Posted on 06/27/2011 7:06:33 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
When the public learns about huge faults in the skeptic scientist accusation, combined with the faults in the IPCC, the result may send AGW into total collapse.
Guest post submitted by Russell Cook
I’m preaching to the choir here when I say appearances of people hiding AGW’s problems beg for clichés – the emperor has no clothes, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, nothing to see here, move along. But I’m not a scientist, nor do I have a scintilla of expertise to say with any authority that the IPCC is wrong and skeptic scientists are right.
The one thing I can do is offer an ordinary citizen’s informed view of what the barrier is preventing skeptics’ viewpoints from being heard, and how that barrier can turn from the paper-thin success story it is into a cancer that has the potential to wipe out the entire ideology of AGW.
Notice that I said ‘informed view’. I watch the mainstream media, but I also read sites like this one, while a large chunk of the public does not. Therein lies the problem, as evidenced by this example: On October 12, 2007, the PBS NewsHour aired a glowing broadcast about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize, in which IPCC scientist Michael Oppenheimer offered scary scenarios rivaling those in Gore’s movie. Two days prior, a UK judge ruled there were nine errors in the movie and it could only be shown in UK schools “with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination”. Yet, I defy anybody to locate a solitary mention of this in any NewsHour broadcast.
See the problem? From my extensive digging through the NewsHour’s broadcast archives, Michael Oppenheimer has appeared on the program eight times and three other IPCC scientists have appeared there on six occasions collectively, all speaking at length about AGW with no rebuttal. How many times have skeptic scientists been allowed a similar opportunity there? Zero. Our friend Pat Michaels appeared once briefly in a taped segment to give his thoughts about ClimateGate…. four months after that event was breaking news.
The nothing to see here, move along tactic works fine as long as the bulk of the audience doesn’t know legitimate skeptic scientists exist.
The keyword is ‘legitimate’, and that’s where the barrier comes in. When a large portion of people around the world learn about global warming through Al Gore’s movie and through internet repetitions of its details, or from viral regurgitated details from anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 The Heat is On and 2004 Boiling Point, then the perception is there are no legitimate skeptic scientists.
The Gore / Gelbspan / internet repetitions are one-and-the-same. Skeptic scientists are accused of being in a fossil fuel-funded conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact“, and this mimics the old tobacco industry conspiracy. Everybody remembers how well that one turned out.
The key to the whole accusation is the “reposition global warming” sentence – it’s in Gore’s movie, it’s in two of the three global warming nuisance lawsuits, and was spread out as far as the eye could see on the internet beginning largely in 1996. When I first stumbled onto the phrase in late 2009, my google searches yielded seemingly endless amounts of accusers using the phrase, though lately all of my online articles about it have ‘tainted’ the search results rather noticeably.
Here’s the big problem I found: That accusation is based on a 1991 memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, but Gore had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier.
And just days ago, Gore mysteriously contradicts himself again in Rolling Stone about who found the memo. He also slams the mainstream media, who’ve been largely responsible for creating and maintaining the barrier keeping the public unaware about skeptic scientists. But, that’s a rather old ruse to to prompt left-leaning journalists to say to themselves, “I’m not going to be duped into diluting the importance of this issue by giving equal time to skeptic scientists”. None of the current media people are insulted because they say, “I’m not that guy.” It’s been a very clever tactic, of course dependent on reporters intuitively knowing all skeptic scientists must be accepting fossil fuel money. Seventeen+ months of research on this allows me to point out these problems in my latest article, “Pt II: Is Gore’s Accusation of Skeptic Climate Scientists Still a Hoax?“
The thing to consider here is that AGW promoters absolutely, positively do not want to see the kind of debate that occurred at last November’s US House testimony between Richard Lindzen and Ralph Cicerone. Otherwise, it becomes abundantly obvious that Lindzen’s level of expertise is not something that would be paid for and pre-scripted in an Exxon conference room. And most critical of all, no reporter must ask in response to such an accusation, “There is proof that he’s literally paid to make that stuff up, right?”
Their mantra is ‘settled science’ / ‘corrupt skeptics’ / ‘the media dilutes the issue by talking to skeptics’. This only works when there is faith in that whole system, as in the US investment banks circa 2007 and Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme.
Wipe out the faith in this mantra and what happens?
Found this listed on Breitbart’s Big Government website as #17 on today’s topic list.
I’m sort of feeling this!
End is near?
Nah!
They might shelve it for a while, only to renew it at a later time.
For example, Gore is now on population reduction. That was the greenie rave of 40 years ago, only it was called Population Zero. It was highly popular, then went into obscurity. Now, Gore is reopening it.
These issues don’t die. They just shelve them until they fade from memory for a while, only to be resurrected later.
we can hope!
I met a guy the other day that started railing about man causing global warming, and how bad it was.
I told him that AGW was a myth and a scam.
He had no idea what AGW meant.
He was also clueless when I tried to explain the MWP and
The Little Ice Age.
We can not fix stupid.
I thought AGW stood for “Al Gore’s Whopper.”
That is good,,,,never heard that before.
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Bob Diaz says:
To me, it seems that the AGW believers can keep going and going on. Mostly because the media is withholding the key information from the public.
There’s just too much invested in this scam to give up now. As long as the lies keep coming forth, they can maximize their deception.
We could have massive amounts of snow in Southern California in the middle of summer and the believers will still pump out the same AGW myth.
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Arn Riewe says:
It’s an interesting day at WUWT. Just after I posted a link to Walter Russell Meade under the last post on Tim Wirth, up pops this post focusing on Al Gore, an even more relevant topic to the blog by Meade, ‘The Failure of Al Gore: Part One”.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/24/the-failure-of-al-gore-part-one/
It’s a sad thing to watch as CAGW gasps for it’s last breath.
79 degrees in Sacramento.
Over the years, each of these categories is always filled. There is rotation between them, obviously, but they rotate asynchronously. As the "holder" of a particular niche gets old, a "niche vacuum" is produced, and record producers go looking for something to fill the niche. Whoever gets there first with a decent offering will fill the niche, and then the producers shift their focus toward another niche.
Of course, there are producers that specialize in one or two niches, but the really successful producers have projects in the wings for every niche.
In the same way, the left -- and maybe the right, too, depending on how you look at it -- rotates a set of issues across the public stage. As you correctly point out, the "population explosion" issue gets trotted out from time to time, and has for at least a hundred years; more, if you go back to the original thesis of Thomas Malthus. At other times it's global warming, or global cooling, or environmentally-induced cancer, or the effects of insecticides, or the over-use of antibiotics.
Once in a while, some innovator tries to come up with a new one, or a hybrid of two old ones; I'm thinking here of the "environmental racisim" trial balloon that got run up the flagpole a few years ago.
What's that line of Menckens?
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.Smart guy, old H. L.
Bring it, Mr. Wirth – a challenge
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UPDATE (Sunday 6/26 8:30AM): After choosing the quote of the week this week (see above here) I’ve come to the conclusion that former Senator Wirth is mentally incapable of debating the issue in a rational manner, would likely not respond, and thus there is no point in keeping this as a top post. – A
Former Senator Tim Wirth invoked the nuclear option yesterday. Small mushroom clouds are now appearing across the world as people read what he said. This is my response to him. It will remain the top post for the next few days or until Mr. Wirth responds to the offer made below.
I got the email about this bit of climate ugliness just after having dinner Friday night. I couldn’t do anything about it while I was driving home from Sacramento then, and it is a good thing, because it made me quite angry. The hour long drive gave me time to think about it and remember what the world was like before global warming supposedly made the weather worse.
First, let me remind everyone who former Senator Tim Wirth is. For that, we have to go back to June 1988. Dr. James Hansen is getting ready to testify before the Senate on what he thinks is a serious problem, global warming. The sponsor for Dr. Hansen? Senator Tim Wirth.
Dr. James Hansen testifies on global warming, June 1988
If we left it there, there would really be nothing to say beyond the fact that he’s the guy who put Hansen in front of the Senate and launched the cause. But Senator Wirth was culpable in foisting stagecraft onto the Senate to make them “feel” the problem in the form of a well crafted lie.
If any of you have ever been in Washington DC during the summertime, you’ll be able to relate to this. Senator Timothy Wirth made sure that room was “steamy”. This transcript excerpt is from PBS series Frontline which aired a special in April 2007. Here he admits his stagecraft in his own words:
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
Watch the Frontline video here. [UPDATE: The Frontline video has gone missing, but here it is on YouTube]
"near"?
I thought that hoax/scam was long dead and buried, aside from a handful of ignorant hangers-on?
Post/thread...BTTT!
Might as well repeat the links to Pt 1 & 2 of Cook’s articles:
I think a little more connecting of the dots is required to make the case. Whatever the case is.
This is wishful thinking. The fact is that the AGW crusade won’t go away until it is replaced with another scam of a similar magnitude that can suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy and enrich the scammers. There are far too many people getting filthy rich off this scam — and with our tax dollars, to boot.
I’m drawing a blank on MWP.
Did you mention the Maunder Minimum, though?
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