Peter Sinclair: What Climate Deniers Learned from Big Tobacco [MUST SEE VIDEOS - BOTH OF THEM!!!!!]

by Peter Sinclair, This Is Not Cool, February 26, 2015

Above, my newest “This is Not Cool” video focuses on the backstory behind “Merchants of Doubt,” the new documentary inspired by Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway’s book of the same name.  The centerpiece of the book is the story of how techniques of science denial perfected in the tobacco industry have been adapted to the broader war on inconvenient science.

This week’s media firestorm centering on Dr. Willie Soon, a high-profile prop at many a gathering of climate deniers, was kicked off by Justin Gillis’ piece in the New York Times on Sunday.

It’s not insignificant that Gillis put the affair in a larger context, something that happens rarely in media coverage of the climate issue.
—

The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization.

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding. 

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden. 

“The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a book about such campaigns. “Willie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.”
—

I was able to include parts of detailed interviews from scientists who were very much a part of the story, including Dr. Oreskes, who was the target of a massive climate denier attack after she published a key paper on the scientific consensus around climate change, in 2004.  

In addition, I include part of our interview with Dr. Ben Santer – who sheds light on the role of tobacco and climate science denier Fred Singer – and Stanton Glantz, who appears in the film and was an early, and combative, critic of the tobacco industry’s war on reality, and connects the tactics, and even the combatants,  to the climate issue.

The movie adaptation of Dr. Oreskes’ book is due in theaters next week. I’ve seen it, and I think, especially in light of the recent revelations, it will become a starting point for a lot of conversations.  

I’m sure that editors and reporters at the New York Times would have seen the movie and been aware of it too, so it causes one to wonder if there is a bit of calculation behind the recent story.

Merchants of Doubt trailer below.

http://climatecrocks.com/2015/02/26/new-video-what-climate-deniers-learned-from-big-tobacco/

MUST READ: Nigel Lawson: An Honourable Man [yeah, right] (1st installment in a series on the Climate Denial Machine in the UK)

by Brendan Montague, DeSmog UK, September 1, 2014

The once chancellor to Thatcher and father of Nigella Lawson stages a remarkable political resurrection by making climate denial his personal crusade. The first of three parts in our inaugural series, "An Honourable Man." 

Nigel Lawson is an honourable man. The one-time British chancellor interrupted his idyllic retirement in the South of France to take part in what he described as a “distinctly surreal” debate on global warming held by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London on the evening of Monday, November 23, 2009. It would turn out to be portentous day in the history of British and American climate denial.

The 82-year-old was sporting dyed-black hair and a crooked salmon-pink tie. He spoke off-the-cuff. “There are huge benefits from a warming planet,” he assured his audience. “What is important is that you will be able to pocket all the benefits.”  

The shrewd rhetorician admitted that he was “not competent to pronounce on the science” and that he simply did not know whether climate change was taking place: “Within these four walls,” he said, “I have to confess to this ignorance.”

But he was certain climate science “lacked integrity” and thought that even if climate change was indeed happening, the assumption that we should try to prevent it was a “great delusion.”

He accused the government of producing “mendacious” propaganda to “frighten the public,” before presenting a harrowing picture of how any limits to economic growth from reducing our dependence on fossil fuels would impact the world's poor.  

Possibly Immoral 

“If you slow down the rate at which these countries can develop, what you are doing is condemning tens of millions of people in the developing world to unnecessary poverty, unnecessary malnutrition, unnecessary premature death and unnecessary diseases,” he concluded. “I think that's possibly immoral.” 

Dr. S. Fred Singer spoke alongside the seasoned politician that night. The silver-haired US-based scientist was among the first to question the emerging science of global warming. Singer sang from the same hymn-sheet. “I'm not worried about climate change. Not at all. We know how to adapt to climate change better than our ancestors: we don't have to live in caves any more,” he smiled.

“What worries me -- the only thing I'm scared of -- are politicians: when the zeal to control the climate, to save the climate, will introduce policies that will ruin the economy.” 

The politician and the scientist were warmly applauded by the assembly of blazer-wearing pensioners that filled the small room.

This presentation took place at the Institute of Directors' imposing classical building on London's prestigious Pall Mall during a perfect storm that would severely damage the public's trust in climate science. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, Barack Obama, the American President, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, and the rest of the world's most powerful leaders were preparing for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15), taking place that December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The gathering was being hyped by environmentalists as the last real chance to prevent runaway catastrophic global warming and therefore save humanity from itself. 

The climate deniers in Britain and America, on the other hand, were at this time marginalised from the debate after their leading proponents had become tainted with the lingering, acrid smell of oil and tobacco money. 

A Miracle Just Happened

But shortly before Lawson’s talk a comment was posted on a popular sceptic blog: “A miracle just happened,” it said.

The cryptic message linked to a file on a Russian server which contained hundreds of thousands of private emails between professors Michael Mann, Phil Jones and dozens of the world's leading climate scientists which had been hacked and stolen from the servers of a British university. 

The hack was quickly dubbed “Climategate” by James Delingpole, an eccentric denier then blogging for The Telegraph, and newspapers and broadcasters from London to New York published the sensational claim that these emails contained “smoking gun” proof that global warming was in fact an elaborate hoax. 

The farce threatened to undermine the public's trust in climate science just when the world's governments were about to introduce legally binding restrictions on carbon emissions. Lawson appeared in The Times demanding a “high-level, independent inquiry” into Jones and his work.

“The integrity of the scientific evidence” on which “far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions” are based “has been called into question,” he wrote, “and the reputation of British science seriously tarnished.” The article hit the streets as he travelled to Committee Room G of the House of Commons to launch his charity, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), before an invited audience of Conservative MPs, lobbyists and well-wishers.

Currency Speculation

Lawson's remarkable luck would continue late into the evening. After the formal proceedings at Pall Mall drew to a close, Mark Littlewood, the chain-smoking director general of the IEA, invited the speakers to dinner. They were joined by a third man, who had made millions in currency speculation, and had given the IEA a generous £36,000 to host the discussion -- Lawson commands a speaking fee of up to £12,000. 

During the meal, the third man discussed Lawson’s recent book An Appeal to Reason, A Cool Look at Global Warming with the author himself and accepted an invitation to pay a visit to his small charity. Some time after, he turned up at the GWPF offices just off Trafalgar Square where he met Dr Benny Peiser, the social anthropologist who somehow has become Lawson's indispensable side-kick. The multi-millionaire was seemingly impressed and agreed to donate a large sum to Lawson's foundation.

This was the beginning of a new offensive against climate science, and the end of a political consensus in Britain supporting policies to reduce emissions to prevent the worst horrors of runaway global warming.

Tomorrow: part two of our three-part prologue and introduction to the first definitive, unauthorised history of climate denial in Britain and the United States. Share on Twitter and Facebook so your friends are not forced to play catch-up!

http://desmog.uk/2014/09/01/nigel-lawson-honourable-man

I CRASHED A CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL CONFERENCE IN LAS VEGAS

by Brendan Montague, VICE, July 22, 2014

Alex Epstein, author of forthcoming The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, sports his I Heart Fossil Fuels T-Shirt

I’ve been researching the climate denial industry for almost three years and the best way to gather information about this incredibly small yet influential clique is to hang out with them. I attended their 2012 conference of the Heartland Institute, an oil and tobacco funded free market think tank that spends a lot of time and effort trying to call bullshit on what is clearly not bullshit – the science of climate change. My presence was clearly unwelcome – but I guess they forgot to scrub me from their email invitation list, because I got invited again this year, to their 9th International Conference on Climate Change in the deep heat of the Nevada desert amid the chaos of Las Vegas casinos.

The choice of Vegas by Heartland seemed brilliantly provocative. A celebration of high-stakes capitalism in the very gambling dens where $92 billion is lost each year in pursuit of the American dream. The dazzling lights, the grotesquely oversized hotels, the free drinks.

Perhaps nowhere on earth is more profligate and wasteful of increasingly scarce natural resources than this twisted utopia. The Republican Party reportedly blackballed Vegas for its 2016 convention fearing its Christian supporters would be repelled by this den of iniquity – and that its legislators would be lured into its brothels and casinos. Scientists have explicitly stated we are “loading the dice” by raising temperatures so that extreme weather and deadly catastrophes will become more frequent – gambling with our future, basically. Joseph Bast, the president of Heartland, was surely thumbing his nose at his detractors.

Heartland has had a torrid two years. Dr Peter Gleick, a hydro-climatologist and author, took the unusual step of posing as a board member and tricking Heartland staff into sending him a trove of highly secret internal documents. The papers revealed that Heartland was working with a coal industry consultant in order to enter American schools and attack climate science.

Two months later, and just ahead of their 2012 conference in hometown Chicago, Heartland made the bizarre decision to erect a huge advertising billboard attacking climate science on the basis that the terrorist Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had apparently been concerned about global warming. This gave their archenemies Greenpeace US and Forecast the Facts the ammunition they needed to successfully lobby funders to withdraw.

The Vegas conference was going a good opportunity to enter this strange world again. But did I really want to spend a week in the middle of dustbowl America with three hundred climate cranks who would crowd around trying to tell me how wrong I am about everything if they knew the first thing about me?

24 hours later and I touched down at the Vegas airport in the dead of night, bathed in light. The Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, a gold-plated monument to excess, appeared to be next to the runway. Still it took 20 minutes and $20 dollars for a cab driver to get me there.

This sub-prime feeling hotel was the perfect setting for Heartland. The deregulated casinos glared as they took people’s money and the acrid smell of tobacco was pervasive. The hotel was brash, huge, and run down. All fur coat and moth eaten. There were loud renovations taking place when I arrived. The front desk had double booked my room, so when I finally got there I was confronted by a stout, hairy American wearing tight black underpants. Mercifully I was relocated.

The morning after my arrival I met Christopher Monckton, who had agreed to have breakfast with me. Within minutes I found myself almost entirely lost in confusing nonsense. Monckton repeated his claim to be a member of the House of Lords, which has been denied by the House of Lords, and having been the scientific advisor to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she first championed climate science, which has also been debunked.

The aristocrat, a classically trained architect and one-time journalist, told me he had produced a very simple climate model that proved actual scientists had exaggerated the threat of climate science and that there was no evidence that heating the atmosphere was dangerous.

Monckton has worked closely with the ominous sounding neoliberal think tank, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). They even hired a plane so he could parachute uninvited into the Durban climate conference. CFACT has enjoyed significant funding from ExxonMobil and other oil and car industrialists. So I asked Monckton if he had benefited from ExMo’s largesse. “The cheque has not yet arrived in the post,” he joked, before asking if I was “left wing.”

Monckton then told me he attended climate conferences because it was better than sitting at home on his sofa and he cared for the future of society. He had refused his $1,000 Heartland fee. I asked him how this chimed with his belief in the free market, that rested on the idea that people only respond to financial incentives. He grinned.

After I had paid for his breakfast he said something that really surprised me. We were walking past the slot machines when I asked him what he thought of Vegas. He said he believed gambling to be immoral. The casinos were profiting from people’s lack of a good education and fundamental misunderstanding of mathematics. He said Heartland had, in fact, chosen Vegas to make the point that climate scientists had failed to understand risk.

Dr Willie Soon. He claims Albert Einstein would have been a sceptic and accused the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “gangter science” during his presentation.

Bearded Joseph Bast opened the conference that evening. He said, “Speaking of funding and for the record, except for $150 from the Illinois Coal Association and another $150 from Liberty Coin Service, a great little coin shop in Lansing, Michigan, owned by my old friend Pat Heller, no corporate money was raised for this conference. And no, not a nickel from the Koch brothers" – owners of Koch Industries, the largest privately held firm in the United States and a major player in the oil refinery industry. The humorously small donations were meant to prove that Big Oil was not behind this jamboree.

The remarks came seconds after he thanked his co-sponsors, who included the Media Research Center, Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, CFACT, and the George C. Marshall Institute – many of which have been funded by oil corporations and some by Charles Koch foundations.

The fact checking website Media Matters for America put out a blog post about some of thespeakers’ various links to oil. But their website was blocked in the hotel and the Heartland delegates, all doughty defenders of free speech, were left in the dark.

Then the shadow-side of this comic dishonesty and hypocrisy became almost too much to bear. Dr S Fred Singer, a folk hero around here, was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award. He in turn presented the Frederick Seitz Award. If one man can take credit for inventing climate denial it is Singer. The old man once claimed, rather brilliantly, that, “My connection to oil during the past decade is as a Wesson Fellow at the Hoover Institution; the Wesson money derives from salad oil.” Exxon had given Singer $10,000 in funding just a few years earlier.

The late Dr Seitz had many achievements in his lifetime. But the one I will remember him for was contributing indirectly to the deaths of millions of Americans. He sat on the medical research committee of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and oversaw $45 million in medical funding which his critics claimed “served the tobacco industry’s purposes.” Much of my close family has been wiped out by smoking related diseases, so this one sticks out for me.

The Heartland conference was now in full swing and my brain began to melt. There was the usual monotony of badly put together Powerpoint slides, rambling speeches and desperate attempts to resurrect climate science controversies buried by actual scientists almost three decades ago. The speakers were being paid around $1,000 to attend, plus flights and large hotel suites.

The hundreds of sceptics around me not once questioned the bizarre, the illogical, the poorly constructed claims that swirled in front of our eyes. This parody of science was a deadly hybrid of 1970s Open University programmes and sub-Cirque du Soleil.

In the intervals I managed to speak to some of the key deniers. Dr Patrick Michaels has been vilified by Greenpeace and was one of the early generation of scientists to take money from coal companies to argue against mainstream climate science. He once admitted on national television that 40% of his funding comes from the oil industry.

He told me how as a young scientist he challenged what he thought of as a monolithic orthodoxy of climate change only to see his government research grants dwindle. Believing himself to be among the most brilliant he was insulted that he was in fact one of the worst paid in his profession. Thankfully, car companies were willing to secretly pay him to help them fight environmental legal battles.

Later I spoke to Dr Willie Soon, one of the few professional scientists in the room. He was once funded by Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute and one way or another by Charles Koch. Greenpeace used Freedom of Information laws to expose his financial support from oil barons through his university. Soon told me Exxon broke off his funding, without so much as a kiss goodbye. Soon was another sad sack who seemed convinced of his own brilliance and dumbfounded at the lack of recognition. At Heartland he was given a glass trophy and a round of applause.

I was then witness to a suited Greenpeace activist dressing down Anthony Watts, the one-time weatherman who blogs at Watts Up With That?, in a hallway. Watts broke the story of Climategate, when thousands of private emails between climate scientists were hacked and published online. The emails were presented as evidence of a lurid and global conspiracy to fool the public into fearing global warming. They weren't.

Then I ran into James Delingpole, the one-time Telegraph Online journalist who spewed vitriol at climate scientists and their defenders. I was about to undergo the kind of nasty, bitter confrontation I wanted to avoid.

Delingpole went to Oxford University with the British Prime Minister David Cameron but his novels didn’t do brilliantly and he was never invited into London Society. Delingpole’s other claim to fame was being made to look a complete fool when Sir Paul Nurse, filming for the BBC, asked if he had read the abstract of any scientific papers (the short introduction which sets out the significance of the study). Delingpole, who claims to have found a remarkable global conspiracy to fake climate research, admitted he hadn’t. So I just asked James if he had read any abstracts since. “No.” I couldn’t quite believe it.

Delingpole has written off one of the most influential climate studies as “ludicrous, comedy” and claimed its author, Professor Michael Mann at Penn State University, has “little discernible talent.” But during our confrontation he confirmed he had never interviewed Mann, never read his book and never read any of his scientific papers. I was dumbfounded.

Delingpole was furious. He raged and spat and accused me of being a troll. He attacked my journalism, having not read any, and attacked my opinions, having not heard any. All of this was being filmed by two French filmmakers. I was shaking. More in anger than in sorrow. “Can I give you some friendly advice,” I said.

“I don’t want your friendly advice, Mr Montague,” he said.

“Why don’t you read the abstracts to three scientific papers. Then you won’t look like such a fool next time someone asks that question. It doesn’t take long.”

The argument fizzled out and we both went our separate ways, huffing. And then I felt sad for Delingpole. Why was he even at this conference? He could be at home with his family, playing Scrabble. It seems he is driven by ambition, but had made it no further than the basement conference hall of a faded hotel in Vegas.

The Heartland exhibition

After three days locked into this air-conditioned hell Wednesday was upon us and the conference finally drew to a close. And I remembered we were in Vegas. I buttonholed Joseph Bast and asked whether he had indeed chosen Vegas as a brilliantly daring provocation to his critics. The spin of the roulette wheel reminded me at least of the madness of sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps that plunged millions of Americans into penury. Was it social commentary? “No,” he said. “The rooms were cheap.”

It would almost be possible to dismiss this whole crowd as a bunch of sad cranks. Somewhere between 9/11 Truthers and homeopathic doctors. Not just snake oil salesmen but snake oil customers at the same time. Immune to the accumulating evidence that free market economics is not only responsible for the economic crash of 2008, but also the ever-closer ecological catastrophe.

They would just be sad sacks if they were not also influential. Among the delegates swarm the sharks just as surely as they do in the Mandalay Bay Hotel aquarium. Myron Ebell of CEI who once conspired with a White House insider to downplay climate in a seminal government report. Senator James Inhofe who, by video call, told the troops to ready themselves to take Congress in November. They also influence lower level officials.

During one dinner I sat next to Rod Wright, a brilliantly funny and apparently savvy Democrat state senator from the environmentalist hotbed California. Rod, one of only two black people I saw out of a claimed 600 attendees, told me how he became suspicious of renewable energy, and then climate science more generally.

These suspicions were confirmed by the avalanche of literature he received from the Heartland Institute. His colleagues deserted him but he was steeled by the support of the free market think tank. “You have to sift information through your own filter”, he told me. “Their funding does not devalue their information. Everybody got money from somebody. Jesus said, ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’ ” He smiles, before adding, “I have looked at some of their work on insurance and I think they’re full of shit.” (I read later that Wright has been convicted of voter fraud.)

They are full of shit. But they are having a real influence on American politics. They are just one of the hundreds of Koch and Exxon funded think tanks and fake grassroots campaigns that have frustrated and blocked Obama’s administration at every turn. As I leave the conference I find it hard to reconcile what I have learned. These people are just cranks but they are perverting American politics. I did learn in Vegas that attacks from these people are not going to hurt me.

In the casino the tragedy of the American Dream continues. Hardworking Americans sit emotionless pouring their salaries into slot machines. Believing the dream. But investing every last dime in a desperate and, for the overwhelming majority, simply hopeless attempt to escape. I watch a guy burn $2,500 in 20 minutes during a spiral of roulette stupidity.

When you see the homelessness in Vegas, and the drug addiction, and you know there is no real welfare state over here, no safety net. These Heartland folk are just a few pay cheques from freefall. They're not going to get headhunted by Stanford University any time soon. They believe themselves too educated to survive McJobs. They are clinging on. They’re hustling. That’s what you do in Vegas.

Brendan Montague is a London-based investigative journalist who has published in The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday and The Guardian. He is founder of the Request Initiative, which boasts Greenpeace UK among its NGO clients.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/las-vegas-climate-change-denial-brendan-montague-101

David Suzuki: Attacks on climate change science hinder solutions

Resolving the problem of climate change will cost, but it will be much more expensive to follow the defeatist advice of industry shills, whose greed and lack of care for humanity will condemn our children and grandchildren to an uncertain future.

By David Suzuki with contributions from contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Manager Ian Hanington.

Starting in late September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its Fifth Assessment Report in three chapters and a summary. Not to be outdone, contrarians [i.e., paid fossil-fuel deniers]have unleashed a barrage of attacks designed to discredit the science before it's released. Expect more to come.

Many news outlets are complicit in efforts to undermine the scientific evidence. Contrarian [i.e., paid fossil-fuel deniers] opinion articles have run in publications in Canada and around the world, from the Financial Post and Washington Post to The Australian and the U.K.'s Mail on Sunday.

In The Guardian, scientists Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham point out that attacks cover five stages of climate denial: deny the problem exists, deny we're the cause, deny it's a problem, deny we can solve it and claim it's too late to do anything.

One attack that's grabbing media attention is the so-called Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change's report "Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science." It's written by Fred Singer, a well-known tobacco industry apologist and climate change denier, with Bob Carter and Craig Idso, also known for their dismissals of legitimate climate change science, and published by the Heartland Institute, a U.S. non-profit known for defending tobacco and fossil fuel industry interests. Heartland made headlines last year for comparing people who accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused climate change with terrorists and criminals such as Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski!

Read Singer's report if you want. But it's full of long-discredited claims, including that carbon dioxide emissions are good because they stimulate life. It's not the goal of deniers and contrarians to contribute to our understanding of climate change; they want to promote fossil fuel companies and other industrial interests, a point explicitly stated in the Heartland-NIPCC news release.

It claims the Singer report, which isn't peer-reviewed, provides governments with "the scientific evidence they need to justify ending the expansion of ineffective alternative energy sources and other expensive and futile strategies to control climate. Then they can focus on supporting our most powerful energy sources - coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro-power - in order to end the scourge of energy poverty that afflicts over one billion people across the world."

In other words, don't worry about climate change, let alone health-damaging pollution or the fact that fossil fuels will become increasingly difficult to extract and eventually run out altogether. And even though mountains of solid evidence from around the world show climate change is and will continue to be most devastating for the world's poorest people, the report feigns concern for those suffering from "energy poverty."

Overall, the attacks on legitimate climate science are coming from people whose arguments have been debunked many times and who often have ties to the fossil fuel industry. Some, including Roy Spencer and Ross McKitrick, have signed the Cornwall Declaration, which states: "We believe Earth and its ecosystems - created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence - are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."

The declaration also states that "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming" and that renewable energy should not be used to replace fossil fuels. Their world view can't accept the reality of climate change or its solutions no matter how much evidence is provided - something that offends many people of faith who believe we have a responsibility to care for the Earth.

The IPCC report, on the other hand, is a review of all the available science on climate change, conducted by hundreds of experts from around the world. It confirms climate change is happening, burning fossil fuels is a major cause and it will get worse if we fail to act. It also examines what appears to be a slight slowing of global warming - but certainly not a halt, as deniers claim - and offers scientific explanations for it. Upcoming chapters will also propose solutions.

Resolving the problem of climate change will cost, but it will be much more expensive to follow the defeatist advice of industry shills, whose greed and lack of care for humanity will condemn our children and grandchildren to an uncertain future.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/science-matters/2013/09/attacks-on-climate-change-science-hinder-solutions/

Brendan DeMelle: International Climate Science Coalition Lacks Credibility, Launches Heartland Institute Anti-Science Report

by Brendan DeMelle, DeSmogBlog, September 17, 2013

The self-proclaimed experts at the International Climate Science Coalition have today launched another fanciful flight into the realm of climate denialism and United Nations conspiracy theories.
The ICSC, headed by Tom Harris, a former Canadian energy company public relations consultant, is trying to grab media attention with a new report written by the who's who of the climate denier conspiracy bunch. The report, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, is part of a series published by a Chicago-based front group for the oil and tobacco industries called the Heartland Institute. 
I really hope mainstream media does not fall for their trickery again. After all, it is pretty well known by now that Fred Singer, the lead author on the International Climate Science Coalition's report, was an apologist for the tobacco industry long before he got into the business of denying the basic science of climate change. The other authors of the report, Bob Carter and Craig Idso, have equally shaky backgrounds when it comes to the science of climate change. 
To give you an idea of just how shaky, look no further than Craig Idso. DeSmog discovered last year that Idso was getting paid a whopping $11,600 a month by the Heartland Institute - not exactly the most reputable source of information when it comes to a globally important issue like climate change.

Interestingly, the press release put out today by the ICSC makes no mention at all of the Heartland Institute's role in funding and publishing the report. Perhaps because of that nasty Unabomber billboard, even ICSC is afraid to be associated publicly with Heartland?  

This report goes so far as to actually make the absurd claim that, "CO2 is 'the gas of life'. The more CO2, the more life." Yes, and water is also vital to life until you find yourself drowning in it.

In an effort to dupe reporters into trusting these "climate experts," this anti-science outfit even named itself the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), mirroring the official science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This is the same small group of people who claim a grand conspiracy by the United Nations to take over the world. This echo chamber of climate denial attempts to prop up non-experts in the hopes of grabbing a few headlines before journalists figure out they have been fooled by conmen. 

The only story to be found in this latest salvo by the International Climate Science Coalition and the Heartland Institute is whether anyone in the press will actually fall for this nonsense again.

http://desmogblog.com/2013/09/17/international-climate-science-coalition-s-lacks-credibility

Two Tweets and a Lie! Greenpeace Responds to Heartland Institute

From left: Heartland Institute president Joseph Bast, lawyer James Taylor and contracted pseudo-scientist Craig Idso. Crossposted from ...

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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Brendan DeMelle: International Climate Science Coalition Lacks Credibility, Launches Heartland Institute Anti-Science Report

by Brendan DeMelle, DeSmogBlog, September 17, 2013

The self-proclaimed experts at the International Climate Science Coalition have today launched another fanciful flight into the realm of climate denialism and United Nations conspiracy theories.

The ICSC, headed by Tom Harris, a former Canadian energy company public relations consultant, is trying to grab media attention with a new report written by the who's who of the climate denier conspiracy bunch. The report, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, is part of a series published by a Chicago-based front group for the oil and tobacco industries called the Heartland Institute. 

I really hope mainstream media does not fall for their trickery again. After all, it is pretty well known by now that Fred Singer, the lead author on the International Climate Science Coalition's report, was an apologist for the tobacco industry long before he got into the business of denying the basic science of climate change. The other authors of the report, Bob Carter and Craig Idso, have equally shaky backgrounds when it comes to the science of climate change. 

To give you an idea of just how shaky, look no further than Craig Idso. DeSmog discovered last year that Idso was getting paid a whopping $11,600 a month by the Heartland Institute - not exactly the most reputable source of information when it comes to a globally important issue like climate change.

Interestingly, the press release put out today by the ICSC makes no mention at all of the Heartland Institute's role in funding and publishing the report. Perhaps because of that nasty Unabomber billboard, even ICSC is afraid to be associated publicly with Heartland?  

This report goes so far as to actually make the absurd claim that, "CO2 is 'the gas of life'. The more CO2, the more life." Yes, and water is also vital to life until you find yourself drowning in it.

In an effort to dupe reporters into trusting these "climate experts," this anti-science outfit even named itself the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), mirroring the official science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This is the same small group of people who claim a grand conspiracy by the United Nations to take over the world. This echo chamber of climate denial attempts to prop up non-experts in the hopes of grabbing a few headlines before journalists figure out they have been fooled by conmen. 

The only story to be found in this latest salvo by the International Climate Science Coalition and the Heartland Institute is whether anyone in the press will actually fall for this nonsense again.

http://desmogblog.com/2013/09/17/international-climate-science-coalition-s-lacks-credibility

Two Tweets and a Lie! Greenpeace Responds to Heartland Institute

From left: Heartland Institute president Joseph Bast, lawyer James Taylor and contracted pseudo-scientist Craig Idso. Crossposted from ...