Posted on 03/22/2015 5:11:07 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
For nearly thirty years, climate scientists have been the targets of character assassination by the fossil-fuel industry’s hired guns. They’ve been mugged on the streets of public discourse, pounded by the fists of demagoguery and smear. Their lives have been upended in an effort to have their research suspended. They’ve been kicked, slapped, whipped, tripped, and called every ugly name in the book.
Now they’re fighting back, in a bold and innovative new campaign known as More Than Scientists. This campaign provides an inside look into the lives of the climate scientists whose extensive research led to the scientific verdict that greenhouse gas emissions were causing our planet’s temperature to increase to dangerous levels.
Eric Michaelman, a Seattle-based climate activist, is the creator of this effort. In an e-mail interview last week, Michaelman told me that this initiative “developed out of discussions and brainstorming between longtime climate activists in the Seattle area and scientists at the University of Washington who personally wanted to play a more constructive part in the public conversation about climate…[W]e felt that video would be the best medium with the goal of helping the public better get to know the scientists personally, since when you see and hear someone talking it’s easy to make your own impression of their sincerity and conviction.”
Rational-thinking people have long since been convinced of the sincerity and conviction of those who have labored tirelessly for decades to analyze the risk greenhouse gases pose to the planet. However, if you have any friends who still think Sean Hannity knows more about climate change than actual climate scientists, ask them to watch these videos and see if they change their minds…or just keep them closed.
[VIDEO embedded at source]
As Michaelman noted last week, “The goal of More Than Scientists is to help the public get to know the scientists and hear in their own words that climate change is real and they’re concerned about it. There’s so much misinformation spread about climate science that we felt it would be really helpful to hear more directly from the scientists themselves. What better way to communicate the actual scientific consensus than to hear from the scientists themselves? And if we can help the public to see and appreciate the scientists as their neighbors, fellow community members and parents, then it can only help acceptance of their message that it is real and we should be concerned for the world we’re leaving our children and grandchildren.”
Speaking of the world we’re leaving our children and grandchildren—and those who are, and who are not, terribly concerned about it—I wasn’t surprised in the least to learn that wingnut media entities have opened rhetorical fire on former Secretary of State George Shultz after he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post suggesting that Republicans who dismiss the threat of climate change are ignoring the lesson Reagan taught when he addressed the threat of ozone-layer depletion in the 1980s. It’s obvious that Schulz’s words—in particular, his call for revenue-neutral carbon-pricing legislation —have fallen upon deaf right-wing ears. The savagely negative reaction to Shultz’s piece is a precursor to how the right wing will go after Pope Francis when he releases his encyclical on the environment and addresses Congress later on this year. To right-wing ideologues, Shultz is just a senile RINO and Francis is an impostor; in their deranged minds, David Koch is the real Pope.
I know that many climate scientists hope that the partisan divide on this issue can be brought to an end. I’m sure Shultz thinks this divide can be brought to an end. I assume climate-concerned Catholics believe Pope Francis can bring the partisan divide to an end. However, this divide can only end by bringing an end to the tyranny of right-wing ideology in this country. That’s a hard fight…but it can be won. It must be won.
UPDATE: More from Thom Hartmann.
For nearly thirty years, climate scientists have been the targets of character assassination by the fossil-fuel industry's hired guns. They've been mugged on the streets of public discourse, pounded by the fists of demagoguery and smear. Their lives have been upended in an effort to have their research suspended. They've been kicked, slapped, whipped, tripped, and called every ugly name in the book.That's just a stream of lies -- yes, the global warming hoax are demagogues, but they are the ones who have condemned anyone who disagrees by using smears, damning by association, cutting of grants, etc. Since they want to up the ante, ALL of them should be hanged.
Lysenkoism.
A brilliant description of what is happening, but I wish it was a simpler word to pronounce. In order to help us control the narrative, we need more accessible language than this.
"It's poetry in motion
She turned her tender eyes to me
As deep as any ocean
As sweet as any harmony
Mmm - but she blinded me with science
She blinded me with science"
If you've ever used a CO2 fire extinguisher you know it creates a white cloud. What happens in the atmosphere is all those white CO2 molecules conspire to focus rain droplets so that all the rain falls in one place (the flood picture you saw) while there is drought everywhere else.
On a long-term basis, we don't know if it's normal for successive cat5 hurricanes, or even converging, simultaneous multiple hurricanes. Over time, we simply have NO reliable long-term data upon which to say what it is that describes normal hurricane activity. We only have knowledge of what has been said over the last 600 years.
This could be the Nation's salvation if only the republican party gave a shit. In early 2008, with Obama acting like an idiot euro rock star, McCain's campaign began to use ridicule to attack him, with great success. But then one of McCain's traitorous staff pulled the plug on the only chance McCain had, ceased the attacks, and the rest is history.
Hopefully the GOP will have noted this and applied the lesson in 2016, but frankly I'm not holding my breath. I still have no confidence that the GOP gives a shit.
These are the death spasms of a movement that has pestered governments and citizens to the point of nausea. Enviros have been crying “Wolf!” far too long and patience has run out. People resent having their fears played upon. Too many are feeling the effects of this extortion by indoctrination.
More Than Scientists YouTube Channel has 31 subscribers and the video with the most views has 330 views at this time ...
True, Pielke normalized for that and found that the most expensive hurricane remains Miami 1925 (or some year close to that).
Galveston (1900)
I’d like see them produce videos that show the shrinking glaciers in the Himilayas, or the disappearing ice caps, or the total absence of polar bears, or overwhelmed shorelines, or millions of dead women and children and poor, or ANY of the ruin they have predicted.
American Thinker - July 6, 2011 - J. R. Dunn Democrats Unveil the Weapon of the Future "......This is an extraordinary series of events, of a type that we haven't witnessed before. Even more singular is the legacy media's insistence on covering the story (with the exception of the siege of Madison, which got the standard "unions unbound" treatment) as if it were commonplace to the point of boredom. It is no such thing; it is an ideological campaign of a magnitude and breadth that we have not seen in quite some time, if ever.
What all this amounts to is the baptism of fire of what I have taken to calling the "liberal superstructure." This superstructure is the vast constellation of advocacy groups, think tanks, single-issue outfits, unions, and various other flotsam constructed by the left over the past half-century or so. There are literally thousands of these groups, ranging from the ACLU and the Sierra Club with their hundreds of thousands of members to the local "Friends of the People's Venezuela" outfit which amounts to a retired feminism professor and her six cats. These organizations are ubiquitous, universal, and networked to a fare-thee- well. They are also liberalism's last great hope of controlling politics in the United States....."
And this is supposed to be an article about "climate change," on its merits? There is not a single statement about the current state of the science of climate change in this entire article.
What we have instead goes entirely to ad hominem considerations. Moreover, this 100-proof exercise in pure sophistry seems to have only one end in view: to separate, on the basis of ideology (or "received opinion") the "good guys" from the "bad guys" in the public mind, on what should be purely scientific questions.
Indeed, the author has already firmly confessed to this, in saying that it is conservative thought itself — right-wing ideology, that is — that is "wrong" on this issue, and thus must be defeated by this saintly crowd of AGW devotees, who are being unfairly beat up by the "hired guns" of the nefarious energy industry and its nefarious cohorts.
What does anything of this have to do with actual science???
Our attention is diverted here to the sheer nobility of the AGW pioneers. They are the beacons of truth. They are virtuous, down to the core. So much so, that we must shoot a video, capturing them in the "truth" of all their raw, passionate humanity — I gather the idea here mainly being that the more we see how lovely these people are personally, the more we can forgive the sheer craftiness (including cheating) of their personal pronouncements on climate "change."
Of course, let it not be thought that these beacons of truth are at all affected by pecuniary considerations of filthy lucre. They are far too noble for that dontcha know.
And yet in saying "Their lives have been upended in an effort to have their research suspended," I think we get the main clue behind the writing of an article like this.
The main fear on exhibit here is loss of research grants, of academic positions, of professional respectability, ultimately of personal self-esteem and self-satisfaction.
Nothing in this catalogue of "sins" has anything to do with legitimate science.
It is all entirely a side show, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Still, dear Cincinatus' Wife, it is deeply distressing that a screed like this can pass muster as a bone fide contribution to rational public discourse.
It doesn't "contribute"; and it isn't even "rational."
It’s become their religion - and they want it to be a universal religion.
The insane closed minded/single-mindedness of these science thugs is the ignoring of the most dangerous developing pollutions in the environment. We humans are literally poisoning our planet while arguing about anthropogenic warming so that an elite gaggle of wealth-beyond-avarice oligarchs can enslave more people via taxation on ‘carbon’ totals. It is a form of deadly insanity to allow this great deceit to continue.
I tire of all the politics under the cover of science.
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