Strange Bedfellows

You know the climate change deniers have officially joined the Flat Earth society when their major spokesperson publishes his work in Lyndon LaRouche's conspiratorial publication; Executive Intelligence (sic) Review.

Yep that puts them squarely in the camp of conspiracy nutbars and folks who believe that humans lived with dinosaurs.

Of course LaRouche and his followers are the original climate change deniers, who have spent the past thirty years promoting nuclear power.

Of course it is all about the company you keep. And it seems that when it comes to Climate Change there are those on the American left who also embrace the flat earth ideal.

Alex Cockburn for instance, who in keeping up with his fellow ex-Trotskyist, ex-Brit compatriot and former Nation fellow writer; Christopher Hitchens, has decided to be a contrarian.

“Peer Review” and Global Warming

There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997.

It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn.

Of course this makes sense since LaRouche is also an ex-Trotskyist. Heck isn't everybody who makes up the American neo-con right.

The problem with Hitchens and Cockburn is that they could have posed a libertarian alternative to the war in Iraq (which Hitchens supported) or to Kyoto and the capitalist crisis of the environment, which Cockburn denies. But they didn't. Instead they have like their former Trotskyist predecessors, embraced the neo-con right. Just as some of those in the so called Libertarian movement in the U.S. have over the issue of climate change.

Take Lew Rockwell, for instance. He is incredibly insightful when discussing the over bearing power of the state to make war, or the intrusion of the state into our lives. But he happily links to articles such as this one by Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch, regurgitates the most of the so-called scientific evidence against global warming, every single bit of which has been debunked and refuted before.

It is clear from the preponderance of evidence, from the vast majority of climate scientists (a number that is growing, not shrinking) that global warming is really happening and is caused by human activity. Why, then do libertarians and anarchists refuse to accept it?

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Ice Age Continues

Let's see how quick the flat earth society of climate change deniers are to grab onto this news item to once again claim that climate change is not the creation of capitalism.

The satellites found that the Earth's crust over Canada has not completed what scientists call the "post-glacial rebound." Now, it's clear that the ice age is still affecting the planet.

GRACE satellites have detected changes in the gravitational field over regions of Canada that can be attributed to the crust bouncing back after the melting of a glacier 20,000 years ago (Illustration: Science/ M Tamisiea)

CO2 burps from ocean to atmosphere at end of last ice age

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Even Albertans Get It

From todays Angus Reid poll showing the majority of Albertans are concerned about climate change global warming. And though this is a Conservative stronghold in the NDP provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba the numbers are the same.

Views on Climate Change Q1. We are interested in your views on the debate currently underway in Canada on global warming. Do you think global warming represents a serious threat to the world, or is the issue being overplayed?
All		BC		Alta.		Man. / Sask.		Ont.		Que.		Atl.
A serious threat	73%		72%		63%		61%		74%		77%	81%
Overplayed	20%		26%		33%		31%		19%		13%	10%
Not sure	7%		2%		5%		8%		7%		9%	9%

Environment

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Groupthink

We sometimes overlook the most obvious connection between deniers, those who deny global warming, those who deny evolution and those who deny the holocaust.

They suffer from the same kind of groupthink and conspiracy theories.

Its not denial they say, it's debate they want, the facts are not irrefutable, there is evidence to the contrary.

For a long time Bradley Smith has tried to present himself as an honest chap, a champion of intellectual freedom simply seeking an "open debate"about the "holocaust controversy [sic]." But this debate is a sham. The so-called holocaust controversy does not exist. It is the invention of a collection of long-time anti-Semites and apologists for Hitler.

On the surface, Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth."

Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

Of course most holocaust deniers are right wing kooks that even other right wingers disavow or do they? Not so. Once upon a time they had powerful business backers, and in many cases still do today.

Like Robert Welch Jr. who founded the John Birch Society. Today the Birchites focus their criticism on immigration, legal or illegal and the UN. There are many in a variety of right wing movements, like the Minutemen, whose roots go back to the sixties and the World Anti-Bolshevik Movement which gave succour to post WWII fascists.

The right wing is inundated with conspiracy theorists, holocaust deniers and neo-fascists. And ideological differences aside they are part of the 'mainstream' right, they are backed by private business interests and the tactics they have developed over fifty years of lobbying in the United States remain the same.

Because they are effective. Deny that your opponents have evidence, claim something is a theory, not a fact and viola, their views are challenged for there creditability.

Thus the same argumentative tactic used to deny the holocaust is used to deny evolution and used to deny climate change. It is groupthink on the right. And the argumentative style does not change, the subject of the attack does.

And it is always tinged with conspiracy theory, that the scientific or historical facts are being foisted on us because it is consensus reality, consensus of those in power it is not the 'real thing'.

So all the historians that accept the holocaust are establishment historians not 'real' historians. Scientists that accept evolution or global warming are not 'real' scientists.

The only place that a climate change science consensus exists is in what Essex and McKitrick call 'Official Science', the collective voice of governments and other so-called 'science authorities'. But this is not real science.

The Climate Change Deniers have money and powerful connections they have used to discredit their opponents, in this case other scientists and academics. And sometimes do so to end careers, literally terrifying their opponents into silence. Certainly a form of fascism.

"There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute," he says. "And Kevin [Trenberth] is a likely target." Mann agrees that the scientists behind the upcoming IPCC report are in for a rough ride. "There is already an orchestrated campaign against the IPCC by climate change contrarians," he says.

Many of the IPCC's authors, some of whom asked not to be named, say this is a smokescreen. They claim there is an extensive network of lobby groups and scientists involved in making the case against the IPCC and its reports. Automobile, coal and oil companies have coordinated and funded past attacks on them, the scientists say. Sometimes this has been done through Washington lobby groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose officers include Myron Ebell, a former climate negotiator for George W. Bush's administration. Recently, the CEI made television advertisements arguing against climate change, one of which ended with the words: "Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life." CEI's past funders include ExxonMobil, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.

The money trail

Some sceptical scientists are funded directly by industry. In July, The Washington Post published a leaked letter from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), an energy company based in Colorado, that exhorted power companies to support the work of the prominent sceptic Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Worried about the potential cost of cleaning up coal-fired power plants to reduce their CO₂ emissions, IREA's general manager, Stanley Lewandowski, wrote: "We believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists... In February this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels."

The Fraser Institutes response to the IPCC report was a long time in the making, and a coordinated effort between them and the anti-climate change lobby, the flat earthers, in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. And the organizations, front groups really, are all interconnected.

It was planned years ago, as new front organizations sprung up over the past three years in preparation for the IPCC report. While the Fraser Institute like its American counter-part the Cato Institute have existed since the seventies, groups like Canada's Natural Resources Stewardship Project, and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition are all relatively new lobbying groups. Even the older Friends of Science. was only created in 2002.

The push was on by the right and their big business backers when they saw the writing on the wall after Kyoto was signed. One faction of capitalism endorsed Kyoto, another was ambivalent, and a handful, but a powerful handful, vehmently opposed Kyoto.

Having lost the war they now engage in a protracted series of battles to attempt to inundate doubt in the public mind, using fronts like Junk Science.com and Fox News, various assorted right wing media mouthpieces in Canada, Europe and America. They know they have lost, but if in anyway they can hold back radical changes required to deal with the heat death of the planet, to save their industries they will. Victory to them is to delay change.

And they will never go away, another issue will come to the fore that they can delay, attack, undermine, and deny. And the consipiratorial politics of denial will once again be used.

The Right Wing exposes the Janus nature of the ruling class. One face appeals to the public as liberal, seeking to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism, the other jingoist, nativist, reactionary seeks to dominate through demagoguery and populism. One is enlightened capitalism the other is fascism. Both are false choices.

The alternative is, as it has always been for the past one hundred years, Barbarism or Socialism.



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Fraser Institute

Environment

Conspiracy Theory

Fascism

Anti-Semitism


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God Created Global Warming

Yep when you break down the arguments from the right that's what it comes down to.

Global Warming, like AIDS, is all part of Gods plan.

Global warming is a given. The cause of global warming is questioned. Some scientists blame man, just as many other scientists contend we are undergoing one of Earth's natural warming cycles.

Our planet has been cooling and warming since God created it.


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Business As Usual

Despite the headline the bosses still don't get it.

Bosses heed climate warning

The oil and gas sector's peak lobby, the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, described the IPCC report as a "sober, careful and comprehensive overview" of the status of climate change science. APPEA chief executive Belinda Robinson said national and international policy responses must be similarly considered, measured and multi-faceted. "Just as the IPCC avoids hysteria, so should our responses. The report leaves little doubt in my, and judging by a range of polls, most people's minds that climate change is very, very serious," she said.

"But in tackling it there is absolutely no room for knee-jerk, ill-informed approaches that have more to do with political optics than a genuine desire to understand the complexities in settling on a suite of policies that serve the best long-term interests of Australia and the world."

Ms Robinson warned that until commercial, environmental and technological drivers combined to dictate Australia's future energy profile, the emphasis must be on keeping all gas, clean coal, renewable, nuclear and a variety of other energy options open, as well as well others not yet dreamt of.

As in Canada so it is in Australia. PM pushes nuclear power

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Environment

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Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Real Climate - Climate Science From Scientists says the Fraser Institutes Flat Earth response to the IPCC report, falls flat as a pancake;

An unofficial, "Independent Summary for Policymakers" (ISPM) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report has been delivered by the Fraser Institute. It's a long, imposing-looking document, resembling, come to think of it, the formatting of the real Summary for Policymakers (SPM) document that was released on Friday after final negotiations of the IPCC in Paris last week. The Fraser Institute has assembled an awsome team of 10 authors, including such RC favorites as tilter-against-windmills-and-hockey-sticks Ross McKitrick, and other luminaries such as William Kininmonth, MSc, M.Admin -- whose most recent paper is "Don't be Gored into Going Along" in the Oct-Nov issue of Power Engineer. To be fair, he did publish a paper on weather forecasting, back in 1973. According to the press release, the London kickoff event will be graced by the presence of "noted environmentalist" David Bellamy. It's true he's "noted," but what he's noted for is his blatant fabrication of numbers purporting to show that the world's glaciers are advancing rather retreating, as reported here.

And Real Climate refutes the theory of Radiative Forcing which Blogging Tory Kitchner Conservative used in his blog to prove that the IPCC report was Fear Mongering and Alarmism.

One of the strangest sections of the Fraser Institute report is the one in which the authors attempt to throw dirt on the general concept of radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is nothing more than an application of the principle of conservation of energy, looking at the way a greenhouse gas alters the energy balance of a planet. The use of energy conservation arguments of this type has been standard practice in physics at least since the time of Fourier. We have heard certain vice presidents dismiss "Energy Conservation" as merely a matter of personal virtue, but we have never before heard people who purport to be scientists write off the whole utility of "Conservation of Energy." From what is written in the Fraser report, it is not even clear that the authors understand the first thing about how radiative transfer calculations are done.

Ouch.

And DeSmogblog issued a press release in anticipation of the Fraser Institutes Report today;

DeSmogBlog.com: IPCC Criticism Fits into Canadian Climate Change ...

A Canadian think tank's attack on the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of several recent initiatives by Canadian groups to block action on global warming, DeSmogBlog.com President, James Hoggan, said Monday. The latest attack, by the Exxon-funded Fraser Institute, is scheduled to be released today, Feb. 5 at a press conference in the United Kingdom.

"These people are an embarrassment to Canadians," Hoggan said. Two industry front groups (the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science) have popped up in Canada the last couple of years, spreading doubt about climate change at every turn. And a scientist associated with those groups put together a petition of skeptical "experts" last spring, a petition that was quoted in U.S. Senate committee hearings.

Now the Fraser Institute, a right-wing think tank that has received annual grants from oil-giant ExxonMobil, is issuing what it calls an independent summary of the report of the IPCC. The Institute claimed that the IPCC's own summary is a political document "neither written by nor reviewed by the scientific community".

Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis and a lead IPCC author called the Fraser Institute's effort "highly ideological". The IPCC summary was written and reviewed by some of the most senior climate scientists in the world, without political or bureaucratic input, Weaver said.

The English newspaper the Mirror issued the following report;

ATTACKS ON GLOBAL WARMING

A RIGHT-WING think tank funded by oil firms will today try to rubbish claims of climate change.

The Canadian-based Fraser Institute argues there is no globally consistent pattern in rain or snow falls and not enough data to prove rising temperatures pose a danger.

Its review - branded "rubbish" by Friends of the Earth - attempts to challenge the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which compiled a report by 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries.

ExxonMobil has paid the institute more than £30,000. A quarter of its funding comes from organisations including pharmaceutical, oil, and gas companies.

Today's launch of the report follows the revelation that the right-wing American Enterprise Institute - also funded by ExxonMobil - offered scientists up to £5,000 to underminine the IPCC study.

Just to be Fair and Balanced as they say on Faux Newz.

The Scoop from New Zealand published a news release from a New Zealand Flat Earth Coalition, another arm of the Fraser Institute. You can tell because they call the Fraser Institute an 'independent think tank', not a right wing one nor do they mention Exxon funded the report, nor the fact they are one of the Fraser Institutes sources.

Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

Independent Summary Shows New UN Climate Change Report Refutes Alarmism And Reveals Major Uncertainties In The Science

February 5, 2007

For Immediate Release

LONDON, UK—An independent review of the latest United Nations report on climate change shows that the scientific evidence about global warming remains uncertain and provides no basis for alarmism.

In 2006, independent research organization The Fraser Institute convened a panel of 10 internationally-recognized experts to read the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report and produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers. The result, released today and available at www.fraserinstitute.ca, is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of the science. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers.

US Republican Senator Inhofe is using the Fraser Institute Report to refute the IPCC Report, he too is aligned with the small circle of climate deniers, he quotes the report almost word for word,

Washington, DC – Sen. James Inhofe, (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, today commented on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Summary for Policymakers.

"This is a political document, not a scientific report, and it is a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain. The media has failed to report that the IPCC Summary for Policymakers was not approved by scientists but by UN political delegates and bureaucrats," Senator Inhofe said. The IPCC is only releasing the Summary for Policymakers today, not the actual scientific report which is not due out until May 2007.

Which is refuted by Real Climate;

Why go to all the trouble of producing an "independent" summary? The authors illuminate us with this wisdom regarding the official Summary for Policymakers: "A further problem is that the Summary for Policy Makers attached to the IPCC Report is produced, not by the scientific writers and reviewers, but by a process of negotiation among unnamed bureaucratic delegates from sponsoring governments." This statement (charitably) shows that the Fraser Institute authors are profoundly ignorant of the IPCC process. In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists, and are publically acknowleged. Moreover, the lead authors of the individual chapters are represented in the writing process leading to the SPM, and their job is to defend the basic science in their chapters. As lead author Gerald Meehl remarked to one of us on his way to Paris: "Scientists have to be ok, they have the last check. If they think the science is not represented, then they can send it back to the breakout groups. "

Inhofe, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition; a handful of scientists and rigth wing lobbyists, and a wine grower, like the folks the Fraser Institute has rounded up are all part of the coalition funded by Exxon of climate change deniers, like the Candian petro lobby; Friends of Science.

In fine neo-con tradition what they do is quote each other, without refering to the fact they all belong to the same club, as if that proves their authority and points.
And they make the misleading claim that they are "leading climate scientists" which of course they are not. They are corporate apologists for capitalism.

This is the same tactic used when the Fraser Institute issues an economic report on the joys of the free market, proving their evidence by quoting a "leading" economicst from the Cato Institute, which of course quotes a "leading" economist from the Fraser Institute as a source.

You get where all this is leading. It is a self completing circle, as Phil Ochs said; a small circle of friends. Though one could be forgiven for considering it an ideological circle jerk.

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Fraser Institute

Environment


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Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Love this announcement from the Fraser Institute for their Flat Earth Report; note the Bill O'Riley like No Spin Zone pronouncement.

Climate Change Without the Spin:
An Independent Summary for Policymakers of the New IPCC Report

When spinning is exactly what this is all about. Another example of neo-con newspeak.


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BT Climate Change Denial

Well this proves that in order to be a true card carrying conservative in Canada you must, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to deny the scientific evidence of Global Warming. Not because you don't believe it but because it's the rigorous (as in rigor mortus) position you MUST hold or all is lost.

As evidenced by the following Blogging Tory posts:
PCC Report Doesn't Prove Causality
By the Numbers
"The best CTV push-poll yet..."
A Voice of Sanity at the Globe
From the people who brought you...
"The semantics of climate change"
The forecast calls for pain
National Post reinforces my point
"Global Cooling" ?
It?s very likely, said the groundhog
It is VERY LIKELY!

etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The irony is that like their Great Leaders denial of the science of climate change/Global Warming back in 2002 when he called Kyoto a 'money sucking socialist' scheme, these poor deluded folks don't get it.

Kyoto is meant to save capitalism from itself. It has to do with ameliorating the worst excesses of the market by creating a market to exchange carbon credits, thus producing a new form of stock market. That is capitalism in action. Nothing socialist about it. Well except for government regulations, which even capitalists agree are needed to keep the playing field level.

Of course these folks are correct in pointing out Kyoto doesn't work, nor can capitalism when it comes to changing the course of its own inherent crisis as the result of its creation of self sustaining technology.

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A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

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Flat Earth Society Meets In London

The New Flat Earth Society is officially meeting in London England to respond to the UN Global Warming report issued by the IPCC in Paris.

And its all paid for by Exxon Mobil.

And it is a tax write off because they are a registered as a charity in Canada and the United States. Yep your tax dollars help pay for this right wing drivel.

Their sypmathisers at the National Pest round up the usual suspects to be 'objective' in their reporting on global warming. If being objective means quoting folks about why the world is flat.

These guys are the grass roots base of the Harper government so the fact the New Canadian Government opposes Kyoto should come as no surprise.

And just because they have scientists on their side don't forget so did these guys;

The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society, as a successor to the 19th century Universal Zetetic Society. The Flat Earth Society devised detailed arguments, based on scientific observations and references to the Bible, to support their claim that the Earth is a motionless disc not an orbiting globe.


A tip o the blog to Buckdog, Far and Wide and Mike Marin

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John Baird In Exxons Pocket?

Climate Change Skeptics the New Flat Earthers

Fraser Institute

Environment

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John Baird In Exxons Pocket?

Is Harpers new Environment Minister, John Baird in the pocket of Exxon Mobil? After all their Canadian anti-Kyoto lobby is run by Barry Cooper part of the Calgary School which Harper is a graduate of. We will find out soon enough as he goes to Paris for the UN Climate Change Report.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has maintained any environmental plan for Canada must balance the need to reduce greenhouse gases with the need to profit from the country's vast energy resources.

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