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In 2025, with John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, and Roy Spencer, McKitrick was a member of the United States Department of Energy's Climate Working Group and a co-author of its A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate (23 July 2025)[7]

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From Katrina to Helene: A timeline of Fox News’ hurricane misinformation, harmful narratives, and climate denial

August 29 marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 08/28/25 mma

For two decades, Fox News has weaponized major disasters caused by supercharged storms to attack political opponents, push right-wing narratives, and deny climate change.

Major storms that hit populated areas generate wall-to-wall TV news coverage. At its best, this coverage exposes systemic issues that leave certain populations vulnerable to disasters, keeps a spotlight on both rescue and recovery processes to keep accountable those responsible for disaster response, and discusses the link between our warming planet and the intensification of storms, along with solutions for reducing climate pollution.

At its worst, coverage ignores these issues, downplaying or denying the role of climate change and using disasters to amplify false narratives and misinformation that serve a political agenda. In 20 years of hurricane reporting, Fox News’ coverage has predominately reflected the latter.

Below is an overview of some of the major storms that have made landfall in the U.S. over the past 20 years – and how Fox covered them.

Hurricane Katrina remains the costliest extreme weather disaster in U.S. history and one of the deadliest, with many of the 1,392 deaths likely having come as a direct result of the federal government’s failed response. Over 1.5 million survivors were displaced, making it also “one of the largest forced migrations in U.S. history. … Families were separated, homes were lost, and entire communities were erased.”

The media latched on to unverified stories of violence and societal breakdown, demonizing those most impacted by the storm and further delaying rescue and recovery efforts. Military forces were deployed to suppress the victims rather than evacuate them. Fox pushed this narrative of violence — “robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness” — and supported the Bush administration's reported strategy of blaming the faulty emergency response on Democratic state and local officials.

Superstorm Sandy hit the eastern United States in October 2012, causing at least 182 deaths and approximately $65 billion in damage. Fox criticized the Obama administration's Hurricane Sandy relief efforts by comparing them to the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. In fact, there were few similarities between the responses, and the Obama administration's response to Sandy was widely praised by members of both parties.

Discussing Hurricane Sandy on the November 1, 2012, edition of his show, Fox host Sean Hannity asked: “So where's President Obama? Well, after his photo-op with Gov. Chris Christie, and the help of your tax dollars, he boards Air Force One and he begins his day with a stump speech.” Hannity later said, “And with the horrifying images of Sandy's devastation now contrasted with the president's constant campaigning, this is starting to look like, in my opinion, Obama's Katrina.”

Hurricane Harvey was, at the time, “the most significant tropical cyclone rainfall event in United States history” and was particularly devastating to Black and Hispanic communities in Texas. Discussing Hurricane Harvey on the August 25, 2017, edition of The Five, Fox host Jesse Watters downplayed the impact of climate change on hurricanes, stating, “Hurricanes have been happening since the beginning of time. … These things just happen. It’s called the weather” — a nonsensical argument, as scientists are not claiming that climate change causes hurricanes, but that it makes them stronger and more intense.

Hurricane Irma, which hit Florida, was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic. It claimed 129 lives in the U.S. and Caribbean and cost an estimated $52 billion in damages. Discussing Hurricane Irma on the September 11, 2017, edition of The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld also brought up the frequency of hurricanes while ignoring intensity, stating that “landfalling U.S. hurricanes, they’ve been decreasing over the last 140 years.”

Hurricane Maria killed an estimated 3,000 people in the U.S. territory and caused roughly $90 billion worth of damage. President Donald Trump’s administration was widely criticized for its response and for blocking federal aid to Puerto Rico, which struggled for weeks to return power to its residents. The mayor of San Juan publicly criticized Trump’s response, and Trump drew backlash when he threw paper towels into the crowd at a relief center. Lying about death toll numbers, Trump claimed Democrats had inflated the number to make him look “as bad as possible.”

Fox personalities were among the right-wing media figures who leapt to Trump's defense. Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs called the Hurricane Maria death toll a “farce” and “an amazing tortured inflation.” Fox News’ John Roberts suggested that the dispute over Maria's death toll in Puerto Rico was part of Trump’s “feud with Puerto Rican officials.”

On the October 19, 2017, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the former host defended Trump from charges of racism against Puerto Ricans because “Puerto Rico is 75 percent white, according to the U.S. Census.” Carlson characterized as “unfounded” the charges that the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was racist and added that “the race angle” bothered him because “it makes people hate each other, and it’s just stupid.”

Hurricane Florence caused catastrophic damage to the Carolinas, claiming at least 37 lives. On Fox, climate denier Joe Bastardi and Rush Limbaugh’s former “official climatologist” Roy Spencer dismissed the link between climate change and intensifying hurricanes in favor of the denier argument that the frequency of hurricanes is decreasing. (Climate science does not argue that climate change is increasing the number of storms, but rather that it is making storms “more intense, with higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall, and more severe storm surge.”)

On the September 14, 2018, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Spencer talked about the declining frequency of “hits of the United States by major hurricanes,” claiming there’s too much “natural variability” to determine what influence human actions have had on hurricanes. On Hannity, Bastardi stated, “The amount of hurricanes in the last 50 years, from Florida to New England, is 37% of what it was the previous 50 years, so if there’s climate change going on, it's actually decreasing the amount of major hits.”

Affecting many states in the south, Hurricane Dorian was also the worst storm ever to hit the Bahamas and was responsible for at least 78 deaths. But the lives that Dorian claimed were overshadowed by the spectacle of “Sharpie-gate” when the president altered a map of the storm’s predicted path with a marker. After Trump lied about the path of Hurricane Dorian, using a Sharpie to manufacture a threat to Alabama, not only did prime-time host Sean Hannity defend him, but Fox’s Howard Kurtz attacked the media for covering Trump’s comments. Hannity called the media who reported on Trump’s lie “psychotic jackasses” and claimed that only “Trump derangement syndrome” could explain why reporters would point out that the president was wrong.

Roy Spencer appeared on the September 2, 2019, edition of The Story with Martha MacCallum to downplay climate change’s impact on hurricanes. Spencer stated that there is “no long term trend in either their intensity or in the number of major hurricanes … that have hit Florida.” On the September 4, 2019, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Ainsley Earhardt again brought up storm frequency in order to downplay the link between climate change and hurricanes, stating, “Hurricanes have been happening since the beginning of the atmosphere.” Later, on September 4, 2019, Jesse Watters appeared on The Story with Martha MacCallum to claim falsely that “there's no correlation between temperature and hurricanes, and there's no trend over the last hundred years about intensity or ferociousness or numbers.”

Hurricane Ida caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., where it brokeprecipitation records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania and caused major flash flooding, killing 95 people and causing an estimated $85 billion in damages. Fox News used the storm to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack then-President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill that contained measures to make communities more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

While discussing Hurricane Ida on the September 7, 2021, edition of The Ingraham Angle, one of the network’s favorite climate contrarians, Michael Shellenberger, said that the frequency of hurricanes is decreasing and that there is “no significant increase” in intensity — a bald-faced lie. On the September 8, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Joe Bastardi downplayed the intensity of the storm by arguing that other bad storms happened in the 1950s.

On the September 2, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Hannity, Sean Hannity began a segment downplaying the impacts of climate on Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather, and using it as yet another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5, 2021, edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, host Steve Hilton ran a short segment on Democrats supposedly using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Hurricane Ian brought a historic storm surge and catastrophic flooding to Florida and was responsible for at least 84 storm-related fatalities. As Hurricane Ian pummeled Florida and the Carolinas, Fox News dismissed, mocked, and outright denied climate change’s impact on hurricanes. On the September 29, 2022, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, former Fox host Tucker Carlson focused on hurricane frequency and downplayed the intensity argument, falsely claiming that “there’s no science behind these claims.” On the September 28, 2022, edition of Hannity, Sean Hannity stated, “During hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes, like we did a hundred years ago.” Later that night on The Ingraham Angle, Michael Shellenberger stated that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.”

Meanwhile, Jesse Watters mocked Biden's disaster response. Watters said, “Maybe the reason Joe [Biden] isn't talking with the leader of the state that's about to be devastated by this natural disaster is because he's already got the whole thing covered with the Inflation Reduction Act. Sen. Amy Klobuchar laid it out for us clearly. There's no need to worry, people, because the Inflation Reduction Act and voting for Democrats is going to stop hurricanes.”

Hurricane Idalia slammed into Florida's Gulf Coast, causing approximately $4 billion in damage to one of the state's poorest and least populated areas. As climate-fueled Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Florida, Jesse Watters Primetime hosted Judith Curry, a climate contrarian who consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia, to argue that scientists have “seriously mischaracterized” the threat of climate change. She claimed that the “dominant factor” in climate change is “far and away” Earth’s “natural climate variability.”

On the August 30, 2023, edition of Fox News’ so-called straight news program Special Report with Bret Baier, anchor Bret Baier dismissed comments from Joe Biden connecting the storm to climate change.

With 213 fatalities, Hurricane Helene became the second deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in 50 years, with economic losses estimated at more than $200 billion. Fox used Hurricane Helene to attack the Biden administration’s policies and disaster response while laundering harmful misinformation, even while politicians of both parties representing the impacted areas praised the response and begged media and bad actors to stop spreading misinformation that ultimately disrupted rescue and recovery efforts and put Federal Emergency Management Agency workers in danger.

One of these false and harmful claims contended that FEMA’s hurricane victim relief funds had been drained by aid to undocumented immigrants. In reality, the funding is separate and unrelated. Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity led the charge in repeating the false claim; Watters’ prime-time show repeated the lie in 5 consecutive broadcasts starting October 3, and Hannity managed 6.

Fox News also falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration were ignoring millions of Americans impacted by intense flooding while dishonestly claiming that victims were only entitled to $750 in aid, when in reality that is just the start of federal benefits. Fox’s misleading coverage of the $750 payments was “one of the more dishonest omissions ever seen on Fox News – which is saying something,” Mediaite senior editor Michael Luciano wrote of the misleading attack by Fox hosts Hannity, Watters, and Laura Ingraham.

Fox personalities also complained about the Biden administration’s pledge to give $157 million to Lebanon, incorrectly claiming that the humanitarian aid for Lebanon was being taken from funds that would otherwise be used for disaster relief assistance. Hannity misleadingly suggested U.S. foreign aid was competing with disaster relief for funding. Watters, meanwhile, incredulously asked, “How is it that Biden and Harris can send money overseas faster than they can send it to our own citizens?”

In May, just weeks before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season and peak extreme weather, CNN obtained an internal memo warning that FEMA was “not ready” for hurricane season. According to the internal assessment, preparations for hurricane season have been “derailed” and issues abound at the agency, “including a general uncertainty around its mission, lack of coordination with states and other federal agencies, low morale and new red tape that will likely slow responses.” Fox ignored reporting on the agency's lack of preparation for this year’s extreme weather season. The network was also quiet about multiple states that expressed frustration over delayed or denied disaster relief from the Trump administration.

On June 2, acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson made headlines, first in Reuters, for telling staff in a daily briefing that he had been unaware the U.S. has a hurricane season. Legacynewsoutlets, including cable networks CNN and MSNBC, covered Richardson’s controversial remarks and the wider concerns about FEMA’s hurricane preparedness while Fox News seemingly ignored them.

After the deadly flooding in Central Texas in early July, Fox News personalities attacked the media and prominent Democrats for linking the flooding to climate change and for raising concerns about Trump administration cuts to agencies and services that predict and respond to extreme weather events. When reporting showed that the Trump administration’s response had been delayed, Fox ran defense for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

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mma

The Trump administration's “critical review” of climate science is authored by some of Fox News’ favorite climate deniers

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 08/14/25

These arguments, routinely made by people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, were included in an unusual report released by the Energy Department on Tuesday. The report, which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.

“There is a history of some of the authors of this document cherry-picking dates to show that there is no change, but they’re not providing the evidence to support that,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia. She resigned from Georgia Tech in 2017 citing climate “craziness” and has been called out by other scientists for promoting debunked climate denial arguments.

As climate-fueled Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Florida in August 2023, Curry appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime to argue that scientists have “seriously mischaracterized” the threat of climate change. She claimed that the “dominant factor” in climate change is “far and away” the “natural climate variability” of the Earth. (Earlier that same month, Curry published an op-edin the New York Post, another Murdoch property, where she falsely claimed that the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on climate change is “manufactured” and suggested that scientists are incentivized by “fame and fortune” to push the idea that climate change is caused by human activity.)

John Christy

John Christy is “an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming,” according to The New York Times. (In reality, “more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.”) He has regularly downplayed the link between climate change and extreme weather and has also pushed the false narrative — central to the Trump DOE climate report — that “CO2 is not the problem” because “carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food.”

During a deadly global heat wave in July 2022, Christy appeared on The Ingraham Angle to falsely claim that extreme heat and other disasters are not “increasing in intensity or frequency.” He also repeated the common climate denial argument that “deaths from weather disasters and so on has gone down about 95% in the last hundred years.” But Reuters points out that the decrease in deaths since 1920 is largely due to “better forecasting and preparedness,” even while “the number, intensity, and cost of climatic and meteorological hazards have all increased over the last hundred years.”

Steven Koonin

Physicist Steve Koonin, a former scientist for the oil and gas giant BP who wrote a book chock-full of errors about climate change, appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Fox Business’ Kudlow to downplay the release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin stated that “it is kind of absurd to think that another one degree over a century is going to create catastrophe.” But this would put the planet at over 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which climate scientists have long urged policymakers to prevent because it will be catastrophic for large parts of the globe.

Koonin also appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier to dismiss the connection between extreme weather and climate change, claiming that natural disasters were “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.”

In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest into triple digits just two months before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming.

Roy Spencer

Roy Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an adviser to the Heartland Institute, and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was known as Rush Limbaugh's “official climatologist.” Politico reported that even while he has written that “climate change is big business” driven by a “marching army of climate scientists whose careers now depend on a steady stream of funding from governments” (a frequent claim among climate deniers), Spencer himself “has worked with organizations that have received funding from an interlinked network of fossil fuel companies — a multitrillion-dollar global industry — as well as wealthy foundations with billions of dollars in holdings that support groups opposing climate and energy regulations.”

After Hurricane Irma devastated parts of the U.S. in 2017, Fox & Friends hosted Spencer to undermine the science linking more intense storms to a warming planet. Spencer claimed: “As you go through time, there has been no increase in the number of major land-falling hurricanes in Florida, and there's been no increase in their intensity.” While climate scientists predict that “storm frequency will either decrease or remain unchanged” due to climate change and studies consistently show “no discernible trend in the global number of tropical cyclones,” data has confirmed that warmer temperatures have increased their intensity — including stronger wind speeds and greater precipitation.

“I've been in the climate debate and discussion for over 20 years, so I know certainly a lot of people in that world and I just made a list of who I think are the true, honest scientists,” Wright responded. “They follow the data and the facts where they lead them. They don't have a political agenda or a desired policy or a desired thing. They're just honest scientists. There's plenty of those. But I made a list of about a dozen of them that I thought were very senior and very well-respected. I called the top five and everyone said yes.”

Collins noted that “some people have criticized the report saying the information was cherry-picked by people who had already predetermined what they wanted to say in this report.” Notably, “some people” includes climate scientists whose work is cited in the report.

Wright also claimed that “the report references the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports over 100 times,” but it is worth noting that the well-known climate contrarians behind the Trump administration’s “critical review” contradict the findings of the hundreds of scientists who spent eight years developing the IPCC report.

On the August 7 edition of Morning with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo asked Wright to respond to The New York Times’ “pushback” from the article headlined “Energy Department attacks climate science in contentious report.”

“What a crazy headline, but I guess that’s par for the course for The New York Times — in fact we are doing the exact opposite,” Wright responded. “We are exposing the American people and the broader scientific community to what is actually in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, not the hyperbolic summaries for policymakers or media headlines that claim all sorts of crazy stuff. This is what we actually know.”

“How often do you hear that the planet is getting greener because there’s more carbon dioxide in the air that contributes to increased crop productivity and greener wilderness?” he continued. “How often do you hear that deaths from extreme weather have been falling like stone for a century? And that insured losses from extreme weather events have been on a multidecadal decline — those are just facts.”

All of these climate denial arguments have been debunked for years. Increasing CO2 is far more harmful to plants and farmers than any short-term benefit. Extreme weather deaths are falling because of better forecasting even while weather events are more intense due to our warming planet. And we are currently facing an insurance crisis because of climate-fueled events making some locations economically unviable and dangerously uninhabitable. But these stark realities were abandoned in the Trump administration’s climate report in favor of debunked arguments that support the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against climate action.

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The Trump administration's “critical review” of climate science is authored by some of Fox News’ favorite climate deniers

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 08/14/25

These arguments, routinely made by people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, were included in an unusual report released by the Energy Department on Tuesday. The report, which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.

“There is a history of some of the authors of this document cherry-picking dates to show that there is no change, but they’re not providing the evidence to support that,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia. She resigned from Georgia Tech in 2017 citing climate “craziness” and has been called out by other scientists for promoting debunked climate denial arguments.

As climate-fueled Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Florida in August 2023, Curry appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime to argue that scientists have “seriously mischaracterized” the threat of climate change. She claimed that the “dominant factor” in climate change is “far and away” the “natural climate variability” of the Earth. (Earlier that same month, Curry published an op-edin the New York Post, another Murdoch property, where she falsely claimed that the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on climate change is “manufactured” and suggested that scientists are incentivized by “fame and fortune” to push the idea that climate change is caused by human activity.)

John Christy

John Christy is “an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming,” according to The New York Times. (In reality, “more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.”) He has regularly downplayed the link between climate change and extreme weather and has also pushed the false narrative — central to the Trump DOE climate report — that “CO2 is not the problem” because “carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food.”

During a deadly global heat wave in July 2022, Christy appeared on The Ingraham Angle to falsely claim that extreme heat and other disasters are not “increasing in intensity or frequency.” He also repeated the common climate denial argument that “deaths from weather disasters and so on has gone down about 95% in the last hundred years.” But Reuters points out that the decrease in deaths since 1920 is largely due to “better forecasting and preparedness,” even while “the number, intensity, and cost of climatic and meteorological hazards have all increased over the last hundred years.”

Steven Koonin

Physicist Steve Koonin, a former scientist for the oil and gas giant BP who wrote a book chock-full of errors about climate change, appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Fox Business’ Kudlow to downplay the release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin stated that “it is kind of absurd to think that another one degree over a century is going to create catastrophe.” But this would put the planet at over 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which climate scientists have long urged policymakers to prevent because it will be catastrophic for large parts of the globe.

Koonin also appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier to dismiss the connection between extreme weather and climate change, claiming that natural disasters were “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.”

In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest into triple digits just two months before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming.

Roy Spencer

Roy Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an adviser to the Heartland Institute, and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was known as Rush Limbaugh's “official climatologist.” Politico reported that even while he has written that “climate change is big business” driven by a “marching army of climate scientists whose careers now depend on a steady stream of funding from governments” (a frequent claim among climate deniers), Spencer himself “has worked with organizations that have received funding from an interlinked network of fossil fuel companies — a multitrillion-dollar global industry — as well as wealthy foundations with billions of dollars in holdings that support groups opposing climate and energy regulations.”

After Hurricane Irma devastated parts of the U.S. in 2017, Fox & Friends hosted Spencer to undermine the science linking more intense storms to a warming planet. Spencer claimed: “As you go through time, there has been no increase in the number of major land-falling hurricanes in Florida, and there's been no increase in their intensity.” While climate scientists predict that “storm frequency will either decrease or remain unchanged” due to climate change and studies consistently show “no discernible trend in the global number of tropical cyclones,” data has confirmed that warmer temperatures have increased their intensity — including stronger wind speeds and greater precipitation.

“I've been in the climate debate and discussion for over 20 years, so I know certainly a lot of people in that world and I just made a list of who I think are the true, honest scientists,” Wright responded. “They follow the data and the facts where they lead them. They don't have a political agenda or a desired policy or a desired thing. They're just honest scientists. There's plenty of those. But I made a list of about a dozen of them that I thought were very senior and very well-respected. I called the top five and everyone said yes.”

Collins noted that “some people have criticized the report saying the information was cherry-picked by people who had already predetermined what they wanted to say in this report.” Notably, “some people” includes climate scientists whose work is cited in the report.

Wright also claimed that “the report references the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports over 100 times,” but it is worth noting that the well-known climate contrarians behind the Trump administration’s “critical review” contradict the findings of the hundreds of scientists who spent eight years developing the IPCC report.

On the August 7 edition of Morning with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo asked Wright to respond to The New York Times’ “pushback” from the article headlined “Energy Department attacks climate science in contentious report.”

“What a crazy headline, but I guess that’s par for the course for The New York Times — in fact we are doing the exact opposite,” Wright responded. “We are exposing the American people and the broader scientific community to what is actually in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, not the hyperbolic summaries for policymakers or media headlines that claim all sorts of crazy stuff. This is what we actually know.”

“How often do you hear that the planet is getting greener because there’s more carbon dioxide in the air that contributes to increased crop productivity and greener wilderness?” he continued. “How often do you hear that deaths from extreme weather have been falling like stone for a century? And that insured losses from extreme weather events have been on a multidecadal decline — those are just facts.”

All of these climate denial arguments have been debunked for years. Increasing CO2 is far more harmful to plants and farmers than any short-term benefit. Extreme weather deaths are falling because of better forecasting even while weather events are more intense due to our warming planet. And we are currently facing an insurance crisis because of climate-fueled events making some locations economically unviable and dangerously uninhabitable. But these stark realities were abandoned in the Trump administration’s climate report in favor of debunked arguments that support the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against climate action.

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NO LNX

In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding

The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus.

By Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman

Reporting from Washington

July 29, 2025

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday the Trump administration would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

Speaking at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. planned to rescind the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.

“The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” Mr. Zeldin said. He said the proposal would also erase limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks on the nation’s roads.

Without the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. would be left with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts. It marks a notable shift in the administration’s position from one that had downplayed the threat of global warming to one that essentially flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.

It would not only reverse current regulations, but, if the move is upheld in court, it could make it significantly harder for future administrations to rein in climate pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

Without the United States working to reduce emissions, it becomes far tougher for the world to collectively prevent average global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That is the threshold beyond which climate scientists say there is significantly greater risk from increasingly destructive storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, as well as from species extinction.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also moved to scrap restrictions on pollution from power plants, halt key measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and delay approvals of wind and solar energy projects on federal lands.

“Today’s E.P.A. announcement ignores the blindingly obvious reality of the climate crisis and sidelines the E.P.A.’s own scientists and lawyers in favor of the interests and profits of the fossil fuel industry,” former Vice President Al Gore said in a statement.

To justify the proposal, the E.P.A. cited a report that the Energy Department commissioned from five scientists known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, namely that it is being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The New York Times first reported that the Energy Department had hired these scientists, including Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled,” and John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming.

In their report, the scientists criticized the computer models used to predict climate change, saying they tend to overestimate warming. They also wrote that carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, has positive effects by helping plants grow and increasing agricultural productivity. And they asserted that overall, government climate regulations have a limited effect on global temperature rise.

The E.P.A. echoed this last argument in the proposed rule, saying greenhouse gases from cars on American roads do not contribute significantly to climate change because they are a small share of global emissions. Reducing these emissions to zero “would not have a scientifically measurable impact” on global climate trends or on public health and welfare, the agency said. Instead, the agency said, climate regulations are what pose the true threat to public health and welfare, because they increase the price of new vehicles and leave fewer choices for car buyers.

Many environmental activists and lawyers criticized those arguments, noting that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. If the U.S. motor vehicle sector were a country, it would be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the E.P.A.’s own data.

“If vehicle emissions don’t pass muster as a contribution to climate change, it’s hard to imagine what would,” said Dena Adler, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Dan Becker, who leads transportation policy for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, called the E.P.A. proposal a “cynical one-two punch” that will lead to more gasoline-burning vehicles on the road and fewer tools to reduce tailpipe pollution. He said that the auto-emissions rules being rescinded were projected to prevent 7 billion metric tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere while saving the average American driver about $6,000 in fuel and maintenance over the lifetime of vehicles built under the standards.

“The E.P.A. is revoking the biggest single step any nation has taken to save oil, save consumers money at the pump and combat global warming,” Mr. Becker said.

The administration’s plan has its backers. Daren Bakst, who directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization, said, “It is unreasonable to claim that pollutants contribute to endangerment if emissions are de minimis.”

Mike Braun, the governor of Indiana, said at the event in Indianapolis that the Biden administration’s vehicle emissions rules had burdened the auto industry in the state. “As a lifelong entrepreneur for 37 years actually in the automotive business, I think I know a thing or two about it, and you can count on Indiana being for common sense and reining in government,” he said.

John Bozzella, chief executive of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group for most major carmakers, said in a statement that he was still reviewing the E.P.A.’s announcement. “At the same time, there’s no question the vehicle emissions regulations finalized under the previous administration aren’t achievable and should be revised to reflect current market conditions, to keep the auto industry in America competitive,” he said.

While the Chamber of Commerce and fossil fuel groups had fought the endangerment finding when it was first written, none have been clamoring in recent years for its reversal. This year Marty Durbin, who leads the chamber’s energy institute, called the finding “settled law” and said his group, which is a major business lobbying organization, was not seeking its repeal.

“I’m not aware of anyone in industry who has been pushing for it,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, an energy attorney with the law firm Bracewell who served in the E.P.A. during the administration of the first President George Bush and, later, that of President George W. Bush.

The plan to eliminate the endangerment finding showcases the political evolution of Mr. Zeldin, who for years took moderate positions on climate change and other environmental issues.

A former congressman from a coastal community on Long Island that is struggling with rising sea levels linked to global warming, Mr. Zeldin once joined a bipartisan caucus to address climate change. In 2019 he broke with fellow Republicans to vote against an amendment that would have prohibited the E.P.A. from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

An ally of Mr. Trump who prominently defended him during House impeachment hearings, Mr. Zeldin moved to the right on energy and other issues during his unsuccessful bid for governor of New York in 2022. Just weeks after his nomination to lead the E.P.A., Mr. Zeldin declared that he would be “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” by repealing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions

“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Mr. Zeldin said on the conservative podcast “Ruthless” earlier on Tuesday. One of the co-hosts of the program called the endangerment finding “the left’s tent pole to begin the whole climate grift,” to which Mr. Zeldin agreed.

The proposed repeal of the endangerment finding is all but certain to draw legal challenges, and David Doniger, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said he expected that it would eventually be struck down in court. He noted that climate science has advanced significantly since 2009, when the finding was issued.

After the proposal is published in the Federal Register, the E.P.A. will solicit comments from the public for 45 days, Mr. Zeldin said. The agency will then finalize the rule, most likely in the next year.

Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.

Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. To Retract Bedrock Finding On Climate Crisis. Order Reprints

---

REF ALSO NYT

Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change

The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country.

Steven E. Koonin, dressed in a dark suit and yellow tie, gestures as he speaks while sitting on a stage.

Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author, was hired by the Energy Department. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, as a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and as an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.Credit...Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg

By Maxine Joselow

Reporting from Washington

July 8, 2025

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

It was not immediately clear what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid. Representatives for Dr. Koonin, Dr. Spencer and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.

In a brief phone interview and follow-up email, Dr. Christy said he was not working on the endangerment finding nor collecting a government salary. He declined to comment further.

A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal — are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.

A small minority of scientists, however, rejects this consensus. Dr. Koonin, who has said he is a friend of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, has been one of the loudest critics.

During President Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut these claims. At the time, mainstream climate scientists said the proposal would make a mockery of scientific research and create a platform for marginal views that had already been disproved in the normal course of scientific debate.

Image

Roy Spencer, in a dark suit, blue shirt and tie, holds a microphone in one hand and points to a projection on a screen with the other hand.

Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist and researcher at the University of Alabama, in 2012. He has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover.

Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told coal industry executives that he planned to conduct the exercise. But John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, ultimately blocked the effort.

Now, Dr. Koonin is listed as a “special government employee” in the Energy Department’s internal email system, the records show. Federal law says special government employees are executive branch appointees named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk had that classification when he began Mr. Trump’s cost cutting initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Dr. Koonin also serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning research organization on Stanford University’s campus. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

In his 2021 book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” Dr. Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.

In a phone interview in November, Dr. Koonin said that the book had made an impression on Mr. Wright, who ran the oil and gas company Liberty Energy before he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.

“He reached out when I wrote the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Dr. Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come talk to his company at one point — it was a couple years ago — and we got to know each other.”

He added, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book.”

Dr. Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also has a connection to Mr. Wright. In a report published last year by Liberty Energy, Mr. Wright cited atmospheric temperature records that Dr. Spencer had collected. (The overall report, titled “Bettering Human Lives,” made the case that fossil fuels were “essential” to solving global poverty, a claim that some experts have called misleading.)

In addition to his role at the University of Alabama, Dr. Spencer is a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science. He previously served as a scientist at NASA and as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration.

Dr. Spencer has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover. While some of Dr. Spencer’s past work has been funded by the government, he has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.

“The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve,” he wrote in his 2010 book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.”

Image

John Christy, dressed in khaki shorts, sneakers and a blue polo shirt, sits on a chair in front of a large wall map of the world.

:{John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts that human activity has caused global warming, in 2014

Dr. Christy has worked closely with Dr. Spencer to maintain atmospheric temperature records at the University of Alabama. He has also served as Alabama’s state climatologist since 2000. A vocal critic of climate models, he championed the “red-team, blue-team” exercise and served on an E.P.A. scientific advisory board during the first Trump administration.

When asked about his Energy Department role in a brief phone interview, Dr. Christy said he was an “unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.

Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.

On his first day back in the White House, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that charged the E.P.A. with reviewing the “legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. And last week, the agency sent a proposal to reconsider the finding to the White House budget office, a first step in repealing it.

An E.P.A. spokesman, Mike Bastasch, declined to comment on the proposal before its public release.

Brad Plumer contributed reporting from Washington.

Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2025, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Energy Department Hires Skeptics of Climate Change

===

pumping bs window shooting

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/08/06/doing-lord-s-work-heartland-institute-gathers-climate-deniers-america-first-energy-conference

One of the world’s most notorious climate science denial groups — the Heartland Institute — will gather its supporters and fellow ideologues this week for a one-day energy conference in Louisiana.

Aside from the conference’s fanatical devotion to fossil fuels, the line-up includes the usual pushers of junk science who are sure that every major science academy in the world is wrong about the dangers of adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

Gathering at the conference will be “hundreds of state and national elected officials, think tank leaders, and policy analysts.”

Front and center in New Orleans will be Fred Palmer, a veteran coal industry lobbyist who was behind what was probably the very first fossil-fuel funded attacks on the science linking coal burning to dangerous climate change.

After more than 30 years with the Western Fuels Association and then coal giant Peabody, Palmer now spends his time as a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute.

Shortly after Donald Trump won the U.S. Presidency, Palmer told DeSmog that he would be “reaching out to the fossil fuel community” for cash to fund the institute. This would be added to the more than $5 million the institute has received from major Trump financial backer Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire whose daughter Rebekah Mercer was a key member of the President’s transition team.

Given the backing of the Mercers, it’s perhaps not surprising that Heartland has borrowed the title of Trump’s energy policy in holding its “America First Energy Conference.”

A favorite talking point from climate science deniers around the world — including those at the Heartland Institute — is that governments and scientists around the world have adopted climate science as a new “green religion” and it’s this fanaticism that is clouding their judgment.

Heartland likes to pitch global warming as “facts vs faith,” as a “green religion,” and to tell its followers that environmentalism is like a church where climate change is the new religion.

This is a curious position to take, when you compare it to the beliefs of Fred Palmer and other speakers at the Heartland conference. Quite literally, they believe that coal was put there by a god for humans to use.

“It’s hard not to concede that coal hasn’t been put on Earth and other fossil fuels as part of a divine plan,” Palmer has told DeSmog.

In July 2018, Palmer gave a speech to the Western Conservative Summit in Colorado. In audio obtained by DeSmog, Palmer says of Heartland’s efforts on climate change: “We are, I know, doing the Lord’s work.”

But this literal religious zeal is not restricted to Palmer at Heartland’s conference this week.

One session — titled Why CO2 Emissions are not a climate crisis — includes panelists Dr. Roy Spencerand Professor David Legates, who are both old hands at pushing back on all that green religion.

In 2015, Legates was featured in a series of videos attacking climate science and environmentalism produced by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

“There has to be a designer — a creator behind this to make something as complex as it is, yet as robust as it is,”says Legates.

“To be a true Christian means you have to believe and understand what we are being taught through the Bible and through God’s word.”

Scheduled beside Legates on the Heartland Institute panel is Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Spencer once wrote that he had analyzed Biblical claimsthat “the universe and all life within it had been created by some greater intelligent Being, not by mere chance.”

His conclusion? The “theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution.”

There are many well-credentialed climate scientists who are also people of faith.

But the argument from denialists that climate scientists are blinded by their own faith in a “climate change religion,” belies their own quite literal belief that they are doing the work of god.

As a presumably god-given debating tactic, it’s as flawed as their science.

fucktard: isn't calling kickass gestapo hate speech?

must be getting traction: realclear investigations:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/03/washington-post-wants-facebook-to-shut-down-pj-media-and-others-for-climate-denial-n1529542

pj media r spencer

no lnx [banner about silence rt so give us $ radical agenda bs?]

while the Washington Post piously reminds us that “democracy dies in darkness,” it’s busy shooting out the lights: On Tuesday it published a lengthy call to Facebook to shut down dissident media, including PJ Media, because, you see, the non-Leftist publications are daring to spread “climate change denial” on the platform. Not just democracy, but also the freedom of speech will die in darkness if the Post gets its way.

The Post article focuses upon a newly published study from one of the endless stream of far-Left advocacy groups masquerading as think tanks, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which the Post hastens to assure us is a nonprofit. Of course. What else could it possibly be called?

Disagree with the Leftist establishment about the causes of and/or remedies for climate change, and what else could possibly be your motivation but “hate”? You don’t want to see your country voluntarily impoverish itself and empower the People’s Republic of China in service of unproven assumptions and selective application of accountability? Come on, man! You’re just a bigot!

The CCDH study supposedly shows that “10 publishers, including RT and the Federalist Papers, are responsible for nearly 70 percent of interactions with climate change misinformation on the platform.”The CCDH has labeled these publishers the “Toxic Ten,” and they comprise virtually all of the major dissident platforms operating today: Breitbart, the Western Journal, Newsmax, the Media Research Center, the Washington Times, the Federalist Papers, the Daily Wire, and the Patriot Post, along with Russian State Media (what’s a Leftist conspiracy theory these days without the Russians) and of course Townhall Media, including PJ Media, Townhall, Red State, and Twitchy.

These publications, the Post claims, put out “a broad range of climate disinformation, including articles that undermine the existence or impacts of climate change or misrepresent data in ways that might erode trust in climate science experts.” They’re out there exercising the freedom of speech, utterly heedless of the looming apocalypse: “The study comes amid increasing political concern about the catastrophic impact of climate change, as global leaders gather in Glasgow for the United Nations-brokered COP26, described as the last chance for nations to hammer out a unified plan to significantly cut greenhouse gases.”

The Post hopes that the CCDH report will put an end to all that and bring about still more ideological conformity on Facebook: “While the report doesn’t provide a comprehensive look at all misleading climate change content promoted on Facebook, it has the potential to inspire political action as the CCDH has historically captured policymakers’ attention.”

It notes that the CCDH’s earlier report, which targeted the “disinformation dozen” who supposedly spread “anti-vaccine content,” was repeatedly cited by the White House along with numerous lawmakers in Congress, and it was used as a proxy for questions about the role of social media in aggravating vaccine hesitancy.”

Related: Lefty Website Calling for Canceling Conservatives Is Stunned When YouTube Comes for Them]

:{

}:

The need to act is urgent, or so the CCDH and the Post would have you believe. CCDH chief Imran Ahmed wants you to know that he is thoroughly petrified: “When you put it all together, you’ve got these two industries, Big Oil and Big Tech, and they are the two industries that pose the greatest threat to the survival of our species.”

Facebook, however, is not being cooperative, and not exercising enough censorship: “Earlier this year, Facebook promised to start adding informational labels to some climate posts, much like it does with election or coronavirus posts. But CCDH researchers found that of the posts they surveyed containing climate misinformation, just 8% carried Facebook’s informational label.” Nor does it look as if this is going to change anytime soon.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone called the methodology of the CCDH study “flawed.” Facebook previously, according to the Post, “pushed back on the structure of the CCDH’s disinformation dozen report, arguing it was based on ‘narrow data’ that wasn’t representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people shared about coronavirus vaccines on Facebook.”

That’s not to say that Facebook doesn’t interfere in climate change discussions at all. Nick Clegg, the social media giant’s vice president for global affairs and communications, noted that Facebook “reduces distribution of posts that its third-party fact-checkers say are false.” That’s not enough, as far as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Gestapo) is concerned. “Facebook and other social media companies make money when they send users down rabbit holes of climate change denial,” Whitehouse thundered. “That’s a very dangerous business model for the future of the planet. It’s hard to tell which is more disgusting: Facebook propagating this disinformation, or the fossil fuel industry funding it.”

So far Facebook isn’t cooperating, but fascists such as Whitehouse and the Post editors aren’t going to give up their efforts to silence all dissent and destroy the freedom of speech. As Paula Bolyard noted the other day regarding another controversial issue where PJ Media is telling truths that others fear to enunciate, “In 21st-century America, truth is considered a revolutionary idea….We’ve sacrificed a lot of revenue over the last few years because we refuse to cave to the social-media censors, but we will continue to tell the truth. If you want to support us in this mission, please consider becoming a VIP member. For the price of a cup of coffee per day, you can partner with us to make sure the Left isn’t the only voice out there.”

The Left is working hard to make sure it is the only voice out there. That’s why we must raise our voices all the louder.[$ ask]

blog?

see monckton durban parachute

WHAT IS Climategate 2.0?

[https://americanelephant.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/climategate-2-0-a-pattern-of-deception-and-collusion/

CLIMATEGATE 2.0: A PATTERN OF DECEPTION AND COLLUSION! by The Elephant's Child

November 27, 2011

Filed under: Economy, Energy, Environment, Junk Science | Tags: Climategate 2.0, Consequences, The IPCC

The Climate meeting in Durban is just opening, and the new batch of ClimateGate e-mails —Climategate 2.0 — is dominating environmental news. “They not only reveal bias, but also some private doubts among the core scientist faithful about the scientific basis for the IPCC’s policy goals,”as climate scientist Roy Spencer explains.

In trying to learn about a subject as complex as climate, scientists may have diametrically opposing views on some matter, even given the same evidence. They may come to completely different conclusions about what their measurements mean. Scientists are humans with biases.

The problem with climate science, as we now refer to ‘global warming,’ is that governments got all excited about “saving the planet” and funded that research which would look for the causes of global warming and the problems that would result from that warming.  In other words they funded one side of the question,and neglected to fund any science intended to demonstrate that warming and cooling were natural phenomenon.

The funding — grants, prestige, facilities, equipment, assistants — was not only plentiful, but encouraged anyone in any sort of scientific field to write a grant proposal that would make their specialty important to climate. That biases appeared is not surprising. That some would go too far in defense of their own biases is unfortunate, and revealed by this new release of Climategate 2.0 emails.

Ever since NOAA’s James Hansen chose the hottest day of summer in Washington DC to warn Congress about the out-of-control warming of the earth, and how they must act to save the planet, Congress has encouraged the investigation.  Dr. Hansen also provides us with an example of the rewards for the warmist, as his “outside” earnings from speeches, appearances, and protests have topped $1 million. Outside income that he neglected to report to his institution.

Dr. Roy Spencer has written a generous essay on Bias in Scientific Research, Climategate 2.0, and the scientists who supported the IPCC efforts.  The IPCC was founded over 20 years ago to support political and energy policy goals, not to search for scientific truth.

For the Climategate 2.0 emails, go to Anthony Watt’s blog” Watts up with that“, or to Mark Moran’s Climate Depot, or to Steven Milloy’s JunkScience.com.  It’s great fun. They validate everything the skeptics have been saying for years.

It is almost impossible to estimate the total of the vast wasted sums spent by governments (plural)on policies and programs derived from climate change: the race to eliminate carbon in all its forms, the attack on coal mines, the attack on offshore oil drilling, electric cars, wind farms, solar arrays, the EPA and all its regulation, the Department of Energy and all its grants and subsidies, the ‘smart grid,” Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth, the Chicago Carbon Exchange, the20,000 old folks who died from fuel poverty in Britain last year,down to all the advertising that brags about how “green” a business is. A pox on all of it. The damage done by this delusion is incalculable.  As Christopher Booker says in The Telegraph:

The scare over man-made global warming is not only the scientific scandal of our generation, but a suicidal flight from reality.

Do read up on this story.  It’s important to understand what is going on, and to try to understand the consequences of all this deception. It affects everything, absolutely everything.]

Z.2010.08-11 Roy M. Spencer

NAS Begins Global Warming Inquisition IRS-3E Meme-146

“A new  [so-called meme] “study” has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences (PNAS) examining the credentials and publication records of climate

scientists who are global warming skeptics versus those who accept the “tenets

of anthropogenic climate change.”

It should be no surprise that the study finds scientists skeptical of the

anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crisis theory have fewer publications or

are less credentialed than the marching army of scientists who have been paid

hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 20 years to find every potential

connection between fossil fuel use and changes in nature.”

Roy Spencer’s career has been based on government money, but he has

been wrong again and again. When scientists complain about exclusion,

sometimes it is because they are poor scientists, §Y.1.

alluded to my mandy g 2017 testimony?

aha hmmn fake outrage?  useful cudgel in that 99% of threat are to actual climate sci, egged on by climategate, morano dox etc etc; also demonize irrational opponents who can't win w/ words thus violence, plus just make christy important when he's really pretty irrelevant, esp since trump gone and fallbk 4 does not need hacks

roy sp

shots Fired into the Christy/Spencer Building at UAH

April 24th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend.

All [nope] bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building).

Given that this was Earth Day weekend, with a March for Science passing right past our building on Saturday afternoon, I think this is more than coincidence. When some people cannot argue facts, they resort to violence to get their way. It doesn’t matter that we don’t “deny global warming”; the fact we disagree with its seriousness and the level of human involvment in warming is enough to send some radicals into a tizzy.

Our street is fairly quiet, so I doubt the shots were fired during Saturday’s march here. It was probably late night Saturday or Sunday for the shooter to have a chance of being unnoticed.

Maybe the “March For Science” should have been called the “March To Silence”.

Campus and city police say they believe the shots were fired from a passing car, based upon the angle of entry into one of the offices. Shell casings were recovered outside. The closest distance a passing car would have been is 70 yards away.

This is a developing story. I have no other details.

UPDATE: Local news reports that UAH police have classified this as a “random shooting”. So, the seven Belgian 5.7 millimeter bullets which hit windows and bricks around John Christy’s office from 70 yards awaywere apparently deemed to be “random” occurrence. (Despite my personal defense training, I probably would have struggled to get that tight a “random” cluster with a semi-automatic pistol.) Nothing to see here, move along.

---

Update on Possible Ecoterror Attack at UAH

April 26th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Ecoterrorism. Eco-terrorism is defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against people or property by an environmentally oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.” -Wikipedia

It appears that at least some people are beginning to take the shots fired into the side of our building a little more seriously.

By way of clarification, the March for Science here on Saturday did not pass right by our building, but started farther down our street. (As I’ve said before, the shots would not have been fired during the march. The expensive “boutique” FN Five-seven [5.7 mm] gun used has a loud report — everyone would have noticed.)

Also, there seems to be some disagreement whether all shots hit John Christy’s floor (4th floor of the NSSTC). UAH Chief of Staff Ray Garner has been quoted in this AL.com story that a few shots hit the third floor. I did not see those when surveying the outside; each floor has about 5 ft of window at the top, and 3 ft of siding below the window. Some of the bullets hit the siding below the window. Below the 4th floor would then be 5 feet of window on the third floor, and no third floor windows were hit that I could tell.

But it doesn’t really matter. The bullets all hit near John Christy’s office.

In fact, these details miss the big picture of this event. Even if: (1) the bullets had hit the other end of the building, (2) on the first floor, (3) it didn’t happen on Earth Day weekend, and (4) there was no March for Science that weekend, I would still consider 7 shots fired into our building a probable act of ecoterrorism.

I am not surprised this happened at all.

For the last 25 years our science has been viewed as standing in the way of efforts to institute a carbon tax or otherwise reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The amount of money involved in such changes in energy policy easily run into the hundreds of billions of dollars… more likely trillions.

When I was at NASA, my boss was personally told by Al Gore that Gore blamed our satellite temperature dataset for the failure of carbon tax legislation to pass.

So why am I not surprised that our building was shot up?

Because people have been killed for much less reason than hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is why the FBI needs to get involved in this case, if they haven’t already. Ecoterrorism is a federal crime. There were federal employees in the building at the time the shots were fired into the building.

The original media reports that the event was a “random shooting” were, in my opinion, irresponsible. As far as I know, there were no questions asked of us, like “Do you know why someone might have intentionally shot into your building?”

Well, hell, yes I know why. And I’m a little surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

John and I have testified in congress many times on our work. John has been particularly effective in his testimony over the years. While I believe the shots were a “message” to us, I don’t think John or I are that worried for our personal safety. Whoever did this is most likely not going to approach us and physically threaten us in person. Instead, we mostly just get hate mail. Nevertheless, just in case I took personal defense training with firearms years ago.

I doubt that the perps will ever be identified. But if UAH employees want to have a sense of safety, it is not helpful for such an event to be deemed a “random shooting” within only six hours of it being reported, and the public told it won’t be investigated any further. Last evening, the UAH police sent out emails to everyone on campus asking for any additional information related to the shooting, and correcting their previous statement that no one was in the building during the shooting (NWS employees are here 24/7). The FBI needs to also be involved in this, sending a message that if anyone tries to do this again, there might be consequences.

The parents of students considering attending UAH would expect no less.

CLARIFICATION: I didn’t mean to imply the motive for the shooting was necessarily financial, although the perps could have been paid to do what someone else was afraid to do on their own. It’s more likely they are religiously motivated, hoping to Save the Earth. Of course, the evidence that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for life on Earth is not part of their religion.

---

you'd think they wd be pretty careful/sure given

Three people were killed and three others wounded in a shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in Huntsville, Alabama, on February 12, 2010. During a routine meeting of the biology department attended by approximately 12 people, Amy Bishop, a biology professor at the university, stood up and began shooting those closest to her with a Ruger P95 handgun.

mma 919

Fox's Geraldo Rivera: Trump is being “unfairly mugged by the media” for repeatedly lying about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian

09/05/19 9:14 AM EDT

During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” show hosts climate denier

09/03/19 5:14 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/martha-maccallum/during-coverage-hurricane-dorian-fox-hard-news-show-hosts-climate-denier

no lnx

During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” show hosts climate denier

Roy Spencer uses his Fox News appearance to deny the documented link between climate change and hurricanes

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY JOHN WHITEHOUSE

PUBLISHED 09/03/19 5:14 PM EDT

During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” anchor Martha MacCallum hosted climate denier Roy Spencer who denied the proven link between hurricanes and climate change. Spencer also laughably asserted that climate change was occurring slowly; MacCallum did not provide any substantive pushback to his statements.

Video file

CitationFrom September 2 edition of Fox News' coverage of Hurricane Dorian

MARTHA MACCALLUM (ANCHOR): Special breaking coverage tonight of Hurricane Dorian. Dorian is an extremely powerful storm, and we are sure to hear people blame its strength on global climate change. So, should we? Is that correct?Roy Spencer is a meteorologist, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and author of the book Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can't Be Blamed on Global Warming. So we know where you're coming from on this, Roy. It's good to have you with us tonight. You know, a lot of people look at this and they say that global warming has heated the surface of the ocean and that over time, those trapped gases continue to make that hotter and that that warm water is what leads to the fact that we've had five [Category] 5s in just the last few years. What do you say to them?

ROY SPENCER (METEOROLOGIST): Well, there's all kinds of statistics, Martha, that you could look at. The ones I look at are the long-term, because that's climate. Climate is long-term. And since 1900, out of all of the major hurricanes that have hit Florida, there has been no long-term trend in either their intensity or in the number of major hurricanes -- that is Cat. 3 or stronger -- that have hit Florida. Even if Dorian were to hit Florida as a Category 4, which it looks like now is not going to happen, there still would be no long-term trend. Now yes, we do expect, theoretically, that warmer waters should lead to stronger hurricanes. And the waters out around the Bahamas, where Dorian really intensified, are unusually warm. But if you go back, again, through the last hundred or more years, and look at the sea surface temperatures in that area and the hurricanes that have hit Florida, it turns out that the seven hurricanes -- since 1871 -- the seven hurricanes that went over the most unusually warm water for that time of year, and then hit Florida -- all of them occurred before 1950.

MACCALLUM: That's very interesting. Another statistic out there, and you tell me what you think about it, is that since 1970, you've had a one-tenths of a percent celsius increase every decade. So it's this slow but steady climb, and according to those numbers, that show that over time, the oceans are warming up. What do you say about that?

SPENCER: That's right. The oceans are warming up.

MACCALLUM: What do you say about that?

SPENCER: The oceans are warming up. The atmosphere is warming up. I think, probably based on the theory, over 50% of that is due to humans. But the warming is very slow. And warm waters is only one part of hurricane formation, OK? In order to have a hurricane, most of the tropics -- most of the tropics all the time, during the summer, are capable of producing or supporting a major hurricane. What's usually missing is a preexisting disturbance. For instance, most of the hurricanes we get started out as African easterly waves that come off of Africa, south of the Sahara Desert. That's where most of them come from, the disturbances. So you need that. But you -- even more important, you need low wind shear. So you've got these different ingredients you have to have. It's kind of like tornadoes. You have to have a special mixture of certain ingredients. It's not just sea surface temperature. Otherwise we'd be having major hurricanes all over the tropics, and we don't. They are a relatively rare phenomenon. So, yeah sea surface temperatures are important but statistically, like I said, if you look at the data going back over 100 years, you really can't support increasing hurricane activity with the increasing sea surface temperatures that we actually are seeing.

Contrary to Spencer’s assertions, the link between hurricanes and climate change is a well-known fact. The Union of Concerned Scientists broke the science down into three parts: Warmer water gives more fuel to hurricanes; rising seas worsen storm surges; and warmer air holds more water for rainfall.

The link between hurricanes and climate change

CitationThe Union of Concerned Scientists

Inside Climate News also points to a study linking slow-moving hurricanes like Dorian and Harvey to climate change.

Beyond that, Spencer’s assertion that climate change-driven “warming is very slow” is preposterous. Scientists are warning that the planet is reaching a tipping point beyond which the Earth could be pushed into “into a spiral of runaway climate change.”

Lastly, it’s ridiculous for Fox News to book Spencer at all. Spencer is a longtime climate-denying gadfly who is the “official climatologist” of Rush Limbaugh, someone else who frequently lies about climate change. Spencer has previously argued that climate activists “are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did.”

In 2011, an editor of the journal Remote Sensing resigned after concluding that it should never have published a study by Spencer denying climate change due to “fundamental methodological errors or false claims.” The editor also harshly criticized Fox News for running with and exaggerating the study. Spencer had also released a study in 2003 that used faulty calculations to purportedly show that temperatures in the troposphere had remained constant over the previous two decades.

Fox News anchor Shep Smith has acknowledged that climate change is real. MacCallum’s decision to host Spencer on her “news”-side program goes to show how little the facts actually matter at Fox.

As Hurricane Dorian wreaks havoc, Fox casts doubt on climate change science

09/05/19 12:42 PM EDT

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 pruitt open ltr cornballs

==

cornwall sci creds bs?

The signers of the Open Letter recognize that some radical environmentalists and religious activists oppose Mr. Pruitt because he does not embrace their exaggerated fears of human-induced global warming—fears that go well beyond the empirical evidence crucial to genuine science—or their antipathy to the development of the abundant, reliable, affordable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.

Signers therefore urge President-Elect Trump to stand firmly behind his nominee, as they commit themselves to supporting him in the confirmation process that lies ahead. Signers include:

“Senate Democrats, at the beck and call of environmental activists, are determined to prevent Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation, painting him as a ‘science denier’ or a ‘climate-change denier’, said Cornwall Alliance Founder and National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. “He is neither. He’s a solid, common-sense attorney general who will bring much-needed reform to the EPA.”

==

==

en stile de Story of stuff:  http://climatism.wordpress.com/tag/dr-roy-spencer/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=owx4mfSRZq4

"  MUST-SEE debunking master-class of the global warming agenda, by Roy W. Spencer PhD, former NASA climatologist and climate expert…"

happy guy w/ co2 balloons, med warming lil ice age; ot long enough data of climate system, indreect effects; no warming in last 10 yrs, as sci saidthere wd be, thus co2 no big deal; like ancient sacrifice, we think we affect nature; pol goes for pol pwr and $; green block new dams, remove old ones; nuke dispoasl hobbles (concern of?); green energy 15% drain $ from tax; desroy wealth, restrict freedom, send mfg overseas; go back to medieval pre IR; s real answer if there is a problem, it's slow, so no worries; 

1/200th degree/ yr raise ...just get wiz technology...

Prince Charles is claimed last a “global warming Nazi” and, apparently, so is U.S. President Barack Obama.

That’s according to Dr. Roy Spencer [1], one of the world’s most often cited deniers of the risks of human-caused climate change.

In a blog post titled "Time to push back against the global warming Nazis [2]," Dr Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, wrote that he had made a decision about anyone who used the term “denier” to describe … well… deniers of the threats of human-caused climate change. 

He’s going to call them "Global warming Nazis."

Spencer wrote:

When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it.

They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.

Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back.

I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.

Spencer later added a note, which said:

A couple people in comments have questioned my use of “Nazi”, which might be considered over the top. Considering the fact that these people are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did — all in the name of what they consider to be a righteous cause — I think it is very appropriate. Again, I didn’t start the name-calling.

So who else, apart from Prince Charles [3] and U.S. President Barack Obama [4], will Roy Spencer be branding as “global warming Nazis” because they’ve used the term “denier”?

UK climate policy advisor Sir Nicholas Stern [5] – he’s a “global warming Nazi”. So is Al Gore [6]. And thatRichard Branson [7]? He’s one of them there “global warming Nazis” too.

Dr Spencer is not a fringe figure in the politicization of the science of climate change. 

He has been called at least four times by the Republican Party to give “evidence” to Congress. 

He is cited by prominent climate sceptic commentators around the world, including :{Australia’s :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Maurice Newman [8], the current Government’s top business advisor.

Dr Spencer was also incandescent in his post at the “pseudo-scientific ramblings” of the leaders of the “global warming Nazis”.

Step forward, every major national scientific academy on the planet, all those “global warming Nazis” at the World Bank, and the “global warming Nazis” in various defence forces around the world who increasingly see climate change as a major security issue.

While we’re talking about “pseudo scientific ramblings”, would this be a good time to point out that Dr Spencer believes that a Christian “god” is responsible for everything [8] on the planet and says there’s more evidence for creationism than there is for evolution?

When Dr Spencer is not touting the merits of creationism, he has written how [9] "my job is to minimise the role of government". 

Oddly, while Dr Spencer is convinced that all “deniers” should rally around his call for a rebranding of the likes of Barack Obama and Prince Charles, there are even deniers who prefer the term [10] that he personally finds so offensive.

Take, for example, denier Dr Richard Lindzen, who when asked by a BBC journalist about which descriptive term he preferred, said: “I actually like ‘denier.’ That’s closer than skeptic". (Six months before this interview, Lindzen had claimed the opposite [11], saying he was offended by the term.)  It seems important in this context to point out that Dr Lindzen is Jewish.

Or there’s also denier Steve Milloy [12], who told Popular Science that: “I'm happy to be a denier.”

Lawrence Solomon [13], a prominent Canadian columnist, has written a climate book with the title “The Deniers [14]” based on a series of columns he wrote, also called “The Deniers [15]”.

Tom Harris, the head of climate science misinformation PR outfit the International Climate Science Coalition, agreed with Spencer's Nazi reference,commenting [16]: “Yes, they certainly do behave like Nazis.”

Harris’ organisation claims to seek “a more rational, open discussion” on climate science, which is somehow achieved by calling people “global warming Nazis”.

Another prominent climate science denier to have used Nazi analogies is Lord Christopher Monckton [17].

In 2011, shortly before flying to Australia for a speaking tour, Monckton used a large image of a Nazi swastika [18] in a conference presentation next to a quote by an Australian government climate policy advisor, Professor Ross Garnaut.

As a result, speaking venues in Australia cancelled their Monckton appearances. Prime Minister at the time Julia Gillard described the remarks as “grossly inappropriate” [19] and the Opposition leader Tony Abbott, who is now Prime Minister, said it was “offensive and over the top”. 

Monckton issued a guarded apology, but then later claimed his remarks had been “very mild [20]”.

Spencer also used swastika imagery in his post with a picture of a group of larch trees planted in the shape of a swastika in an east German forest. The trees went undiscovered for many years because the effect was only visible for a short time during autumn when the larch leaves changed their colour but the surrounding pines didn't.

Once discovered, the trees were cut down. According to Spiegel Online [21], this was done over fears the site “could become some kind of pilgrimage location for neo-Nazis”.

Dr Spencer’s offensive comparison with Nazis risks turning his own views, and his own website, into a shrine for the most extremist of climate change deniers.

No offense.

Tags:

roy spencer [22]

climate change [23]

global warming nazi [24]

steve milloy [25]

richard lindzen [26]

Prince Charles [27]

Barack Obama [28]

Nicholas Stern [29]

Read more: Climate Change Denier Roy Spencer Says People Who Use Word 'Denier' Are 'Global Warming Nazis' [30]

Source URL: http://desmogblog.com/2014/02/20/climate-change-denier-roy-spencer-says-people-who-use-word-denier-are-global-warming-nazis

Lou Dobbs Breaks His Promise To "Debunk Climate Change"

Blog ››› August 4, 2011 5:56 PM EDT ››› JILL FITZSIMMONS & JOCELYN FONG

Promoting an interview with scientist and climate skepticRoy Spencer, Fox Business' Lou Dobbs claimed last week that Spencer's "new findings throw the entire global warming theory into question." Not to be misunderstood, Dobbs slowed down and repeated the claim: "I said new facts throw the entire global warming theory into question."

Dobbs teased the interview again at the end of his August 2 show, stating: "Debunking climate change -- new evidence from NASA. The whole thing. Well tune in, Al Gore, tomorrow."

But on August 3, Dobbs changed his tune. His interview with Spencer did not address whether global warming is happening or whether humans are contributing to it, but what the "effects" will be. In fact, at the end of the interview, Dobbs concluded: "[T]here's no question about climate change. What there is an issue about is the effect of it primarily, and really not much of a discussion about cause either."

That doesn't mean, however, that the claims made by Dobbs (and Spencer) during the show were actually supported by Spencer's study. Nor did Dobbs bother to mention that many climate scientists have criticized Spencer's methodology and disputed the study's conclusions.

Dobbs wasn't the only media figure quick to grossly exaggerate Spencer's findings. As we detailed, conservative media outlets ran sensational headlines this week, falsely claiming that Spencer's study refutes the notion that climate change is a problem. Today Rush Limbaughclaimed the paper showed that "the whole thing has been" a "hoax."

Even Spencer, who makes known his conservative political views, said media outlets "are overstating what the research found," according to the Associated Press. On his website, Spencer conceded that he "did not actually 'prove'" that "the models produce too much warming in the long term." However, Spencer himself overstated the findings during his television appearance.

Dobbs claimed Spencer's research shows "the future effects of warming could be far less than what most computer models to this point have predicted." And Spencer said that contrary to IPCC model projections of 3 degrees C of warming, "We're finding from the real satellite data of how the real climate system operates that it might be more like 1 degree C of warming, and maybe even less." But these statements are not supported by the study, which only looked at the past 10 years and cannot speak to long-term warming projections.

Asked about Spencer's performance on Fox Business, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel said:

I cannot see how Spencer's statements to Fox are supported by his data. I must say I am disconcerted to hear him spinning his own work.

Similarly,Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a frequent critic of the IPCC, wrote that Spencer and his co-author were "concluding too much from their analysis about feedback, sensitivity, and the performance of models," adding:

It needs to be understood that given the short period of their data set, Spencer and Braswell are looking only at fast feedback processes associated with clouds (not the longer feedbacks associated with oceans and ice sheets). How to translate all of this into a conclusion that climate models are producing incorrect sensitivity to greenhouse warming is not at all clear.

UPDATE:

Roy Spencer returned to Fox Business on the August 6 edition of The Tom Sullivan Show. And once again, the interview was not as advertised.Teasing the segment, host Tom Sullivan said he would reveal "important scientific data about global warming that will hopefully stop the argument about greenhouse gases." In a second tease, Sullivan stated, "Has a recent NASA study finally put an end to climate change hysteria? Global warming alarmists may have to accept a new inconvenient truth." Sullivan also aired the following graphic stating, "Global Warming a Hoax?"

Global Warming a Hoax?

In a third tease, the on-screen text stated, "No global warming?"

[images/segments deleted]

No Global Warming?

But during the interview, Spencer told Sullivan that his study "doesn't mean there is no such thing as manmade global warming. It might be just that it's been overblown." Spencer later added that it would not be accurate to say his study "refutes the arguments or the projections that have been made about global warming in our world," and acknowledged that the conclusions he drew from ten years of satellite data may not apply to long-term global warming.

 ----

Escalator:

I saw news of a ridiculous sort this morning when scanning the headlines. The whole mountain of science concluding that climate change was happening and was a great concern for humanity got a hole blown through it due to findings from a new study. Of course, this is far, far, far, far from the case. But, unfortunately, due to an all-too-commonly copied trail of disinformation, thousands upon thousands of people probably think so now. It is a disgrace that this sort of thing can happen in a supposedly “advanced” society. First off, the trail:

–> A widely discredited climate scientist who is trying to be a maverick and prove that he’s a genius and 97% of top climate scientists are wrong (and who seems to have some beef with his former bosses at NASA)publishes a deeply flawed study in an obscure online journal (using models that have been picked apart and thrown in the trash by respectable scientists previously).

–> A blogger from a conservative, global-warming-denial, fossil-fuel-funded think tank gets Forbes (owned by the now quite infamous Rupert Murdoch) to publish his interpretationof this study and its implications (as if Forbes hasn’t published enough climate nonsense over the years).

–> More mainstream news outlets (and hordes upon hordes of uninformed deniers) who think Forbes and the Heartland Institute are reputable sources publish stories on the matter as well, adding their own bit of extremism to catch people’s eyes (they know how much people love a good controversy, even if it’s based in nothing more than Jerry Springer style theatrics).

–> The population becomes that much more confused about the completely concerning threat of climate change… and the results will speak for themselves if more people who are informed don’t speak up.

Anyway, Brad Johnson & Dr. Joe Romm of Think Progress wrote good pieces on this story today which I’ll just go ahead and re-print in full below. Everything from here on is from them:

by Joe Romm:

Long wrong climate science disinformer Roy Spencer has published another deeply flawed article.  That ain’t news.  What is news is that the deniers have a couple of new tricks up their sleeves.

First, the disinformers have figured out they should focus on journals that don’t seem to have a very deep understanding of climate science.  In May, it was a paper in a statistics journal, which was ultimately withdrawn because of “evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process.”  This time it’s an article in the open-access Remote Sensing co-authored by Spencer.

It bears repeating that Spencer committed one of the most egregious blunders in the history of remote sensing — committing multiple errors in analyzing the satellite data and creating one of the enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did.

It also bears repeating that Spencer wrote this month, “I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.”

That doesn’t mean Spencer’s new paper on remote sensing is wrong, but it means his work on the subject does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, as most climate journals would know.  And it means we should pay attention to serious climate scientists when they explain how Spencer is, once again, pushing denier bunk.

As the famous critique goes, “Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good”:

  1. “He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
  2. “It is not newsworthy,” Daniel Murphy, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cloud researcher, wrote in an email to LiveScience.
  3. NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth (excerpted from below):  “I have read the paper. I can not believe it got published. Maybe it got through because it is not in a journal that deals with atmospheric science much?”

As for the second denier trick, well, they got Yahoo News to host a “news story” on the article — written by James Taylor.  Not the brilliant singer song-writer who wrote, “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.”  No, the uber-denier James Taylor whose Heartland Institute wants to bring to America’s heartland too much fire and too much rain — and heat waves that you thought would never end.  Sorry, couldn’t resist.

And so Yahoo enables this headline of denier bunk — “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism” — to spread through the web like so much kudzu.  LiveScience noted in its debunking post:

The paper was mostly unnoticed in the public sphere until the Forbes blogger declared it “extremely important.”

In fact, as Dessler emailed me, Spencer’s “paper is not really intended for other scientists, since they do not take him seriously anymore (he’s been wrong too many times).”  Here are his full comments:

To understand this paper, you have to understand the difference, between a “forcing” and a “feedback.” Forcings are imposed changes to, the climate, while feedbacks are processes that respond to changes in, the climate and amplify or ameliorate them. So the addition of carbon, dioxide to the atmosphere by humans is a forcing—it is simply an, imposition on the climate. Water vapor, on the other hand, is a, feedback because the amount of water vapor is set by the surface, temperature of the planet. As the planet warms, you get more water, vapor in the atmosphere, and since water vapor is itself a greenhouse, gas, this leads to additional warming.

The canonical way to think about clouds is that they are a feedback—as, the climate warms, clouds will change in response and either amplify, (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the, initial change.

What this new paper is arguing is that clouds are forcing the climate, rather than the more traditional way of thinking of them as a, feedback. This is not, in fact, a new argument. Spencer’s 2010 JGR, paper as well as the new Lindzen and Choi 2011 paper both make this, argument.

Overall, the argument made in all of these papers to support the, conjecture that clouds are forcing the climate (rather than a feedback) is extremely weak. What they do is show some data, then they, show a very simple model with some free parameters that they tweak, until they fit the data. They then conclude that their model is right., However, if the underlying model is wrong, then the agreement between, the model and data proves nothing.

I am working on a paper that will show that, if you look carefully at, the magnitudes of the individual terms of their model, the model is, obviously wrong. In fact, if Spencer were right, then clouds would be, a major cause of El Niño cycles—which we know is not correct. Talk to, any ENSO expert and tell them that clouds cause ENSO and they’ll laugh, at you.

Finally, the best way to put Roy’s paper into context it is to recognize how Roy views his job: “I would wager that my job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism. I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.” (he wrote that on his blog).

Thus, his paper is not really intended for other scientists, since they do not take him seriously anymore (he’s been wrong too many times). Rather, he’s writing his papers for Fox News, the editorial board of the Wall St. Journal, Congressional staffers, and the blogs. These are his audience and the people for whom this research is actually useful — in stopping policies to reduce GHG emissions — which is what Roy wants.

NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt said of the paper’s findings:

“If you want to do a story then write one pointing to the ridiculousness of people jumping onto every random press release as if well-established science gets dismissed on a dime,” Schmidt said. “Climate sensitivity is not constrained by the last two decades of imperfect satellite data, but rather the paleoclimate record.”

Spencer agreed that his work could not disprove the existence of manmade global warming. But he dismissed research on the ancient climate, calling it a “gray science.”

That would be funny if it weren’t tragic.  So the vast paleoclimate literature is “gray science.”  What disclaimer would one stick in front of Spencer’s “science” in the area of remote sensing?  How about “anti-”?  As RealClimate explained:

We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming, and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.

So after that history, we’re supposed to savor all Roy’s new cookery?

That’s an awful lot to swallow.

Amazingly (or not), the “serial errors in the data analysis” all pushed the (mis)analysis in the same, wrong direction. Coincidence? You decide. But it remains hilarious that the deniers and delayers still quote Spencer lovingly, but to this day dismiss real science no matter how much it has been vindicated and verified by subsequent independent research.

Finally, Kevin Trenberth  of the National Center for Atmospheric Research also commented on the paper in an email.  It’s a bit techie, but  I included for completeness’ sake.

I have read the paper. I can not believe it got published. Maybe it got through because it is not in a journal that deals with atmospheric science much? I have never read that journal.

The main basis for the paper is a figure : Figure 3 which is based on Fig. 2 data. The axis on Fig. 2 is incorrectly labeled. Fig 3 should never have been published because it has no error bars or uncertainty estimates. Significance of results is never addressed, and we do not know whether anything in the figure is significant, but Spencer treats it as if it were. Also we do not know how it was calculated and whether smoothed data (as in Fig. 2) were used or not. Significance also goes down a lot when one goes fishing by including all leads and lags unless there is an a priori reason for those values. One can usually guess the significance by looking at enough leads and lags and the fact that the magnitude of values at -12 months are similar to those at plus 3 months suggests neither are significant. For the models, values are based on 100 years, not 10 years. If instead 10 sets of 10-year model values had been selected then the odds are one would look like the “observed”. i.e. the models are likely more realistic of the true relationship.

In addition, I find the whole discussion to be out of touch with reality. The external radiative forcing of the climate system is mostly well known and comes from the changes in atmospheric composition (greenhouse gases) and the sun spot cycle etc. The part not so well known is the pollution (aerosol), but that is small. Nearly all of the variations in water vapor and clouds, except for those affected by aerosol, are a response to the weather and climate variations; they are NOT a forcing. This is a major error that continues in Spencer’s work.

The model is totally unrealistic and it does not have such things as El Nino or a hydrological cycle. It is known that the major variations in this period are associated with El Nino, as we have discussed in our rebuttal of Lindzen’s work:

Trenberth, K. E., J. T. Fasullo, C. O’Dell, and T. Wong, 2010: Relationships between tropical sea surface temperatures and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Geophys. Res. Ltt., 37, L03702, doi:10.1029/2009GL042314. [PDF]

The ocean heat content and its variations are very important, and moreover are not that well connected to sea surface temperature. Large leads and lags are known to occur. The parameters of Spencer’s model are selected by assuming the answer to get the best fit, and do not take any ocean dynamics into account at all. In short, the model does NOT provide a means of interpreting the data in any shape or form.

by Brad Johnson:

The climate denier blogosphere is going mad over a new paper that supposedly “should dramatically alter the global warming debate” by showing that “far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted.” The paper, written by conservative climate scientist Roy Spencer and his University of Alabama colleague William Braswell, finds that “satellite observations and climate models display markedly different behaviors” and posits, with caveats, that there may be “lower climate sensitivity of the real climate system.” As LiveScience’s Stephanie Pappas writes, the paper then was promoted by a Heartland Institute blogger on the Forbes.com website:...

http://www.greendump.net/tag/anti-environmentalism

Study About Clouds' Effect on Global Warming Debunked

Submitted by Anne Landman on August 5, 2011 - 3:49pm

A small study by prominent climate change skeptic Roy Spencer is being dismissed by mainstream climate scientists as containing technical and theoretical faults that make it incorrect. The study, published in late July in the online, open-access journal Remote Sensing, examined the effects that cloud cover has on climate change, and concluded that clouds are more of a cause of global warming than an effect of it. Spencer is known for his views that climate change is not human-caused. His recent study concludes that the question of the role clouds play in global warming "remains an unsolved problem." The study drew public attention after a writer who works for the Heartland Institute -- a libertarian think tank that questions the reality and import of climate change -- wrote in Forbes magazine that Spencer's study negates climate change "alarmists'" concerns about global warming. Mainstream climate scientists have said that Spencer used an incorrect model in the study, adjusted it to match his own observations, and that he advances arguments in the paper that are neither new nor correct.

Main Source: 

Associated Press, July 29, 2011

http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/07/skeptics_small_cloud_study_ren.html

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.

The climate denier blogosphere is going mad over a new paper that supposedly "should dramatically alter the global warming debate" by showing that "far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted." The paper [PDF], written by conservative climate scientist Roy Spencer and his University of Alabama colleague William Braswell, finds that "satellite observations and climate models display markedly different behaviors," and posits, with caveats, that there may be "lower climate sensitivity of the real climate system." As LiveScience's Stephanie Pappas writes, the paper then was promoted by a Heartland Institute blogger on the Forbes.com website:

The study, published July 26 in the open-access online journal Remote Sensing, got public attention when a writer for The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think-tank that promotes climate change skepticism, wrote for Forbes magazine that the study disproved the global warming worries of climate change "alarmists." However, mainstream climate scientists say that the argument advanced in the paper is neither new nor correct.

Pappas interviewed climatologists Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Trenberth, and Andrew Dessler, who eviscerated Spencer's shoddy science:

skeptic blog:

On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance

by Roy W. Spencer  and William D. Braswell

ESSC-UAH, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Cramer Hall, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA;

:{

E-Mail: danny.braswell@nsstc.uah.edu

}:

A University of Alabama Huntsville news release (via Dr. Pielke Snr.)

Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming

Tags: Dci Group, DCI group, evangelical climate initiative, George C Marshall Institute, george c marshall institute, Heartland Institute, Heartland Institute, interfaith stewardship alliance, John Christy, Ross Mckitrick, ross mckitrick, roy spencer, TCS daily

Roy Spencer

Research and Background

Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.According to a search of 22,000 academic journals, Spencer has published 25 research articles in peer-reviewed journals, mainly on the subject of satellite climate measurements.

Spencer and the "Interfaith Stewardship Alliance"

Spencer is listed as a "scientific advisor" for an organization called the "Interfaith Stewardship Alliance" (ISA). According to their website, the ISA is "a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development."

In July 2006, Spencer co-authored an ISA report refuting the work of another religious organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The ISA report was titledA Call to Truth, Prudence and Protection of the Poor: an Evangelical Response to Global Warming.Along with the report was a letter of endorsement signed by numerous representatives of various organizations, including 6 that have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.

The other authors of the ISA's report were Calvin Beisner, Paul Driessen and Ross McKitrick.

Satellite Research Refuted

According to an August 12, 2005 New York Times article, Spencer, along with another well-known "skeptic," John Christy, admitted they made a mistake in their satellite data research that they said demonstrated a cooling in the troposphere (the earth's lowest layer of atmosphere). It turned out that the exact opposite was occurring and the troposphere was getting warmer.

"These papers should lay to rest once and for all the claims by John Christy and other global warming skeptics that a disagreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends means that there are problems with surface temperature records or with climate models," said Alan Robock, a meteorologist at Rutgers University.

Spencer and the Heartland Institute

Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

The Heartland Institute has also received funding from Big Tobacco over the years and continues to make the claim that "anti-smoking advocates" are exaggerating the health threats of smoking.

Spencer and the George C. Marshall Institute

Spencer is listed as an "Expert" with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Spencer and ICECAP

Spencer is listed as an "expert" by the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP). 

ICECAP is a global warming skeptic organization that believes we should be preparing ourselves for the next ice age.

ICECAP was initially registered by a representative of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), Joseph D'Aleo.  SPPI is a prominent global warming denier group backed by the Frontiers of Freedom Institute (FoF). FoF has received over $1,272,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Spencer and Tech Central Station

Listed as an author for Tech Central Station daily (TCS), an organization that until recently was owned and operated by a Republican lobby firm called DCI Group.

Spencer, Blunder, Swindle and Confusion

Spencer also operates his own blog on global warming in which he describes himself as a "climatologist, author, [and] former NASA scientist."  On his blog, Spencer states that "the extra carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere is not enough to cause the observed warming in the last 100 years."   

Spencer also published a book in April, 2010, titled The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climatologistswhich is prominently advertised on his blog.  Apart from concluding that global warming is likely caused by a natural cycle, Blunder poses the question, that "maybe putting more CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing."

Spencer published Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poorin 2008. Confusion is described as "forsaking blindingly technical statistics" about global warming to describe the issue in "simple terms." In other words, the book tries to sidestep any valid research on climate change.

[[http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Confusion-Pandering-Politicians-Misguided/dp/1594033455  http://www.encounterbooks.com.php5-17.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/images/promotional/EncounterSpring2012.pdf

Roy Spencer also appeared on the notorious film The Great Global Warming Swindle to talk about the "Great Science Funding Conspiracy."  Spencer claims that "climate scientists need there to be a problem in order to get funding." 

Swindle received critical response from the scientific community, including a letter addressed to ABC signed by thirty-seven British Scientists that claimed "the misrepresentations of facts and views, both of which occur in your programme, are so serious that repeat broadcasts of the programme, without amendment, are not in the public interest. In view of the seriousness of climate change as an issue, it is crucial that public debate about it is balanced and well-informed."

ABC Australia’s Tony Jones also brings the film's scientific accuracy into question in an interview with the film’s director, Martin Durkin.

Spencer and Open Letters Denying Climate Change

2007 Open Letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

Spencer is listed as a signatory to a 2007 open letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that denied man-made climate change. 

The letter was featured in the National Post in an article titled "Don't fight, adapt" and states that "it is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity throughout the ages."

2006 Open Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Roy Spencer was one of the 60 "accredited experts" to sign a 2006 open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper denying man-made climate change while urging the government avoid implementing climate policy. 

The letter states that "climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

2004 Open Letter to John McCain

Spencer also signed a 2004 open letter to John McCain refuting the findings by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA). 

The letter concludes that any past warming that occured in the arctic cannot be attributed to greenhouse gas concentrations.  It was signed by prominent climate change skeptics including Richard Lindzen, Tim Ball, David Legates, Pat Michaels, Gary D. Sharp, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas.

C.19.1

Links to Corporate-funded Lobby Groups

(For information about the following organisations and the funding they receive, see Appendix D: Corporate-funded Organisations Linked to Contributors to the Programme).

1.Christy is a member of the Independent Institute’s Panel on Global Warming (see http://tinyurl.com/yp6hh2). He has also written reports for the Independent Institute, e.g. New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn’t Telling Us, July 28, 2003, http://tinyurl.com/34rp8y.
2.Spencer is a Science Roundtable Member (see http://tinyurl.com/yuf3ld) and contributing author (see http://tinyurl.com/3au28u) of the Tech Central Science Foundation.3.Spencer is a Scientific Advisor to the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (see ISA web page at http://tinyurl.com/yss5dy). In July 2006, Spencer and three other noted global warming critics co-authored a report published by the ISA, criticising another religious organization for its support for action to reduce CO2 emissions. For more details, see the ISA entry [below].4.Spencer is a regular contributor to TCS Daily, the web-based magazine of the Tech Central Science Foundation (see: http://tinyurl.com/3au28u).5.Spencer is a contributing author to the Heartland Institute (see http://tinyurl.com/2payzk).6.

Spencer is a Contributing Expert to the George C. Marshall Institute (see http://tinyurl.com/238m72).

spencer aqua

http://www.aqua.nasa.gov/ not listed

404 http://aqua.nasa.gov/about/team_spencer.php try 2012

Team Member Profile

photo of Roy Spencer

Roy Spencer

U.S. AMSR-E Science Team Leader

roy.spencer@nsstc.uah.edu

(256) 961-7960

Dr. Spencer received his B.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1978 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1980 and 1982. He then continued at the University of Wisconsin through 1984 in the Space Science and Engineering Center as a research scientist. He joined NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in 1984, where he later became Senior Scientist for Climate Studies. He resigned from NASA in 2001 and joined the Univeristy of Alabama in Huntsville as a Principal Research Scientist. Dr. Spencer has served as Pricipal Investigator on the Global Precipitation Studies with Nimbus-7 and DMSP SSM/I, and the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer High Altitude Studies of Precipitation Systems. He has been a member of several science teams: the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Space Station Accommodations Analysis Study Team, Science Steering Group for TRMM, TOVS Pathfinder Working Group, NASA Headquarters Earth Science and Applications Advisory Subcommittee, and two National Research Council study panels.

Since 1992 Dr. Spencer has been the U.S. Team Leader for the Multichannel Imaging Microwave Radiometer (MIMR) team and the follow-on AMSR-E team. In 1994 he became the AMSR-E Science Team leader.

He received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1991, the MSFC Center Director’s Commendation in 1989, and the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award in 1996.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140201234501/http://aqua.nasa.gov/about/team_spencer.php

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