LINDZEN 2
2.17 uber hack trumplandia
RED TEAM CWG
HACK? HACKADEMIC MIT EMERITUS
SWINDLE DOKU AND F/U
2009 EPA ENDANGER
MULT STINKTANKS
TRUMP CPAC THUS GOP
MERCER
SUNUNU
REF
E AND E POL
Meet the scientists Trump could tap to undermine climate regulations
:{By Scott Waldman, Zack Colman | 03/19/2025 :
Some downplay the threat of global warming. Others question the efficacy of climate policy. All could be of interest to the new administration.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made it his mission to destroy what he calls the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.
But President Donald Trump’s EPA chief can’t do it alone. To smash the holy grail, Zeldin needs help from a rare kind of scientist — the kind who believes climate change isn’t that bad or might even be good for humanity.
Those scientists aren’t easy to find. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the burning of fossil fuels is heating up Earth, and the planet’s rapid change is putting people at risk for a wide range of calamities — from more extreme storms to rising sea levels to more intense heat waves.
Those threats underpin what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — Zeldin’s holy grail. The 2009 declaration by EPA made clear that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the root cause of climate change, and that EPA has the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act because they can harm human health.
The endangerment finding has empowered EPA to establish landmark climate regulations, including limits on the emissions produced by cars or power plants. Rolling back these regulations — and the endangerment finding itself — would require an attack on the climate science that serves as their foundation.
Enter the climate naysayers.
The Trump administration is looking to recruit scientists who could cast doubt on climate science or climate policy, or who view global warming as either a small inconvenience or a boon to humankind.
Once selected, these scientists could add their perspective to a bedrock climate report that comes out every few years, known as the National Climate Assessment. Their contributions to the report, in turn, could be cited as evidence in future efforts to undermine the endangerment finding — all of which would make it easier to quash climate regulations.
The scientists even could help author a second endangerment finding. A Trump-era endangerment finding might, for example, selectively highlight areas of doubt in climate science or tout the perceived benefits of global warming.
To do that, a Trump-approved body of climate findings would center around future scenarios based on lower carbon scenarios than the world is currently experiencing.
It also could emphasize less severe climate trajectories than those envisioned in the original finding, said Roger Pielke Jr., a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
“Being able to tease out signals of human-caused climate change in extreme weather — which everybody cares about — are going to be much more challenging with a lower emissions trajectory than a higher one,” said Pielke Jr., who is not involved in any of the efforts and has questioned how scientists can link human-driven warming to specific extreme weather events.
There is a relatively small pool of researchers who could — or would be willing to — engage in such an effort because it would misrepresent decades of climate science by the world’s top science agencies.
“It’s a very small group of people. It’s the same people who have been there for the last 20 years,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s this endlessly recycled group of people who have been making the same arguments that are unable to convince anybody in the scientific community.”
The White House has not announced its plan yet nor the researchers who might be involved, and it did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said that as “part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.”
Here are some of the scientists who have spent years downplaying climate risks or criticizing climate regulations, and could be tapped by the Trump administration to help Zeldin destroy the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.
David Legates
David Legates (second from right) appears at a 2016 event in Washington. | Kris Connor/AFP via Getty Images MORANO
Legates likely would be a key leader. He has worked with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on a series of proposals to tear down NOAA and to recruit industry and think tank researchers that oppose climate rules to write a government science report.
The two men authored a key chapter outlining their plans in the Project 2025 conservative policy playbook.
Legates, who was the former state climatologist for Delaware until he was asked to step down, served as a top NOAA official in Trump’s first term. He was also detailed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but was later removed from that position after attempting to publish a series of research memos that distorted climate science.
For years, Legates has turned a partisan lens to research, claiming that climate change will benefit humanity while climate policy will hurt people. He is affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance, a group of conservative Christian scholars “dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship.”
Legates declined to comment for this story.
Steve Kooni
Koonin, a New York University physicist and former top scientist at BP, has long pushed to conduct a “red team, blue team” review of climate science, which would pit two groups of scientists against each other to debate a scientific report, such as the National Climate Assessment.
One group would defend the report while the other would highlight its alleged scientific weaknesses. Koonin worked on putting together the effort during the first Trump administration, but the project was eventually scuttled by the White House because some officials were concerned about Trump’s reelection chances.
Koonin said he would prefer to take on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to highlight areas of doubt.
“Anything that I can do to help make the science more transparent, you know, that’s been my goal, and remains my goal, for a long time,” he said.
Richard Lindzen
The retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist told POLITICO that he would “of course” help the Trump administration challenge the endangerment finding. Lindzen was dismayed that the red team, blue team exercise to publicly debate established climate science never took off during Trump’s first term.
A longtime critic of accepted climate science, Lindzen applauded Zeldin for calling “bullshit” on a “fake issue” of the severity of rising temperatures. But he acknowledged there may be little upside given how much the scientific community has supported the conclusion that human activity is driving climate change, even if he disagrees with it.
Lindzen argued the courts may offer the most direct route, where he said EPA should argue there “was never any evidence in the first place” to suggest greenhouse gases meet a legally defined standard of dangerous.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty obvious when Trump is running on the issue of ‘Drill, baby drill,’ that he is not going to pay any attention to what is claimed to be the science.”
Ryan Maue
Maue has not had any communication with the Trump administration about serving in any science advisory or agency role, he wrote in a text message. But the libertarian meteorologist would be a natural fit: He served at NOAA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in Trump’s first term.
Maue agrees that humans are warming the planet, but he has pushed back against stringent government policies to rein in greenhouse gases.
He has often used his large social media following on X to dispute the connections between climate change and specific extreme weather events. He has repeatedly cautioned that the world is not following the worst-case scenario climate trajectory, calling it “highly implausible” — a view that could align with Trump administration thinking to emphasize less dire forecasts.
Judith Curry
Curry said she would help the Trump administration reconsider the endangerment finding if she could work from home, but noted there’s been no outreach from Trump’s team.
The Georgia Tech professor emerita argued the original endangerment finding was “politically driven,” and that its reliance on worst-case climate scenarios compelled more drastic policy than necessary. Despite U.S. greenhouse gas reductions falling 17 percent below 2005 levels, the nation is still off-track of the U.S. share of reductions needed to stabilize global temperatures.
An additional 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100 — which is aligned with current trajectories — “isn’t a big deal because it’s what we’ve seen over the last 100 years, and we’re doing just fine,” said Curry, who is now president of consulting firm Climate Forecast Applications Network.
Scientists have said such increases have brought and would bring massive biodiversity loss, more intense extreme weather events, deadlier heat waves and economic harm through natural disaster damage, lost labor productivity, food insecurity and deteriorating health.
While Curry said there are “plenty of reasons not to like fossil fuels” and that clean energy investment is needed, she claimed “policy isn’t going to help here.” An endangerment finding that reflected less severe consequences for failing to deal with climate change “takes away the urgency for doing all of this” through government policy, she said.
John Christy
Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead IPCC author. He has questioned whether humans are driving the observed warming trends in recent decades — something the world’s top science agencies have long confirmed.
He opposed the endangerment finding in 2009 and has questioned the climate models on which it was based in congressional testimony. He is also a longtime proponent of applying a red team, blue team exercise to climate science.
Christy said he believed he could identify weaknesses in the first endangerment finding and that he could use research from the last 15 years to further his argument if the Trump administration pursued a second endangerment finding.
“I would like to see a very clear demonstration that climate models are not capable of telling us about the future of climate to the level of the CO2 forcing that is occurring in the atmosphere,” he said.
In fact, climate scientists have tested the models on which they rely and have found a notable amount of accuracy, particularly the latest versions, which are far more sophisticated than the models of the past.
Will Happer
Happer was part of Trump’s National Security Council in the first term, who mostly worked on classified military projects. He is a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, though not a climate scientist.
Happer is one of the few scientists who have given Trump a briefing on climate research, though his views are not supported by the world’s leading science agencies. Happer has long cast doubt on the role humans play in driving global warming and has been a vociferous opponent of climate policy.
In Trump’s first term, Happer worked on the effort to conduct an adversarial review of climate science with Koonin. After that effort was torpedoed by White House officials, Trump told Happer that he wanted to bring him back for a red team, blue team effort in his second term. Trump even discussed a potential nationally televised science “debate,” Happer told POLITICO.
“If I see an opportunity to help, I will,” Happer said. “I think it’s long overdue.”
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The Wilks Brothers and PragerU
Dan and Farris Wilks aretwo of the largest funders of PragerU (:{AKA:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: “Prager University”). Farris’ Thirteen Foundation gave $1 million to the foundation in 2015, while Wilks has given at least $120,000 through the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, according to publicly available 990 forms reviewed by DeSmog. [13]
PragerU, which is not an accredited academic institution, was created by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Pragerwho has “historically fought against what he describes as ‘liberal’ evils—marriage equality, feminism, and multiculturalism.” According to its 2014 annual report, PragerU was advancing with the specific goal of targeting middle school and high school children. [13]
The group’s “Environmental Science” course is dominated by climate change deniers such as Alex Epstein,**Bjorn Lomborg**,Patrick Moore, and Richard Lindzen.[14]
Dennis Prager has called campus rape a “gargantuan lie to get votes” and “nonsense” promoted by the “feminist left.”[15]
Stance on Climate Change
July 2013
“If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” Wilks said, according to sermons reviewed by *Reuters*. [11]
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/us-think-tank-shuts-down-prominent-center-challenged-climate-science
:{:{E&E News:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:
The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.
The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers’ concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.
“They informed me thatthey didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, ‘OK, bye,’” Michaels said in an interview yesterday. “There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn’t work out.”
A spokeswoman said Cato’s shuttering of the Center for the Study of Science does not represent a shift in the institute’s position on human-caused climate change. But the think tank moved decisively to close down the science wing that was overseen by Michaels. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former adjunct scholar, also left the center.
“While it is true that, with the departure of Pat Michaels, we have deactivated our Center for the Study of Science, we continue to work on science policy issues,” Khristine Brookes, the spokeswomen, wrote in an email. She didn’t mention climate change.
Michaels is among a small number of academics with legitimate climate science credentials who downplay the human contribution to rising temperatures. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and other conservative outlets, and he has spent years attacking efforts to address climate change. He was influential in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and he helped turn the GOP away from climate policy at a time when conservatives were embracing it (*Climatewire*, Dec. 5, 2018). That shift has endured.
Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank. It’s unclear when he left Cato, and Brookes declined to comment on personnel issues.
Maue, who worked with Michaels, said other think tanks cultivated closer relationships with the Trump White House.
“In terms of climate change and regulation, Cato was not a big player at all in the Trump administration,” he said.
Michaels was not asked to take part in the White House plan for an “adversarial” review of climate science related to the National Climate Assessment. Michaels has been critical of government climate reports for decades and has published research in major scientific journals. Both of those are seen as attributes by recruiters in charge of finding experts for the White House panel.
Michaels has spent years attacking climate modeling, which he claims ran hot, despite evidence from NASA that contradicted his claims and demonstrated that models were largely accurate. He has also portrayed academic researchers in climate-related fields as beholden to funding that incentivizes them to produce alarming research. The Cato Institute has received millions of dollars from the Koch network, the Mercer Family Foundation, Exxon Mobil Corp. and other foundations that oppose regulations.
Maue said theNiskanen Center,which was founded by Cato alumnus Jerry Taylor, has attracted conservative followers with its middle-of-the-road climate policy. That’s appealing to businesses that help fund think tanks and to those that might support policy positions on climate in the post-Trump era, he said.
“That’s attractive to business and politicians who don’t really want to see the climate flame wars continuing on,” Maue said in an interview. “I think many businesses have taken an approach to what’s going to happen and, assuming Trump isn’t around in 2021, what’s coming down the pike.”
Still, Maue said that one of Michaels’ lasting contributions in the climate policy debate was to create a position where one can accept that humans are affecting the climate but not as much as the vast majority of scientists claim. It’s now a de facto position for many Republican lawmakers who acknowledge that humans are contributing to climate change but don’t want to restrict fossil fuel use.
“Where Pat’s influence is is in the term ‘lukewarming,’” Maue said. “Lukewarming is not climate denial; it’s just that he’s taking, and most of us on this side of the issue believe in lower climate sensitivity. We don’t believe there’s going to be 5 degrees of warming; we figure it’s at the lower end of 1.5 degrees.”
The vast majority of climate scientists believe that the world could warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels within the next two decades and accelerate through the end of the century, with some estimates placing warming above 5°C.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. Copyright 2019. E&E provides essential news for energy and environment professionals at :{:{www.eenews.net:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:
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The thrust of Boutrous’ presentation wasn’t that climate science was wrong — he, too, took a turn running through graphs showing the precipitous rise in global temperatures and sea levels — but he also took care to show the rate of emissions in China and India, lingering particularly on a graph that said that China’s emissions currently exceed the United States. He said that this was largely due to the burning of coal, which is being reduced in the US. In fact, Boutrous even credited hydraulic fracking with reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the US.
Boutrous seemed to say that fossil fuel companies aren’t responsible for how people use their products. “IPCC doesn’t say that the extraction or production of fossil fuels leads to emissions,” Boutrous said. “It’s energy use, the economic activity, that drives the demand for fuel that leads to emissions.”
“WE’RE JUST MAKING THE CIGARETTES, PEOPLE ARE CHOOSING TO SMOKE.”
It’s an argument we’ve heard before from tobacco companies, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Tobacco companies for years said that ‘We’re just making the cigarettes; people are choosing to smoke,’” Frumhoff says.And for years, courts sided with the companies, he says — until public opinion began to change. “It was the consequence of their efforts to disinform that led juries and judges — who are members of the public — to say, ‘Wait a minute,’” Frumhoff says. The lawsuit itself says bluntly that the defendants “borrowed the Big Tobacco playbook in order to promote their products.” The complaint accuses the oil companies of “promoting massive use of fossil fuels by misleading the public about global warming by emphasizing the uncertainties of climate science.”
In response, Boutrous’ presentation on the history of climate science focused on the controversy around the theory that climate change was caused by humans. Chevron may be willing to say nowthat climate change was caused by humans, but surely it wasn’t wrong to say otherwise then. For example, both Boutrous and Allen mentioned Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius who, at the turn of the 20th century, grew increasingly concerned that anthropogenic carbon emissions could increase global temperatures.
But Boutrous took time to emphasize that, until about the 1960s, most scientists didn’t believe him. This isn’t strictly wrong — although Judge Alsup himself noted that in 1938, Guy Callendar linked climate change to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Even NASA’s Earth Observatory agrees that Arrhenius was largely disregarded until the second half of the century. “It’s trial and error. Scientists debating each other,” Boutrous said in court. “Questioning other scientists’ views is part of the scientific process.” (Boutrous did not call any scientific experts on behalf of the oil companies to speak before Judge Alsup Wednesday about how the scientific process is conducted or anything else.)
“WHAT’S ACTUALLY SAID IS NOT NEARLY AS IMPORTANT AS WHAT THE EVIDENCE IS TO SUPPORT IT.”
Boutrous drew quotes from IPCC reports across the years, showing the increasingly strong language that was used to characterize its conclusions about climate change. In 1995, the IPCC said that “the balance of evidence suggests” human-caused climate change, the 2007 report goes with the phrase “very likely,” and by 2013, it becomes “extremely likely.” In other words, the oil companies are emphasizing that it’s taken time for scientists to reach a consensus on climate change. It’s a strategy that climate law expert Jessica Wentz at Columbia Law School was expecting. “Not directly attacking the science, but undermining it by emphasizing uncertainty,” she says.
The legalistic reading of the IPCC’s statements was frustrating to Allen, he said in an interview with The Vergeafter the tutorial concluded, because to scientists, the evidence and context are more important than the language. “The question of whether somebody writing a scientific paper uses the word ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ is kind of neither here nor there,” Allen says. “What’s actually said is not nearly as important as what the evidence is to support it.”
Still, on the basic facts, the two sides agreed more than they disagreed — which kept arguments over whether or not climate change was real from derailing the hearing. This wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the deniers: academics William Happer, Richard S. Lindzen, and Steven E. Koonin requested leave to file their own scientific presentation, which questions anthropogenic climate change. Happer and Lindzen are climate deniers; Koonin claims climate science is “not settled.” Another group of deniers, led by a British viscount with a degree in classical architecture, asked to file an amicus brief in the case. Neither group has yet received permission to contribute to the case, but the judge has asked both to disclose their funding sources and any links to either of the parties in the case. Notably, Koonin disclosed that he had “some money vested in a BP pension plan arising from his employment that ended nine years ago.” (He was chief scientist at BP for five years, according to his NYU bio.)
milloy desmog
February 4, 2018
In January 2018, more than 200 scientists endorsed an open letter calling on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to remove climate change denier Rebekah Mercer from its board and to “end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation.” The New York Times reported that those among the AMNH letter calling for Mercer to step down wereMichael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. [60]
Milloy was among a group of climate change deniers who responded with their own open letter, calling for the AMNH “not to cave in to this pressure.” The letter was signed by numerous individuals with ties to groups funded by the Mercer Family Foundation such as Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition; Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. There are a number of signatories affiliated with the Heartland Institute, which has received over $5.78 million from the Mercer Family Foundation since 2008. [61]
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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/10/11/climate-science-deniers-respond-ipcc-report-anger-fear-and-distortion
mike s
big UN report arrived on Monday, saying in no uncertain terms that the world has up to two decades to massively cut emissions by transforming the global economy if we want to avoid terrible climate impacts.
Given the implications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) findings — government intervention, progressive social policies, more international aid — it’s perhaps not surprising that those who deny climate change is real or a problem pushed back. It took a few days, but the climate science deniers’ response to the IPCC report is now in full flow.
What we see is three distinct layers of climate science denial at play here:
There’s the ‘this isn’t happening’ sun-spot brigade. There’s the ‘this is happening but it’s all a Communist ruse’ zealots. And then there’s the team who reluctantly admit they’ve lost the debate but shoehorn in a number of caveats and excuses to justify why nothing should happen.
‘This isn’t happening’
Over at Steve Bannon's alt-right hate machine Breibart, James Delingpole calls the IPCC report: “wailing hysteria and worryingly eco-fascistic policy prescriptions”.
Quoting Benny Peiser of the oft-debunked Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), he claims that the climate breakdown “hasn’t been supported by real-world evidence”.
Delingpole draws on an old friend, author Rupert Darwall, to claim that “science” is really just a pretext, devised by “ideological Euro Greenies, to destroy the fossil fuel hegemony of countries like the U.S. and to impose on them a new, eurocentric, renewable energy global tyranny.”
Now in full flow, Delingpole mocks reporting (such as ours) that points to the egregious media coverage in the UK, which favoured Strictly Come Dancing over ecological crisis. He asks, could it be that within the media universe “a few vestiges of the old standards still prevail? That maybe some editors still recognise a complete non-story when they see one?”
The BBC's editors decided it was a story, but had a slightly odd approach to covering it.
As DeSmog UK pointed out, Newsnight chose to invite on US climate science denier Myron Ebell.
Ebell is the former head of President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team and a Director of the libertarian US think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
His appearance has been heavily slated. Environmental writer Mark Lynas described the interview as “utterly pointless and embarrassing. Car-crash television, and a waste of time that could have been used addressing the real questions.”
“If you want political analysis, ask a policy analyst. If you want propaganda, ask Myron Ebell,” said Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London.
Not to be denied their place in the sun, LBC radio got in on the action, giving a platform to GWPF-founder Lord Nigel Lawson to spout his stock in trade — that all this talk of climate action is just “PC claptrap”.
Not content with giving Nigel Lawson a platform, LBC doubled up by bringing Piers Corbyn on to deny not just climate breakdown — “I'll challenge the IPCC and the professor just speaking, there is no scientific paper in existence that shows that increases of carbon dioxide worldwide drive world temperature rises” — but that coral reefs were under threat.
The IPCC's report compiled evidence from more than 6,000 papers. It said 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs would be lost with 1.5C of warming, and almost all with 2C of warming.
‘It’s all a ruse’
Over at Conservative Woman — which regularly runs pieces by Conservative non-woman and GWPF researcher Harry Wilkinson — a headline runs “Top scientist shoots the climate-change alarmists down in flames”. In that article, Wilkinson quotes American climate science denier Richard Lindzen,who the GWPF contrived to give its annual lecture on the day the IPCC report was released.
In an extraordinary talk, Lindzen equates the climate consensus with “the suicide of industrial society”. His talk is a homage to oil and coal arguing: “the power these people desperately seek includes the power to roll back the status and welfare that the ordinary person has acquired and continues to acquire through the fossil fuel generated industrial revolution and return them to their presumably more appropriate status as serfs.”
Lindzen has form. Back in 2017 writing at Merion West, Lindzen argued that believing climate change is largely caused by increases in carbon dioxide is “pretty close to believing in magic.”
In 2015 The Daily Mail reported Lindzencompared people believing in global warming to religious fanatics: “As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical.”
The Spectator would seem to agree. Its beleaguered editor Fraser Nelson tweeted a sneering comment in support of Ross Clark’s article, in which he states:
“It isn’t hard to spot the problem with issuing frightening-sounding deadlines. If the deadlines come and go, without us managing to lower emissions and yet still life goes on, it makes the people setting the deadlines look rather foolish.”
“It is also somewhat counter-productive. Given the failure of the world to come to an end, it is tempting to say, just as we do when religious cults and other fantasists make doom-laden predictions which fail to come to pass: well, the whole thing must be a hoax. What is the point of listening any further?”
Clark has a long history of climate denial. Back in 2015 he wrote in the Express the sort of paean to fossil fuel capitalism that Richard Lindzen would have been proud of:
“Climate change is not the greatest risk to the world: the biggest danger we face is the economic decline which would result from the loss of the cheap energy which has improved lives beyond all recognition over the past two centuries.”
“You name it: better food, better transport, better medical care. Ultimately, all the fantastic improvements in our lives since 1800 have been down to one thing: our ability to harness energy from fossil fuels.”
In summary: Everything’s getting better forever and ever. Except the IPCC report tells us that's very much not the case, unless we take radical action.
Which is perhaps why, in a second Breitbart article, Delingpole took aim at the organisations charged with implementing this ‘green tyranny’ that would see a move away from fossil fuels — specifically the Committee on Climate Change's (CCC) Chief Executive, Chris Stark.
He’s a man full of “revolutionary fervour” for cutting the UK’s emissions and helping the world avoid terrible climate impacts, Delingpole (sort of) writes. “If this doesn’t chill you to the marrow, it should”, apparently.
He’s not the only one that’s scared the CCC might now become empowered. Nick Timothy, a former SPAD for Theresa May who is credited with getting the UK’s Department of Climate Change shut down, urges Telegraph readers to “take back control” from “unaccountable entities” such as the CCC.
And entities such as the Nobel committee, perhaps.
Bjorn Lomborg over at the Wall St Journal took the opportunity to distort the work of just-announced Nobel Prize winner, climate economist, William Nordhaus. Lomborg claims Nordhaus said that “proposed cost of CO2 cuts aren't worth it”.
But as Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans points out on Twitter, Nordhaus literally wrote in one of his many, many papers on the economic rationale for climate action:
“The future is uncertain so we should have more climate policy, not less.”
As Evans points out, the entire framing used by Lomborg is just wrong: [twits]
In one sense the new ideological discomfort of the shrinking climate denial network is understandable. As the IPCC reports outlines, mass systemic change is required - a systemic change that is incompatible with the economic system the climate science deniers revere.
‘It’s happening, but…’
The Daily Mail - a bastion of climate science denial under former editor Paul Dacre - started uncharacteristically promisingly with Peter Oborne’s excellent report from Bangladesh, which seems to be based on actual facts and actual reporting and firmly grounded in reality.
But then on Wednesday they had Stephen Glover veer from acknowledging the level of crisis, to arguing that it’s all just too expensive so nothing should be done. He writes:
“This week’s IPCC report judged that global warming must be kept to a maximum of 1.5C warmer than pre-industrial levels, rather than the 2C ceiling previously envisaged. How can scientists be so sure that the lower figure should become the new goal?
“I ask because it carries enormous extra costs. The IPCC estimates that new energy infrastructure — wind, solar and electricity storage — as well as technologies that can capture CO2 from the atmosphere, could cost a jaw dropping £1,800 billion.”
“This will be paid for by the likes of you and me.” He’s not the only one that acknowledges climate change is a problem but isn’t really willing to countenance the solutions.
Rod Liddle in The Sun takes aim first at vegetarians, then at windfarms.
Of the IPCC’s suggestion that we’re going to have to eat a lot less meat, he says: “Climate change is a fact. But when they conflate two issues for reasons of fashion, I begin to smell a rat”.
So Rod isn’t going veggie. But what of another IPCC finding, that the world is going to need a heck of a lot more windfarms? No. He doesn’t fancy that either:
“Wind turbines are a blight on our landscape”, he says, “causing misery wherever they are”.
That's all pretty normal messaging for newspapers known for objecting to climate policy. But what’s new about the latest spate of climate science denial is its politics.
Having overwhelmingly lost the scientific debate, these groups are now pivoting to a new position which is centred around two ideas: first that the new is too apocalyptic and second that it’s too expensive.
Given what is required is systemic change, they are swiftly changing positions to defend the indefensible — an economic system based on extraction and exploitation of natural resources and mass consumerism that the IPCC tells us must be in its end-phase.
But it’s not all bad…
Amongst the torrent of climate science denial from the usual suspects, there are also a few shoots of refreshing reality appearing. For instance, the normally obstinate Times runs an editorial that breaks with their own columnist Matt Ridley’s vehement do-nothingery and points to the IPCC report to make his stance look absurd:
“The IPCC report’s authors warn that cutting emissions fast enough to keep the planet sufficiently cool could mean a $2.5 trillion hit to global GDP. Others estimate that switching to electric cars will create new industries worth $7 trillion a year in the US alone. It is true that a revolution will be necessary, but it should be bloodless and it will be good for us. So bring it on.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06032017/climate-change-denial-scientists-richard-lindzen-mit-donald-trump
Lindzen, an outspoken climate contrarian and retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, sent a letter last month to President Donald Trump urging him to pull the United States out of the United Nations' climate change regime because global climate action is "not scientifically justified."
After MIT's climate researchers and faculty found out, they wrote their own open letter to the president, setting the record straight.
"As [Lindzen's] colleagues at MIT in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate, all of whom are actively involved in understanding climate, we write to make it clear that this is not a view shared by us, or by the overwhelming majority of other scientists who have devoted their professional lives to careful study of climate science," said the March 2 letter, signed by 22 current and retired MIT professors.
The MIT staff addressed specific inaccuracies in Lindzen's letter, including his assertion that "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant."
"The risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide are almost universally agreed by climate scientists to be real ones," they wrote. "These include, but are not limited to, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and increases in extreme flooding and droughts, all with serious consequences for mankind."
Lindzen responded to InsideClimate News with a one-page statement that echoed the contrarian points he made in his letter. He also criticized MIT's climate program. Lindzen has spent years downplaying the significance of man-made climate change through his published research, testimony in lawsuits and appearances before Congress. He has compared "global warming believers" to a "cult," and called the most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate science body, "a political document." He served as a meteorology professor from 1983 to 2013. He is nowa distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank.
"Since MIT's administration has made the climate issue a major focus for the Institute with the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC) playing a central role, it is not surprising that the department would object to any de-emphasis of this issue," Lindzen wrote. "For far too long, one body of men, establishment climate scientists, has been permitted to be judges and parties on what the 'risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide' really are," he said, referencing something James Madison wrote in 1787.
A petition accompanying Lindzen's letter was signed by 300 other people. Lindzen described the signatories as "eminent scientists and other qualified individuals" in his letter. A review of the names by the Guardian, however, revealed few biology, chemistry, climate, earth and physics scientists. Many are well-known climate contrarians and deniers. They include Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Steve Goreham of the Heartland Institute, an industry backed organization that denies climate science; and William Briggs, a statistician at Cornell University who questions climate models.
"In stark contrast to Lindzen's letter, ours was signed only by those who know something about the climate system," said Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric sciences who signed the letter opposing Lindzen.
The science advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientist also annotated the letterto point out its errors.
The MIT letter noted that professional societies including the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union have all released statements affirming the scientific consensus on man-made climate change and its grave risks. A recent analysis found that 140 of the world's national academies and top scientific geosciences, biological, chemical, physical, agricultural and other organizations have issued statements about human-caused warming.
"We owe it to future generations to remain engaged with the international community to seek the widest possible efforts to understand and mitigate [climate change] threats," the letter said.
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MedievalDeception 1991: Lindzen Hijacks Curve For Western Fuels Video - Early Fake News
“Medieval Warm Period was warmer”is not only irrelevant to future climate, but was known wrong within science by the early 1990s. In 2017, it is still repeated by climate deniers. They have long misused some version of an IPCC(1990) curve, whose abuse is the focus of this MedievalDeception series. The first known promoter now seems to be Richard S. Lindzen.
He was featured in The Greening of Planet Earth (produced 1991, published 1992),a
,* widely promoted by the coal group Western Fuels Association (WFA), which funded many climate disinformation efforts, such as those by Pat Michaels and Robert Balling, Jr. For more, see Western Fuels Association's Decades Of Dollars For Doubt And Denial.
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Beware climate science deniers bearing gifts or, in the case before us right now, bearing open letters claiming to have hundreds of signatures from “eminent” scientists.
Last week, long-time climate science contrarian and retired MIT professor Richard Lindzen dusted off his contacts book one more time.
Lindzen, who is with the conservative think tank the Cato Institute, sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pull the United States entirely from the United Nations international convention on climate change, known as the UNFCCC.
Trump has previously promised to pull the U.S. from the deal signed by almost 200 countries in Paris in late 2015 as part of that convention.
“In just a few weeks, more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world have signed the petition below,” wrote Lindzen.
Carbon dioxide, wrote the petitioners, “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth” — a statement at odds with every major science academy around the world.
Media outlets including Fox News, The Hill, and Daily Caller took Lindzen’s word that the list did indeed have “eminent scientists” and “qualified individuals” without bothering to check, or even ask if this qualified as news.
Because in reality, Lindzen’s list is a rehash of previous “open letters” and petitions going back almost a decade, carrying many of the same names and making the same worn-out arguments that CO2 is good for the planet.
What Kind of Who's Who?
So who is on the list? Who are these “qualified individuals” and “eminent scientists” who have suddenly scrambled to make their voices heard?
There are medical doctors, mystery men, coal executives, petroleum engineers, economists, and think tank members. Only a small handful could be considered even remotely “qualified” or “eminent” — but not in the field of climate science.
According to the list, there are people who are “interested in climate” and one resident of Sweden who is identified only as an “emailer who wished to sign the petition” which, judging by the quality of the rest of the list, is totally good enough.
Some signers have no affiliation or address whatsoever (please step forward, Roger Bee, Barry Beetham, Geoffrey Billard, David Boothby, Claude Brasseur, Simon Breeze, Ray Cullen, Joan Gorner, Kurt Granberg and at least a dozen other mystery people, whoever you are).
Dozens of people on Lindzen’s list seem to act like central casting for these PR stunts, lending their names to many “open letters” and petitions over the years.
Names like William Happer (reported to be in the running as Trump's science adviser), Tim Ball, Viv Forbes, and Heartland Institute–affiliate Madhav Khandekar will, it seems, sign anything that comes across their mailbox.
When they sense a political moment, climate science deniers are nothing if not opportunistic.
For example, shortly after the UK had voted to leave the European Union in 2016, one group of climate science deniers called for a “Clexit” — declaring “man does not and cannot control the climate.” (Man does.)
More than half of the signers of that Clexit declaration also appear on Lindzen’s latest warmed-up list of “eminent scientists.”
Back in 2009, Lindzen, Happer, and other “skeptics” were trying to pressure the American Physical Society (APS) to change its position statement on climate change.
At least 15 on Lindzen’s new list also signed a petition sent to the APS (there could have been more, as this archived list only goes up to the letter L).
Two years earlier the APS had updated its position statement on climate change. Lindzen and others were not happy, and wanted the APS to instead declare the recent changes to the Earth’s climate were “neither exceptional nor persistent” and that there was “an extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals.”
Later in 2009 in the run-up to the failed UN climate talks in Copenhagen, the deniers were again checking their contacts to come up with a petition to do nothing. Some 30 of those signers back in 2009, which included Lindzen himself, also appear on Lindzen’s list eight years later.
There are several Australians on Lindzen’s new list, including former coal miner and now One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, coal company director Viv Forbes, and blogger and gold trader David Evans, who is part of efforts to start up the “world’s first anti-global warming hedge fund.”
There’s a Colin Brooks who, it turns out, joined The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in 1955. There’s Reg Brownell, an anti-wind farm activist, and Alan Moran, an economist who used to be with the “free market” Institute of Public Affairs think tank until someone read his Twitter feed.
Dr. Wes Allen is a family doctor from northern New South Wales.
Lindzen’s list also includes several members of Principia Scientific International — a UK-based group that has claimed carbon dioxide is not even a greenhouse gas.
Climate science denier and British peer Lord Christopher Monckton once described a founder of that group, John Sullivan, as “confused and scientifically illiterate.”
This is terrifically ironic because Monckton is also on Lindzen’s latest list, except his name is spelled “Mockton.”
Given what we now know about Lindzen’s list, that typo is a thing of beauty.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/27/climate-denier-richard-lindzen-300-scientists-trump-usual-parade-non-experts
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/23/hundreds-scientists-urge-trump-withdraw-un-climate/
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batasch daily caller;
Hundreds of scientists and policy experts sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to withdraw from a major United Nations environmental treaty ratified during the Bush administration.
More than 300 eminent scientists signed the letter to Trump, delivered Thursday, arguing he should pull out of the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because it targets carbon dioxide — a gas essential for life.
CO2 “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth,” reads the petition, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Observations since the UNFCCC was written 25 years ago show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign — much less than initial model predictions.”
Trump promised to pull out of the Paris agreement on global warming, which went into effect in November 2016. President Barack Obama signed the U.S. up to cut greenhouse gases 26 to 28 percent.
The hundreds of scientists who signed the letter, however, argue that’s not far enough. Trump should pull out of the foundational treaty the Paris agreement is based on — the UNFCCC.
The UNFCCC’s focus on global warming is misguided because it targets CO2, which isn’t a pollutant, with the idea reducing it can stop global warming. Their plans aren’t supported by science, one petitioner argued in a letter.
“Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm—with no environmental benefits,” reads a separate letter written by Richard Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“While we support effective, affordable, reasonable and direct controls on conventional environmental pollutants, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” Lindzen wrote in his letter, supplementing the petition.
“To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison,” Lindzen wrote.
Increasingly, scientists are finding the world has actually greened in the past few decades largely due to increased CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 fertilization is even greening some of the world’s most arid regions.
It’s not clear when Trump plans on withdrawing from the Paris agreement, but some sources say executive orders on the matter could be coming in the next few weeks.
Obama never brought the Paris agreement before the Senate for ratification, so Trump can treat it as an executive agreement, rather than a treaty, and pull out without congressional consent.
Pulling out of the UNFCCC may be trickier. The Senate ratified the UNFCCC in 1992, and there’s not a ton of legal precedent on what the procedure would be for withdrawing from such a treaty.
The petition from Lindzen and others comes just two months after a group of 800 scientists called on Trump to stay party to the Paris agreement. Those scientists claim pulling out of Paris would “undermine our best chance to avoid dangerous climate change.”
“The United States will lose its seat of influence at the international negotiating table, and will cede to China, the EU, and other countries its authority as a political, technological, and moral leader,” scientist wrote to Trump in Decembe
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Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/23/hundreds-of-scientists-urge-trump-to-pull-out-of-a-25-year-old-un-environmental-treaty/#ixzz4ZdaDaPVq}:
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http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/320793-climate-skeptics-ask-trump-to-withdraw-from-un-agency
group of scientists and others skeptical of global warming are asking President Trump to withdraw the United States from the United Nations’ climate change agency.
The group of 300, led by high-profile climate change skeptic Richard Lindzen, said in a Thursday letter to Trump and Vice President Pence that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are not as harmful as most climate scientists say.
“Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm — with no environmental benefits,” the letter reads.
“While we support effective, affordable, reasonable and direct controls on conventional environmental pollutants, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” it says. “To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison.”
The U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international treaty that was established in 1992 and signed by more than 150 countries. The treaty requires countries to make certain annual disclosures about their greenhouse gas emissions, among other requirements.
It is under the treaty that leaders in 2015 wrote the Paris agreement, which includes non-binding emissions reductions.
Trump has vowed to “cancel” the Paris agreement. But shortly after the November election, Reuters reported that some advisers were exploring a pullout from the 1992 treaty altogether.
While the signers of the Thursday letter differ slightly on their exact problems with mainstream climate science, Lindzen has argued that the atmosphere is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide as most believe, due to other factors that counteract its greenhouse effect.
“It is especially important for members of your administrative team to hear from people like the signers of this letter, with the training needed to evaluate climate facts, and to offer sound advice,” the signers wrote. “Climate discussions have long been political debates — not scientific discussions — over whether citizens or bureaucrats should control energy, natural resources and other assets.”