GLOBAL WARMING 1

See GW1-4 for newer content

see 1.5 for newest

https://www.ecowatch.com/native-americans-colonization-climate-change-2627721578.html

The widespread genocide of Native Americans by European colonizers between the 16th and 17th century killed so many that it helped cool the globe, according to new research.

A study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews calculates that the 56 million indigenous deaths across the Americas caused by disease and European-led massacres led to the overgrowth and reforesting of large tracts of agricultural land, contributing to a 0.15C degree drop in the early 1600s known as the Little Ice Age.

"For once, we've been able to balance all the boxes and realize that the only way the Little Ice Age was so intense is ... because of the genocide of millions of people," coauthor Mark Maslin told CNN.

As reported by the BBC:

"The [research] team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492.

It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse.

It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.

The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France.

This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air).

'To put that in the modern context - we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we're talking a large amount of carbon that's being sucked out of the atmosphere,' explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin,"

deeper dive:

CNN, The Guardian, BBC, Miami Herald, NY Daily News

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Climate Change Beliefs, Parsed on a Local Level, Paint a Valuable Portrait

A publicly available tool allows users to look up national, state and local opinions on climate change. It shows that nationally, 63 percent of Americans agree that the climate is changing. A majority thinks so in every state—even in coal hotbeds West Virginia (54 percent) and Wyoming (55 percent).

Climate Change Skepticism Is Highest In Japan, Britain and U.S., Poll Finds

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/climate-change-skepticism-poll_n_1939846.html?ref=topbar

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer:

Only about 7 percent of likely voters have not yet decided whether they will support Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, a new national survey finds. But on the topic of climate change, at least, these undecideds look more like Obama supporters than Romney voters.

Undecided voters are more likely than Romney voters to see climate change as an important issue, and their desire for government action approaches levels seen in Obama voters. What's more, undecideds are as likely as Obama supporters to believe that global warming is happening and that humans are causing it.

"We were surprised to look at how undecided voters broke on this issue, that they were much more similar to Obama voters than they were to Romney voters," study researcher Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change Communication, told LiveScience.

The new survey queried a nationally representative sample of 1,061 American adults, who filled out an online questionnaire on their voting plans and their climate-change beliefs. People chosen to be on the survey panel who did not own a computer or have an Internet connection were given one, ensuring that older and poorer Americans were not left out of the sample.

For Romney and Obama voters, the margin of error of the findings is plus or minus 5 percentage points. For undecided voters, the margin of error is plus or minus 11 percentage points.

Sixty-one percent of the undecided voters said they see global warming as an "important issue" they'll consider when making their choice. Seventy-five percent of Obama supporters said the same, as did 32 percent of likely Romney voters. In many ways, undecided voters match likely Obama voters with their climate-change concern: 80 percent believe the globe is warming, compared with 86 percent of Obama voters. (In contrast, 45 percent of Romney voters accept that global warming is happening.) [10 Climate Myths Busted]

Similarly, 65 percent of both undecideds and likely Obama voters say that global warming is driven by human activities, a statement with which only 27 percent of Romney voters agree. And 64 percent of undecideds think the president should do more to combat climate change, matching the 61 percent of Obama voters who feel the same.

Only 35 percent of likely Romney voters think the president should do more about global warming, and 47 percent say he should do less.

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bill mck: 8/21 RS

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel,.....

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)...

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher...

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it....

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground." The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.

It's not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with some big plays in alternative energy.

"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this." Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst – that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might – and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real movement.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. "The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719?print=true

five dangerous myths:

Myth #1: It's all China's fault.

Reality: America must do far more to cut emissions for both moral and practical reasons.Some U.S. politicians have long used China's growing emissions as an excuse for inaction. But China has dramatically ramped up solar power use and still lags far behind the U.S. in per-capita emissions. On a historical, cumulative basis, we are the world's single largest emitter.

And we're really kidding ourselves when we compare current U.S. pollution levels only to very recent, high-emissions years. The United States agreed, with the rest of the world, to use 1990 as the "baseline year" for comparing emissions levels, to avoid cheating on emissions reduction targets. While it is certainly good that our emissions have fallen recently, we must not forget that our emissions have increased more than 10 percent since 1990 -- nor try to change the rules of the game by insisting on a later baseline year to avoid accountability for our pollution.

China's growing emissions are a problem, of course -- but what's the best way to inspire change? A huge coastline and drought-vulnerable agriculture give China extra incentive to fight global warming, but developing countries rightly insist on meaningful U.S. cuts -- that's the only fair and politically feasible way toward concerted global action.

Myth #2: Cutting carbon pollution would hurt America's economy.

Reality: Fighting climate change is critical to America's prosperity.Drought is already wreaking havoc among U.S. farmers and ranchers. In decades to come, climate change-driven extreme weather and sea-level rise will threaten businesses, key infrastructure and public health around the country. That's why America's Clean Air Cities are urging federal action. At the same time, the cost of emissions reduction is likely much lower than anticipated: Reductions in other dangerous air pollutants over the past 40 years shows that regulation tends to spur innovation and technological advancement, reducing the cost of pollution controls.

Myth #3: Natural gas and fracking will save us.

Reality: Natural gas and fracking pose huge threats to our climate. First, there's growing evidence that natural gas operations leak methane -- an incredibly potent greenhouse gas -- at very high rates. Because of these leaks, some experts conclude that uncontrolled shale gas fracking actually has a greater climate-change effect than coal over the whole production life cycle. Fracking also poses huge additional risks to air, water, wildlife and communities. Second, fracking is also being used to develop vast new reserves of shale oil.

Pushing China to adopt this destructive technology, as Richard Muller has advocated, would be like pouring rocket fuel on a forest fire. We need to transition to truly clean and renewable energy sources, not open up new fossil fuel deposits with damaging new drilling techniques.

Myth #4: Polar bears and other endangered animals aren't really that threatened by climate change.

Reality: A large body of scientific evidence shows that global warming threatens polar bears, who depend on Arctic sea ice for hunting and all of their essential behaviors. The thickness and extent of the Arctic's summer sea ice have declined dramatically over the past 30 years, and this year's levels are currently tracking below record lows.

Based on evidence including declining population numbers, declining cub survival, and the drowning and starvation of individual bears, the government placed the polar bear on the threatened species list. Claims that polar bear numbers are actually rising are false: At least eight of the world's 19 polar bear subpopulations are declining and just one is demonstrably increasing (due to the curtailment of severe overhunting levels), according to a 2009 report by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group. Experts say that more than two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be gone in less than 40 years.

Many other wildlife species are imperiled by climate change, posing a threat to our planet's web of life.

Myth #5: A new law is the only way to meaningfully reduce U.S. emissions.

Reality: We already have the Clean Air Act, a potent weapon against greenhouse gas pollution. TheClean Air Acthas reduced harmful air pollution for four decades. Courts have repeatedly upheld efforts to apply the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gases, but the Environmental Protection Agency has been too slow and timid in using the law to control carbon pollution. Full use of all of the Clean Air Act's successful pollution-reduction programs offers our best hope for quick reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

To head off the worst effects of climate change, we need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to no more than 350 parts per million. The United States can't delay any longer. For the sake of our planet and our future, we need to get moving in the fight against climate change.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kassie-siegel/climate-change-myths_b_1761025.html

Follow Kassie Siegel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CBD_Climate

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Over the course of the last two weeks, two scientists -- James E. Hansen of Columbia University and Richard A. Muller at the University of California, Berkeley -- took to the pages of two prominent American newspapers to present new and compelling evidence that climate change is real, that it is driven overwhelmingly by human activity, and that its dire effects are already upon us.

And then nothing happened.

"Call me a converted skeptic," Muller wrote in an essay published July 28 in The New York Times, citing research posted, though not peer-reviewed, to the website of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature initiative. "Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Hansen's turn came a week later. "Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change," Hansen declared in The Washington Post on Sunday, citing peer-reviewed work published the following day in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change."

The nation took note and then went about its business. Minds were not changed. Energy policies were not revisited in any meaningful way. And most notably, the two presidential campaigns, now rounding the final turn toward November's election, remained characteristically mute on the whole issue.

Why? Well, one reason might be that most reasonable people aren't really waiting around for more and better science to reinforce the basic mechanics of climate change. They already get it.

What ordinary Americans really want is for honest brokers on all sides to detoxify and depoliticize the global warming conversation, and then get on with the business of addressing it. That business will necessarily recognize that we all bring different values and interests to the table; that we perceive risks and rewards, costs and benefits differently; and it will identify solutions through thoughtful discussion and that crazy thing called compromise.

Dan M. Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University, has demonstrated how important it is to acknowledge differing worldviews in all this. In a study published in April in the journal Nature Climate Change, Kahan and his colleagues showed that it's inaccurate to suggest, for example, that one side of the debate simply understands the science better. Scientific literacy, the study found, is actually a poor predictor of how individuals view the climate change problem.

"Our primary insight is that there's not a kind of direct transmission of valid science to public opinion that reflects the strength or quality of the scientific evidence," Kahan said in a phone call. "Other things are involved."

The research showed, for example, that those who value both rank and individualism -- known as "hierarchical individualists" in social-science speak -- are inherently more skeptical of environmental risks. "Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that hierarchical individualists value," the researchers noted. "In contrast, people who hold an egalitarian, communitarian world-view -- one favoring less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to individual needs -- tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it congenial to believe those forms of behavior are dangerous and worthy of restriction."

Kahan and his colleagues noted that the most scientifically savvy Americans -- that is, those most able to grasp the basic mechanics of global warming -- were also the most polarized on the issue.

Getting past that is no easy task, Kahan suggested, but it at least involves creating an environment where accepting scientific evidence does not define us politically. It also involves exploring a wide array of potential solutions that are prized by people of varying worldviews. In practical terms, that might mean not just condemning the evils of oil and gas companies, but highlighting the inevitable role of markets and technology and innovation in helping to curb planet-warming emissions.

In this context, Hansen, who comes with a penchant for strident activism, and Muller, whose funding sources have raised eyebrows and whose willingness to belittle his colleagues has earned him few friends, could be their own worst enemies.

Whatever the reality on that front, separating science from ideology would seem imperative. "In truth, there's no connection between what kind of person you are and the kinds of climate policies that are sensible," Kahan said. "We need to understand and make clear that the science of what's happening, and the policy options available to address it, are compatible with the commitments of diverse people."

How diverse? Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, working with researchers at the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, identifies at least six distinct dispositions on the climate change question in the latest installment of the study "Global Warming's Six Americas," published last month.

The analysis has shown that the American populace tends to fall into a half-dozen categories along a continuum of concern, ranging from those on one end who are "Alarmed" by global warming to those who are altogether "Dismissive" of the issue at the other. Each group accepts, interprets, frames and prioritizes information on global warming in different ways, and understanding and accepting that diversity is a necessary first step toward reaching general agreement -- not absolute unanimity, but a consensus -- on a path forward.

"Any effort to communicate effectively needs to start with the dictum, 'first, know thy audience,' Leiserowitz said in an email message, "and this research helps to define who these different audiences are and why they interpret this issue in such different ways."

No doubt some people on the left would characterize all this as a lot of unnecessary bending over backwards to draw in stubborn or self-interested obstructionists on the right. And of course, viewed the other way, many conservatives would likely dismiss this sort of message management as so much propaganda. I asked Leiserowitz if that's what everything boils down to: peddling the science on global warming in different ways to different audiences.

"'Know thy audience' is a general rule that applies to all forms of human communication -- including with one's own friends and family members, among co-workers, teachers with their students, coaches with their players, and, I daresay, even journalists with their readers," he said. "Yes, salesmen need to know their audience or market too, but there are infinitely more types of communication that have nothing to do with buying and selling.

"In this case, if you are trying to inform 'the public' about the scientific facts of climate change, so they can make up their own mind about whether this problem exists, whether humans have anything to do with it, whether it presents a serious risk, and whether or what kinds of actions individuals or societies could take to respond, you still need to know your audience," he added. "There is no single 'American public.'"

And there's the rub.

Still, there are signs that enlightened minds are looking to move forward. One came in the form of an editorial from Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, published in *The Wall Street Journal* on Monday. Skeptics need to stop denying the clear science, Krupp wrote, and supporters of climate action need to recognize that no policy solution can ignore the economic and market consequences that might come with it.

"We'll have a much better shot at developing solutions to our climate and energy problems that are good for our economy," Krupp wrote, "if leaders from across the political spectrum get re-engaged in the debate."

A more promising sign might have been revelations last month that a broad spectrum of thinkers and stakeholders -- left, right and center -- have been holding secret meetings on the topic of global warming under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative Washington-based think-tank.

Among the agenda items: finding a politically viable way to put a price on carbon emissions.

Of course, almost no one identified in the meeting program that was leaked online has agreed to speak publicly about the gathering. Until they feel safe doing so -- and until the price for reasonableness and appearing to compromise is eliminated -- we'll likely stay stuck.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-zeller-jr/global-warming-cooler-heads_b_1765473.html?utm_campaign=081012&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-green&utm_content=FullStory

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...Cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australiahas been studying climate deniers and conspiratorial thinking -- and the link between the two. He suspected that climate deniers -- as opposed to climate "skeptics," who actually use the tools of science to verify facts -- are highly prone to unrelated kinds of conspiracy thinking, and also to a conservative, pro-business ideology. He decided to test these ideas by questioning people who write and read blogs related to global warming.

He chose blogsbecause people with an anti-science bias have found a welcoming home on the Internet. Science denial is difficult to practice in the mainstream, peer-reviewed literature, but such contrarian views can be freely expressed in the blogosphere, where conspiracy theorists can feed one another's feelings of persecution. Lewandowsky surveyed blog denizens about their views on climate science, other scientific propositions, and their environmental leanings; their perceptions of what scientific "consensus" means; their beliefs about free-marketeconomics; and finally, their views on a number of well-known conspiracy theories. The conspiracies covered the political spectrum, from fears of a world government (a right-wing idea) to the belief that 9/11 was an "inside job" (typically embraced on the left).

:{The results were unambiguous, and unsettling. First, those who hold a laissez-faire view of unfettered free markets were much more likely to strongly reject climate science. Lewandowsky believes that, because the fundamental importance of fossil fuels (and CO2 emissions) to modern economics, climate science in general (and evidence for global warming in particular) is a threat to free market advocates. Free marketers were also more likely to reject other established scientific findings, even the (undisputed) facts that smoking causes lung cancer and HIV causes AIDS.

Second, conspiracy thinking was clearly linked to climate denial -- and to the rejection of scientific propositions in general. This was true even of conspiracy theories unrelated to the environment or climate -- the belief that NASA staged the moon landing, for example, or that the CIA killed Martin Luther King. In other words, conspiracy thinking is not simply a convenient way to dismiss a particularly bothersome scientific consensus. Instead, some people seem to have a general personality trait or cognitive style, which leads them to endorse any conspiracy. Thisparanoidthinking in turn predisposes them to reject completely unrelated scientific facts.

Lewandowsky's study will be published in a future issue of 'Psychological Science,' a peer-reviewed scientific journal, providing further evidence of a vast and ingenious plot to elevate enlightenment thinking and marginalize the unenlightened. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/climate-change-denial-_b_1686437.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green

Climate reality bites: Gen-Xers don’t care much about global warming

By John Upton

Members of Generation X are responding in a disturbing way to climate change — with a big, collective shrug of indifference. Grist readers being the obvious exceptions, of course.

Only 22 percent expressed “high concern” about climate change in a 2011 survey [PDF] of about 3,000 Gen-Xers in their late 30s. This despite the fact that “Generation X is the most scientifically literate and best educated generation in American history,” according to lead researcher Jon D. Miller.

The data come from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth, a University of Michigan-led project that has exhaustively tracked the views on various subjects of thousands of Gen-Xers since they were pimply-faced students attending high school across 26 states in 1987.

Click to embiggen. (Image by Tim McDonnell of Climate Desk.)

Along with a lack of concern, the survey participants exhibited a growing lack of engagement: In 2009, just one out of every 25 said they followed climate change “very closely.” When the same question was asked of the same group last year, just one out of every 50 responded the same way.

http://grist.org/climate-change/climate-reality-bites-gen-xers-dont-care-much-about-global-warming/

DN: As we discuss the spate of extreme weather in the United States, the author and professor Christian Parenti argues that the Republican-led assault on the public sector will leave states more vulnerable to global warming’s effects. "Another thing that’s missing from these discussions is not just the words 'climate change,' but the words 'public sector,'" Parenti says. "I mean, who’s out there fighting these fires? It’s the public sector, you know? Where do people go when there are these cooling centers? It’s the public sector. ... This assault on the public sector must be linked to climate change." We’re also joined by The Guardian’s U.S. environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg and by Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website. [includes rush transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/3/climate_disasters_toll_worsened_by_sustained

BANGKOK (AP)-- The United States says it will not be able to carry out a major climate study this year because Thailand has delayed a decision on whether to grant the U.S. space agency permission to use a key naval air base.

NASA's request to use Thailand's U-Tapao air base as the project's operations center has faced opposition from critics who say it could be a cover for military purposes. The base is located in Chonburi province, 190 kilometers (118 miles) southeast of Bangkok.

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amy g btsb: mckibben

us forest take up 20-40% anthro co2 (forest fires pos feedback)

ff co fight hard b/c terrified by tobacco co suit in which corps held acctable for damage

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top 28 skeptic funders http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/30/companies-block-action-climate-change/print

Top US companies shelling out to block action on climate change

Analysis of 28 companies finds cases of support for thinktanks that misrepresent climate science, including Heartland Institute

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 May 2012 13.49 EDT

US oil and Energy major companies lobby in Washington against green policies ( lobbyist )

Oil company heads during the US Senate finance hearing on oil and gas tax incentives on 11 May 2011. Photograph: Scott J. Ferrell/Getty Images

Some of America's top companies are spending heavily to block action on climate change or discredit climate science, despite public commitments to sustainable and green values, a new report has found.

An analysis of 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies by researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists exposed a sharp disconnect in some cases between PR message and less visible activities, with companies quietly lobbying against climate policy or funding groups which work to discredit climate science.

The findings are in line with the recent expose of the Heartland Institute. Over the years, the ultra-conservative organisation devoted to discrediting climate science received funds from a long list of companies which had public commitments to sustainability.

The disconnect in this instance was especially stark in the researchers' analysis of oil giants ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, and the electricity company DTE energy.

But even General Electric Company, which ranks climate change as a pillar of its corporate policy on its website, had supported trade groups and thinktanks that misrepresent climate science, the researchers found.

Caterpillar Inc, despite its public commitment to sustainability, also worked behind the scenes to block action on climate change. The company spent more than $16m (£10.3m) on lobbying during the study, with nearly five times as much of that spent lobbying to block climate action than on pro-environmental policies.

Other big corporate players were fairly consistent with their public image. Nike and NRG Energy Inc lobbied in support of climate change policy and supported conservation groups.

Peabody Energy Corporation, which produces coal, was ranked the most obstructionist of any of the companies. It spent more than $33m to lobby Congress against environmental measures and supporting trade groups and think tanks which spread disinformation about climate science, the researchers found.

"The thing we found most surprising in doing this research is just how all 28 companies expressed concern about climate change," said Francesca Grifo who heads the UCS scientific integrity programme. "But when we took a deeper look we found that a lot of the actions they took weren't connected to the messages."

The result of the disconnect was growing confusion about climate science, the researchers said. That made it more difficult to push for environmental protections.

The study was focused on the years 2009 and 2010, and looked at the companies' responses to moves by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions and the failed attempt by Congress to pass a climate change law.

It also looked at lobbying and political contributions surrounding the 2010 referendum to overturn California's climate change regulations.

But the researchers acknowledged that they were handicapped by a lack of transparency about corporate donations and lobbying, which made it difficult to determine exactly how companies were trying to exert political influence.

"Given the inconspicuous ways in which companies can utilize supposedly independent groups to further their own agendas, the funding of industry groups is an important pathway through which corporations influence the national climate conversation without accountability," the analysis said.

===

public opinion improving except TP/gop:

...

Public understanding of climate change: Getting warmer

By Joseph Romm

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

To go by the polls, the high point of public understanding of climate science was 2006 to 2008. That’s no surprise, since that period saw a peak in media reporting on climate science, starting in 2006 with An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary of Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation on climate science, and continuing in 2007 with the four scientific assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Disputes on the science were kept to a minimum in the 2008 election since both major candidates — Barack Obama and John McCain — understood and articulated both climate science and the need for action. It wasn’t until after Obama was elected with progressive majorities in both houses of Congress and the prospects for climate action became real that the anti-science disinformation campaign kicked into overdrive.

Ironically, or tragically, just as the anti-science disinformation campaign was ramping up, the advocates of climate action decided to downplay climate in their pitch for action, as the Washington Post’sEzra Klein explained it in his June 2010 article “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“

And the media’s coverage of climate science has utterly collapsed. Indeed, evening news coverage dropped from over 386 minutes of coverage in 2007 to 32 minutes (!) last year:

We see a similar jump in the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus about global warming:

This is all the more remarkable because the president and the media are hardly talking about the subject — though there was certainly a fair amount of media blowback from Rick Perry’s disinformation about the scientific consensus, in part because fellow Republican Jon Huntsman took him on.

And this move is also remarkable because the Tea Party crowd, largely conservative Republicans, generally get their news from sources that have continued spreading nonstop disinformation. Gallup’s figures suggest that the polling numbers for Republicans have hardly budged, which means most of the movement is due to shifts in the views of independents and progressives.

Certainly the partisan divide is large, as Gallup reports:

But again this is mostly the Tea Party crowd, especially conservative Republican males, and that’s what makes climate change a wedge issue.

http://grist.org/climate-change/public-understanding-of-climate-change-getting-warmer/

dunlap and mccright chart: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/09/chart-climate-change-spin-cycle

guardian coverage http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/public-opinion-climate-change-polls-politics_n_1285738.html

different survey methof=ds give diff opoll results; one sees 80% for decades

---

bill mck, grist

big blue marble apollo pix:

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56 percent of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to … deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40 percent over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: The fossil-fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the WSJarticle, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: The giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: Their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: We’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second-highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

http://grist.org/fossil-fuels/the-great-carbon-bubble-why-the-fossil-fuel-industry-fights-so-hard/

...

Progressive politics in general” … including climate politics.

Let’s remember what is too rarely discussed in polite company: Climate denial is largely concentrated among conservative white men. And not just conservative white men, but old conservative white men, otherwise known as the GOP base. The average age of a Fox News viewer is 65. A 2008 survey found that Rush Limbaugh’s audience is 72 percent male, 80 percent conservative, and an average age of 67.

Climate denial is not some isolated quirk of this cohort; it is part of something much deeper. Older white men are a privileged group. They saw their fathers occupy a position of unquestioned normative dominance. And yet history is passing them by; America is becoming more diverse, more urban, and more socially liberal. White men are in the process of losing their position of privilege. Their resentment and fury are intense and, partially as a result, their epistemic standards are becoming increasingly insular and tribal. Limbaugh explained the worldview like this:

We really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap. …

The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.

If you reject government, academia, science, and media as sources of information, you are left to believe any old sh*t that gives you a squirt of dopamine. You’re left without exogenous epistemological standards of any kind; you can believe whatever feels right. In short, you have achieved perfect epistemic closure.

This is a cohort that has convinced itself that bike paths are a U.N. plot. And I don’t mean “bike paths are a U.N. plot” in some sort of satirical, poetic-license sort of way. They really believe bike paths are a U.N. plot. They’ve convinced themselves that Obama is a Kenyan socialist with no birth certificate who apologizes for America and wants to fundamentally transform it into Europe, where they loll about all day on welfare, having homosexual sex while the Muslims take over. They believe in death panels and reeducation camps and giant North American mega-highways and creeping Sharia...

http://grist.org/climate-change/cohort-replacement-climate-deniers-wont-change-but-they-will-die/

polling/persuasion tactics;

http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-11-the-frog-and-the-polar-bear-the-real-reasons-americans-arent-buy

12/11

global cooling myth:

http://boingboing.net/2011/07/22/lowercase-theories-u.html#more-110307

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-03-now-that-were-on-the-way-to-a-hellish-4c-of-warming-lets-describ

straight to the source

Four Degrees of Devastation, IPS News
Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ‘Hellish Vision’ of 7°F (4°C) World, Climate Progress

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-07-01-severe-weather-costs-us-485-billion-per-year

by Jess Zimmerman

1 Jul 2011 12

According to estimates from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the baseline cost of extreme weather (which has always been with us, but which is steadily getting worse due to climate change) in the United States is $485 billion a year -- 3.4 percent of the country's GDP.

This is a complicated number -- it includes not only immediate costs from weather destruction, but also lost crops, power outages, resource usage, retail demand changes, and other indirect effects. Plus, it takes into account the fact that severe weather can be a boon for some industries (snow for ski resorts, for instance, or droughts for outdoor construction). Add it all up, and you get a chunk of change equivalent to a third of the U.S. budget deficit.

Right on the heels of America's spring of extreme weather, scientists at the Columbia Earth Institute have unveiled a package of historical data that shows greater variation in weather when the Earth is warmer. The 1,100 years of data, derived from tree rings, show that the difference between El Nino and La Nina -- large, multi-year climate phenomena that often lead to extreme weather -- is greater when the planet is warmer.

Historically, the intensity of El Nino and La Nina has waxed and waned in 50- to 90-year cycles. The most intense peaks -- when the Pacific ocean is warmest, for El Nino, or coldest, for La Nina -- correlate with warmer climates overall. If you want to oversimplify, the physics here is pretty straightforward: More heat in the system means more energy, and that leads to bigger swings and more violent weather.

straight to the source

Tree Rings Open Door on 1,100 Years of El Niño, Columbia Earth Institute

grist

lakoff: we are subsidizing energy co's to defeat GW politically (pos feedback) and alternative technologies

Carbon-based fuels -- oil, coal, natural gas -- are deadly. They bring death to people and animals and destruction to nature. We are not paying for their true cost because they are being subsidized: tens of billions of dollars for naval protection of tankers, hundreds of billions for oil leases, hundreds of billions in destruction of nature, as in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska coast. Death comes from the poisoning of air and water through pollution and natural gas frakking. And global warming pollution destroys nature itself -- the ice cap, the creation of violent storms, floods, deserts, the blowing up of hilltops. The salesmen of death -- the oil and coal companies -- are profiting hugely from our payouts to them via subsidies and high prices. And with the money ordinary citizens are giving to them in subsidies, they are corrupting the political process, influencing political leaders not to deal with global warming -- our greatest threat. We are dependent on them for energy, to a large extent because they have politically blocked the development of alternatives for decades.

September 2004: Study: Media Misrepresents Scientific Understanding of Global Warming

A study surveying media coverage of global warming finds that, on average, news organizations give “roughly equal attention” to opposing views on the causes of climate change. In its effort to be fair and balanced, the media, in many cases, has treated the opinion of a handful of industry-paid scientists and free marketeers as being equal in value to the consensus view of hundreds of the world’s top climate scientists. According to the authors, this has created the false impression that there is no prevailing scientific consensus on the causal factors of global warming. The authors—Maxwell T. Boykoff, a UCSC doctoral candidate in environmental studies and his brother, Jules M. Boykoff, a visiting assistant professor of politics at Whitman College—surveyed 636 stories published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal between 1988 and 2002. They found that 53 percent of these articles “gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change is exclusively the result of natural fluctuations.” The results of this study contrast starkly with those of another study which had surveyed 928 articles in peer-reviewed science journals. In that study, the percentage of articles expressing uncertainty about the cause of global warming was zero percent (see December 3, 2004-May 2005). The authors say this difference—between how the causes of global warming is described by the media and between how it is understood by the scientists—represents “a disconnect between scientific findings and public understanding.” “By giving equal time to opposing views, these newspapers significantly downplayed scientific understanding of the role humans play in global warming,” says Maxwell Boykoff. “We respect the need to represent multiple viewpoints, but when generally agreed-upon scientific findings are presented side-by-side with the viewpoints of a handful of skeptics, readers are poorly served. In this case, it contributed to public confusion and opened the door to political maneuvering.” The authors suggest that “disinformation” campaigns funded by the fossil fuel industry (see April 1998) are to blame for the media’s inaccurate coverage. *Global Environmental Change* 14, no. 2, 2004.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004; [*Currents (UC Santa Cruz)*, 6 September 2004.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Currents (UC Santa Cruz), 9/6/2004; *Extra!*, November 2004.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Extra!, 11/2004]

------

Our Coming Mega-Drought

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/10/coming-mega-drought

— By Kevin Drum

| Fri Oct. 22, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Here are a few recent data points for you: (1) The *New York Times* reports that "skepticism and outright denial of global warming are among the articles of faith of the Tea Party movement." (2) In the *National Journal*, Ron Brownstein notes that "The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones....Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect." (3) It's not just Senate candidates. ThinkProgress notes that an analysis by Wonk Room "finds that 22 of the 37 Republican candidates for governor this November are deniers of the scientific consensus on global warming pollution." (4) The *Wall Street Journal* reports that "extreme drought" has taken hold in parts of nine states stretching from the Southeast to the lower Midwest.

thinkprogress:

Although 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is manmade, only two Republican gubernatorial candidates in Democratic strongholds — Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie (R-VT) and Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona (R-HI) — want to address the threat. Two more candidates — Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) and Meg Whitman (R-CA) — accept that global warming is a manmade problem, but oppose enacting policy to reduce fossil fuel pollution. The other eleven candidates have “artfully avoided” any discussion of the threat global warming poses to their states, from flood-ravaged Iowa and Tennessee to drought-parched Nevada.

Without further ado, meet the twenty-two climate zombies running for governor:

ALABAMA – Robert Dudley

ALASKA – Sean Parnell

CONNECTICUT – Tom Foley

FLORIDA – Rick Scott

GEORGIA – Nathan Deal

ILLINOIS – Bill Brady

KANSAS – Sam Brownback

MINNESOTA – Tom Emmer

MAINE – Paul LePage

MARYLAND – Robert Ehrlich

MASSACHUSETTS – Charlie Baker

NEW YORK – Carl Paladino

NEW MEXICO – Susana Martinez

OHIO – John Kasich

OKLAHOMA – Mary Fallin

OREGON – Chris Dudley

RHODE ISLAND – Joseph Robitaille

SOUTH DAKOTA – Dennis Daugaard

TEXAS – Rick Perry

UTAH – Gary Herbert

WISCONSIN – Scott Walker

WYOMING – Matt Mead

B2 promised to cap co2 thus took GW off table vs Gore, but reneged re DC

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._congressional_action_on_climate_change

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/category/global-warming-denial-machine/

[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Climate_Change PR Watch Climate Change Portal] tracks current developments as well as skeptics and their funding, as does:

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/ Climate Science Watch]

Marshal funded by http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Earhart_Foundation

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Climate_Change

Some of the industry-funded groups and think tanks opposing the Kyoto treaty include the:

Americans for Prosperity
Cooler Heads Coalition [koch's AFP member]
Friends of Science Society (Canada)
Frontiers of Freedom
Global Climate Coalition
Greening Earth Society
Institute of Public Affairs
Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP) (Canada)
Science and Environmental Policy Project
George C. Marshall Institute
Scientific Alliance

skeptic

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_H._Sununu

heritage talk fr =chief of staff

Bogus NY conf

http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institutes-2009-climate-conference-new-york-funding-history-sponsors

Michele Bachmann	Politician	6-Apr-1956		Congresswoman, Minnesota 6th
Fred Barnes	TV Personality	c. 1943		Fox News regular
John Barrasso	Politician	21-Jul-1952		US Senator from Wyoming
David Barton	Activist	1954		Opposes separation of church and state
Glenn Beck	TV Personality	10-Feb-1964		Conservative TV and radio talk-show host
Don L. Blankenship	Business	14-Mar-1950		CEO of Massey Energy
Neal Boortz	Radio Personality	6-Apr-1945		Libertarian radio host
Brent Bozell	Activist	14-Jul-1955		Media Research Center
Paul Broun	Politician	14-May-1946		Congressman, Georgia 10th District
Pat Buchanan	Columnist	2-Nov-1938		Crossfire
Jeb Bush	Politician	11-Feb-1953		Governor of Florida, 1999-2007
Neil Cavuto	TV Personality	22-Sep-1958		Fox News Channel VP, news anchor
Ron Christie	Government	c. 1969		Former Cheney aide
John Coleman	TV Personality	15-Oct-1934		Founder, The Weather Channel
Michael Crichton	Novelist	23-Oct-1942	4-Nov-2008	Jurassic Park
Ken Cuccinelli	Politician	30-Jul-1968		Virginia Attorney General
Mitch Daniels	Politician	7-Apr-1949		Governor of Indiana
Lou Dobbs	TV Personality	24-Sep-1945		CNN anchor, Lou Dobbs Tonight
Steve Doocy	Journalist	19-Oct-1956		Fox & Friends
Pete du Pont	Politician	22-Jan-1935		Governor of Delaware, 1977-85
Myron Ebell	Activist	c. 1953		Global Warming cynic
Michael Fumento	Author	4-Jan-1960		Conservative science writer
Dan Gainor	Activist	Apr-1961		VP, Media Research Center
Bernard Goldberg	Journalist	31-May-1945		Bias
Jonah Goldberg	Columnist	21-Mar-1969		National Review Online
Sean Hannity	TV Personality	30-Dec-1961		Hannity & Colmes
Christopher C. Horner	Activist	?		Competitive Enterprise Institute
Laura Ingraham	Pundit	19-Jun-1964		The Hillary Trap
James Inhofe	Politician	17-Nov-1934		US Senator from Oklahoma
Brian Kilmeade	TV Personality	7-May-1963		Fox & Friends
Lawrence Kudlow	Economist	20-Aug-1947		Kudlow & Cramer
Mark Levin	Activist	21-Sep-1957		Landmark Legal Foundation
Marlo Lewis, Jr.	Activist	c. 1951		Global Warming critic
Rush Limbaugh	Radio Personality	12-Jan-1951		Conservative talk show host
John P. Mackey	Business	1954		CEO of Whole Foods Market
Michelle Malkin	Columnist	20-Oct-1970		Syndicated conservative columnist
Mary Matalin	Politician	19-Aug-1953		Political creature
Steven J. Milloy	Activist	?		JunkScience.com
Stephen Moore	Activist	16-Feb-1960		Club for Growth
Andrew Napolitano	Pundit	6-Jun-1950		Senior Judicial Analyst, FOX News
Ted Nugent	Musician	13-Dec-1948		Rock star, bowhunting enthusiast
Wes Pruden	Columnist	?		Washington Times editor-in-chief
James Randi	Magician	7-Aug-1928		The Amazing Randi
Lee Raymond	Business	13-Aug-1938		CEO of ExxonMobil, 1999-2005
Dana Rohrabacher	Politician	21-Jun-1947		Congressman, California 46th
Michael Savage	Radio Personality	31-Mar-1942		Savage Nation
Lawrence Solomon	Activist	1948		The Deniers
Ben Stein	Game Show Host	25-Nov-1944		Host of Win Ben Stein's Money
Marc A. Thiessen	Columnist	c. 1967		White House speechwriter, 2004-09
Fred Thompson	Actor	19-Aug-1942		Actor turned Senator from Tennessee
Roger Wicker	Politician	5-Jul-1951		US Senator from Mississippi

http://www.nndb.com/lists/724/000206106/

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64918 1/10 issue 1096

rogue's gallery

AS RANKING REPUBLICAN on the House energy committee, Barton is a mini version of Sen. James Inhofe. In his view, the climate is changing for "natural variation reasons," and humans should just "get shade" and learn to adapt. "For us to try to step in and say we have got to do all these global things to prevent the Earth from getting any warmer is absolute nonsense," he insists. "You can't regulate God."

During the Bush era, Barton bottled up all climate legislation and pushed to open up public lands for drilling by private interests. He also targeted leading climate scientists, demanding that they provide Congress with detailed documentation of their financial interests. (Barton himself has received $1.4 million from oil and gas donors, plus $1.3 million from electric utilities.) The inquisition drew sharp rebukes, even from Barton's fellow Republicans. Your "purpose seems to be to intimidate scientists rather than to learn from them," then-Rep. Sherwood Boehlert told Barton. The effort "to have Congress put its thumbs on the scales of a scientific debate" is "truly chilling."

As the World Burns

How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming

...Obama's first moves on the climate front were encouraging. He appointed Carol Browner, head of the EPA under Bill Clinton and a close confidante of Al Gore, as "climate czar," and he named Steven Chu, a respected scientist who understood the need to confront global warming, as energy secretary. A month after taking office, he also moved to implement a 2007 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court empowering the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The threat to Big Coal and Big Oil was implicit: If energy interests balked at working with Congress to create a new system to curb carbon pollution, the administration would simply unleash federal regulators. "If Congress does nothing," warned Sen. Barbara Boxer, who was spearheading climate legislation as chair of the Senate environment committee, "we will be watching EPA do our job."

...

Energy lobbyists found a willing ally in the Republican Party, which had decided to deny any legislative victory to President Obama — even if it meant cooking the planet in the process. Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas who had been replaced by Waxman as chair of the House energy committee, pledged to launch "crafty" attacks on the climate bill, comparing the GOP's battle plan to "guerrilla warfare."

"I talked to Joe Barton as this process began, expressing a desire to work together with him on this," recalls Waxman. "He told me he didn't believe in the science of global warming, didn't think it was a problem and didn't want to try to solve it."

A key element of the "crafty" tactics employed by the Republicans involved a simple approach: lying. Cap-and-trade, they argued, should really be called "cap-and-tax." Throughout the debate, GOP members of the House cited a study by MIT that, they claimed, showed the climate bill would "cost every American family up to $3,100 per year in higher energy prices." John Reilly, an MIT professor and one of the authors of the study, called House Republicans and protested that they were distorting his findings. But a week later, House Minority Leader John Boehner used the $3,100 figure again, and the National Republican Congressional Committee employed it in dozens of press releases. Reilly sent a blunt letter to Boehner and Markey's committee, noting that $3,100 was actually "ten times the correct estimate, which is approximately $340."

But deception wasn't the only card that House Republicans had to play. As the climate bill moved through Waxman's committee, Barton and his troops fell back on tactical games to stall the measure. Before the committee voted, Barton threatened to have the entire 900-plus-page bill read aloud, hoping that Democrats would get sick of the delay and simply walk out. When Barton discovered that the committee had brought in a speed-reader to tear through the bill, he relented. But as the ranking Republican on the committee, he tied up the process by introducing 400 amendments designed to weaken or stall the bill. By the time the measure came to a vote last June, however, it had become clear that Barton and his fellow Republicans weren't the only ones listening to lobbyists from the energy industry.

Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat from the coal fields of southern Virginia, is a dapper little guy with a large forehead and big round glasses. He wears nice suits and well-polished shoes — you could easily mistake him for a Wall Street analyst. With Boucher, however, the smell of money comes not from swapping derivatives but from burning carbon. Boucher is the House's top recipient of cash from Big Coal, raking in nearly twice as many contributions — more than $144,000 last year — as any other congressman. The climate bill was his moment to shine. "The negotiations between Boucher, Waxman and the coal industry were the crucible in which this deal was done," says Jason Grumet, Obama's energy adviser. "Without it, there would be no legislation."

...

For the Democrats, passing the climate bill came down to a simple equation: how many favors they were prepared to shovel out to Boucher's pals in the coal industry. Without support from Democrats in key energy states, the bill didn't stand a chance. Waxman and Markey, both of whom had recently backed what amounted to a moratorium on new coal-fired plants, were hardly friends of the industry. But now they were willing to cut a deal — and so was Big Coal. Instituting a system to curb carbon pollution, the industry knew, would reveal coal for what it is: the nation's single biggest contributor to global warming, and a source of air pollution that kills 24,000 people each year.

To shift the focus of the debate, the industry launched an all-out effort to rebrand its product, spending $18 million on a high-profile ad campaign to sell Americans on the virtues of "clean coal." The campaign — paid for by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a front group for coal companies and utilities — was vague about how coal could actually be cleaned up, relying instead on images of hip hardware like Mac computers to suggest that technology could somehow solve the problem. What the ads failed to note was that the technology behind "clean coal" — known as carbon-capture-and-sequestration — is still a pipe dream. There is not a single commercial coal-fired power plant in the world that captures and buries its carbon emissions, for a very simple reason: The process is far too complicated and expensive. But the coal industry knew it didn't need to have a real solution — it could just tout the promise of new technology, without actually changing a thing.

To drive home its message on Capitol Hill, the coal industry spent $10 million on lobbying — far more than any other special interest devoted to climate change. (ACCCE says the figure includes advertising and grass-roots advocacy that most groups don't report.) And to make sure congressmen were paying attention, ACCCE's member firms and their employees, including top executives, contributed more than $15 million to federal campaigns.

The money proved to be well-spent....American Electric Power, the nation's dirtiest utility.

...But even in its watered-down form, the climate bill drew fierce attacks from Republicans. The eight GOP congressmen who voted for the measure were labeled "cap and traitors" by party loyalists, and several were told they will face primary challenges next year. The National Republican Congressional Committee also ran ads targeting a dozen or so vulnerable Democrats who supported the bill, including Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia, who had won his seat by only 727 votes. The ads — foreshadowing the fight to come during this year's midterm elections — accused Perriello of voting for the "Pelosi Energy Tax," falsely claiming that the climate bill would raise energy costs for his constituents by $1,870 per family.

...The White House wasn't the only one scrambling to regroup. The energy industry and its Republican allies realized that their scare tactics on climate change weren't working: To crank up the opposition, they needed to crank up the fear. To do that, they adopted both the rhetoric and the infrastructure of the burgeoning Tea Party movement that had been formed to fight health care reform. Cap-and-trade, the Republicans began to argue, was part of Obama's master plan to strip Americans of their freedom. "The government is going to monitor where you set your thermostat, how much plane travel you do," declared Marc Morano, a former Republican staffer on the Senate environment committee who now runs Climate Depot, a clearinghouse for disinformation about global warming. "It's a level of control we've never even contemplated in America."

Never mind that cap-and-trade would cut climate pollution by harnessing the power of the free market — the virtues of which Republicans have been preaching for decades. The climate bill and its market-based solution was now transformed into an instrument of government control and communist bureaucracy. "They are going to take our financial systems, and then they are going to nationalize industry, and then they are going to nationalize energy," Glenn Beck said. Those who support the measure, he added, "have exposed themselves quite honestly, I think, as treasonous."

The trouble was, people weren't buying such nonsense: Polls show that only one in three Americans believe that addressing global warming will hurt the economy, and three in four support some kind of climate legislation. To create the illusion that ordinary voters oppose action on global warming, Big Oil once again relied on outright deception. Last summer, the American Petroleum Institute — the lobbying arm of the oil and gas industry — coordinated a series of "Energy Citizen" rallies in 20 states to protest limits on carbon pollution. In an internal memo leaked in August, API urged its nearly 400 member companies, including oil giants like Shell and Exxon, to quietly pack the rallies with their own employees. "Please treat this information as sensitive," the memo warned. "We don't want critics to know our game plan."

Americans for Prosperity, which was busy organizing town-hall brawls over health care, also lent its support to the industry's campaign to kill climate legislation. AFP — co-founded and supported by David Koch, an executive of Koch Industries — conducted a "Hot Air Tour" of America in which its president, Tim Phillips, would appear with a hot-air balloon and warn whatever sparse crowds the group had been able to bus in about the threat of "global-warming alarmism." The climate bill, Phillips insisted, would lead to "lost jobs, higher taxes and less freedom."

In at least one case, however, such hot-headed and misleading rhetoric backfired. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which was working closely with energy companies to stop the climate bill, sparked an internal revolt when one of its vice presidents called for the science behind climate change to be put on trial — a public spectacle he predicted would represent "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century." The statement was so idiotic that it inspired eight major companies, including energy giants Exelon and PG&E, to quit the Chamber. In his resignation letter, CEO Peter Darbee of PG&E denounced the Chamber for its "extreme position" on global warming and its "disingenuous attempts to distort the reality" of climate change.

While Big Oil and Big Coal worked to whip up public hysteria, their Republican allies moved to block the climate bill in the Senate. The most unexpected and influential voice proved to be John McCain, who had long been a champion of climate legislation. The Arizona senator was highly respected by environmental and business leaders for his grasp of both the science and economics of global warming. Even while he was busy selling his soul to the far right during the presidential campaign, he called climate change "a test of foresight, of political courage and of the unselfish concern that one generation owes to the next." But when the opportunity to show some political courage of his own arrived, McCain executed a bizarre about-face. The industry-friendly bill passed by the House, he now declared — a measure modeled on the cap-and-trade bill he had co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman — was "the worst example of legislation I've seen in a long time."

http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/global_climate_change_lobby/

top lobbyists

http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/climate_change/articles/entry/1377/

won award? #1 something?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

Common threads of Climate Skeptics Arguments

In a paper reviewing the common arguments of the global warming skeptics, Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, noted that "the various climate sceptics hold very different positions. We can distinguish trend skeptics (who deny there is is harmless or even beneficial). Representatives of the various skeptics' camps quarrel, sometimes ferociously, in internet forums."^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-The_climate_sceptics-1)

'Trend skeptics', he suggested, are "a gradually vanishing breed" as public understanding of the reality of global warming has risen. These sceptics commonly claim that the surface temperature measurements have been distorted by ther proximity to urban areas, which is referred to as the 'urban heat island effect'. 'In fact, the measured trends have already been adjusted to allow for this effect by comparing adjacent urban and rural stations. The warming above the oceans as measured by ships, the global retreat of glaciers, and the declining Arctic sea ice provide further evidence against this claim," wrote Rahmstorf. These sceptics also often claim that satellite measurements show little, if any, warming trend since the data was first collected in 1979. After allowing for various factors which make direct comparison between data sets difficult, Rahmstorf wrote that the data "show trends between 0.08°C and 0.26°C per decade, compared to 0.17°C per decade found in surface measurements.^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-The_climate_sceptics-1)

'Attribution skeptics' on the other hand argue that while warming is occurring, it can't be attributed to human activities. These skeptics argue that Co2 emissions originate from the oceans or that increases in CO2 do not result in warming. "The oceans have certainly not released CO2 into the atmosphere; on the contrary, they have absorbed some of the extra fossil CO2 load. (Incidentally, this is leading to an acidification of sea water, causing considerable damage to coral reefs and other marine organisms, even without any climate change)," Rahmstorf wrote. While there are uncertainties about the feedbacks caused by increased greenhouse gases, Rahmstorf noted that "many studies using different approaches have provided increasingly hard evidence that the most likely value of the “climate sensitivity” (i.e. the equilibrium response of the climate to a doubling of the CO2 concentration) is close to 3°C. This results independently both from our physical understanding of the various feedbacks (which can be observed in today’s climate, e.g. in the seasonal cycle) and from an analysis of the role played by CO2 during past climate changes."^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-The_climate_sceptics-1)

He also noted that arguing that strong feedbacks from increased CO2 could not also claim that warming was caused by other factors such as solar activity. Rahmstorf notes that "solar variations cannot explain the warming in the 20th century. For one thing, they are not large enough; the radiative effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases is by now several times stronger. And while reconstructions of solar activity do indicate a rise until 1940, they show no significant trend since then. The same is true of measurements of cosmic rays."^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-The_climate_sceptics-1)

The 'impact skeptics' argue that there are positive consequences from global warming, such as an extension of the range of agriculture or increased productivity. "In the absence of climate protection measures, we will probably see a warming by several degrees in this century. The most recent comparable period of major global warming occurred when the last ice age ended ~15,000 years ago: at that time, the climate warmed by approx. 5°C in global mean. This warming had serious implications for man and ecosystems. But the process unfolded over a period of 5,000 years – humankind is now threatening to bring about a similarly large climate change within the space of a century. This extraordinarily rapid change would most likely exceed the adaptive capacity of man and nature," Rahmstorf wrote.^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-The_climate_sceptics-1)

Skeptics Group Discounts Skeptics Arguments

An internal 1995 document (pdf) of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) -- an industry front group that disbanded in 2002 -- reviewed some of the "contrarian" arguments used by Richard Lindzen, Robert Jastrow and Patrick Michaels and other climate change skeptics. The document, which was obtained as part of a court action against the automobile industry^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-2) concluded that of the arguments reviewed:

"The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change. Jastrow's hypothesis about the role of solar variability and Michaels' questions about the temperature record are not convincing arguments against any conclusion that we are currently experiencing warming as the result of greenhouse gas emissions. However, neither solar variability nor anomalies in the temperature record offer a mechanism for off-setting the much larger rise in temperature which might occur if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases were to double or quadruple.""Lindzen' s hypothesis that any warming would create more rain which would cool and dry the uper troposphere did offer a mechanism for balancing the effect of increased greenhouse gases. However, the data supporting this hypothesis is weak, and even Lindzen has stopped presenting it as an alternative to the conventional model of climate change."^{[4]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-3)

Global Warming's Deadly Denial

Reviewing the continued campaign by climate change skeptics, David McKnight, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales (Australia), notes that there several reasons why companies such as Exxon have had some success playing the global warming denial card. "First, the implications of the science are frightening. Shifting to renewable energy will be costly and disruptive. Second, doubt is an easy product to sell. Climate denial tells us what we all secretly want to hear. Third, science is portrayed as political orthodoxy rather than objective knowledge, a curiously postmodern argument," he writes. While the tobacco industry is often referred to as the template for the fossil fuel industry's campaign, McKnight argues that there is an important distinction. "There are no 'smoke-free areas' on the planet. Climate denial may turn out to be the world's most deadly PR campaign," he concludes. ^{[5]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-4)

UK Split Ruling on Climate Change Skeptics

In July 2008, the British government's media regulator, Ofcom, issued a split ruling on "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a film commissioned and broadcast by Channel 4. Ofcom received 265 complaints about the film, including "a detailed 'group complaint' from scientists and concerned individuals that ran to 176 pages and accused Channel 4 of seriously misleading viewers." ^{[6]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-Ofcom-5)

Ofcom found that Channel 4 broke impartiality guidelines and the film misrepresented statements by former British government scientist David King, in a scene with global warming skeptic Fred Singer. Ofcom also found that the film unfairly treated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and MIT professor Carl Wunsch. However, Ofcom ruled that the program did not "cause harm or offence" by "materially" misleading viewers. Ofcom also said that its impartiality rules did not apply to the majority of the film, because the rules require balance on "matters of political or industrial controversy" and human-induced climate change has "been almost universally accepted by governments around the world." ^{[6]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-Ofcom-5)

Funding

Ross Gelbspan, journalist and author, wrote a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine argues that the climate change skeptics "assert flatly that their science is untainted by funding. Nevertheless, in this persistent and well-funded campaign of global warming denial they have become interchangeable ornaments on the hood of a high-powered engine of disinformation. Their dissenting opinions are amplified beyond all proportion through the media while the concerns of the dominant majority of the world's scientific establishment are marginalized." [1]

Risk averse skeptics

In November 2004, climate change skeptic Richard Lindzen was quoted saying he'd be willing to bet that the earth's climate will be cooler in 20 years than it is today. When British climate researcher James Annan contacted him, however, Lindzen would only agree to take the bet if Annan offered a 50-to-1 payout. Subsequent offers of a wager were also refused by Pat Michaels, Chip Knappenberger, Piers Corbyn, Myron Ebell, Zbigniew Jaworowski, Sherwood Idso and William Kininmonth. At long last, however, Annan has persuaded Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev to take a $10,000 bet. "There isn't much money in climate science and I'm still looking for that gold watch at retirement," Annan says. "A pay-off would be a nice top-up to my pension." [2]

Critiquing Skeptics as "Distraction Strategy"

In a blog ahead of the COP15 conference, Senator Christine Milne, Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens and former Vice-President of the IUCN, wrote that "Around the world, governments are explicitly linking the extreme weather events we've seen – heat waves, bushfires, drought and floods – to climate change and using that link to push for the limited action they are willing to take. Attacking climate sceptics for holding back action has also become a favoured mechanism for claiming the moral high ground in the climate debate. This claim to be guided by the science while espousing weak and scientifically unsupportable targets, this climate hypocrisy, is more dangerous than true climate scepticism because it is more insidious."^{[7]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-6)

Just prior to the COP15 conference, British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, told the Guardian that "With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5bn-tonne gap. That will seal the deal."^{[8]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_warming_skeptics#cite_note-7)

Individual skeptics

Don Aitkin
Dennis Avery
Sallie L. Baliunas
Tim Ball
Robert C. Balling
Glenn Beck, CNN TV
David Bellamy
Robert (Bob) Carter
Ian Castles
John R. Christy
Ian Clark
Alexander Cockburn
Martin Cohen, and philosophical objections to the global warming theorists
Joseph D'Aleo
Martin Durkin
Paul Driessen
David Evans
Ray Evans
George Fox
Robert Giegengack
Bill Gray
Chris Horner, the author of "Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming
Sherwood Idso
Andrei Illarionov, chief economic adviser to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin
James M. Inhofe
Aynsley Kellow
William Kininmonth
Czech president Vaclav Klaus
Lord Lawson
David Legates
Marlo Lewis, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute;
Richard S. Lindzen
Bjorn Lomborg
Stephen McIntyre
Ross McKitrick
Patrick J. Michaels
Christopher Monckton
Alan Moran
Luboš Motl
Alan Oxley
Garth Paltridge
Tim Patterson
Roger Pielke Jr.
Ian Plimer
Arthur B. Robinson
Frederick Seitz
S. Fred Singer
Willie Soon
Roy Spencer
Carlo Stagnaro
Bob Stallman
Philip Stott
John H. Sununu
George Taylor,
Wolfgang Thüne
Jan Veizer
Len Walker
Sammy Wilson

Organizational skeptics

Australian APEC Study Centre
Competitive Enterprise Institute (US) [3]
Doctors for Disaster Preparedness
Exxon-Funded Skeptics
Friends of Science (Canada)
George C. Marshall Institute (US)
Global Warming Policy Foundation (UK)
Heartland Institute (US)
Institute of Economic Affairs (UK)
Institute of Public Affairs (Australia)
International Climate Science Coalition (NZ)
International Policy Network (UK)
Lavoisier Group (Australia)
Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NSRP) (Canada)
New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
Scientific Alliance (UK)
The United Kingdom House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs
NZ Center for Policy Research (NZ) [4]
New Zealand Climate Change Coalition (NZ) [5]

http://www.heatisonline.org/

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/pro-environment-groups-were-outmatc.html

Yet even as pro-environment groups seemed poised to capitalize on favorable trends, moneyed opponents girded for a fight with more financial capital than ever before.

Clients in the oil and gas industry unleashed a fury of lobbying expenditures in 2009, spending $175 million -- easily an industry record -- and outpacing the pro-environmental groups by nearly eight-fold, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis.

Some of the largest petroleum companies in the world together spent hundreds of millions of dollars in various attempts to influence politics during the past 18 months

ExxonMobil, the industry leader in 2009, spent $27.4 million in lobbying expenditures that year -- more than the entire pro-environment lobby.

And in July, congressional debate on global warming stopped cold.

In other words, Goliath whipped David.

"The way it turned out was a huge disappointment, to put it mildly," Nathan Wilcox, the Federal Global Warming Program Director for Environment America, one group that lobbied heavily on comprehensive climate change legislation, told *OpenSecrets Blog*.

"The opposition outspent us, and they took it to a new level this time."

MOMENTUM GIVES WAY TO DEFEAT

Though only recently coming to a head, the battle over climate change policy -- and subsequent dramatic increase in political spending -- began a few years earlier for both of these groups.

Energy and climate change became major issues for both groups following the Democratic sweep of the congressional mid-year elections in 2006. Environmental groups scored major victories in the 2008 election cycle, betting heavily on a Democratic majority and the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.

Individuals and political action committees contributed nearly $5.6 million to political candidates in 2007 and 2008. Ninety-four percent of the total went to Democrats.

These same groups favored Obama, who campaigned on a promise to aggressively tackle global warming, if elected. Pro-environment groups poured more than $1.2 million into his campaign, donating to his campaign over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's by a seven-to-one margin.

Oil and gas groups again outspent pro-environmental groups considerably, and with their own partisan slant. With more than $35.6 million, individuals and political action committees contributed far more, at a more than six-to-one rate. Seventy-seven percent of contributions from this industry went to Republicans during the 2008 cycle.

Still, it was pro-environmental groups that backed the winning candidates. And it was pro-environmental groups who carried the political momentum into 2009 and the first legislative battleground in the House of Representatives.

grist

by Christopher Mims

21 Oct 2010

Africa, China, Climate & Energy, climate change impacts, climate change science, climate change skepticism, energy subsidies, Politics, solar thermal power, solar voltaic power

Half of Americans polled by researchers at Yale University are woefully ill-informed about climate change, including the 43 percent that believe, "If we stopped punching holes in the ozone layer with rockets, it would reduce global warming."

That's the same percentage of Americans who are unaware it takes Earth one year to orbit the sun, so perhaps this poll is about as meaningful as a bowl full of tea leaves. Grist argues the poll indicates Americans are hungry to know more about climate, and once they do, they'll start worrying, while risk expert David Ropeik argues more information won't change anyone's mind.

Where Americans learn about climate science: Everyone wants to pour their climate message into the chasm of ignorance, the Yale study revealed, including Glenn Beck and possibly an oil company-backed group of evangelicals, who are pushing the notion climate change is a "false religion," says Think Progress.

Meanwhile, Republican West Virginia senate candidate John Raese says global warming is a "myth," and his Democratic opponent, if you recall, recently shot the climate bill.

The National Resource Defense Council unveiled the results of a poll it claims shows voters support candidates who voted for cap-and-trade, but even progressives aren't buying it. The Christian Science Monitor argues climate change simply isn't a big campaign issue, even though Republican challengers to Democrat incumbents are uniformly against its existence.

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-10-21-the-climate-post-is-americans-climate-ignorance-a-tragedy-or-an-

GLOBAL WARMING

Merchants of Doubt

epi: ad stev; the trouble w/ Americamns is that they haven't read the minutes of the previous mtg

IPCC partner is world meteor soc p 2, exceptionally inclusive and peer rev p3

MoD germans proved cancer in 30's but tainted by nazi assoc (antismoke campaign, hitler forbade in presence

co's met to plan stategy 1953, reacting to tar on mice stuidy, created "research body" , hired CC little

discoverd create doubt just by asking questions (even if you know answer not helpful or irrelevant 18

p 22 dropped 'industry' from name

used fairness doctirine to get = time!

met with publishers, Luce, scripps, hearst etc 16

created ties to medical schools , public health officals etc 20

by early 60's tob co's knew cancerm addictive etc 21, brit co admitted no controv

busted for racketeering RICO 31

by end of 90's most ppl know tob harmful, but 30% could not name specific illness 33, 25% said no harm p 33

acid rain 1979, some int'l action and bi-lat Carter 73, undermined by RR

Nierenberg RR, pete wilson acoustic anti-sub res p 79, Scripps did defense work

edison inst inserted prop into comm? 89

Fortune mag ran version of singer written by hudson inst 94 Liken ~ in sci mag, but not pop --> pattern p 100

singer calimed fix acid rain difficult, expensive, hurt economy, opposite has happemned 103 bush1 cap and trade?

regulation drives innovation 105

OZone Hole: blame volcanos

hole found 4 yrs abefore, but no one could believe data so thrown out 118

panel included DuPont, which decided to quit cfc's 123

RR sec of int hodel propsed shirts to protect, canned (for Watt?!)

all thinktaknks anti eco, pro biz but Heritage grew out of SST contov p 125 coors, scife, GM, Chase mAN BANK AND mOBIL

sci bs on ozone to bump funding charge 126, twist sci 127

pattern: sci uncertin, sci corrupt, hard and $ to fix 129

singer's SEPP affil w/ Moon funded IVPP 130

ch 5 secondhand smoke

Brown and Wm paid .5 mil to stallone to smoke in 4 films 139

sietz and singer ~ 142

scam: fake conf endrun peer review 154

1995 PM had record profits, best yild on dow 162

FOREST thatcherite UK group smoking = freedom

ch6 gw

polls 169, hist 170 150 yrs tyndall

Jasons study Carter 172

EPA rept nierenberg meese 182 gep keyworth advisor

89 berlin wall falls, GMI picks eco as new villain 186

Jastrow claims GMI killed carbon tax in ltr to API 190

Revelle, singer scam 190-, used against Gore 194 by G Easterbrook in New rep

singer sued lancaster for libel, forced him to fold 196

Larry gates at Livermore got all models to run same data to check 199

santer wigley , ch reformated to be uniform, led to singer/ alter charge 205

singer wash times

jrnlists fooled 214 bullied max and jules boykoff found 1/2 arts 88-02 had balance. 1/3 gave slace to deniers p 215 p 242 1999 UCSF study found 2/3 coverage 2nd h smoke 92-4 said controversy // acid rain

dod paid retired gen'l to be pundits 243

bogus jrnls to cite 244 r proctor researched

oregon 244

rmn got rid of pres sci advis comm 246

cf gelbspan, mooney (on exxon) and mckibben of gw skeptics and funding

ch 7 anti Carson usedf a poster child anti-reg; also imp b/c RC marked shift from aethetics to realiztion that biz needed regulation p 237 acid rain, o3 co2 all lessons

to fight commie, you have to save mkt/biz; irony is ended up as stalinist defenders of lies 238; keot it up 40 years 241. if no eco growth, rastioning = commie 252 world gov ironically, stall will req drastic action soon 254

rmn supported epa b/c he knew it wd be advantage in elections 222

Lonborg 223

ddt 5x breast cancer

dixie lee ray

j gordon edwards sjsu, oregon inst affil

court case 1977 http://cases.justia.com/us-court-of-appeals/F2/556/113/68241/

cribbed by crichton state of fear novel

capitalism, like marxism cliams to be sci 249

santer attacked, mann by barton 264

positivism redux 267

5x up anti eco boks 90's:

The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism

Co-authored with Riley E. Dunlap and Mark Freeman published in the journal Environmental Politics, June 2008

Abstract

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed 'sceptics' claim to be unbiased analysts combating 'junk science'. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection....Summary

Our analyses of the sceptical literature and CTTs indicate an unambiguous linkage between the two. Over 92 per cent of environmentally sceptical books are linked to conservative think tanks, and 90 per cent of conservative think tanks interested in environmental issues espouse scepticism. Environmental scepticism began in the US, is strongest in the US, and exploded after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of global environmental concern stimulated by the 1992 Earth Summit.

Environmental scepticism is an elite-driven reaction to global environmentalism, organised by core actors within the conservative movement. Promoting scepticism is a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement coordinated by CTTs, designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement's efforts to legitimise its claims via science. Thus, the notion that environmental sceptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of sceptics as marginalised 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as sceptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations.

Given the success of CTTs in promoting environmental scepticism, particularly obvious in the case of climate change (Antilla 2005; Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; McCright and Dunlap 2003; Mooney 2007), it seems reasonable to conclude that the CTT-based countermovement has contributed to the decline of US support for environmental protection in recent decades. The ability of CTTs to influence environmental policy replicates their accomplishments in other policy domains (Covington 1997; Callahan 1999; Krehely et al. 2004; Stefancic and Delgado 1996), and thus should come as no surprise.

cf junkscience and fox

rolling stone issue jan 10

http://web.ebscohost.com.oca.ucsc.edu/ehost/results?vid=2&hid=106&sid=acfad2af-3678-4da9-88b2-ee729cdea55e%40sessionmgr111&bquery=%28JN+%22Rolling+Stone%22+and+DT+20100121%29&bdata=JmRiPWE5aCZ0eXBlPTEmc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZl

Chris Mooney The Republican war on

Science

2005 update 2010

http://books.google.com/books?id=FzkMEDKf

lKwC&dq=republican+war+on+science&printse

c=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=2HEOTNHgI

pKsNubh5O4M&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result

&resnum=7&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=f

alse

ch 6 junking sci:

cf 74 on Luntz

ch 7 on GW p 78- (some in ch 6 Luntz)

inhofe called epa gestapo, o rating up yp

4% by league of conserv voters

follows std strategy of claiming to

support sound sci

killed McCain -Liber c& t

kennedy, edof sci says don't ban anti-GW

art'ls, just aren't any good ones p 81

orestes looked at 928 papers in sci mag

and found no dissent

even some corps jumped ship on GCC, but

2002 exxon 1 mil/yr ~ GW p 82

NYT exposed API memo to spend millions on

PR, incl sci and journalists 82

exxon hit list of gov sci, incl IPCC

chair! watson 83

inhofe repeatedly misrep sci, even when

authors called him on it 86, went after

Mann w/ forum (soon [api and gcmi, and

legates), mann there 88

Climate Res jrnl eds resigned after Soon

and B art'l published, later bush admin

tried to take out hockey stick diagram

and replace w/ S&B 90 in EPA rept

inhofe ignored NAS report, w/ CEI sued

clinton admin on nat'l asess

Data Quality Act used by bush admin as

weapon? a la frivolous lawsuits, fe p 106

Lindzen, used by CEI, good to nip in

bud/preemptive

DQA aslo used by phil-M, daut of shelby

asmendmant that allows co's to audit

studies they don't like 109

ch 8 tozzi, OMB, RR, Multinational Biz

Service

http://www.waronscience.com/excerpt.php

The next three chapters demonstrate how

cultural conservatives have disregarded,

distorted, and abused science on the

issues of evolution, embryonic stem cell

research, the relation of abortion to

health risks for women, and sex

education....

post goldwater, "The story begins,

however, with a narrative that cuts to

the heart of the modern Right’s war on

science. You see, despite the poignant

accuracy of their critique, the authors

of The Party That Lost Its Head—Bruce K.

Chapman and George Gilder—have since

bitten their tongues and morphed from

liberal Republicans into staunch

conservatives. In fact, you could say

that they have become everything they

once criticized. Once opponents of

right-wing anti-intellectualism, they are

now prominent supporters of conservative

attacks on the theory of evolution, not

just a bedrock of modern science but one

of the greatest intellectual achievements

of human history. With this

transformation, the modern Right’s war on

intellectuals—including scientists and

those possessing expertise in other

areas—is truly complete...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhzf9bXm96

foratv 9/11/06 360 bush pol appointees

xian and corps two pillars, have their

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winning does not req strong evidence,

just semblance of controv

Heritage proto Bethel (Politically

Incorrent science Regnery, libs hijacked

sci (originally, "now it's own turn" cf

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FDR on, Carson p 31

Climate Change and the Military

As Don Fitz wrote in 2007, "[t]he military is the only sector of the economy where emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) can be reduced by greater than 100%. This is because militarism is the only type of activity whose primary purpose is destruction." [1]

Indeed, Fitz concludes that: "The world does not need a global warming strategy which features tanks charged by wind power or Israelis using solar-powered bulldozers for leveling Palestinian homes. Given the oil used by the military, its interconnections with other economic sectors, and its increasing permanence, no proposal for reducing GHG should be taken seriously if it does not include a massive restructuring of war industry into a peacetime economy." [2]

On the contrary, a 2004 "secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world." Unfortunately, this observation is only likely to lead to an increase in military budgets, as the report's authors note that climate change "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern". [3]

Ironically, there have even been calls that Governments must declare war on climate change.

Also see, Council on Foreign Relations "Special Report on Climate Change and National Security" (author: Joshua W. Busby)

Contents[hide]

1 Articles and resources

Articles and resources

References

External resources

External articles

Joni Seager, "Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis", Routledge, 1993. (see pp. 14-69 for a discussion of the influence of war on the environment)
Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, "Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us", The Observer, February 22, 2004.
Jeffrey Sachs, "Climate Change And War", TomPaine, March 1, 2005.
Don Fitz, "What’s Possible in the Military Sector? Greater than 100% Reduction in Greenhouse Gases", Znet, April 30, 2007.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_Change_and_the_Military"

Categories: Climate change | Environment | War/peace | Coal Issues

**greenman3610** | December 21, 2010 | 610 likes, 20 dislikes

Switching the words "climate change", for global warming, -- is it a devious, Orwellian perversion of the language, a mind controlling neurolinguistic word play engineered by psychological manipulators of the New World Order?.

Climate deniers realize that only

they can see through the evil plans of the global thought police.

What mysterious and secretive conspiracy is behind this monstrous mind game?

Luntz memo

http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008...

Luntz memo pdf

http://www.ewg.org/files/LuntzResearc...

Interview with Luntz:

http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008...

Christian Science Monitor, 1939

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/csmonitor...

Gilbert Plass and climatic change

http://www.americanscientist.org/issu...

The Denial Machine, CBC

http://video.google.com/videoplay?doc...

Frontline: Hot Politics

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontli...

Category:

Science & Technology

GLOBAL WARMING 1

See GW1-4 for newer content

Climate Change Beliefs, Parsed on a Local Level, Paint a Valuable Portrait

Climate Change Skepticism Is Highest In Japan, Britain and U.S., Poll Finds

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===

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Climate reality bites: Gen-Xers don’t care much about global warming

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amy g btsb: mckibben

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top 28 skeptic funders http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/30/companies-block-action-climate-change/print

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Public understanding of climate change: Getting warmer

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/public-opinion-climate-change-polls-politics_n_1285738.html

different survey methof=ds give diff opoll results; one sees 80% for decades

---

straight to the source

September 2004: Study: Media Misrepresents Scientific Understanding of Global Warming

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Our Coming Mega-Drought

As the World Burns

How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming

Common threads of Climate Skeptics Arguments

Skeptics Group Discounts Skeptics Arguments

Global Warming's Deadly Denial

UK Split Ruling on Climate Change Skeptics

Funding

Risk averse skeptics

Critiquing Skeptics as "Distraction Strategy"

Individual skeptics

Organizational skeptics

More:

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

External resources

External articles

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