Spread this excellent new video from the talented team at Skeptical Science far and wide. It explains why the latest denialist trope — no warming for 16 years — is rubbish. Take out the impact of the three biggest factors driving natural variations in the global average temperature — volcanoes, the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the solar cycle — and what’s left is the underlying upwards trend being driven by our CO2 emissions. The world’s warming, Australia’s burning, ice is melting and we did it. No room left for wishful thinking or complacency.
Tag: denial
Clive Hamilton on Einstein, scientific dadaism and the roots of climate denial
Clive Hamilton has a riveting essay in a new book edited by psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe, Engaging with Climate Change, which had its origin at an inter-disciplinary conference at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London a couple of years ago. Hamilton’s subject is what history can teach us about climate change denial. He begins with the deep polarisation of US society and the way in which global warming has become a battleground in this wider culture war. The implications of climate change threaten conservative cultural identity. Not that liberals are less likely to sift evidence through ideological filters, but in the case of global warming the evidence overwhelmingly endorses liberal beliefs that unrestrained capitalism threatens future well-being, that government intervention is needed and the environmentalists were right all along. In Europe, the absence of a long and rancorous culture war explains the relative weakness of climate change denial.
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Fairfax and Stuff.co.nz: presenting propaganda as opinion and lies as fact
This morning the Sydney Morning Herald published an opinion piece by well-known Aussie climate denier David Evans, and later in the day the Fairfax New Zealand news web site Stuff.co.nz decided to feature the Evans article in their science section. Two small problems for Fairfax: Evans “opinion” piece is nothing more than propaganda masquerading as opinion, and contains straightforward lies about our understanding of climate.
We last met Evans back in April, when he unleashed on an unsuspecting world a risible political analysis of those who want action on climate change. Even so, the SMH, for reasons best known to themselves, chose to let him loose on their pages to present a “scientific” argument. The problem? Evans scientific understanding is as weak — if not weaker — than his political analysis. His deliberate misrepresentation of the state of scientific understanding of the climate system renders his “opinion” on the matter worthless, and calls the editorial judgement of the SMH and Stuff.co.nz into question.
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No dallying with denial
Will Hutton’s Observer column this week was forthright on the folly and danger of climate change scepticism. “Climate change is already hurting and, unchecked, will turn into a catastrophe.” Against that statement he points to the intellectual bankruptcy of allowing ideological preference for reducing the role of government in society to somehow justify climate change scepticism. It’s not even as if capitalism is under threat of disappearance. “Capitalism is not going away: the task is to reform it deploying a more agile, intelligent state.” But taxation and regulation will be part of that reform and the climate sceptics on the right need to come to their senses on that necessity.
Hutton’s was the sort of direct statement we should expect from informed journalists. He notes in passing that the media is often less interested in the evidence that it should be. “It likes a spat: the idiosyncratic brave climate change dissenter is pitched as the David against the Goliath of established opinion.”
The day after I’d read Hutton’s column the NZ Herald’s monthly magazine Element accompanied Monday’s edition of the paper and cheered up my morning. There was no dallying with denial here. Editor James Russell gave voice to the slight embarrassment many of us who worry about climate change probably feel in some company.
Big coal coughs up for climate denial “conference”, takes NZ sceptics along for the ride
As US corporate donors step away from the Heartland Institute following their ad campaign likening climate change believers to mass murderers and terrorists, big coal — in the shape of the Illinois Coal Association, supported by all the major US coal companies — has stepped in as a “Gold Sponsor” to support Heartland’s climate “conference” next week. In other heartwarming news for the ultra-conservative lobby group, the big guns of New Zealand’s climate denial movement, the Heartland-funded NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, have also sponsored the conference, thereby endorsing Heartland’s disgusting ad campaign.
Here’s what Heartland’s president Joe Bast says about the Unabomber billboard campaign:
“The leaders of the global warming movement have one thing in common: They are willing to use force and fraud to advance their fringe theory.”
Can we assume that Barry Brill, Bryan Leyland, “Heartland expert” ((It’s worth following Big City Lib’s polling of other Heartland experts, to find out how many have asked for their names to be withdrawn following the Unabomber stunt. There’s no sign (yet) of de Freitas following suit.)) Chris de Freitas and the other members of the NZ CSC all support Bast’s statement? Only Bob Carter has made a public statement, telling The Age that:
“the usual ‘liberal’ media sources” had been “amazing, immediate and over-the-top”, and that he would still speak at the conference.
Given that Heartland are happy to pay Carter a monthly retainer, it’s perhaps not surprising he supports their tasteless little publicity stunt. Money may not be able to buy you love, but it can certainly buy support, as Carter and the CSC crew prove.