain, coughing, nausea, headaches and chest congestion and discomfort. It can worsen heart disease, bronchitis, and emphysema.
Prior to Dudley’s appointment to OIRA, Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, wrote in an email exchange with Media Transparency that “Dudley would be the most anti-regulatory zealot within the Bush Administration, bar none. Her ideology is based upon a core belief that regulations are generally bad and there should be no regulation unless it can be proven to be cost effective and supported from within the market place.”
The Cost is Too High report said that Dudley’s radicalism put her “right at home at Mercatus”—which was “founded by corporate interests and endowed by large corporations, free-market oriented foundations, and leaders from the corporate world” and “has long operated at the intersection of money, power, and influence in order to promote corporate special interests at the expense of the public interest.”
Note: Susan B. Dudley is a Research Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration and is serving as the Director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
EPA Nemesis: Mercatus Center Another Koch Think Tank (Sourcewatch/Center for Media and Democracy)
Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group Mercatus Center (Greenpeace)
From Promoting Acid Rain To Climate Denial: Over 20 Years Of David Koch’s Polluter Front Groups (Think Progress)
The White House’s Agents Of Environmental Corruption (Think Progress)
Koch’s Web of Influence (Center for Public Integrity)
Koch-Powered Tea Party Pushes Climate Denial Bill In New Hampshire (Think Progress)
Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. (The New Yorker)
The White House’s Agents Of Environmental Corruption (Think Progress)
Does Bush know how to pick ’em or does he know how to pick ’em? (Daily Kos)
The Cost is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections (Public Citizen & OMB Watch)
Bush Nominates Anti-Regulatory Zealot To Head ‘Super-Powerful’ Public Safety Office (Think Progress)
Stop Susan Dudley: The air you breathe depends on it (Public Citizen)
Dudley Do-Wrong of George Mason University (Media Transparency)
With Senate on break, Bush appoints officials: The three, including a contentious regulatory director, most likely would not have been approved by lawmakers. (Los Angeles Times)
I Am OMB and I Write the Rules (Washington Post)
On First Day Of New Congress, Koch Operatives Met With GOP Chairman Planning To Gut The Clean Air Act (Think Progress)
ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection (The Nation)
Exclusive: Tea Party Billionaire David Koch Denies Climate Change, Shrugs Off His Carbon Pollution (ThinkProgress)
The Koch Energy and Commerce Committee (Turley Blog)
Koch Industries multibillionaire Koch brothers bankroll attacks on climate change science and policy (Climate Science Watch)
The Most Important Think Tank You’ve Never Heard Of (Richard C. Young)
Rule Breaker: In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation (Mercatus)
Meet Koch Industries (Oil Watchdog)
Mercatus Center—Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial [REPORT] (PolluterWatch)
Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial [REPORT] (PolluterWatch)
Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial 2011 Update (Greenpeace)
Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine (Greenpeace)
The Kochs’ Mercatus Center and Environmental Deregulation (The Green Market)
Does This Matter? Eliminating the EPA? (Watchdog Progressive)
REPORT: Koch Fueling Far Right Academic Centers At Universities Across The Country (ThinkProgress)
FSU Accepts Funds From Charles Koch In Return For Control Over Its Academic Freedom (ThinkProgress)
Billionaire’s role in hiring decisions at Florida State University raises questions (St. Petersburg Times)
VIDEO: Why Oil Billionaire David Koch Is Secretly Funding Astroturf To Repeal CA Clean Energy Law AB 32 (Think Progress)
Wegman scandal rocks cornerstone of climate denial (Think Progress)
Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) – Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group (Greenpeace)
Bush Obstructs EPA, OSHA, CDC Regulations (Mother Jones)
Koch Industries and Lobbying in Washington (Desmogblog)
Koch and George Mason University (Desmogblog)
Still Hiring Tree Haters (Tom Paine)
Another big time fox nominated to be gatekeeper to the henhouse (Watching the Watchers)
Charles Koch’s Assault on Academic Freedom (Mother Jones)
In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation: With White House Ex-Staffers, Mercatus Helps Zap Codes It Says Restrict Business (Wall Street Journal)
Statutory Interpretation in the Era of OIRA (Georgetown University law Center)
Testimony of Susan E. Dudley
Before the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety
Committee on Environment and Public Works
April 24, 1997
Elaine:
I dont think people are denying global warming, what we are denying is man has any significant contribution to what is occurring naturally.
The earth cycles in regard to temperature, it has been going on for millions of years. And so what if the temperature of the earth rises a little bit? It makes it better for human beings.
Krugman hasnt said anything of any significance, but then when does he ever?
From PolluterWatch
Polluter #74
Koch Industries
http://www.polluterwatch.com/koch-industries
Excerpt:
The Political Economy Research Institute ranks Koch Industries as the tenth worst air polluter in the U.S. in their Toxic Release Inventory. CARMA reports that Koch releases just under 5 million tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide annually.
Through Koch Industries and their family foundations, the Koch brothers are premier financiers to organizations that deny, skepticize or belittle the significance of global warming. Compared to ExxonMobil, which spent $10.2 million on skeptic groups from 2005-2008, Koch Industries dwarfed their contribution with a $31.6 million effort. More than $5.6 million went to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (founded and chaired by David Koch), over $2.2 million to the Heritage Foundation and over $1.2 million the Cato Institute (co-founded by Charles Koch, chaired by David Koch). The Koch family foundations have contributed over $55 million since 1997, more than half of which was spent after 2005.
Source: Greenpeace Report
Koch worked behind the scenes during the 2010 “Rally for Jobs” astroturf events, coordinated by the American Petroleum Institute in order to create political pressure against clean energy and climate legislation in the interest of the oil and gas industry. Groups such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which are both heavily funded by the Koch brothers and founded by David Koch, were partner organizations in promoting the rallies.
Koch Industries spent $1 million to promote California Proposition 23, intended to undermine the states clean energy and climate law, through subsidiary company Flint Hills Resources. Koch also pushed Prop 23 through one of their beneficiary front groups, the Pacific Research Institute, which published and promoted reports that made favorable economic arguments for Prop 23 using flawed methodologies.
*****
Political Economy Research Institute (UMASS Amherst)
Toxic 100 Air Polluters
March 2010
http://www.peri.umass.edu/toxic_index/
The Climate Killers
Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming
TIM DICKINSON
Rolling Stone
Posted Jan 06, 2010
http://weirddream.com/
Excerpt:
The Tea Partiers
Charles and David Koch
CEO and Executive Vice President, Koch Industries
The multibillionaire brothers not only run the nation’s largest private energy company, they rival Exxon in funding the front groups that spread disinformation about the dangers of climate change. Over the years, the Kochs and their foundations have lavished millions on climate deniers at the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, which Charles founded in 1977. Cato, in turn, supports the work of Patrick Michaels, a leading climate denier who attempts to discredit the international scientific consensus on global warming while accepting money from coal companies. As author Thomas Frank observes in What’s the Matter With Kansas?, “Koch money subsidizes the mass production of bad ideas.”
One major recipient of Koch cash is Americans for Prosperity, where David chairs the foundation’s board. In addition to fomenting last summer’s town-hall brawls over health care reform, AFP sponsored a “Hot Air Tour” on climate change, deploying a manned balloon at 75 events for the purpose of “Exposing the Ballooning Costs of Global Warming Hysteria.” At the events, the group’s president, Tim Phillips, grossly exaggerated the costs of climate legislation, calling it a trillion-dollar tax on American families.
Last October, at an AFP summit attended by David Koch, the assembled Tea Partiers screened a climate-denial film that accused advocates like Al Gore of wanting to take civilization “back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague.” Such events, Koch proclaimed, “bring to reality the vision” of “fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history.” Last year, seeking to defend its own prosperity against a carbon-capped future, Koch Industries spent more than $8.5 million on lobbying.
26 May 09
The Cato Institute and Patrick Michaels – It’s a Small World After All
http://www.desmogblog.com/cato-institute-and-patrick-michaels-its-small-world-after-all
Excerpt:
It’s not often the public gets to follow the money trail, so it was a treat this week when PR Watch revealed the Cato Institute has been bankrolling a consulting company owned by notorious climate denier Patrick Michaels to the tune of $242,900 since April 2006.
Michaels is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and according to tax documents uncovered by PR Watch for 2006 and 2007, Cato ponyed up almost a quarter million to Michaels’ firm New Hope Environmental Services for “environmental policy” services.
Small world eh?
Both Cato and Michaels have a long and reprehensible history of questioning the link between carbon emissions and climate change. Last month, Cato bankrolled full-page ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times, and the Los Angeles Times, opining that climate change was “grossly overstated”.
Their statement was naturally targeted at decision makers in advance of the cap and trade legislation moving through Congress. It was signed by the usual suspects, including Patrick Michaels, who has made a lucrative career of challenging climate science on behalf of a variety of vested interests.
Real scientists were of course disgusted by this tactic, as well as the baseless claims being spread around the nation. A scientific evisceration of the Cato letter is available here.
For a more in-depth journey into the bowels of the carbon-funded campaign to confuse the public on climate change, you may want to peruse a remarkable affidavit filed by Patrick Michaels in 2006. He was weaseling out of testifying as an expert witness in court after learning he might be forced to unmask his funding sources.
It seems Michaels was hired by a number of auto companies and lobby groups, including General Motors and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, in a legal bid aimed at preventing the government of Vermont from regulating greenhouse gases.
Greenpeace intervened in the case seeking to have Michaels’ consulting company reveal its shadowy clients. Dr. Michaels quickly bid a hasty and undignified retreat. Rather than risk exposing who was bankrolling him as a professional climate expert he filed this remarkable document in court outlining the reasons why this would endanger his livelihood.
How badly did Michaels want to keep his backers secret? He states himself that dropping the trial “resulted in short-term loss of income to me.” How much, he did not say. However other parts of his affidavit show how lucrative it can be to hang a shingle a professional climate skeptic.
Climate contrarian Pat Michaels refused to disclose funding in Vermont court case
Posted on September 19, 2007 by Rick Piltz
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/09/19/climate-contrarian-pat-michaels-refused-to-disclose-funding-in-vermont-court-case/
Excerpt:
Patrick J. Michaels, one of the global warming skeptics most often interviewed by news media, withdrew as an expert witness in a high-profile Vermont court case rather than disclose his funding sources, court documents show. Moreover, Michaels told the court in July 2007, some funders gave him money on the condition that their identities remain secret —and he is largely dependent for his livelihood on the money they give him.
Scientific American editors slam science deniers Patrick Michaels and George Gilder for misusing their unscientific online poll
By Joe Romm on Nov 18, 2010
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2010/11/18/207059/scientific-american-science-deniers-patrick-michaels-george-gilder-unscientific-online-poll/
Excerpt:
SciAm “horrified” by “the co-opting of the poll” by users of “the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That”
Memo to media, science museums, homo ‘sapiens’: Enough with the online polls!
Just how weak is the case of the anti-science disinformers? In his written testimony for the recent House hearing on climate science, leading science denier Patrick Michaels of the pro-pollution Cato Institute, devoted two pages to the most unscientific ‘evidence’ possible — an online poll.
Michaels, who recently said Big Oil funds some 40% of his work, based a key part of his testimony on the ‘results’ of an online poll by Scientific American that was gamed by the deniers themselves, as SciAm has documented.
GOP, Koch Brothers Climate Denier Dr. Richard Muller Changes Opinion
April 13, 2011
By Michael Muracco
http://americanpatriottoday.net/2011/04/gop-koch-brothers-climate-denier-dr-richard-muller-changes-opinion/
Excerpt:
Today, there was a climate science hearing in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Of the six “expert” witnesses, only three were scientists. The others were an economist, a lawyer, and a professor of marketing.
One of the scientists was Richard Muller from University of California, Berkeley. Muller has been working on an independent project to better estimate the planet’s surface temperatures over time. Because he is willing to say publicly that he has some doubts about the accuracy of the temperature stations that most climate models are based on, he has been embraced by the science denying crowd. A Koch brothers charity, for example, has donated nearly 25 percent of the financial support provided to Muller’s project.
The Truth, Still Inconvenient
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 3, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04krugman.html?_r=1
Excerpt:
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly. But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these people?
My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”
The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up.
Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation.
But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.
You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.
Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”
Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.
Denier Cash Machine Swells: Pollutocrat Koch Brothers Now Worth $50 Billion, Poised to Become Richest Men in America
By Joe Romm on Sep 22, 2011
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/22/325612/denier-koch-brothers-worth-50-billion-richest-americans/
Bron,
Global warming? Blame the bovines. They are the culprits!
Cow farts collected in plastic tank for global warming study
Scientists are examining cow farts and burps in a novel bid to combat global warming.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2274995/Cow-farts-collected-in-plastic-tank-for-global-warming-study.html
I am denying the point humans play a large role in the change.
Volcanoes can change the weather for a short period too when they erupt, but they arent being blamed and they spew a good deal of junk every year.
Swamps emit methane, so does the sea. How much CO2 is put into the atmosphere by algae and other plants? What about forest fires? Trees sequester a great deal of CO2 which is released during a natural forest fire.
I am sure there are hundreds of other points that could be made that I dont know about because I am not a weather guy.
You do remember Galileo was turning the “settled” science on its head. There are too many scientists jumping on this band wagon for me to believe it is true. Anthropogenic Global Warming has always been a political phenomenon of the Malthusian variety or worse.
Elaine:
I am not denying that climate change is taking place.
I see the Ice sheets are going to gone by the year 2,000
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zmI0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=L5wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5376,3200988&dq=ice+free+arctic&hl=en
LATimes
Scientist proves conservatism and belief in climate change aren’t incompatible
MIT professor Kerry Emanuel is among a rare breed of conservative scientists who are sounding the alarm for climate change and criticizing Republicans’ ‘agenda of denial’ and ‘anti-science stance.’
January 05, 2011
By Neela Banerjee, Washington Bureau
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/05/nation/la-na-scientist-climate-20110105
Excerpt:
Reporting from Cambridge, Mass. — According to the conventional wisdom that liberals accept climate change and conservatives don’t, Kerry Emanuel is an oxymoron.
Emanuel sees himself as a conservative. He believes marriage is between a man and a woman. He backs a strong military. He almost always votes Republican and admires Ronald Reagan.
Emanuel is also a highly regarded professor of atmospheric science at MIT. And based on his work on hurricanes and the research of his peers, Emanuel has concluded that the scientific data show a powerful link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
“There was never a light-bulb moment but a gradual realization based on the evidence,” Emanuel said. “I became convinced by the basic physics and by the better and better observation of the climate that it was changing and it was a risk that had to be considered.”
As a politically conservative climatologist who accepts the broad scientific consensus on global warming, Emanuel occupies a position shared by only a few scientists.
In much the same role that marriage and abortion played in previous election cycles, denial of climate change has now become a litmus test for the right.
The vast majority of Republicans elected to Congress during the midterm election doubt climate science, and senior congressional conservatives — Republican and Democrat — have vowed to fight Obama administration efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s why scientists such as Emanuel rattle the political pigeonholes. Some are speaking out, using their expertise and conservative credentials to challenge what many researchers consider widespread distortions about climate change.
Texas Tech atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe is an evangelical Christian who travels widely talking to conservative audiences and wrote a book with her husband, a pastor and former climate change denier, explaining climate change to skeptics.
A physicist by training, John Cook is an evangelical Christian who runs the website skepticalscience.com, which seeks to debunk climate change deniers’ arguments. Barry Bickmore is a Mormon, a professor of geochemistry at Brigham Young University and the blogger behind Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah, where he recently rebuked Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) for his climate views and posted editorials mentioning his Republican affiliation.
Emanuel waded into the fray early last year. He wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal criticizing a friend and colleague for dismissing the evidence of climate change and clinging “to the agenda of denial.” Then Emanuel added his name to the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a website run by scientists to provide accurate information from top researchers in climate-related fields.
“I’ve always rebelled against the thinking that ideology can trump fact,” said Emanuel, 55. “The people who call themselves conservative these days aren’t conservative by my definition. I think they’re quite radical.”
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science
How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.
—By Chris Mooney
Mother Jones
May/June 2011
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney
Big Picture Science: climate change denial on Fox News
Discover Magazine
8/15/2011
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/15/big-picture-science-climate-change-denial-on-fox-news/
Excerpt:
Every month or so I do a skeptical segment with astronomer Seth Shostak called “Brains on Vacation” for the SETI radio show/podcast “Big Picture Science” (what used to be called “Are We Alone?”). This month’s episode, Plotting Along, is about conspiracy theories and is now online. You can listen to it there, or download the file directly.
This time, I talked about the climate change denier Joe Bastardi’s bizarre take on global warming that recently aired on Fox News — you can read all about what he said on sites like Scientific American and Media Matters. Basically, Bastardi denies humans have anything to do with climate change, and has a history of saying things that, um, turn out not to be entirely accurate when it comes to basic science.
In this case, Bastardi tried to invoke the First Law of Thermodynamics to show humans don’t cause global warming, a truly weird thing to do since the First Law actually supports the idea that pumping CO2 into the air makes it heat up. Without carbon dioxide, the energy from the Sun would hit the Earth, with some being absorbed and some radiating away. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, just balanced. However, carbon dioxide traps some of that heat, warming us up*. It’s not that new energy is being created someplace, it’s just that more of the Sun’s heat stays trapped here on Earth instead of being radiated away. That energy cannot just go away or be destroyed, so we warm up.
The First Law is safe. Phew!
Not content with just physics, Bastardi then moved on to chemistry: this time, Le Chatelier’s Principle. That one (which is not actually a law but more like a rule of thumb) says that a system out of equilibrium tries to get back to equilibrium. For a totally random example, say you have a planet with CO2 in its air, trapping some heat and letting some leak away. If you add more CO2, more heat will be trapped and the planet will warm up, eventually re-establishing equilibrium (different than the previous balance, but still balanced).
Bastardi’s claim about this is truly weird; he claims Le Chatelier’s Principle is why Earth’s temperature has leveled off recently. That’s wrong because of the reason I just stated above, but also because of the small fact that our temperature hasn’t leveled off. This is a relatively new denier claim that’s been making the rounds, and it’s flatly (haha) wrong. The Earth’s temperature has been increasing steadily for quite some time, including the past few decades (2010 tied the year 2005 as the hottest year on record so far; note that both years are in the period where Bastardi claims the temperatures have leveled off).
EDITORIAL
NYTimes
In the Land of Denial
Published: September 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/opinion/in-the-land-of-denial-on-climate-change.html?_r=1
The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”
Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation. Never mind that America needs a national policy. Mr. Perry has a big soapbox, and what he says, however fallacious, reaches a bigger audience than any scientist can command.
With one exception — make that one-and-one-half — the rest of the Republican presidential field also rejects the scientific consensus. The exception is Jon Huntsman Jr., a former ambassador to China and former governor of Utah, who recently wrote on Twitter: “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” The one-half exception is Mitt Romney, who accepted the science when he was governor of Massachusetts and argued for reducing emissions. Lately, he’s retreated into mush: “Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that, but I think that it is.” As for the human contribution: “It could be a little. It could be a lot.”
The others flatly repudiate the science. Ron Paul of Texas calls global warming “the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years.” Michele Bachmann of Minnesota once said that carbon dioxide was nothing to fear because it is a “natural byproduct of nature” and has complained of “manufactured science.” Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, has called climate change “a beautifully concocted scheme” that is “just an excuse for more government control of your life.”
Newt Gingrich’s full record on climate change has been a series of epic flip-flops. In 2008, he appeared on television with Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, to say that “our country must take action to address climate change.” He now says the appearance was a mistake.
None of the candidates endorse a mandatory limit on emissions or, for that matter, a truly robust clean energy program. This includes Mr. Huntsman. In 2007, as Utah governor, he joined with Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor of California, in creating the Western Climate Initiative, a market-based cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing emissions in Western states. Cap-and-trade has since acquired a toxic political reputation, especially among Republicans, and Mr. Huntsman has backed away.
The economic downturn has made addressing climate change less urgent for voters. But the issue is not going away. The nation badly needs a candidate with a coherent, disciplined national strategy. So far, there is no Republican who fits that description.
Bdaman,
“Let me know when you take your blinders off. I got more important things to do other than trying to convince you you’ve been hoodwinked.”
Just because you drink the climate change denial Kool-aid, doesn’t mean we should all swallow it. Have a nice vacation from this discussion.
😉
I guess we better tell the scientists and researchers over at Nature they are wrong because the Koch brothers and Bdaman say so.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6918/full/nature01333.html
Sorry guys I know I’m wasting my time.
Yall have at it. Let me know when you take your blinders off. I got more important things to do other than trying to convince you you’ve been hoodwinked.