Where Have All the Climate Deniers Gone?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.11.07
We had so much fun last year with these commercials from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Exxon-funded "free-market think tank" that produces the CO2: We Call it Life" ads. Well we won't have them to kick around anymore; Exxon cut their funding and their president, Red Smith, "sounded like a cornered man" when he spoke before the Senate Committee on Environment last month. According to the Australian, he said: Like a boy forced to apologise for pulling his sister's hair, he ceded grudgingly: "I am happy, for the purposes of this discussion, to accept all the scientific arguments behind their proposals." Hence, he sniffed, "attempts to allege climate denialism in response to my points are ad hominem attacks not worthy of consideration". It's getting hard out there for a global-warming sceptic. via ::Desmogblog
Up in Canada, Financial Post humourist Terrence Corcoran has given up on his denier parodies and come out strongly in the camp of Fidel Castro and Alternet against ethanol subsidies. "In the United States and Canada, governments are manipulating the market, issuing mandatory ethanol requirements and subsidizing plant construction and corn production....the great ethanol ripoff is also now playing havoc with the global food system, upsetting prices, production systems and supply chains." As Victor Lazzlo said to Rick: "Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win." ::Financial Post
Folks! Spellcheck!
LA: thanks. sorry.
Its awfully cold here in St. Louis today. Its been cold for months now actually. Should I leave my car running in the driveway to get this whole global warming thing kicked in?
So now we're gonna have people who are denying that they were ever deniers? We need a new term...
Denier [squared]?
How about Squares?
I don't know......in the UK "The Great Global Warming Swindle" documentary has swung a lot of people back the other way in one fell swoop. Raised quite a few questions in my mind too, which I haven't seen answered yet.
"Its awfully cold here in St. Louis today. Its been cold for months now actually. Should I leave my car running in the driveway to get this whole global warming thing kicked in?"
I assume you are kidding, but I just want to point out that most people who are not getting global warming are confused about the "global" part and mistake this theory with local weather.
It is possible to have a record cold on one region of the globe while having the warmest year ever. Heat distribution can change locally positively or negatively while the total amount of heat increases.
Climate is the average of all weather. Weather is driven by heat from the sun...not only directly, but by what is taken up and released later by land surface and seas. Complex. That's why we use computer models to overcome our faulty intuitions.
The sweet spot for our response to climate change is midway between panic and denial. I think this is called scientific rationalism, or something to that effect. It's what we learned after the Renaissance. Leonardo, Sir Francis Bacon, Ben Franklin: all those guys. There might be books by them.
"Its awfully cold here in St. Louis today"
Yeah, this kinda poor logic is why Chrysler Motors can't find any takers at 80% off of the price Daimler paid 10 years ago. (24 billion versus 4 billion.) Americans just get no science in school anymore.
gone? yup like they mentioned the great swindle (wasn't that a Sex Pistols album?) is alive and kicking... and the CEI have a bastard son called Bureaucrash and they post movies on youtube all about how the whole thing is a boondoggle in order for ecofreaks to control the world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydKPUYrE_VQ)
And while they cant take money from Exxon to deny climate anymore, they can take money from Exxon for other anti-eco things (just not climate). And also, the AEI (? or is it EIEIO?) has hired Fred "Cigarettes don't cause cancer" Singer to deny climate change...
so, really. gone?
There's still some lunatics still out there.
http://andrewkrause.com/
Yes, funny that. I could have sworn I saw Bjorn Lomborg on Newsnight last night, (UK, 10:30pm) saying human-made GW really was happening (his thesis now being that there are lots of other problems to think of first)...but then again it was very late, past my bed-time in fact and I might have dreamed it all...