DENIER 2

newer content post 7/16 see main and tag

includes psychology (see also GOP)

see main for older, also tag

30 TAGS 10/20

neglected? usually this is just a node to point to person

bak 8 24

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bad code

an 8 24

a Democrat-backed 2022 climate law is "drawing growing GOP support," causing friction among Republican lawmakers, according to a Sunday, August 25 Politico report.

While the Inflation Reduction Act "is undeniably bringing federal money, private investments and jobs into communities around the country overwhelmingly represented by Republicans," Politico notes thatno GOP lawmakers voted for the bill in 2022, "and conservatives consistently charge that its hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for electric vehicles, wind, solar and other technologies will drive up prices, distort the markets and benefit China."

Per the report, earlier this month, 18 House Republicans signed onto a letter asking Speaker Mike Johnson to spare the energy tax credits from efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, with many of them seeing the incentives as both good for the planet and extremely beneficial for local economic development."

However, some far-right Republicans, like Rep. Chip Roy (TX), are calling some colleagues who signed the letter hypocritical.

Noting that the "18 Republicans voted last year to repeal the IRA climate subsidies," Roy claimed via X, "Now, [they] want to preserve so-called ‘green’ handouts to Democrats’ corporate cronies."

Politico reports that Nick Loris, vice president of public policy at the Republican-aligned firm C3 Solutions, predicts GOP members will "treat the tax credits as something of a buffet, with Republicans picking and choosing what they like and what they don’t."

He emphasized, "There’s going to be some division for sure, but it’s not going to be black and white, either."

READ MORE:[Conservative admits Trump’s policies 'would result in price spikes' for most Americans

The possible party showdown, Politico adds, is "all part of an intensifying debate within the Republican Party about how to respond to climate change, a rising priority for many young voters. And while more GOP lawmakers say they want to be active on the issue, many conservatives — including Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — still don’t buy the reality of human-caused global warming and the impact of fossil fuels."

*Politico's full report is available here.

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821 IPCC 6th]

last week, President Biden signed an Executive Order encouraging U.S. leadership in the clean car sector with a goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. being zero-emission by 2030. It took them a few days, but deniers seem to have assembled their response by cobbling together a mix of old lies, new misrepresentations, and bizarre logical fallacies.

For example, a response that in any sane outlet might be praise for Biden’s plan was published in the Koch-funded RealClearEnergy as an attack: President Biden’s Electric Car Future is Union Made. Bruce Yandle, a fellow at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is upset that Biden invited three major U.S. car companies to attend the announcement because they were the largest employers of workers in the United Auto Workers union, and didn’t invite non-American companies with non-union workers to his event promoting good American jobs.}:

By Climate Denier Roundup

Obviously, it’s no surprise that a Koch crony is anti-union and anti-EV, unless you confuse organized labor with organized denial.

Speaking of organized denial, while the once-Koch-funded Daily Caller has since basically given up on regular climate denial reporting, and its IPCC story was a straightforward rip-off of the AP’s “code red” coverage (sans any Koch-network denial quote, because no-pay, no-play, we assume). The Caller still occasionally publishes guest opinion pieces and ran one from Charlotte Whelan of the (pro-Covid) Independent Women’s Forum andSteamboat Institute (which is hosting Marc Morano and a slate of other rightwing pseudostars at an upcoming festival).

Whelan is also upset the White House invited union workers to its pro-union-jobs event, and adds (with a deliberately misleading citation) the claim that “it could take more than 15 years to recoup the upfront extra costs in fuel savings. The average American certainly can’t wait that long to ‘make back’ the additional upfront cost” But the work cited (an NRDC post based on a peer-reviewed study) doesn’t even measure how long it would take to recoup the upfront cost of an EV with cheaper charging and a more efficient propulsion system. The study did, however, use 15 years as the unit of measurement for a car’s life. So the calculations show that over an average 15-year lifespan of ownership, it can be almost $15,000 cheaper to go with an electric car.

Over at theKoch-funded Heritage foundation’s media arm, their policy analyst Katie Tubb makes a similar claim about EVs being for rich people, which we’ve addressed before as part of their propaganda campaigns, as well as the old racist dog whistle about China.

Finally, we get to a new name to us, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who wrote that Biden’s move was “costly and counterproductive” in the industry-funded Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

After a column defending the auto industry from 5G in January, and another in March with the phrase “nothing beats personal vehicles for social distancing.” Furchtgott-Roth makes similar points to the other professional disinformers in her most recent City Journal piece, but she also a:{dds a particularly baffling claim:(style="background-color:#ffff33;"):}: that because “the United States has achieved energy security by becoming a net exporter of oil and natural gas,” then “mandating sales of electric vehicles would weaken that security.”

But if exporting oil makes us stronger (by her logic) then wouldn’t having more of it to export because our own cars are using less of it be a good thing, that would make us stronger?

Why would someone write something so inane and illogical, despite a byline that includes “former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation” and “adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University?” Those are both legitimate organizations, not industry-funded disinformation operations!

Well it turns out that the DOT appointment was made by notoriously-bad-hiring-manager Donald Trump, and prior to that, Furchtgott-Roth was an economist for the American Petroleum Institute, proving once again that when someone says something stupid about EVs, it’s probably on purpose.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

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disaster cap'lism:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/07/climate-supervillain-creating-new-tv-channel-to-report-on-weather-he-helped-fuck-up/

we’ve reached the final boss level of climate irony. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose News Corp. owns Fox News, plans to launch a full-time channel focused on the weather called Fox Weather.

Apparently, viewers are hungry for weather content — the Weather Channel’s viewership was up 7% in the first half of this year, while viewership fell for big cable networks. And looking at the historic heat waves gripping much of the country this summer — caused partially by stalled climate action aided by Fox News working in tandem with oil companies and the Republican Party to spread climate misinformation — it’s not hard to see why.

The irony of Fox creating a weather channel, of all things, is as deep as the rapidly heating ocean and as wide as our swiftly overheating country. As much of the rest of the world ponders how to dig ourselves out of this mess we’ve made, Fox News is still clinging desperately to denial.

Last month, star Tucker Carlson used his show to allege that climate activists want to “experiment to make children smaller” to fix global warming (spoiler alert: that is, uh, not true), while in May, climate denier Steve Koonin was invited to not one, but two Fox News programs to promote his book claiming that other scientists are getting too worked up about this global warming thing....Even the supposedly nonpartisan evening news show hosted by Brett Baier has a distinct denier slant: A Media Matters analysis of Baier’s climate coverage from 2009 to 2021 found that a whopping 88% of it ran the gamut from misleading to promoting bad-faith narratives to flat-out lies.

“It’s not just the bigger climate denial,” said Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters. Fox News, Fisher said, “specifically use[s] weather to push climate denial. That is a long-worn tactic of Fox News, even before Trump was tweeting out, like, ‘where’s your global warming now?’ during a snowstorm. That’s a very classic Fox move.”

Fisher pointed out that as recently as this year, Fox News contributors used an April cold snap to claim climate change was a hoax. “They’re emphatic about dismissing the relationship between climate change and weather, whether it’s during a megastorm or the wildfires last year or the record-shattering heat this week, and then also mocking the idea of global warming during moments of abnormally cold weather,” she said. “They’re the ones who have made weather political.”...News Corp owns the denier-friendly Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as several right-wing outlets in Murdoch’s home country of Australia. While Murdoch...;released last year found that News Corp’s coverage of the devastating 2020 Australian wildfires drove a “viral misinformation campaign” intended to spread misinformation on the causes of the fire and protect the coal industry in Australia. The company’s explicit and implicit endorsement of climate denial has even led to a fracture in the Murdoch family: during the wildfires, Murdoch’s younger son, James,...issued a rebuke of the company on its handling of climate, and he...According to Fisher, Fox News has meteorologists on staff who report on the weather, but they mostly do “straight reporting” of what is going on. “They’re not contextualising” that weather, she said — despite the fact that other networks are ...tting their meteorologists discuss how extreme weather is shaped by climate change. “That contextualisation of these events as climate is what makes Fox’s entry into this space really suspect and troubling.”

All of this raises the question of how, exactly, Fox is planning to go about reporting the weather when it keeps getting more extreme thanks, in part, to a mess they helped create. As Deadline reported a few weeks ago, Fox has tapped at least six meteorologists from different local markets — Britta Merwin, Jason Frazer, Craig Herrera, Bridgit Mahoney, Stephen Morgan, and Nick Kosir — to flesh out the basis of its news team. Earther was able to find just a few tweets from three of them that mentioned climate change.

“Climate change is real and it is a fact,” Merwin, a future Fox morning host and formerly of KPRC-TV in Houston, responded in February to a Twitter user using Merwin’s report of snow on the beach to claim climate change was a hoax. “It is about science,” she wrote. Her future morning cohost, Frazer of WKYC-TV in Cleveland, thanked a meteorologist in 2017 for “sharing … expertise on climate change” and mentioned climate change in 2018 when discussing the size of a tropical storm. (“You could argue Climate Change but I am not touching that hot potato,” he wrote.) Meanwhile, Herrera, who covered weather for Seattle’s KING-TV and will serve as another coanchor, tweeted about climate in 2013 and 2014, when he covered an IPCC report and did a piece on California’s drought. “We have a long way to go but education and facts are key,” he responded to one user thanking him for his coverage. “Can’t dispute the science or numbers.”

Gizmodo reached out Frazer, Merwin, and Herrera, along with another of their future coworkers, to ask how they planned to handle climate coverage. We will update when we receive any responses.

According to the Times, Fox is dipping a toe into this space because it’s so profitable; it quotes a TV executive saying that “climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade,” while a spokesperson for Fox told the Times the network will offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this [spring].”

Some of Fox’s future competitors making hay out of the climate crisis could goad the network into figuring out ways to cover it: The Weather Channel, the Times reported, has a whole host of climate change programming planned, including a show about miners looking for minerals in Greenland exposed by newly melted ice (sorry, what?).

But Fisher sees a darker possibility for the new weather service.

“It’s the content they’re producing that’s going to get amplified,” she said. “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano, if he starts to get a platform there — that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, it’s not.”

[pix] Asked and Answered

The questions that Q advanced on climate change have been asked and answered — as essentially all of the burning questions on climate science still churning around in climate denial circles have been.

And today, as the impacts of a warming climate are accelerating, it is very clear that we collectively have little time to spare waiting until those who haven’t been keeping up with, or who refuse to acknowledge, the scientific consensus are convinced. The longer the world waits to slash greenhouse gas pollution, the less chance we collectively have to calm the worst impacts of a warming world, according to the world's top climate experts, and if we don't, climate change could make all of the calamities we’ve faced in 2020 soon pale in comparison.

Q, however, raised different concerns about climate action.

“Who audits where the money goes?” the December Q-Drop asked, linking to an article about the Green Climate Fund, which provides funding to help developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to help them meet their Paris Agreement goals.

Nevermind that if you want the audits of the Green Climate Fund alluded to in the Q-Drop, the answer is extraordinarily unmysterious and unglamorous: the audited financial statements are posted online and they’re done by accountants. Nevermind also that the Paris Agreement itself was never fundamentally about the movement of money, but instead involves countries promising to regulate pollution inside their borders — something we’re still continuing to fail to do, both in the United States and worldwide.

And nevermind that the U.S., whose politicians the Q-Drop implies are pocketing money somehow along the way, has nearly walked away from both the Paris Agreement and the Green Climate Fund. That's despite the glaring fact that the U.S. has been the world’s worst climate polluter since 1750, meaning that this country has played the single largest role in causing the very problem that the global climate pact attempts to (somewhat) address.

To turn Q’s question around, one very basic question Q has never answered is who exactly they are — and to what extent, if any, they’ve sought to monetize the power and influence they’ve been busy amassing. “At this point, who's behind it is speculation more than anything,” Ryan told DeSmog.

Another key part of the problem — as ever — is that climate science deniers publicly talk a lot more than others. Whereas in years past, mainstream media was faulted for giving climate science deniers a misleading amount of airtime, today, they’re using social media to achieve the same ends. Graphika’s research found that for every social media post by the vocal climate scientists and environmentalists they studied, the vocal climate science deniers they studied posted four times.

“On average, they observed that the Climate Denial group was about four times ‘louder’ (number of tweets relative to the group size) than the Climate Science group,” Khoo and Ryan, both advisors to a coalition of environmental groups that commissioned Graphika’s research, wrote.

Clutching at Q’s Coattails

Not only is QAnon taking up climate denial, but prominent climate deniers have been taking up QAnon.

“The other thing we see is that the right needs QAnon more and more to amplify their messaging,” said Ryan.

Take, for example,Naomi Seibt, a young German YouTuberwho has questioned climate science and who has worked with the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank and notorious promoter of climate science denial.

“So do you want a beautiful planet that you can stare at but that’s it? It’s just like looking at a TV screen,” the Express, a UK newspaper, quoted Seibt as saying in May. “As a climate realist, I don’t deny that we don’t have some negative impact on the planet. But I don’t think that it’s related to CO2 emissions.”

Seibt briefly rose to broader prominence following a Washington Post article about her in February — though she remains far less well-known than Greta Thunberg, the young environmental activist who the Heartland Institute has sought to compare with Seibt. “She reportedlychose not to renew her contractwith [the] Heartland [Institute] in April 2020 after facing potential fines from a regional broadcasting authority,” DeSmog’s profile on Seibt notes.

In addition to speaking about climate, Seibt has publicly spoken about her views on race and religion. “Seibt’s rise as the young face of climate skeptics has drawn scrutiny of her past remarks. On Friday, video circulated of Seibt’s remarks after a shooting at a German synagogue,” Bloomberg reported on February 28. “'The normal German consumer is at the bottom, so to speak. Then the Muslims come somewhere in between. And the Jew is at the top. That is the suppression characteristic,' she said in comments first reported by The Guardian.”

In July, the trial of that synagogue shooter, charged with murdering two people and the attempted murder of dozens more, began with the accused shooter stating that he felt he was “on the bottom rung of society” and that he was “superseded,” as he sought to justify horrific crimes.

As in Germany, white supremacists in the U.S. have increasingly engaged in racially motivated “mass shooter” armed attacks on unarmed people. And QAnon followers have also begun committing violent acts. “I think it's also important to remember that the FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorism threat,” said Ryan, “and QAnon has inspired kidnappings, it has inspired at least one murder, it has inspired arson, there is a real danger from these folks who are drawn to this and become just embroiled in it.”

Naomi Seibt speaking at a Heartland Institute event. pix]

The teenage Seibt has previously denied allegations of anti-Semitism and her mother, an attorney whose clients have reportedly included politicians from the far-right German AfD party, previously told The Guardian that Naomi is not a supporter of the far-right. “'In fact, I was commenting that I think it’s wrong to comment on different races and to view them differently,' Seibt said,” in response to questions about her views on race, The Guardian reported. “'We should just all be regarded as the same.'”

More recently, in addition to talking about climate change and other topics, Seibt has begun posting about QAnon. “As of right now, I don’t consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement,” Seibt said in a YouTube video posted earlier this month and whose title refers to two QAnon themes, “but I am on the side, watching and evaluating for myself what I think is verifiable and what to me seems too far out there.”

“I do not consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement, nor will I ever attach a label to my activism,” Seibt said in response to a question from DeSmog about whether her position had since changed, adding that she also does not identify as a white nationalist, part of the far-right, or an anti-Semite. “But as long as the QAnon movement continues its peaceful protest against matters of injustice, I consider it a positive contribution to the global political discourse.”

“I do not view any ethnicity or religion as superior,” she said, adding that she identifies as a libertarian. “I promote a reduction of centralised state power so that individuals may act freely. The premise for that freedom, of course, is that the individual does no harm to his or her fellow citizens.”

Social Media Fail

Khoo and Ryan pointed to the ways that social media companies for years failed to conduct the most basic scrutiny of information that they publish online and allowed all sorts of demonstrably false information to be repeated in an endless rumor mill online.

“Facebook has policies that let Trump lie uninterrupted,” they wrote. “And when climate deniers get a simple fact-check on Facebook, members of Congress themselves have sent letters to company executives to complain.”

All of this can, of course, have significant policy consequences in the real world.

“The danger for environmental advocates and for the planet is that QAnon could be the energy that stops a big push for any meaningful climate action,” Khoo told DeSmog. “If a Green New Deal is the next thing, we could see QAnon followers serving as the foot soldiers in that war.”

There’s also the risk that fossil fuel companies and trade organizations might jump on the QAnon bandwagon, inspired by the conspiracy theory's popularity. Last week, President Trump praised the movement, claiming not to know much about it except that “they like me very much.”

“If QAnon becomes more mainstream,” Ryan said, “I could see a scenario where industry groups that are invested in climate denial and fossil fuels and such will be incentivized to embrace QAnon or rely on those tactics and networks.”

The other risk is that conspiracy theorizing, when mixed with social media, can not only bring in adherents, it can also raise money.

“The new addition to this history of climate capitalism is the capitalism behind the clicks, the monetizing of disinformation that happens on all the platforms,” Khoo and Ryan wrote. “Virality is central to the profit model, as are ads. Whether or not they’re true is secondary, from a business perspective.”

And the reality is that QAnon has been growing, with NBC News reporting earlier this month that Facebook discovered QAnon accounts and pages have attracted over 3 million member and follower accounts.

Last week, Facebook removed nearly 800 QAnon groups and took some steps to restrict QAnon hashtags and other social media. That follows moves by Twitter to take down roughly 7,000 Twitter accounts and designating QAnon as “coordinated harmful activity.”

Some see that as far too little, far too late. “They’ve had three years of almost unfettered access outside of certain platforms to develop and expand,” Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project, told MIT Technology Review in July.

As of press time, Facebook and Heartland have not responded to questions from DeSmog.

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copy of desmog list

https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/07/04/climate-deniers/

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042020/science-denial-coronavirus-covid-climate-change

American science denialism, deployed for years against climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus, can be traced back to the early 1950s during the fight over smog in Los Angeles.

When a Cal-Tech biochemist fingered nitrogen oxide emissions and uncombusted hydrocarbons from automobiles and refineries as the cause of the thick smog that often blanketed the city, the American Petroleum Institute counter-attacked by highlighting the alleged uncertainty of his science. The tactic was a test run for the fossil fuel industry's assault 40 years later on climate science.

Decades of climate denial now appear to have paved the way for denial of Covid-19 by many on the right, according to experts on climate politics. After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists and accentuating the supposed uncertainty of climate science, it isn't hard to understand how that happened.

President Trump, who denies climate change, has brushed off Covid-19's seriousness until recently by relying on many of the same arguments he uses to dismiss global warming, such as ignoring government scientists or blaming China.

Climate deniers have long attacked climate scientists, and Covid-19 deniers recently launched a smear campaign against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in part because he corrected the President's inaccurate statements about the pandemic.

The radio host and staunch Trump supporter Bill Mitchell offered a glimpse of how some conservatives see the pandemic as part of a continuum of dubious science when he tweeted that the novel coronavirus is "a minor infection" and the worries about it were "climate change 2.0."

"It's this sense of deja vu. This is what climate denialism looked like," said Jerry Taylor, president of the bipartisan, pro-climate action think tank Niskanen Center and himself a former skeptic of climate science. "The peril here is the reality of what's about to follow. You can't gaslight it. You're not going to be able to deny the reality of the deaths. That will be the wages of dismissing what the technocratic and scientific elites have been telling us for months."

An Echo Chamber of Denial

After he was hired by the City of Los Angeles, Arie Haagen-Smit, a Cal-Tech scientist specializing in airborne microscopic chemicals, quickly figured out that the city's smog came from burning oil. Industry executives immediately hired their own scientists to attack his work. When those scientists came back and said Haagen-Smit was right, the industry hired new ones to sow doubt and home in on small uncertainties that remained.

By 1956, when Haagen-Smit's conclusion had been confirmed by others, oil industry executives pivoted and employed a new tactic: they blamed the auto industry for tailpipe emissions.

Throughout the fight, the oil industry's use of science denial provided a preview of what was to come in the 1980s, as the fight to deny climate change began. "Through it all," Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Law, told InsideClimate News in a 2016 interview, "you see the creation of an echo chamber of doubt that takes the small unknowns and uncertainties and magnifies it until all we have is unknowns, when in fact the actual science isn't that way at all."

Exxon was told unambiguously in 1977 by James Black, its own senior scientist, that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet and endanger humanity. His warning was echoed publicly 11 years later, when NASA's James Hansen sounded the alarm about climate change in landmark congressional testimony.

Exxon and the API responded by dusting off the uncertainty playbook and pivoting to a new narrative throughout the 1990s that focused on all that remained unknown about climate change. Exxon helped set up the pro-industryGlobal Climate Coalition and the Global Climate Science Team to sow doubtand assert that it wasn't even clear that climate change was occurring.

The coalition disbanded, its work completed, after the administration of George W. Bush, scion of a Texas oil family, rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The industry also recommended its own contrarian scientists to review the administration's submissions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The oil industry's ties to the administration were revealed in 2005 when a whistleblower disclosed that Philip Cooney, a former API lobbyist working in the White House, had been rewriting government research papers to create doubt about climate change. He left the administration and went to work for ExxonMobil.

Between 2003 and 2010, 91 climate denialist groups received more than half a billion dollars. They recreated the echo chamber from the long-ago war on smog, increasing its size and upping the volume enough to shape the narrative on climate change for Congress, the media and the American public.

Under pressure from shareholders, Exxon promised to stop funding climate deniers in 2007. But by then, climate change denialism had become a force so extreme in its attacks on mainstream science that even giant oil companies had become suspect. In 2012, the Heartland Institute, one of the country's leading climate denialist organizations, launched a billboard comparing those who believed in climate change to the Unabomber, Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden. The backlash was severe.

But by 2017, Heartland's chief executive, Joseph Bast, was a guest at the White House when Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. "We are winning in the global warming war," Bast said in an email to supporters.

A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that fewer than 30 percent of Americans understood that the vast majority of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies support the conclusion that climate change is a human created threat.

Polls Reveal a Partisan Divide over Climate Change and Covid-19

Today, there's an overlap between communities that have played down the coronavirus pandemic and those that deny man-made climate change. Concern about global warming has risen in recent years in the United States, but conservatives, especially older Republicans, remain holdouts.

Similar disparities between Republicans and Democrats have emerged in recent polling on the coronavirus pandemic. A survey released March 26by the Pew Research Center showed that while 78 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of total respondents said the pandemic was a major threat to public health, only 52 percent of Republicans said it was. Surveys earlier in March by Quinnipiac College and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago also indicated that majorities of Republicans doubted the seriousness of the pandemic. And while older Americans have been generally more worried about the virus, older Republicans weren't for weeks, even as the pandemic spread.

In the most recent polling, partisan differences remain: The Associated Press-NORC Center survey released this week showed that 35 percent of Republicans are extremely worried or very worried about being infected by the coronavirus, compared to 61 percent of Democrats.

These partisan disparities also surface in the way states and territories have reacted to the Center for Disease Control's recommendations on social distancing as the best means to limit the spread of the virus. Those that have been most diligent about implementing social distancing are largely Democratic strongholds, and those most lax have been red states, according to a Covid-19 social distancing scoreboard created by Unacast,a technology company that studies human mobility.

Alabamahad been among states doing the least to establish social distancing, according to the Unacast scorecard, a resistance that continued until early April, when Gov. Kay Ivey announced a stay-at-home order to take effect on April 4. The virus has now spread throughout the state, with 2,229 cases and 48 deaths reported by the state Department of Public Health on Wednesday.

Ashley Lucier is a 30-year-old middle school English teacher who lives with her husband and two young boys in Prattville, Alabama. Lucier's small family and close friends have taken the pandemic seriously and are staying home, she said. But some co-workers think, "'This is a hoax,' and that people are trying to make Trump look bad. They think this will all blow over and we'll be back to work soon," Lucier said.

Lucier's parents, both Republicans, live about 10 minutes away in Montgomery. As Lucier began to lock down in her own home, her mother, Cheryl, 59, was still going out to eat with friends and to church, until the restaurants and churches closed. She was taken aback when her daughter refused to send the grandchildren over to visit, Lucier said. Now, her mother's views on the pandemic have started to shift toward greater worry and caution. But Lucier's father, Anthony, 62, remains less concerned about the pandemic and less convinced of the recommendations of public health. He asked that his family's surname be withheld because he said he feared retaliation over his climate views.

"If Trump doesn't worry about it," Lucier said, "then my parents don't worry about it."

Affable and with an easy laugh, Anthony calls himself a conservative Republican and jokingly describes his liberal daughter, and only child, as a "leftist guerilla jungle fighter." A Fox News fan, he refers to Covid-19 as "the flu," echoing the president. The novel coronavirus is not like the seasonal flu, and its mortality rate is 10 times higher. Anthony also thinks global warming is a hoax and considers the urgent narrative about the pandemic as "climate change 2.0."

"It does feel like that because so many things are thrown in people's faces that are absolutely not true, that you think the next thing down the line is a hoax," Anthony said. "There's so much that's based on nothing, that when the wolf does come along to your door, everyone is surprised."

Anthony acknowledges that the virus could be a real threat, a "wolf." But his small manufacturing firm is open, and he still goes to work. Anthony thinks that people can do little to avoid catching such a contagious illness, so the social distancing and the lengthy lockdowns he has heard of but not seen yet in Alabama feel like overkill.

"We can do this for a certain amount of time before it becomes more of a problem than the flu itself and does serious economic damage," Anthony said, repeating objections Trump voiced last week to widespread social distancing. "People gotta keep on working, they gotta keep on making things, gotta keep on living."

Like Anthony, a plurality of Republicans in the recent Pew poll—nearly 4 in 10—said they felt the country was overreacting to the pandemic. Pluralities of Democrats and others said they thought Americans were not taking the threat seriously enough.

"My father still shrugs most of it off as a media bias or an overreaction of the public, even when I tell him the information is from reputable sources," Lucier said. "I don't know if it will really hit him unless someone close to us gets seriously sick."

That person who could get seriously sick is Lucier herself. Always outdoorsy and healthy, Lucier developed a blood clot in her lungs as a complication of donating a kidney in July 2018. She is on an inhaler and blood thinner for the clots. Her lung function is greatly reduced, and when she had the flu last year, Lucier landed in the hospital. Her parents say they understand she's at risk now, Lucier said, but given how they lead their lives still, she isn't convinced.

Continuing ambivalence about social distancing will only prolong the crisis, said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy. "When you have a big segment of the population that's dismissive about social distancing, you will have spread and you'll keep overloading the hospital system," Goldman said. "The longer there are mixed messages, the longer people don't take it seriously, the worse it will get."

Will Covid-19 Deaths Lead Skeptics to Rethink Views on Climate Change?

Why don't many Americans like Lucier's parents take the pandemic seriously, even when it poses a risk to loved ones? Beyond the nearly 30 years of climate denial that have given conservatives the arguments and social acceptance to dismiss scientific expertise, some of the resistance is driven by "solution aversion," said Taylor of the Niskanen Center. If people think the remedies to a problem will be painful or require sacrifice, they're more reluctant to accept the reality of the threat. With both climate change and Covid-19, skeptics think they will have to surrender economic prosperity, so they dismiss the looming risks.

Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change.

In 2009, thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists were leaked, in a scandal known as Climategate. Climate deniers seized upon excerpts from the emails to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about global warming before international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Multiple reviews of the scientists' emails exonerated them of tampering with data,but to deniers, Climategate remains proof of the dishonesty of climate researchers.

"There's a hostility toward the messengers," Taylor said. "Technocratic elites and scientists are for the most part Democrats, and that's one thing the Republican base knows really well. They're not trustworthy. They're not part of the tribe. And Republicans have been hearing for 30 years that they have an agenda they want to advance."

Michael Nelson, a professor of environmental ethics and philosophy at Oregon State University, said that feeling part of a bigger community, such as a political party or movement, can become "more important than accepting the truth."

Opening people's eyes to that truth isn't a matter of pointing more often to science because that's already an impediment, he said. A more useful approach to changing minds might be to acknowledge that the resistance people offer is reasonable to them, if not completely sound to others, Nelson said.

Goldman of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed. "One of the things we've learned from communicating climate science is that if you communicate something that triggers someone's worldview, it makes them more resistant to the science," she said. "We saw the same triggering of political worldviews with the coronavirus because the primary messengers like the president and his allies were denying it. And you didn't see as many scientific experts who should have been leading the messaging at the beginning of the pandemic."

As the death toll from the pandemic climbs, conservatives are likely to set aside their continued skepticism of science, including the facts underpinning climate change, Taylor said. "The distrust of expertise and the medical profession will wither away," he said, "because we'll see the consequences of that distrust."

But Goldman is less optimistic that the impact of Covid-19 can lead doubters to reconsider anything other than Covid-19.

"I'm skeptical that this situation is enough to change people's minds on climate change," she said. "There will never be an event that you can point to and say that it's climate. You won't have a 'gotcha moment' as you would with this virus because you have a more definite link to deaths when you have a virus. If coronavirus changes people's science denial ways here, I wouldn't put money on it changing their views on other scientific issues."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/04/01/coronavirus-covid-19-climate-denier-response

no lnx many pic vid

Climate Science Deniers Use Coronavirus to Downplay Environmental Threats

By Zak Derler • Wednesday, April 1, 2020 - 06:01

Commentators known to spread disinformation on climate change are using the COVID-19 pandemic to downplay the threat of environmental crises and undermine action, DeSmog analysis has found.

The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that the COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The virus has affected hundreds of countries and territories worldwide, and has so far led to tens of thousands of deaths.

Its arrival in the UK spawned thousands of words of commentary, with many writers who have previously used their platforms to undermine mainstream climate science or attack climate action turning their attention to the pandemic. Their attacks normally take one of three forms.

“The Dystopia Greens Want Us to Live In…”

Environmentalists have been quick to point out that the drop in carbon emissions and air pollution due to the COVID-19 outbreak is unlikely to have a long-term impact, and that policies they have long promoted do not require any great loss of liberty or need to sacrifice quality of life. But libertarian voices and free-market advocates nonetheless claim the government-implemented lockdown measures represent an outcome that environmental activists have been fighting for all along.

Brendan O’Neill, editor of Koch-funded website Spiked, argued that “this pandemic has shown us what life would be like if environmentalists got their way”. In a column titled “COVID-19: a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in,” O’Neill claimed government responses to the virus represent a “warped dystopia” that environmentalists like George Monbiot have been calling for.

O’Neill regularly speaks out against what he describes as “climate change alarmism” and is highly critical of Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and other environmental activists, which he says are the “enemies of liberty”. Political blog Guido Fawkes also used the crisis to regularly attack Extinction Rebellion, claiming that the group had “hijacked” COVID-19 for its own ends.

Previously, O’Neill referred to the COVID-19 outbreak as a “fashionable apocalypse” similar to those supposedly constructed by environmentalists and those wanting the UK to stay in the EU.

Motor show host Jeremy Clarkson made a similar argument in The Times, describing the COVID-19 pandemic as a scenario “our eco friends have been dreaming about.” For “hardcore environmentalists”, he argued, the coronavirus lockdown is “their idea of a wet dream. Fewer people, no travel, no pollution and, as a smear of icing on the cake, no commerce.”

Clarkson has questioned the validity of anthropogenic climate change for years, though he recently appeared to soften his stance.

Former UKIP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage meanwhile accused environmentalists of failing to stand up to repressive regimes in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, claiming “the Green lobby is happy to inflict chaos on our society any time it chooses”. Specifically, he said environmentalists were not doing enough to challenge China, which he blames for the global pandemic. Farage has previously said he “hasn't got a clue” whether carbon dioxide drives climate change.

‘Compared to COVID-19, Climate Change is a Non-Problem…’

Other commentators have used the COVID-19 pandemic to downplay the threat of climate change.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group, has regularly shared material promoting this argument over the past two weeks.

The group recently reposted an article written by Jeff Jacoby that said the “horrors of pandemics have been documented and depicted often. Yet while climate activists have been forecasting world-ending doomsday scenarios since the 1960s, the apocalypse never seems to materialize.” Jacoby, who has previously claimed global warming “brings positives”, was at pains to point out that, in contrast to climate change, “plagues are real”.

GWPF

@thegwpfcom

Jeff Jacoby: I’m Skeptical About Climate Alarmism, But I Take Coronavirus Fears Seriously https://www.thegwpf.com/jeff-jacoby-im-skeptical-about-climate-alarmism-but-i-take-coronavirus-fears-seriously/ …

Jeff Jacoby: I’m Skeptical About Climate Alarmism, But I Take Coronavirus Fears Seriously - The...

A friend asked me the other day if I didn’t think the agitated media coverage of Covid-19, the coronavirus disease, was getting out of control. She knows that I have long been skeptical of the shrill...

thegwpf.com

6:01 AM - Mar 17, 2020

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The GWPF also shared an article by Lorrie Goldstein, originally published in the Toronto Sun, who argued that the world had “gambled on the wrong threat – climate change.” Goldstein argued that COVID-19 “shows us what the world will be like if we abandon fossil fuels prematurely,” claiming that without high-carbon fuels, “hospitals could not maintain sterile conditions”.

Dutch climate science denial group CLINTEL echoed the sentiment that climate change was not a real threat in an open letter titled “fight virus not carbon”.

The group demanded that the EU’s Green New Deal be abandoned because “compared to COVID-19 climate change is a non-problem.” The letter was signed by high-profile climate science deniers including Viv Forbes, Fritz Vahrenholt, and Richard Lindzen.

Likewise, Rupert Darwall, a policy consultant and GWPF report writer, contrasted the threat of climate change and COVID-19 in an article for The Hill saying the pandemic “shows what a genuine crisis looks like”.

Read about US COVID-19 misinformation — Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks

Sherelle Jacobs, writing in the Telegraph, for which Darwall has also regularly written, argued that “we need to redirect university financing away from climate change predictive modelling, into the scientifically uncontested problem of pandemics.” Jacobs has regularly used her platform to cast doubt on the veracity of mainstream climate science.

Tom Welsh, the Telegraph’s comment editor, also claimed that coronavirus has made environmental projects look “extraordinarily decadent”. In the same vein, controversial media personality Katie Hopkins expressed her delight that in the face of the pandemic, “climate weirdos have shut up”.

“This Coronavirus Pandemic Could Be a Big Hoax…”

There are some climate science deniers that consider COVID-19 to be a conspiracy or that disregard it as a threat; though these are fewer in the UK than the US.

Piers Corbyn, a self-styled ‘weatherman’ whose work Boris Johnson has previously promoted, recently claimed the pandemic is a “world population cull” created by “mega-rich control freaks” Bill Gates and George Soros to deal with carbon dioxide emissions.

Piers Corbyn

@Piers_Corbyn

THE CV PANDEMIC WAS SIMULATED OCT 2019 BY MEGA-RICH CONTROL FREAKS BILL GATES, GEORGE SOROS +CRONIES.

NOW IT'S FOR REAL.

THE AIM IS A WORLD POPULATION CULL ("PEOPLE cause #CO2 problem") by THEIR mass VACCINATION PLAN CONTAINING POISON.

*REFUSE*CV*VACCINE*https://youtu.be/RJGBVDlqWjI

YouTube #StayHome ?@YouTube

1,055

6:48 PM - Mar 15, 2020

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Corbyn, who has previously said that “globalist elites” are using climate science as a cover to deindustrialise the West, also falsely claimed that Soros owns a company in Wuhan, and urged his Twitter followers to “refuse the vaccine”.

Godfrey Bloom, former UKIP MEP,echoed these sentiments when he tweeted about “the coronavirus hoax”, linking to an article that questioned whether the pandemic could be a “big hoax” by those “who seek to profit – financially or politically – from the ensuing panic.” Former UKIP researcher Ben Pile also took to Twitter to suggest people were “being played” by the media coverage of both the risks of COVID-19 and climate change.

Some climate science deniers have even claimed they have found a cure for COVID-19. Breitbart columnist James Delingpole has shared his interest in hearing from funders after claiming he fought through a COVID-19 infection with “a high powered zinc formula” ; a theory a University of Reading professor in cellular microbiology has called “absolute garbage.” Alt-right talk show radio host Alex Jones also allegedly marketed ineffective treatments and cures for COVID-19 on his show – a charge he denies.

Climate science skeptics grasp for power in changing GOP

Nick Sobczyk, E&E News reporter

Published: Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Skeptics of mainstream climate science and hard-line conservatives think they still have a hold on the GOP, despite a recent rhetorical evolution among congressional Republicans.

Climate science skeptics grasp for power in changing GOP

MARCH 10, 2020

As originally published in E&E News.

By: Nick Sobczyk

March 10, 2020

Skeptics of mainstream climate science and hard-line conservatives think they still have a hold on the GOP, despite a recent rhetorical evolution among congressional Republicans.

It’s part of a battle for the soul of the party between hard-right organizations, such as the Club for Growth, and the newfangled and well-funded ecosystem of conservative clean energy groups, led most prominently by ClearPath and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.

There are abundant signs on Capitol Hill that people who question climate science are losing clout with Republicans. But they are insistent that not much has changed, particularly with President Trump still in the White House.

“I don’t think we’re losing much ground,” said Myron Ebell, a prominent energy advocate with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a longtime opponent of the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. Ebell helped lead Trump’s EPA transition team.

“I do think that there’s been more hand waving,” he added, “but I don’t think Republican voters have been influenced very much by the hand waving and the shouting.”

Party leadership on Capitol Hill would beg to differ. And even some Trump-loyal Republicans are happy to distance themselves from the climate science denial movement, even if they’re not willing to offer the kind of policies many experts say will be necessary to reduce the use of fossil fuels — the primary driver of climate change.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his top energy deputies rolled out a package of small-ball climate change bills last month, pointing to polls that show younger voters increasingly worried about the issue.

None would reduce fossil fuel use, but they would aim to reduce emissions through carbon capture and sequestration (Greenwire, Feb. 12).

Meanwhile, Republicans on powerful committees such as Energy and Commerce have largely dropped outright climate denial for the kind of “energy innovation” talking points favored by CRES and ClearPath.

“Both sides now recognize climate is changing, temperature is increasing we need to do something about it,” said Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “We’re just speaking out and making our own views known better, and there is more evidence.”

Policywise, what they’re doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped. It truly is.

Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow]

The fact remains, however, that the Republican president frequently denies climate change and for a time employed a man — William Happer — tasked with performing a critical review of federal climate science.

For skeptics and libertarian ideologues alike who want to see the federal regulatory regime torn down, that’s an important audience.

“Policywise, what Andrew Wheeler is doing is phenomenal. Policywise, what Donald Trump is doing is phenomenal,” said Marc Morano, director of communications at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, who has questioned climate science for years.

“Policywise, what they’re doing is phenomenal and unbelievable and beyond anything we could have hoped,” he said. “It truly is.”

Fighting over the details

There’s no meaningful debate among climate scientists about whether temperatures are rising because of man’s industrial activity.

A host of peer-reviewed studies warn of potentially catastrophic economic and environmental effects, many of which are readily apparent today, without dramatic changes to global greenhouse gas emissions. Most objections to the science have virtually zero credibility in the world’s scientific community.

Still, politically, Ebell doesn’t think it’s useful for conservatives to cede the debate because he said McCarthy’s efforts won’t convince voters who want the federal government to address climate change to vote Republican.

“If local environmental groups or local media in their districts start looking into these bills and start giving them publicity in the local media, they’re going to have a hard time explaining themselves because we’ve conceded that global warming’s a problem, and we’ve got a plan which will do nothing to address it,” Ebell said.

“So I think it’s not a well-thought-out way to proceed on this issue, and I doubt that they’re going to get very much positive spin out of it with voters,” he said.

Prominent conservative organizations, meanwhile, are making similar arguments with more subtle references to the science of climate change.

After McCarthy, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves and other Republicans came out with their package of bills last month, the Club for Growth promptly blasted it, threatening to withhold endorsements from supporters.

“When you give an inch on principle, you concede a negotiating posture that has also led to devastating bipartisan agreements on bailouts, spending and regulation,” Scott Parkinson, vice president of government affairs for the Club for Growth, wrote in a subsequent letter to the editor in The Washington Post last month.

“Club for Growth will continue to work with principled conservatives who reject climate alarmism and fight for energy and environmental policies based on sound economic principles,” he wrote.

Despite those disagreements, the Republican efforts on climate aren’t actually all that new, and they’re generally more focused on repackaging GOP-backed policies through a climate change lens.

One of the bills they rolled out last month, for instance, would make permanent the 45Q tax break for carbon capture and sequestration, which a Republican-led Congress expanded in 2018.

Graves, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis’ ranking member, is also leading a letter to National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, to be sent in the coming weeks, urging the White House to promote fossil fuel exports as a way to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Top Republicans, including Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are expected to sign.

The Trump administration, of course, is already gung-ho about exporting fossil fuels, but Republicans argue that it can help the fight against climate change because U.S. exports have lower life-cycle emissions than sources in the developing world.

The current backdrop, however, is that U.S. emissions are increasing, undermining Republicans who point to emissions reductions during the last 15 years. EPA’s most recent numbers found that greenhouse gas emissions rose 3.1% in 2018 — during Trump’s second year in office — despite the continued decline of coal (Climatewire, Feb. 13).

Meanwhile, the party as a whole still roundly rejects carbon pricing and regulations, tools that most climate experts say will be necessary to deploy clean energy technology to the market and reduce emissions fast enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

“Looking back over the last several years there have been policies that are entirely consistent with Republican ideology that we can continue doing that achieve multiple goals,” Graves said. “My whole thing is let’s not sit here and fight over the details of the science.”

Constituent services?

Ebell and other skeptics dismiss conservative clean energy groups as empty vessels with money but no loyal supporters, but they’re having an impact.

CRES alone spent nearly $500,000 lobbying on various energy issues in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to disclosure forms, including with several outside lobbying firms.

Much of the lobbying effort went toward getting clean energy priorities into the tax extenders package at the end of last year, according to CRES Executive Director Heather Reams, but CRES and ClearPath were enthusiastic about Republicans adopting their rhetoric in early 2020.

Still, Reams said she doesn’t see her group’s efforts as in direct conflict with those who question climate science. Rather, she believes she offers Republicans who want to talk about climate change a supportive landing pad.

“They’re responding to voters,” Reams said. “So I think it’s a very unfair position that some groups are putting Republican members in. These are complex problems and deserve complex solutions, and keeping your head in the sand is not a solution.”

And in a sign that the climate skeptic wing’s influence could be petering out, the Heartland Institute — a conservative think tank that has long dispersed debunked theories about climate change — laid off some of its staff last week amid reported financial woes (Greenwire, March 9).

Efforts to promote carbon taxes as a conservative solution to climate change have been less successful so far, however, showing the limits of the Republican transformation. Currently, the policy has only a small constituency.

Read the rest of the article here....e&e

fox News has been the epicenter of climate change denial in the United States for over a decade now.

mma 3/20 4 min montage of fox bs

several fear alarm eg

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maybe tipping pt at last?! mark trexler brainguy

dating site OKCupid. Apparently, people don’t want to date “deniers” any more, and so you can screen potential matches based on their views on climate change. In addition, “climate change is more important to daters than the economy, eradicating disease, and world peace.” :{Here’s the piece I’m referencing.}:It’s hard to interpret this in terms of real impact, but if I were putting together puzzle pieces in thinking about tipping points in climate thinking, this is definitely one of those pieces!

kos 1219

ClimateDenierRoundup writes—**New Study Finds Blog Comments Influence Readers’ Perceptions Of Climate Consensus**: “A new study published in November’s issue of the journal:{ }:Memory & Cognition:{ }:found that comments on blog posts can influence a reader’s perception of the content. The study by lead author Stephan Lewandowsky had subjects look at blog posts that either endorsed or rejected climate science, and then read comments either in agreement with or in opposition to the initial content. Researchers set out to study the influence of commenters because of the valuable role that perception of consensus plays in shaping how we think. Put simply, what you believe other people think shapes what you think. If most people believe something, human brains are generally hardwired to also believe that. On the flip side, if we see people united in opposition, we’re going to be a little more skeptical. Therefore, changing whether commenters appear to be in consensus about a post could influence how readers perceive that post.”

:{Read More}:

derede

George Marshall's Don't Even Think About It: Why

Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

===

How the New Climate Denial Is Like the Old Climate Denial

Both are excuses for inaction.

MEEHAN CRIST

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

There has been a subtle shift recently in the rhetoric of many conservative pundits and politicians around climate change. For decades, the common refrain has been flat-out denial—either that climate change is not happening, or that any change is not caused by human activity. Which is why viewers might have been surprised to see Tucker Carlson of Fox News nodding along thoughtfully on January 6 as climate scientist Judith Curry, a controversial figure in climate science, explained, “Yes it’s warming and yes humans contribute to it. Everybody agrees with that, and I’m in the 98 percent [of scientists who agree]. It’s when you get down to the details that there’s genuine disagreement.” Carlson immediately turns to the camera and moots a multi-part series: “What do we know? What don’t we know?”

This rhetorical stance—yes, climate change is real, and yes, human activity is implicated, but we don’t know how much human activity is to blame—is fast becoming the go-to position for conservatives. In confirmation hearings last week, Senator Ed Markey asked Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, if he agrees with Trump that global warming is a “hoax.” Pruitt replied that he does not. But later, under questioning by Senator Bernie Sanders, Pruitt refused to say how much change is caused by human activity. He would say only that the “climate is changing, and human activity contributes to that in some manner.” When pressed by Sanders on whether he agreed with 97 percent of scientists who have published in peer-reviewed journals that human activity is “the fundamental reason we are seeing climate change,” Pruitt equivocated. “I believe the ability to measure with precision the degree of human activity’s impact on the climate is subject to more debate.

The key phrases in Pruitt’s testimony are “in some manner” and “with precision.” These allow Pruitt to acknowledge climate change is happening while moving uncertainty downstream, into the “details.”

This rhetoric is out of step with the latest science. The most recent IPCC report expresses95 percent confidence thathumans are the main causeof most global warming observed since the 1950s. According to one paper summarized on NASA’s Global Climate Change website, “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” The list of scientists and agencies in agreement goes on and on.

Some conservatives have introduced uncertainty by suggesting climate change might be driven by “natural” global cycles. But according to Maureen Raymo of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, we know why climate changes naturally, and non-human activity can’t explain the rapid changes observed in the past century. “The Ice Ages happen due to subtle changes in the sun-earth distance that unfold over thousands of years, and which can lead to sometimes rapid climate change, when thresholds are crossed.” These cycles are still happening, but “the same factors that cause these huge Ice Age swings could not possibly be invoked to explain the warming we now see.” In fact, Raymo said, “left to its own devices, right now Mother Nature would be making the climate colder.”

The planet has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century. “You can quibble about tiny bits,” said Raymo, “but the vast majority of what we observe is that it’s because we’ve been combusting fossil fuels.”

As Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Principal Investigator for the GISS ModelE Earth System Model, put it, “In science, nothing is ever known perfectly. Is there remaining uncertainty in the exact value of gravity? Yes. But to something like the fourth decimal place. It doesn’t matter. So the question is: Is the remaining uncertainty relevant to any policy decision anyone would want to make? And the answer is: no.”

Uncertainty has proved a reliable tool to manipulate public perception of climate change and stall political action. In 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists released The Climate Deception Dossiers, which describes a 1998 memo from the American Petroleum Institute that, according to the dossiers, “mapped out a multifaceted deception strategy for the fossil-fuel industry that continues to this day—outlining plans to reach the media, the public, and policy makers with a message emphasizing ‘uncertainties’ in climate science.” The UCS authors write that the memo (included in the report) states “victory” would be achieved “when ‘average citizens’ and the media were convinced of uncertainties in climate science despite overwhelming evidence of the impact of human-caused global warming and nearly unanimous agreement about it in the scientific community.”

Another “victory” listed on the API memo’s bullet-point list would be when, “those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.”

The new climate-denial rhetoric dovetails with longstanding tactics used by conservatives and fossil fuel companies to sow doubt about climate change, even as they publicly recognize its reality. In a 2006 Letter from ExxonMobil Vice President of Public Affairs Ken Cohen to the Royal Society, the corporation acknowledged that “the use of fossil fuels is a ‘major source’ of carbon dioxide emissions” and tied emissions to climate change: “Given the important role fossil fuels play in providing energy for the global economy, the issues of global economic development, future energy supply, and climate change are closely linked.” This past November, ExxonMobil even endorsed the Paris Agreement in a carefully-worded statement that balanced the need to reduce global emissions with the statement that, “access to affordable and reliable energy is critical to economic growth and improved standards of living worldwide.” Despite this acknowledgement, ExxonMobil has, since November, launched a suite of massive extraction projects in Nigeria, Mozambique, Liberia and Texas.

In his recent confirmation hearings, Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and newly-minted U.S. Secretary of State, carefully avoided making any of the links that ExxonMobil’s own scientists had made by the early 1980s between fossil fuels, rising greenhouse gases, and the ability of those gases to affect climate “in potentially destructive ways.” When asked to explain his “personal view” of climate change by Senator Tom Udall, Tillerson would say only that “after 20 years as an engineer and a scientist,” he had concluded “the risk of climate change does exist,” and “the consequences could be serious enough that action should be taken.” Senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then pointedly asked, “Do you believe that human activity, based on science, is contributing?” Tillerson dodged again, saying only, “The increase in greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect is very limited.”

Tillerson can make statements like these because climate research is ongoing, and climate models are inherently imprecise. According to Schmidt, “To say that science isn’t settled on things people are still researching is totally irrelevant. Does the earth orbit the sun? There’s no substantial ambiguity about the answer to that question, despite the fact that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of scientists working on gravity. There are lots of interesting things about gravity, it’s just that thatis not one of them. There are lots of interesting things about climate change, and adaptation, and interactions between air pollution and clouds, but they’re just not relevant to the question, which is: Is what’s going on related to humans? And the answer is: Yes, it is.”

When Tillerson was pushed by Senator Tim Kaine to admit ExxonMobil’s “history with the issue of climate change,” including the oil giant’s well-documented practice of funding work to discredit climate science and delay political action, he stonewalled until Kaine finally asked, “Are you not answering because you don’t know, or because you don’t want to?” To which Tillerson replied, “A little of both.”

There has been a flurry of recent Republican efforts to stall action on climate policy, including a pair of bills just introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives. Bill H.R. 861, introduced by Representative Matt Gaetz, proposes “to terminate the EPA.” This bill may not even get a vote, but asThe New York Timesreported earlier this week, Pruitt “has a blueprint to repeal climate change rules, cut staffing levels, close regional offices and permanently weaken the agency’s regulatory authority.”

Meanwhile, Bill H.R. 673, introduced by Representative Blaine Luetkmeyer, proposes to “prohibit United States contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Green Climate Fund.” It’s also no secret that many Republicans want to halt funding for the UN FCCC, the international treaty system of 195 nations that produced the Paris Agreement. As the Republican party platform stated in the run-up to the presidential election: “We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.”

On February 8, a cohort of old-guard Republicans came out in favor of a carbon tax, which they call a “conservative approach to climate change.” Rather than setting limits on emissions (as with cap-and-trade), a carbon tax would put a higher price on fossil fuel emissions and leave it to the market to curb emissions. This approach may be appealing to some voters, because as the tax slowly increases consumers receive increasing rebates. While this approach at least acknowledges that human use of fossil fuels is contributing to climate change, many experts argue this would not be a meaningful restriction, given the convulsive climate changes already under way.

In September 2016, carbon-dioxide levels in the air crossed the dreaded 400 ppm threshold, and we are not likely to dip back below that level in our lifetimes. Crossing this red line signals an irrevocable shift toward an increasingly unrecognizable planet (the last time the planet’s air was consistently above 400 ppm was 16 million years ago, and the planet looked a lot different). In just the past few months, we have seen record-breaking global temperatures and a stunning decline in sea ice. A slab of ice bigger than Long Island is poised to crack off the Antarctic’s Larsen C ice shelf and the climate-stabilizing flow of the Gulf Stream, which has decreased by 20 percent in the last 50 years, may be accelerating toward full shut-down. According to the Pentagon’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, climate change will cause catastrophic changes to Earth’s ecosystems and wreak havoc on human populations, including famine, mass migration, and war. A carbon tax may be too little, too late, but even it would be preferable to rhetoric that fails to acknowledge scientific consensus on climate change.

The recent shift in conservative rhetoric exploits legitimate scientific uncertainty that most scientists agree is irrelevant to crafting responsible climate policy. Despite overwhelming evidence, many conservatives are still willing to ignore scientific consensus and stall political action. But offering evidence that this rhetoric is out of step with science may not, in fact, matter when it comes to public perception. When the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology published a press release on February 5, alleging that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “manipulated climate records,” scientists and journalists rushed to correct the statement and demonstrate how it was based on faulty information. But the damage was already done; uncertainty about NOAA and their data are now a part of the public dialogue around climate change.

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omfg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html

some lnx below

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

May 27, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey,James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Image

President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times]

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

Image

The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times]

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer,the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

Image

William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus.CreditPool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones]

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

ImageThe Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science]

...

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denialism

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/12/16/drilled-podcast-climate-denial-crime-century

By Climate Investigations Center

A newly released podcast, Drilled, “investigates the crime of the century — the creation of climate denial.”

The eight part series takes listeners back in time to the inception of climate change denial. It tells the story of the special interests that launched campaigns against evolving climate science and the momentum created by this science, starting in the late 1980s and sustained through the 2000s.

Guided by documents uncovered by reporters, academics, and activists in recent years, Drilled exposes the campaign of climate denial as a successful public relations endeavor undertaken by the fossil fuel industry and allies.

The podcast utilizes primary source documents, such as internal corporate correspondence, leaked plans, government records, and interviews with former fossil fuel industry scientists to illuminate this little known history.

The collection of documents hosted on Climate Files and featured in Drilled outline a story of corporate knowledge and deceit. This history is critical in understanding why climate science has become a “political” issue today and the origin of denial rhetoric that permeates society today, right up to President Trump.

Interviewed for the podcast, Climate Investigations Center’s Kert Davies leads the listener through documents which illustrate corporate knowledge of climate science as early as the 1950s as well as industry campaigns to actively mislead the public.

As these documents show, some of the largest oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon, were studying the severity of climate change long before it became an issue most people were aware of and well before the policy arena started to take action in the late 1980s.

Read the Drilled documents yourself:

timeline? docs]

Highlights from Climate Investigations Center research and Climate Files that were covered in Drilled:

:{Internal Shell Documents:(style="font-weight:700"):}::

In 1998, Shell predicted an inevitable backlash, including climate liability lawsuits against “fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years,” long before the first climate lawsuit was ever filed.

:{What Exxon Knew:(style="font-weight:700"):}::

Illustrating their awareness of the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s own scientists suggested in 1981 “it is distinctly possible” that climate change could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic,” and despite that knowledge, the corporation for decades funded attempts to discredit the scientific consensus that their own research helped shape.

:{The Global Climate Coalition:(style="font-weight:700"):}::

Exxon, not alone in its agenda, emphasized uncertainty with a suite of fossil-reliant corporations and trade associations by funding contrarian scientists, think tanks, and front groups that adopted the industry’s support of fossil fuel consumption.

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a prominent ringleader of 1990s corporate climate denial pressure, was a consortium of fossil fuel corporations and trade associations. Along with other groups, the GCC devoted extensive time, money and effort into changing the climate narrative.

Contrary to the scientific certainty expressed internally by Exxon’s scientists in the 1970’s, in 1996, the GCC statedthat there was “no convincing evidence that future increases in greenhouse gas concentrations will produce significant climatic effects.” The industry coalition actively worked to derail international climate negotiations, oppose action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and promote the views of climate skeptics.

:{Trade Association Denial Campaigns:(style="font-weight:700"):}::

Knowledge of additional industry funded climate denial is extensive. A trail of documents such as the American Petroleum Institute’s 1998 leaked “Global Climate Science Communications Plan” and the Edison Electric Institute’s half a million dollar denial “Information Council on the Environment” (ICE) campaign in 1991 detail industry attempts to derail public faith in climate science and expose a history corporations now wish they could make disappear.

:{Willie Soon investigation:(style="font-weight:700"):}::

Receiving over a million dollars from fossil fuel entities, Willie Soon is one of the most blatant examples of a climate denying scientist being paid by industry interests up until a few years ago.

:{Fred Palmer:(style="font-weight:700"):}::

Fred Palmer, a career climate denier, ran the “ICE” campaign while at the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal utilities and suppliers. He later worked as Peabody Coal’s Senior Vice President for Government Relations, before joining the climate denying Heartland Institute where he runs their. Palmer once said “every time you turn your car on, and you burn fossil fuels, and you put CO2 in the air, you are doing the work of the Lord.” a sentiment he has expressed repeatedly.

Listen to the podcast Drilled for yourself.

The impacts of climate change we are seeing today are happening faster than scientists predicted one or two decades ago. These consequences are too profound to allow the history of who has held us back from solving this crisis to slip silently into the past. Drilled is one step forward in remembering this history, keeping it alive in our consciousness as we look ahead to charting a better future.

Find it on Itunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you stream podcasts.

https://theconversation.com/extreme-weather-news-may-not-change-climate-change-skeptics-minds-112650

no lnx many

The year 2018 brought particularly devastating natural disasters, including hurricanes, droughts, floods and fires – just the kinds of extreme weather events scientists predict will be exacerbated by climate change.

Amid this destruction, some people see an opportunity to finally quash climate change skepticism. After all, it seems hard to deny the realities of climate change – and object to policies fighting it – while its effects visibly wreck communities, maybe even your own.

News outlets have hesitated to connect natural disasters and climate change, though these connections are increasing, thanks to calls from experts combined with more precise data about the effects of climate change. Media voices like The Guardian advocate for more coverage of the weather events “when people can see and feel climate change.” Harvard’s Nieman Foundation dubbed 2019 “The Year of the Climate Reporter.” Even conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh worried that media predictions about Hurricane Florence were attempts to “heighten belief in climate change.”

But a recent study from Ohio State University communications scholars found that news stories connecting climate change to natural disasters actually backfire among skeptics. As someone who also studies scientific communication, I find these results fascinating. It’s easy to assume that presenting factual information will automatically change people’s minds, but messages can have complex, frustrating persuasive effects.

The flooded Platte River in Nebraska is one example of a recent extreme weather event. AP Photo/Nati Harnik]

Investigating how skeptics hear the news

Social scientists have an unclear understanding of how climate change news affects public opinion, as not enough research has specifically explored that question. To explore the question, researchers from Ohio State recruited 1,504 volunteers. They divided them into groups who read news stories about natural disasters – fires, hurricanes or blizzards – that either emphasized or omitted the role of climate change.

Cleverly, the researchers recruited participants from geographic areas most likely to experience the disasters they read about; for instance, participants in hurricane-prone areas read the news articles about hurricanes. Further, the researchers ran the study in fall 2017, during hurricane and wildfire season, when these sorts of disasters are presumably top of mind.

After reading, participants answered 11 questions meant to measure their resistance to the article, including “Sometimes I wanted to ‘argue back’ against what I read” and “I found myself looking for flaws in the way information was presented.”

It turned out that climate change skeptics – whether politically conservative or liberal – showed more resistance to the stories that mentioned climate change. Climate change themes also made skeptics more likely to downplay the severity of the disasters. At the same time, the same articles made people who accept climate change perceive the hazards as more severe.

The study findings suggest that reporting the relationship between climate change and hazardous weather may actually increase the skepticism of skeptics, even in the face of blatant contrary evidence. Psychologists call this the boomerang effect, because the message ultimately sends people in the opposite direction.

Who’s hearing the message matters

The boomerang effects seen in this latest study are less surprising than you might think. Researchers have tried a variety of strategies, including emphasizing scientific consensus around climate change and describing the negative health impacts of climate change on people near and far, only to find that skeptics often end up more entrenched after reading attempts to persuade them.

Messages can work when they use place to increase people’s concern and willingness to act on climate change, but individual studies show inconsistent results. One new study gave Bay Area participants maps showing the increased flood risk in their zip code due to projected sea level rise. The maps made no difference in people’s concern about the effects of climate change on future generations, developing countries or the Bay Area. But the maps did make people who accept climate change less concerned that it would personally harm them. These participants may have replaced their abstract, apocalyptic assumptions about climate change threats with the more tangible predictions, causing them to feel less vulnerable.

Another study, also involving Californians, generated slightly more success for place-based climate change news, but only among participants who were already concerned about climate change.Study participants read news articles explaining that climate change would increase droughts either globally or in California. The global message made people more likely to want policy changes, while the local messages made people more likely to say they would change their personal behavior.

Place-based appeals often have some positive effect on people’s willingness to act on climate change and environmental issues.

But most studies about local messaging suggest that you cannot persuade everyone with the same message. A complex relationship of factors – including previous beliefs on climate change, political affiliation, and attachment to place and gender – can all play a role.

And psychologists offer compelling reasons why persuasive attempts sometimes backfire. Messages about the local impact of climate change might actually replace people’s abstract, altruistic values with utilitarian concerns. In the case of skeptics resisting news about climate-driven disasters, the researchers from Ohio State suggest that these people are engaged in motivated reasoning, a cognitive bias where people force new and threatening information to conform to their pre-existing knowledge.

More and more info doesn’t necessarily convince. AP Photo/Jay Reeves]

More news may not convince

Resistance to news about climate change disasters might be frustrating, but even the media often ignore the role of climate change in disasters, according to an analysis by the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. They found only 7 percent of American news stories about hurricanes mentioned climate change in 2018. Percentages increase for stories about wildfires (27.8 percent of stories), extreme heat (34 percent of stories) and drought (35 percent of stories). But an overwhelming amount of extreme weather news coverage never mentions climate change.

Some omissions are particularly striking. Liberal research organization Media Matters found only one mention of climate change in 127 broadcast news stories during two weeks of extreme heat in 2018. Only about 4 percent of stories about Hurricane Irma and Harvey mentioned climate change, according to an academic analysis that included The Houston Chronicle and the Tampa Bay Times.

Despite these low numbers, U.S. climate change coverage related to extreme weather and disasters actually rose in 2018, according to the report from Public Citizen. This increase aligns with a trend of news slowly improving its climate reporting. For instance, U.S. print media has dropped some of the skepticism from its climate change reporting, both in terms of outright skepticism of the basic science and a subtler version that involved creating a false balance by including voices which both affirm and deny the reality of climate change.

Even if the media continues to increase and improve its climate change coverage, it might not change skeptics’ minds. Of course, the media has a responsibility to report the news accurately, regardless of how some people process it. But those hoping that climate change news will convert skeptics might end up disappointed.

Given this resistance to news, other approaches, such as avoiding fear-inducing and guilt-based messaging, creating targeted messages about free-market solutions, or deploying a kind of “jiu jitsu” persuasion that aligns with pre-existing attitudes, may prove more effective at influencing skeptics. In the meantime, social scientists will continue to investigate ways to combat the stubborn boomerang effect, even as the consequences of climate change intensify all around us.

see energy corps 2 for grafs and lnx

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/22/paris-oil-exxon-chevron-bp-total-shell-billion-climate-lobbying-advertising-influencemap

all rhet

A new report by a British think tank estimates that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies spent more than $1 billion lobbying to prevent climate change regulations while also running public relations campaigns aimed at maintaining public support for climate action.

Combined, the companies spend roughly $200 million a year pushing to delay or alter climate and energy rules, particularly in the U.S. — while spending $195 million a year “on branding campaigns that suggest they support an ambitious climate agenda,” according to InfluenceMap, a UK-based non-profit that researches how corporations influence climate policy.

InfluenceMap cites as an example ExxonMobil’s heavily-touted algae-biofuels research, which the oil giant says “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” with significant climate benefits and has made it the focus of its “The Tiny Organism” ad campaign.

InfluenceMap notes that “detailed disclosures from the company show its goal of 10,000 barrels of bio-fuel a day would equate to only 0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity.

[algae tiny vid]

Oil majors are projecting themselves as key players in the energy transition while lobbying to delay, weaken, or oppose meaningful climate policy,” Edward Collins, author of the new report, said in a statement. “They advocate gradual implementation of market-based and technological climate solutions, but the latest [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report makes clear that urgent policy action and limitations on fossil fuel use are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Today’s report updates the group’s 2016 report that estimated these companies spent $115 million a year lobbying against climate regulations — even policies companies said they supported.

“Say one thing,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, as he described InfluenceMap’s 2016 research on the floor of the U.S.Senate, “do another.”

The new estimates suggest that spending to influence climate policy by the five oil giants has increased sharply over the last two years.

It also comes as global banks are investing more in fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement. In addition, the five oil companies are spending heavily on finding and producing more fossil fuels — and putting only a tiny fraction of their budgets into efforts to transition away from climate-altering fuels.

“This spending accompanies the expansion of the companies’ operations with combined annual sales of over $1 [trillion] and profits of $55 [billion in] 2018, the vast majority of which is oil and gas related,” InfluenceMap wrote. “Combined capital investment will increase to $115 [billion] in 2019 but only about 3 percent of this will go to low carbon investments, according to company disclosures.”

Lobbying One Message While Advertising Another

The report focuses on the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron, leaving out state-controlled oil giants like Saudi Aramco and China’s Sinopec.

InfluenceMap examined the extent to which each company’s branding efforts and advertising campaigns focused on climate change.

Shell's branded content about its emissions scenario in The New York Times

Shell's branded content about its “Sky” emissions scenario in The New York Times.

“The research suggests that Total maintains the highest proportion of its branding activities on climate (29 percent),” the new report finds. “Following this, ExxonMobil, which has faced significant negative media attention in 2018, allocates 19 percent. Shell and BP followed with 16 percent and 14 percent respectively. Chevron appears far less concerned, using approximately 2 percent of its branding budget on climate issues in 2018.”

The think tank's research also looked at what the companies were saying to government regulators, either directly or through industry groups funded by the oil majors.

“Since Paris, Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil have led in opposition to a range of climate-motivated policy stands,” InfluenceMap wrote. “For example, in 2018 both BP and Chevron have directly lobbied U.S. policymakers for a rollback on U.S. methane requirements.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the major constituent in natural gas.)

The report credits Shell and Total for becoming “more positive on a number of climate policy issues” since 2015, but adds that they “continue to support policies that will extend the role for fossil fuels in the energy mix and remain part of highly climate-oppositional trade associations.”

Mixed Messages and Industry Trade Groups

At times, the public stances of a corporation’s leadership stand starkly at odds with the messages from industry groups funded by that same corporation.

For example, on electric vehicles, Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden had a very direct and simple message in July 2018. “We need battery electric vehicles,” he said. And a year earlier, at the oil industry conference, CERAWeek, in 2017, he expressed support for “regulations that speed up investment in low carbon technologies and ? at the same time ? move consumer demand.”

Oil and gas lobbying on climate policies through trade associations. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

In May 2018, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade group for oil and gas, pushed the U.S. Congress to move in the opposite direction by rolling back incentives for electric vehicles.

“American Petroleum Institute (API) opposes mandates and subsidies,” API testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, according to InfluenceMap’s new report. The fossil fuel trade group voiced its opposition for subsidies for electric vehicles, adding that “the level of market penetration achieved by electric vehicles should not rely on government interference.”

The report also notes the difficulty in tracking corporate lobbying in the U.S. given the rise of so-called “dark money” groups and the lack of transparency surrounding political contributions in the U.S. “Political contributions that were made without full disclosure of their ultimate source totaled $539 [million] in the 2018 election cycle according to OpenSecrets.org,” the report says.

Social Influencers

InfluenceMap also dives deep into how companies used social media to influence Americans during the mid-term elections last year.

“During this time ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400K in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads,” InfluenceMap wrote. “The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives whilst promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebook’s data indicates that ExxonMobil’s ads made over 10 million ‘impressions’ in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.”

Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019

All of this spending has implications for shareholders, InfluenceMap observed — and some shareholder groups appear to be listening.

“InfluenceMap’s research confirms a widely held suspicion that Big Oil’s glossy sustainability reports and shiny climate statements are all rhetoric and no action,” Catherine Howarth, Chief Executive of ShareAction, a UK charity focused on responsible investment, said in a statement accompanying the report. “These companies have mastered the art of corporate doublespeak — by boasting about their climate credentials while quietly using their lobbying firepower to sabotage the implementation of sensible climate policy and pouring millions into groups that engage in dirty lobbying on their behalf.”

DeSmog has reached out to ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron for comment.

“We firmly reject the premise of this report. We are very clear about our support for the Paris agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society’s needs for more and cleaner energy,” Shell said in a statement provided to The Guardian. “We make no apology for talking to policymakers and regulators around the world to make our voice heard on crucial topics such as climate change and how to address it.”

“We have not been afforded the opportunity to review the data but we disagree with the assertion that Chevron has engaged in ‘climate-related branding and lobbying’ that is ‘overwhelmingly in conflict’ with the Paris Agreement,” Chevron said in a statement provided to DeSmog, adding that the company was taking “prudent, cost-effective actions” and seeking “balanced and transparent” policies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “We believe climate change is real and human activity contributes to it. We accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Updated: This article has been updated on March 22, 2019 to reflect a statement from Chevron.

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/18/climate-advocates-underestimate-power-fossil-fuel-misinformation-campaign-brulle

Climate Advocates Underestimate Power of Fossil Fueled Misinformation Campaigns, Say Top Researchers

By Graham Readfearn • Friday, January 18, 2019 - 08:51

Myron Ebell at a Heartland Institute conference

Climate action advocates have underestimated the strength and sophistication of decades-long fossil fuel-funded misinformation campaigns and need a coordinated set of strategies to fight back, say leading academics.

Among those strategies, say the three researchers from Yale and Brown University, are promoting financial transparency,suing misinformers and their funders,and researching the vast networks of think tanks and front groups.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Yale University's Professor Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell, together with Brown University’s Professor Robert Brulle, say people working on responses to climate change “cannot afford to underestimate the economic influence, institutional complexity, strategic sophistication, financial motivation, and societal impact of the networks” behind climate misinformation campaigns.

Brulle, who is also an academic at Drexel University, told DeSmog that after conversations with leaders of environment groups and foundations, he had concluded “there is virtually no understanding of the nature or extent of misinformation efforts and organized efforts to stop climate action.”

Misinformation Ignored

He said: “So in my opinion, the efforts to promote climate action are failing to take into account opposition efforts in their strategies. I can assure you that this is not the situation for the organized efforts to stop climate action — which I call the climate countermovement.”

Brulle and Farrell have each produced several major studies in leading academic journals on the funding and influence of the “climate countermovement” and its fossil fuel interests. In 2018, Brulle joined several academics in criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for ignoring in a major report swaths of research and evidence on the impact of organized climate science denial.

In this most recent commentary, they lay out the pervasive nature of misinformation campaigns on climate change in the United States and how those campaigns captured Republicans.

Singled out in the paper are groups including the Heartland Institute, companies including oil giant Exxon, individuals like former Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team members Steve Milloy and Myron Ebell, and the vast network of groups funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and the petrochemical businesses controlled by Charles Koch and brother David Koch.

But the bulk of the paper covers a suite of strategies that could be rolled out to combat the misinformation springing from these groups and individuals.

“Any political strategy to combat scientific misinformation must confront the partisan gridlock around climate change that has been institutionalized into the U.S. political process,” the scholars write.

McConnell said: “The spread of climate misinformation is a political tool that is used to influence both the general public and key decision-makers — and it’s clear that these efforts have had major impacts on public opinion and public policy. To this end, climate action advocates would do well to pay close attention to climate denial.”

Three approaches are suggested and detailed by McConnell, Brulle, and Farrell:

Deploy social science research and public vigilance to show how political processes are manipulated.

Encourage institutions to divest from fossil fuel corporations.

Target areas impacted by climate change where widespread public skepticism exists (such as Florida and Alaska).

Inoculation

In addition, the researchers suggest using an emerging communications technique known as “inoculation” in which the public and policymakers are made aware of key misinformation techniques as myths are being busted.

Denial101x lecture on debunking myths and innoculation theory.[vid?]

They also pointed to the need for continued research into the “networks and mechanisms of scientific misinformation campaigns” that could help scientists defend themselves against “a rise in ad hominem attacks.”

Brulle told DeSmog: “A first step in providing reliable and meaningful information that can aid the climate movement organizations and the foundation funders is to develop a research program on this organized effort to stop climate action.

“Right now, this research effort is based in a number of part-time, unfunded researchers, who all work independently and without an overall guiding research program.

“So the information developed is piecemeal, and sporadic. Developing a coherent and funded research program is a crucial research need.”

Graphic showing fact-myth-fallacy structure to debunking climate change misinformation]

Denial101x lectures adhering to Fact-Myth-Fallacy structure. Denial101x, CC BY-ND

Together with fossil fuel-backed public relations campaigns, research from Brulle has shown that environmental sectors are being massively outspent in lobbying efforts.

In research published in 2018, Brulle found that “environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector lobbying expenditures were dwarfed by a ratio of 10:1 by the spending of the sectors engaged in the supply and use of fossil fuels.”

Brulle added: “I think it is pretty much impossible to determine the extent of delay in action that the climate countermovement has been able to cause. We can certainly say it has not been helpful, and has assisted in blocking action on climate change for over 30 years.

“To move forward in addressing climate action, understanding and addressing the climate countermovement is a critical component.”

Published: 14 January 2019

Evidence-based strategies to combat scientific misinformation

Nature Climate Change (2019) | Download Citation

Abstract

Nowhere has the impact of scientific misinformation been more profound than on the issue of climate change in the United States. Effective responses to this multifaceted problem have been slow to develop, in large part because many experts have not only underestimated its impact, but have also overlooked the underlying institutional structure, organizational power and financial roots of misinformation. Fortunately, a growing body of sophisticated research has emerged that can help us to better understand these dynamics and provide the basis for developing a coordinated set of strategies across four related areas (public inoculation, legal strategies, political mechanisms and financial transparency) to thwart large-scale misinformation campaigns before they begin, or after they have taken root.

blk friday scam

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30112018/fact-check-trump-climate-science-denial-national-assessment-sanders-global-warming

Trump's administration and its allies in the climate denial community have mounted a campaign to try to discredit the Fourth National Climate Assessment, an effort that has escalated in intensity since the report's release during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Trump could not halt the peer-reviewed assessment by the U.S. government's climate scientists. The report—the most comprehensive and authoritative report on climate change and its impacts in the United States—is mandated by a law Congress passed in 1990.

But after an attempt to minimize the attention it received, by slipping it out to the public on the afternoon of the Black Friday shopping holiday, Trump flatly rejected its central finding that global warming is causing ongoing and lasting economic damage. "I don't believe it," he said.

Since then, cabinet members like Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have picked up the extraordinary assault, while some of the most prominent stalwarts of science denial have chimed in with arguments seeking to portray the report as "alarmist" and extreme.

Some of the more than 300 experts inside and outside the government who authored or otherwise took part in the assessment have staunchly defended the report, pointing out that it considered a broad range of scenarios and was based on thousands of climate studies and the work of 13 federal agencies.

"Climate science isn't a religion: it's real, whether we believe in it or not," Texas Tech University atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on Twitter in a lengthy thread seeking to set the record straight. "If our decisions are not based in reality, we are the ones who will suffer the consequences."

But the chorus of doubts could help obscure the significance of a report that poses a significant threat to the Trump administration's fossil fuel-friendly agenda. It would be an echo of a similar campaign at a pivotal moment, the so-called "Climategate" scandal in 2009, in which unsubstantiated attacks on climate scientists based on their stolen emails undercut the credibility of their work on the eve of the Copenhagen climate talks.

Now, the new assessment on the growing threat global warming poses to human life, property and ecosystems across the country, and the potential for vast economic damage, is sure to be highlighted in the renewed discussion of climate changeexpected on Capitol Hill when the Democrats take control of the House in January, and in the growing movement in the states for strong action to reduce carbon emissions.

Fact-Checking the Attacks

The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.

The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "even Obama's undersecretary for science didn't believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released." This appears to be a reference to Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP, who spent 18 months as an undersecretary in the Obama administration's energy department. Koonin has long maintained climate science is not "settled," and has argued the government should have a red-team/blue-team debate—an idea championed unsuccessfully by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Sanders also said that the National Climate Assessment "is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends." But in fact the report considered the full range of climate scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, looking at what will happen if carbon emissions decline, if they stabilize, and if they continue to grow unabated. As Hayhoe noted inher Twitter thread, "the observed increase in global carbon emissions over the past 15–20 years has been consistent with higher scenarios."
The Trump EPA put out a news release it called a "fact check" on Wednesday, citing an article on the conservative website The Daily Caller to try to bolster an assertion by Wheeler that Obama administration's science adviser John Holdren instructed the report's authors in 2015 to look at worst-case scenarios. "Mr. Wheeler's insinuation is absolutely false," Holdren, now at Harvard, responded in a statement. "Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.

Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, said the administration might intervene in future climate reports. "Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that's used for the next assessment," Wheeler said. But the report underwentseveral rounds of technical and policy reviewby the 13 federal agencies involved. There was a series of regional engagement workshops that reached more than 1,000 people in over 40 cities, with listening sessions, webinars and public comment. Anexpert external peer review of the whole report was performed by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, took issue with the reportfor including a figure that was widely quoted in the media: that U.S. GDP could take a 10 percent hit by 2100 due to climate change. The estimate was derived from an innovative, cutting-edge modeling of climate impacts on the U.S. economy published in the journal *Science*. Pielke, who often says he agrees with the core science on global warming but disputes how it is applied, argued this headline-grabbing data point should not have been included, since it reflected a scenario of more global warming than is commonly reckoned in modeling. Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and co-author of the Sciencepaper, said the team purposefully took into account the unlikely—though not impossible—scenario at the end of the charted curve because of its potentially large consequences. "We were deliberately trying to include tail risks, not just 'most likely' outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management," Kopp said in an email.

The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute prefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.

Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast. CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.

A Problem for Trump in the Courts?

The report is a high-stakes problem for the administration in both the political sphere and in the courts.

Not only do Democrats promise to elevate the issue on Capitol Hill next year, but the administration is facing legal challenges on numerous fronts over its rollback of the Obama administration's policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. States and environmentalists challenging the rollback of the Clean Power Plan and vehicle fuel economy standards are certain to point to the report's findings. It could also be used to help underpin the high-profile case by 21 children suing the United States for failing to take action to limit greenhouse gases.

"Though the President denies that climate change is even occurring, and the administration has attempted to downplay the Assessment and limit public awareness about it, the words of the report could well come back to bite the Administration in court,"Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, wrote in a blog post.

Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, said she does not expect that the attacks by the Trump administration and its allies will blunt the power of the scientists' stark assessment in the eyes of the courts.

"I think it's clear that the EPA's raising of doubts and the other high-profile public statements are designed to influence public opinion, and they may indeed influence the politics of climate change," Horowitz said. "They are not likely at all to influence the outcome in the legal arena, where the courts look very carefully at the quality of evidence.MASSIVE JUDGE APPT?!]

"The D.C. Circuit's not going to care what The Daily Caller says," Horowitz said, referring to the federal court that hears most federal regulatory cases. "It's going to care what the evidence shows."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

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DENIER IN CHIEF:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/climate-change-experts-trump-idiotic-global-warming

Tuesday, The Washington Post published a new interview with President Donald Trump. He was even more incoherent than usual in this interview, but perhaps his most off-the-rails comments were on climate change.

Among the claims Trump made in the interview were that our air and water are "at a record clean," that we "take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches" from Asia, that scientists used to say "the planet is going to freeze to death," and that "people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we're not necessarily such believers" in climate change.

As the Post noted, some scientists reached for comment on the interview were so flabbergasted they struggled to find words to reply:

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said in an email Tuesday that the president’s comments risk leaving the nation vulnerable to the ever-growing impacts of a warming planet. "Facts aren’t something we need to believe to make them true — we treat them as optional at our peril," Hayhoe said. "And if we're the president of the United States, we do so at the peril of not just ourselves but the hundreds of millions of people we're responsible for."

Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, struggled to find a response to the president's comments. "How can one possibly respond to this?" Dessler said when reached by email, calling the president's comments "idiotic" and saying Trump's main motivation seemed to be attacking the environmental policies of the Obama administration and criticizing political adversaries.

Trump has repeatedly denied the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity, and emissions, are transforming the earth's climate, at one point claiming that it was a hoax by the Chinese to limit America's economic competitiveness.

This stands in spite of the fact that his own administration just released a damning report that climate change could cost U.S. GDP hundreds of billions of dollars and kill thousands of people. Trump has said he does not believe that report and gave no coherent reason why he believes his own government officials are wrong.

no lnx many

https://www.ecowatch.com/exxonmobil-and-chevron-distorting-climate-science-2614802732.html

Yes, ExxonMobil and Chevron Are Still Distorting Climate Science

By Brenda Ekwurzel

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change. Recently, ExxonMobil received major kudos for giving $1 million to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a lobbying offshoot of the industry-backed Climate Leadership Council. Shortly before that, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum got good press for each pledging $100 million to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which amounts to less than one percent of their capital and exploration budget for 2018 (ExxonMobil's is $28 billion while Chevron's is $15.8 billion). Companies have also touted their support for the Paris climate agreement as well as their research and investments in renewables.

But, as I and my colleagues have analyzed, this "support" is a PR distraction when these companies are keeping up business-as-usual. They intend to continue producing, marketing and selling fossil fuels at current levels for the foreseeable future, which runs counter to the steep reductions in carbon dioxide and methane emissions needed to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Tuesday the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a scorecard, which analyzed what eight major fossil fuel companies are saying they're doing about climate change, and just how much these companies are doing to drastically lower their emissions.

What did we find? Contrary to media reports and shiny company press releases, most of these major fossil fuel companies continue to mischaracterize climate science.

Why is this important? Any company that makes, markets and sells a product that is the primary cause of climate change has a responsibility to stay on top of and clearly communicate with the public scientific developments regarding their product. Misrepresenting climate science and underplaying the urgency of action allows companies to justify their business as usual practices all while climate impacts, including increasingly frequent and severe weather events such as Hurricanes Harvey and Florence, get worse and costlier. Releasing inaccurate statements allows companies to "check the box" for voicing belief in climate change, while continuing to funnel tens of tens of millions of dollars to climate-denying politicians, trade associations and other industry groups that do the dirty work of opposing climate policies.

Major Fossil Fuel Companies Fail to Accurately Represent Climate Science

We measured whether companies consistently and accurately acknowledged the scientific evidence of climate change in their public platforms. Overall, they didn't do great.

We found that five of the eight companies we studied had made public statements on climate change that underplayed the need to urgently reduce emissions, emphasized scientific uncertainty and/or were blatantly incorrect. Only BP amended its statement after UCS and Barnard College called the company out for its deceptive language.

These statements are surprising since these companies have known about climate change for at least four decades now, which would be plenty of time to figure how to make it a priority to accurately convey the latest developments in climate science. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued climate assessments which companies can rely on. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment (2014) represents the latest* mainstream scientific consensus on climate change and it clearly states that "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The primary human influence is through the burning of fossil fuels.

*(Earlier this month, this group released a special report detailing the impacts of a global average temperature increase of 1.5C relative to 2C above pre-industrial levels, and pathways to limit temperature increase to that level. See my colleagues' blog series about what the report means for us and for climate policy).

Let's see how oil and gas company statements on climate change stacked up.

ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil employs a dedicated climate change team and boasts about leading research around cutting-edge technology, such as carbon capture and storage. Yet the company's statements on climate change, including the one above, do not consistently reflect the current scientific consensus around the issue.

Contrary to ExxonMobil's claims, scientific understanding of the likelihood, magnitude and time frame of climate impacts as tied to human-caused climate change has advanced greatly. Research has over the last decade developed to the point where scientists can identify and quantify the part human-caused climate change plays in many types of extreme weather and other climate impacts. For many impacts, the likelihood is high; the magnitude is severe; and the timeframe is now. Scientists have shown, for example, that the likelihood of heat wave similar in magnitude to the one that hit Europe in 2003—during which over 30,000 people died—has doubled. Scientists have also shown that human-caused climate change made the record rainfall that hit Houston during Hurricane Harvey roughly three times more likely and 15 percent more intense.

No matter how much ExxonMobil talks about using oil to lubricate wind turbines, the company knows that most of its oil and gas are being burnt by cars, by energy generation, by human activity—which is the primary cause of climate change.

Chevron

Chevron's statement misrepresents the IPCC Fifth Assessment's conclusions, as mentioned earlier, that human activity is "extremely likely" to be the dominant driver of warming since the 1950s, not simply one possible cause of many possible causes, as is implied by Chevron's phrase "due in part." Chevron's seemingly subtle shift in wording is significant because the report shows that the overwhelming majority of the world's top researchers agree that burning fossil fuels is by far and away the largest contributor to climate change. Injecting any doubt or uncertainty into that conclusion is disingenuous at best, and outright deceiving at worst.

Above: Chevron Corporation. 2018. Climate change resilience: A framework for decision making. Online here, accessed Oct. 15.

If Chevron is going to quote the IPCC, the company should, at the very least, cut-and-paste from the panel's report.

ConocoPhillips

ConocoPhillips's statement on climate science suggests the last decade-worth of climate research, including the most recent IPCC report, simply doesn't exist.

Above: ConocoPhillips. No date. Climate change position. Online here, accessed Oct. 15.

There are three major issues with the company's statement: 1) the claim that increasing atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping gases "can lead" rather than "are leading" to climate change, as has been established since at least the IPCC third assessment report, is followed by 2) highlighting uncertainties on the first point, when there are none and 3) proposing that it is sufficient for the company to "manage" global warming emissions rather than reducing them. Alone, each of these statements is problematic and inaccurately represents the mainstream scientific consensus. Together, they subvert the public's understanding of climate science and supply the company with an alibi for continuing to extract, sell and profit off of fossil fuels.

BP – Old and New

When we analyzed BP's statements from 2018 we found similarly misinforming language. But when we pointed the problematic language out to company representatives (as we did with all eight companies studied), BP promptly made changes that brought its statement back in line with climate science. As you can see in the first attempt, BP emphasizes scientific uncertainty by referring to atmospheric carbon's "possible" climate impact. Svante Arrhenius, more than a century ago, published the fundamental scientific principle that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration results in changes to Earth's temperature.

Above: BP PLC. 2018a. Energy and the environment. Online here, accessed May 22.

BP's new statement, on the other hand, is an excellent example of an accurate copy-and-paste. The company's new statement mentions the IPCC 5th Assessment and, unlike Chevron, gets its facts right in stating that human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, is extremely likely to be the primary driver of climate change.

Above: BP PLC. No date. Energy and the environment. Online here, accessed Oct. 15.

Shell

Above: First quote: Royal Dutch Shell Corporation. No date. Climate change and energy transitions. Online here, accessed, Oct. 15. Second quote: Royal Dutch Shell Corporation. 2018c. Energy Transition. Online here, accessed July 10.

Shell's PR machine has gone into overdrive recently in an effort to paint the company as a climate leader.While Shell falls short in a number of areas, its statements on climate science and the need to reach net-zero emissions are accurate and consistent. There's no equivocating, no hedging, no backsliding, no prevaricating and no hiding inaccurate climate statements on less popular pages of its website. Climate change is real, it's caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, and we need to make changes immediately. Check, check and check.

Additional Studies on the Language of Climate Deception

Several peer-reviewed academic papers have documented how fossil fuel companies have used public communications to mislead the public about the state of climate science and its implications. A University of Reading study published this year showed that up until the mid-2000s, climate change was discussed as a problem with a solution; more recently fossil fuel company language has portrayed climate change as unpredictable and unknowable. Last year, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes analyzed 187 climate change communications by ExxonMobil and found that while company's scientists were quietly contributing to climate science and writing reports about it to company executives, the company was paying for advertisements that told a different story.

Watchdogging Matters

Whether through outright climate denial, sowing public confusion on climate science, or funding of third-party groups that spread climate disinformation, each of these companies has tried to obscure climate science. But, as we saw with BP, the threat of public exposure and pressure apparently pushed the company to correct its website. As with most companies, major fossil fuel companies want to avoid the reputational risk of being branded climate deniers. This is why public watchdogging really matters.

Fossil fuel companies need to acknowledge scientific evidence that shows

The extraction and burning of their product is the main driver of climate change and,

avoiding the worst climate impacts requires dramatic cuts to carbon emissions immediately.

UCS and members of our science network and supporters will continue to hold these companies accountable for what they (and their trade groups) say and do on climate change.

Brenda Ekwurzel is a senior climate scientist and the director of climate science at UCS.

Relationships among conspiratorial beliefs, conservatism and climate scepticism across nations

Nature Climate Changevolume 8, pages614–620 (2018) | Download Citation

Abstract

Studies showing that scepticism about anthropogenic climate change is shaped, in part, by conspiratorial and conservative ideologies are based on data primarily collected in the United States. Thus, it may be that the ideological nature of climate change beliefs reflects something distinctive about the United States rather than being an international phenomenon. Here we find that positive correlations between climate scepticism and indices of ideology were stronger and more consistent in the United States than in the other 24 nations tested. This suggests that there is a political culture in the United States that offers particularly strong encouragement for citizens to appraise climate science through the lens of their worldviews. Furthermore, the weak relationships between ideology and climate scepticism in the majority of nations suggest that there is little inherent to conspiratorial ideation or conservative ideologies that predisposes people to reject climate science, a finding that has encouraging implications for climate mitigation efforts globally.

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http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2017-29745-009.html

jiu

Attitude Roots and Jiu Jitsu Persuasion: Understanding and Overcoming the Motivated Rejection of Science

Matthew J. Hornsey , Kelly S. Fielding

Author Affiliations

Hornsey, M. J., & Fielding, K. S. (2017). Attitude roots and Jiu Jitsu persuasion: Understanding and overcoming the motivated rejection of science. American Psychologist, 72(5), 459-473. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040437

Abstract

There is a worryingly large chasm between scientific consensus and popular opinion. Roughly one third of Americans are skeptical that humans are primarily responsible for climate change; rates of some infectious diseases are climbing in the face of anti-immunization beliefs; and significant numbers of the population worldwide are antievolution creationists. It is easy to assume that resistance to an evidence-based message is a result of ignorance or failure to grasp evidence (the “deficit model” of science communication). But increasingly, theorists understand there are limits to this approach, and that if people are motivated to reject science, then repeating evidence will have little impact. In an effort to create a transtheoretical language for describing these underlying motivations, we introduce the notion of “attitude roots.” Attitude roots are the underlying fears, ideologies, worldviews, and identity needs that sustain and motivate specific “surface” attitudes like climate skepticism and creationism. It is the antiscience attitude that people hear and see, but it is the attitude root—what lies under the surface—that allows the surface attitudes to survive even when they are challenged by evidence. We group these attitude roots within 6 themes—worldviews, conspiratorial ideation, vested interests, personal identity expression, social identity needs, and fears and phobias—and review literature relevant to them. We then use these insights to develop a “jiu jitsu” model of persuasion that places emphasis on creating change by aligning with (rather than competing with) these attitude roots.

KEYWORDS:

climate change skepticism, immunization, motivated cognition, rejection of science, social identity

The Age of Enlightenment heralded an emphasis on reason and observation, and a rejection of beliefs grounded in fear, tradition, and faith. This revolution has only been partly successful, with many people holding beliefs that contradict scientific consensus. For example, despite the fact that 97% of climate scientists agree that the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere is influencing our climate (Cook et al., 2016), roughly one third of the population doubt that climate change is primarily caused by human activity (Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Howe, 2013; Leviston, Price, Malkin, & McCrea, 2014). After a century-long slide in infectious disease rates, there has been a recent resurgence of measles, rubella, mumps, and whooping cough, a trend that is partly attributable to the mistaken belief that vaccinations can cause illness rather than preventing it (van Panhuis et al., 2013). A 2014 Gallup poll showed that 42% of Americans believe that humans were created by God in their present form, and half or more of teachers in Romania, Morocco, South Africa, and Algeria are antievolution creationists (Clément, 2015; Clément & Quessada, 2009). These headline issues form part of a spectrum of “anti-enlightenment” beliefs, such as homeopathy, parapsychology, and other magical or mystical beliefs that can be collectively considered outside the auspices of science. The growing chasm between scientific opinion and popular opinion has recently been the topic of heated discussion, with editorials in Science (Leshner, 2015), a special issue in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Fischhoff & Scheufele, 2014), and a feature article in National Geographic (Achenbach, 2015).

An intuitive first response to unscientific attitudes is explication: to repeat the evidence in language that is as clear and digestible as possible. The principle of explication assumes that evidence, data, and argument drive attitudes. But increasingly there is evidence that the path works the other way around, too: People develop an attitude, and are motivated to search for evidence to service the attitude. In other words, people do not adopt the scientific process, weighing up the evidence before reaching a conclusion. Rather, they often operate like cognitive lawyers, engaging in a biased and selective search for information, with a view to reinforcing their preexisting attitude (Kunda, 1990). In this process of motivated reasoning, evidence is sampled and critiqued selectively in order to reinforce what one wants to believe: strong antiattitudinal arguments are ignored or dismissed, whereas weak proattitudinal arguments are treated as definitive.

Within the literature, there have already been efforts to identify motives that lead people to reject scientific messages, but these insights are scattered across multiple theoretical traditions and disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology, communication, sociology, political science). One goal of this article, then, is to synthesize the motives that have received empirical attention, to present some new motives that have received little attention, and to do so using a transtheoretical language that can help explain a wide range of “anti-enlightenment” beliefs. The second goal is to use these insights to develop a model of science communication that places emphasis on what we call the “attitude roots”: the beliefs, ideologies, fears, and identity issues that motivate people to want to reject scientific consensus. To effectively convert people who reject scientific evidence, it is necessary to identify their attitude roots, and then to tailor communication strategies to work with—rather than against—these underlying motives.

Where Do Counterscientific Beliefs Come From? The Notion of “Attitude Roots”

In an effort to create a transtheoretical language for describing underlying motivations, we distinguish between “surface attitudes” and “attitude roots.” What lies above the surface—the leaves and branches in our metaphor—are specific and concrete attitudes (e.g., creationism, climate skepticism). What lies beneath the surface—the “attitude roots”—are the underlying fears, ideologies, worldviews, vested interests, and identity needs that sustain and motivate those attitudes. It is the antiscience attitude that people hear and see, but it is the attitude root—what lies under the surface—that lends the attitude psychological power and coherence. It is also the root structure that maintains stability and allows the surface attitudes to survive even when they are challenged by evidence. Having formed the attitude, people may seek out evidence, but in a biased and selective way (i.e., with the aim of reinforcing their attitude, or legitimizing it in the eyes of others). If that evidence is refuted, attitude holders will not necessarily discard their beliefs. Rather, they may dismiss the contradictory evidence or generate new arguments to take their place.

In this article we catalogue attitude roots that motivate and sustain antiscience beliefs. We group these attitude roots within six themes: (a) ideologies, values, and worldviews; (b) conspiratorial ideation; (c) vested interests; (d) personal identity expression; (e) social identityneeds; and (f) fears and phobias. These themes were extracted after an exhaustive literature search on motivated cognition, biased assimilation, attitude functions, and attitudes toward science (e.g., climate change skepticism, evolution beliefs, antivaccination attitudes). Our argument is that only one of these attitude roots needs to be active to motivate people to reject science, but we do not presume that one is any more potent than the other: Differences between individuals and contexts will likely influence whether an attitude root surfaces as an antiscience attitude. As elaborated later, however, we do believe that the attitude roots can share complex interrelationships, meaning that in combination they could be more powerful than if one were to operate individually. The mechanisms that connect these attitude roots to the motivated rejection of science are summarized in Table 1.

....

ref1

https://YYY.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/dec/06/more-terrifying-than-trump-the-booming-conspiracy-culture-of-climate-science-denial

For years now geologists have been politely but forcefully arguing over the existence or otherwise of a new epoch – one that might have started decades ago.

Some of the world’s most respected geologists and scientists reckon humans have had such a profound impact on the Earth that we’ve now moved out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene.

It’s not official. But it’s close.

Dropping nuclear bombs and burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels will do that to a planet, as will clearing swaths of forests to make way for food production and supermarket car parks and the like.

The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age

That’s all in the real world though, and sometimes you might get the horrible, chilling idea that when it comes to the production of our thoughts and ideas, that’s not the place a lot of us live anymore.

So I’d like to also propose the idea of an impending new epoch – the Trumpocene – that in the spirit of the era itself is based solely on a few thoughts held loosely together with hyperlinks and a general feeling of malaise.

In the Trumpocene, the epoch-defining impacts of climate change are nothing more than a conspiracy. Even if these impacts are real, then they’re probably good for us.

The era is named, of course, for the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, the Republican pick for US president whose candidacy has been defined by a loose grasp of facts, jingoistic posturing, populist rhetoric, his amazing hair and his treatment of women.

So what are the things that might define the Trumpocene?

Is it the point at which large numbers of people started to reject the views of large groups of actual experts – people with university qualifications and things – in exchange for the views of anyone who agrees with them? (Brexit, anyone?)

How about that point when a critical mass of people have become convinced that they can Google their way out of the laws of physics?

Let’s go and dig for evidence of the Trumpocene.

A few months ago, Trump gave an interview to polemicist and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who could be the angriest person on the internet.

Jones has a regular online radio and TV show called Infowars that has expanded beyond being a vehicle for Jones’s cult personality to include regular news bulletins and a line in “alternative” health therapies.

Las Vegas shooting was 'false flag' operation, InfoWars founder claims

Jones thinks that climate change is a scam being forced on us by the United Nations, which, in turn, is a totalitarian regime and kingpin of a new world order.

The a fervent Trump supporter has told his viewers that the both US president, Barack Obama, and the Democrat nominee, Hilary Clinton, were “literal demons” who smelt of sulphur. I kid you not.

In Australia, we have a senator who similarly sees climate change as a thing made up by the UN. Our top-rating radio host, Alan Jones (no relation), has said climate science is “witchcraft”.

Now, before I go on, there’s a prevailing view (often expressed in the comments of this blog) that climate science deniers and oddballs like Alex Jones should be ignored. In some ways, those commenters are right.

But then you look at the popularity of people like Jones and see that, to increasing numbers of people, they are not people to be ignored, but are paragons of fearless truth-telling.

There’s a demographic to which rhetoric from people like Jones and, more broadly, Trump, appeals.

Jones’s YouTube account has about 1.6 million subscribers and is growing. He has 1.2m likes on his Facebook account. His website, according to SimilarWeb, was getting 27m pageviews a month back in February. Now it’s at 36m.

Earlier this year Jones snagged a rare interview with the conservative blogger Matt Drudge. Jones and Drudge expressed mutual admiration.

Drudge’s news and opinion aggregator website, the Drudge Report, is a genuine web phenomenon and considered hugely influential.

With about 1.37bn page views a month, the Drudge Report is the second-ranked media site in the United States — 600m views behind msn.com but 300m ahead of Google’s news page.

The Drudge Report also tends to link to news items that disparage any action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s now a whole media ecosystem that climate science denialism can exist inside, where there’s little scrutiny of the views of deniers. US-based sites like the Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart and Daily Caller are part of that ecosystem.

As the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade notes,Breitbart “has the dubious honour of challenging Fox News’s status as America’s most influential conservative media outlet”.

Not only is the outlet having influence, but its executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, is running Trump’s campaign.

Breitbart too is growing its audience, according to those SimilarWeb statistics. In February 2016 the site registered 89m page views. In August, it was up to 143m.

Conspiracy central: the activists painting Clinton as a sick, terrorist-friendly killer

Another characteristic of the Trumpocene might be the heightened levels of hubris combined with triumphant rhetoric and the tendency towards insults.

The Breitbart writer James Delingpole, for example, rejects the evidence of human-caused climate change. Last week he described a Royal Society fellow and climate scientist as a “puffed-up missy”.

“What a bunch of disgraceful, money-grubbing, charlatans the climate alarmists are,” wrote Delingpole, before then trying to link “climate alarmists” with child abusers.

For a while, maybe the Trumpocene and the Anthropocene can coexist.

But even though they exist on separate plains, can we really afford to dismiss the impact of either of them?

===

ref2

https://YYY.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/dec/06/more-terrifying-than-trump-the-booming-conspiracy-culture-of-climate-science-denial

no lnx

more terrifying than Trump? The booming conspiracy culture of climate science denial

Graham Readfearn

Conspiracy websites and hyperpartisan media outlets are building huge online audiences who want to hear climate change is a hoax

@readfearn

Tue 6 Dec 2016 01.52 EST Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 12.08

The US president-elect, Donald Trump, who has praised the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars.com, Alex Jones. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Back in December 2015, Donald Trump gave a 30-minute live interview to the website Infowars.com and its combustible leader, Alex Jones.

“Your reputation is amazing and I will not let you down,” said Trump, who, at the time, was leading in most polls for the Republican presidential nomination.

Jones, a fervent Trump supporter, is a conspiracy theorist writ large. He insists there is “iron clad” evidence that the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US were an “inside job”.

How a dubious tweet about illegal votes found its way to Trump's megaphone

Jones has also said that in 1996 governments deployed a worldwide program to secretly put chemicals into the fuel of aircraft to poison people. These “chemtrails” don’t hurt the “globalists” though, because Jones says they have a “special detox”.

Oh, and Jones also thinks climate change is a hoax.

Climate change is an issue he covers regularly on his shows, where he has interviewed climate science deniers such as Christopher Monckton (a familiar name to Australians given his multiple speaking tours here), Marc Morano and James Delingpole.

While it’s easy to dismiss the conspiracy culture pushed by Jones as pseudoscientific rubbish, it is not so easy to dismiss the size of the audience he has been building. Jones’s website gets 57m page views per month – double where it was six months ago.

According to analytics site Social Blade, the Alex Jones YouTube channel has 1.8m subscribers and just racked up its one billionth (that’s not a typo) video view. (For comparison, the BBC News YouTube channel has 992,000 subscribers.)

Jones’s Infowars site is part of an ecosystem of hyperpartisan media outlets that insist climate change is a hoax. Like Jones, that ecosystem is rapidly building a receptive online audience.

Those sites can now reach hundreds of millions of people with headlines insisting that human-caused climate change is a hoax, that global warming has stopped or that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is good.

One example. The most popular climate change story across social media in the past six months was not some diligently researched piece from one of the many very good science journalists writing for major news organisations around the world.

Rather, the story claimed that thousands of scientists had come forward to declare that climate change was a hoax. The writer was a guy running a website in Los Angeles who worked for eight years for the UK conspiracy theorist David Icke.

Icke thinks the moon might be some sort of spaceship, that the world is controlled by a globalist illuminati and, yes, that climate change is a hoax. Icke is a regular guest on Infowars.

Infowars will often source material from Breitbart – the website that used to be run by Trump’s campaign chairman and soon-to-be chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

Many of Breitbart’s most popular climate change items are written by Delingpole, a British polemicist. Guess what he thinks of climate change?

Given that climate science denial has become a part of the Republican party’s identity, it was hardly surprising that the GOP-led House of Representatives committee on science should tweet a link to a Breitbart climate story written by Delingpole (a story based on a deeply misleading article in the UK’s Daily Mail).

Breitbart is also building its audience. According to data from SimilarWeb, the site now gets 168m page views per month, doubling its reach in the past six months.

The Drudge Report – the wildly popular conservative-leaning news aggregator site with 1.7bn page views a month – also helps drive traffic to sites such as Infowars and Breitbart. Its founder, Matt Drudge, was another recent guest of Jones.

Since Trump won the US election, there has been much talk of the influence of “fake news”, with Facebook in particular identified as a key conduit. That encompasses news that is blatantly fabricated but also lounge room content farms that pass themselves off as news. Then there are the hyperpartisan opinion sites.

I’m happy to admit the online growth and reach of climate science denialists and conspiracy theorists terrifies me. Why?

LeBron James will not stay at Trump-branded hotel in New York

Thinking Error at the Root of Science Denial

By Jeremy P. Shapiro

Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent [members](https://youtu.be/ikax0Y0NJsY)members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy. Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.

No Shades of Gray

As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book "Psychotherapeutic Diagrams," dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.

In this type of cognition, a spectrum of possibilities is divided into two parts, with a blurring of distinctions within those categories. Shades of gray are missed; everything is considered either black or white. Dichotomous thinking is not always or inevitably wrong, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities because these usually involve spectrums of possibilities, not binaries.

Spectrums are sometimes split in very asymmetric ways, with one-half of the binary much larger than the other. For example, perfectionists categorize their work as either perfect or unsatisfactory; good and very good outcomes are lumped together with poor ones in the unsatisfactory category. In borderline personality disorder, relationship partners are perceived as either all good or all bad, so one hurtful behavior catapults the partner from the good to the bad category. It's like a pass/fail grading system in which 100 percent correct earns a P and everything else gets an F.

In my observations, I see science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims. In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy. Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt, regardless of the amount of supportive evidence.

Similarly, deniers perceive the spectrum of scientific agreement as divided into two unequal parts: perfect consensus and no consensus at all. Any departure from 100 percent agreement is categorized as a lack of agreement, which is misinterpreted as indicating fundamental controversy in the field.

There Is No 'Proof' in Science

In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of "proof."

Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as "unproven." Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.

I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

For example, climate change skeptics jump from the realization that we do not completely understand all climate-related variables to the inference that we have no reliable knowledge at all. Similarly, they give equal weight to the 97 percent of climate scientists who believe in human-caused global warming and the 3 percent who do not, even though many of the latter receive support from the fossil fuels industry.

This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists. They seem to misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of this body of research is fundamentally in doubt. For example, the biologist James Shapiro (no relation) discovered a cellular mechanism of genomic change that Darwin did not know about. Shapiro views his research as adding to evolutionary theory, not upending it. Nonetheless, his discovery and others like it, refracted through the lens of dichotomous thinking, results in articles with titles like, "Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken" by Paul Nelson and David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute, which promotes the theory of "intelligent design." Shapiro insists that his research provides no support for intelligent design, but proponents of this pseudoscience repeatedly cite his work as if it does.

For his part, Trump engages in dichotomous thinking about the possibility of a link between childhood vaccinations and autism. Despite exhaustive research and the consensus of all major medical organizations that no link exists, Trump has often cited a link between vaccines and autism and he advocates changing the standard vaccination protocol to protect against this nonexistent danger.

There is a vast gulf between perfect knowledge and total ignorance, and we live most of our lives in this gulf. Informed decision-making in the real world can never be perfectly informed, but responding to the inevitable uncertainties by ignoring the best available evidence is no substitute for the imperfect approach to knowledge called science.

ELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

===

https://www.alternet.org/psychologist-explains-thinking-error-root-science-denial

there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent [members](https://youtu.be/ikax0Y0NJsY)members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways....

As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.

...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03052018/un-climate-talks-trump-negotiators-bonn-pompeo-bolton-kudlow-foreign-policy

international climate negotiators meet in Bonn this week to draft rules for carrying out the Paris Agreement on climate change, the United States delegation presents a wraithlike enigma.

Even though the Trump administration has renounced the treaty, the United States has not yet withdrawn, and Washington would like to influence the discussions. But the Trump foreign policy team, now more than ever, is a tight cabal of hard-line foes of climate action.

That puts the career diplomats who lead the U.S. delegation in an awkward spot as the rest of the world works out the details of the emerging Paris rulebook, due to be adopted by the end of the year. The American negotiators might like for it to provide for greater transparency and to avoid different rules for developed and developing nations, two long-standing goals of U.S. climate diplomacy. But they have no bargaining chips, such as money for sustainable development or bold targets for deeper cuts in U.S. emissions.

It has been jarring that the United States, historically the largest contributor to the world's carbon dioxide buildup and until recently a driving force behind the Paris Agreement, to be at the table but not ante up. Now, other players worry that President Donald Trump's new team will overturn the card table.

That's particularly troubling at a time when Europe, China and other nations will in the next few years need to set more ambitious targets than they have committed to so far in order to meet the Paris goals of bringing net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero in the next several decades.

"People are trying to figure out how do you keep progress in the system without the U.S. as an active and positive contributor," said Alden Meyer, the director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists who has been attending these meetings for decades. "If that switches, and the U.S. becomes an active opponent or blocker, then you've got a bigger problem."

"That is the concern, given some of the statements [the new Trump administration appointees have] made about reality of the climate problem ... and their overall attitude to the Paris Agreement," Meyer said.

Denial in the White House

Trump's top advisers—none of whom are at the Bonn talks—now include Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has said that America should not "bow down to radical environmentalists"; chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who praised Trump's retreat from Paris as ending "the war on fossil fuels"; and national security adviser John Bolton, who views the accord as a threat to U.S. sovereignty. Trump's entire cabinet is overwhelmingly hostile to the climate treaty, but these three newcomers hold special sway.

Until recently, hope ran high among other delegations that Trump's previous top economic and foreign advisers would persuade the president to keep the U.S. commitment to Paris.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, well-acquainted with the history of climate negotiations as former chief executive of Exxon, had told Congress he believed that the U.S. should keep "a seat at the table." Former economic adviser Gary Cohn had given a warm hearing to former Secretary of State James Baker and allies who came to the White House early on to make the conservative case for a carbon tax—earning him the derogatory nickname "Carbon Tax Cohn" among his opponents on Trump's staff. And although Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the previous national security adviser, muted his views on the Paris Agreement, many close observers, including President Obama's climate envoy Todd Stern, said they had expected him to be an advocate for the U.S. to stay in the agreement, a high priority for military allies in NATO and for possible adversaries like China.

But their advocacy ran headlong into Trump's zeal to fulfill his campaign promise to "cancel" the Paris accord. And they are all gone.

Fine Print and Lots of Dialogue

Trigg Talley, director of the U.S. State Department's Office of Global Change, is leading the team of career civil servants who are going through the paces during the talks this week in Bonn.

It's a mix of nitty-gritty deliberations on treaty technicalities and touchy-feely dialogue on broader issues of fairness and ambition, and nothing is expected to be resolved there. The aim is to reach consensus on the next steps in time for the annual Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP 24, in the historic coal mining town of Katowice, Poland, at the end of this year.

The process "to bring the Paris Agreement fully to life and make it work in very real terms [is] the most critical moment for global political leadership on climate change since the outcome in Paris in 2015," said David Waskow, director of international climate action for the World Resources Institute.

The United States and China are co-chairing a working group on transparency issues—the rules to provide accurate and precise measurement, reporting and verification on the steps nations have taken to cut carbon emissions.

In addition to pushing for transparency, U.S. negotiators are expected to resist any efforts at "bifurcation," or separate pathways for rich and poor nations.

Both are stances that the U.S. has maintained in the talks through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Other gnarly questions include how much financial assistance to give poorer nationsfor controlling their pollution and adapting to the changing climate; how to compensate them for damages already being incurred, such as drought, famine, floods, storms and rising seas; and how to design workable international offsets so that nations can trade credit for pollution reductions among themselves in a yet-to-be-defined carbon marketplace.

"At this stage, at least, the politics around the State Department hasn't unduly affected [the U.S. negotiating team's] ability to carry forward with what I guess you could call the traditional U.S. negotiating objectives," Waskow said. "But the overlay for all of this is Trump's intention to withdraw from Paris, and I don't think we should be dissuaded at all from seeing that as the central orientation of the president and ultimately the administration."

The absence of U.S. leadership at Bonn may be keenly felt in the one-day session scheduled for May 8 dedicated to the so-called Talanoa Dialogue, the process to reexamine the commitments that individual nations have made so far. (Fiji, the current chair of the talks, chose the traditional word "Talanoa" to reflect a process of inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue.)

So far, there are 48 submissions to the dialogue representing the views of 178 countries that are parties to the Paris Agreement, as well as hundreds of submissions by non-governmental organizations, addressing how nations might raise their ambitions. The United States is among about 20 nations that had offered no submission as of Wednesday. (Other large carbon emitters that have not made Talanoa Dialogue submissions include Canada and Brazil.)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is scheduled to contribute to the discussion this fall in the form of a special report on the science behind a tougher goal, keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. But the national commitments that have been made under the Paris Agreement so far only get the world a third of the way to the goal of keeping the temperature increase below 2°C, as the United Nations Environment Program's "Emissions Gap" reportshowed last year.

"We don't have to wait for the IPCC report to know that we are way behind the curve," said Meyer.

Room for Hope?

Although few observers of the climate talks have illusions that the Trump administration—especially with its new foreign policy team—will offer to set stronger goals to cut carbon emissions, French President Emmanuel Macron's remarks before Congress last week demonstrated that some world leaders still hold out hope that the United States will return to the climate fight in the long run.

"I am sure, one day, the United States will come back and join the Paris Agreement," Macron told Congress. "Let us face it: There is no Planet B."

And when Pompeo, during his confirmation hearing, faced a question on climate change from Sen. Jeff Merkley, (D-Ore.), he replied: "I ... believe the climate is changing, that there's a warming taking place. I'm happy to concede that there's a human component to that. I'm equally prepared to tell you that as we find tools that are effective to prevent the risk to the United States ... the State Department ought to appropriately be involved in them." (In fact, human causes are behind most or all of the observed warming in recent decades, and the risks go beyond what affects the United States. International diplomacy also is needed to address the fact that the U.S. and other developed countries are largely to blame for the warming seen so far, which presents worse risks to nations like small island states that have contributed little to atmospheric carbon emissions.)

One avowed optimist is the Trump White House'sformerinternational climate adviser, George David Banks, who had supported staying in the Paris Agreement. He maintains that the hard-line U.S. stand puts the nation in a stronger negotiating position when it comes to the talks now underway. That's because the rest of the world knows the Trump administration is willing to walk away, he argues.

"The Trump administration could not have negotiated the Paris Agreement—it took the Obama administration to do that," argues Banks. "But now that the international community has invested so much political capital in the agreement, the Trump administration has much more leverage than a Hillary Clinton administration would have had in finalizing these points. It's an interesting situation."

But on top of the changes in Trump's top echelon of foreign policy advisers, recent staff turnover at the White House adds to uncertainty around the future U.S. role in the climate talks.

Banks, who served as a climate negotiator in President George W. Bush's administration, resigned from his Trump administration post earlier this year when he could not obtain a security clearance. Trump's top domestic energy adviser, Michael Catanzaro, has also resigned to return to his former lobbying practice. Banks and Catanzaro, both of whom have years of experience working on energy issues, have been replaced by two young newcomers to the field. GOP political operative Wells Griffith, whose only previous experience in energy was a one-year stint in Trump's Energy Department, has been appointed to lead international climate and energy strategy for the White House, while Francis Brooke, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence who moderated a panel on fossil fuels at last year's climate talks, will take Catanzaro's place as top domestic energy adviser.

Observers also are watching to see if the Trump administration follows through on a plan, first reported by Bloomberg, to nominate Paula Dobriansky, who was a lead climate negotiator under President George W. Bush, as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department. Dobriansky's past statements indicate that she accepts the reality of manmade climate change, although she favors "collaboration, not coercion," and close partnerships with industry. (When Bush backed out of the Kyoto accord, she gave creditto the oil lobby.)

For the time being, Meyer sees the U.S. negotiating team as significantly hampered by its lack of high-level support and the power to deal. If his assessment is correct, even if the U.S. returns to the Paris Agreement in the future, it may be under rules that it was unable to influence.

"You basically have a loss of leadership," he said. "The [U.S.] team is doing the best they can on the technical rules, but obviously they don't have as much leverage on that issue when they are not playing on other issues. They are negotiating with one hand tied behind their back, and that creates a vacuum that others are trying to figure out how to fill."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY

CLIMATE DENIAL

CLIMATE CHANGE

PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

DONALD TRUMP

MIKE POMPEO

===

https://www.desmog.uk/2018/03/28/it-s-very-male-dominated-space-welcome-sexist-world-brexit-and-climate-science-denial

Do Brexiters and climate science deniers have a problem with women?

DeSmog UK has previously drawn links between climate science denial outfits based out of offices at 55 Tufton St, just around the corner from parliament. And research has shown that the impacts of climate change and Brexit will both affect the UK’s women disproportionately.

Yet, there is only a small percentage of women in leadership roles at organisations pushing for Brexit and to dampen the UK’s climate commitments, a DeSmog UK investigation reveals — and women who do speak out against these agendas are often subjected to horrific sexist abuse.

Male-Dominated

The new analysis shows that only around 16 percent of leadership roles at Westminster-based, pro-Brexit, and Eurosceptic organisations are occupied by women.

In the analysis, ‘leadership roles’ were defined as directors, presidents, chief executives and chairmen (and their deputies or policy advisors) and directors or heads of research or policy, plus senior fellows where they were responsible for significant research/policy leadership. For a more detailed breakdown see below.

When roles include board members, trustees, advisors and fellows were included, the number rises very slightly to about 27 percent; with women occupying under one-third of the positions.

The UK’s most prominent climate science denial think tank, the GWPF, is also hugely male dominated - with just one woman and 35 men at leadership level.

...

https://www.alternet.org/environment/republican-climate-denialism-has-sunk-staggering-new-low-under-trump

Climate and weather are not the same thing, but good luck convincing the president of the United States of that basic fact. As if his tweets dismissing global warming as a “hoax” manufactured by the Chinese and his decision to pull the U.S. out of the multinational Paris Agreement on climate change weren’t depressing enough, now there is evidence that Donald Trump’s determination to make the Republican Party the “stupid party” has been a wild success.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

5:01 PM - Dec 28, 2017

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199K people are talking about this

As Americans have drifted further apart on a wide variety of issues over the past few years, perhaps nothing exemplifies the growing gulf between supporters of the two major parties more than climate change. (Gun control is a similarly divisive issue, especially now.) In the Trump era, Republicans appear to have significantly regressed in their beliefs about climate change -- which is admittedly saying something.

Fewer Republicans say they believe in a scientific consensus on climate change, a year into Trump’s presidency, than said they did shortly after he took office, according to a new Gallup poll. Released this week, Gallup's annual survey on the environment found that Trump has pushed Republicans to be more extreme on issues concerning the environment, specifically climate change.

While more Americans think that climate change will pose a serious threat in their lifetime than at any other time since 1997, according to Gallup, Republicans remain more skeptical than ever.

Only a third of Republicans said they worry about climate change or even acknowledge that it is already happening, down 3 percentage points from the year prior. Just 35 percent of Republicans believed global warming was caused by humans, compared with 40 percent at about this time in 2017, a few months after Trump took office.

In 2017, 53 percent of Republicans agreed that most scientists believe climate change is occurring. That number declined 11 percentage points during Trump’s first year in office to 42 percent in 2018. Just to clarify that: A majority of Republicans now reject not merely the idea that climate change is real, but the idea that most scientists believe it is real. That suggests an imperviousness to fact that goes well beyond unorthodox opinion into outright delusion.

“President Donald Trump, who has called global warming a ‘hoax,’ may have contributed to this widening divide by reversing a number of government actions to address the issue,” Gallup said regarding the data.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

12:15 PM - Nov 6, 2012

67.1K

117K people are talking about this

In fact, 97 percent of climate scientists believe that global warming is caused by human activities. But according to a new report on Perceptions of Science in Americafrom the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, only 39 percent of U.S. adults trust climate scientists “a lot” to provide full and accurate information about the causes of climate change. Although last year was the second warmest year on record, behind only 2016, nearly 70 percent of Republican respondents told Gallup that the threat of climate change is "exaggerated," an increase from 66 percent last year. Only 4 percent of Democrats shared that view.

Trump has waged a successful war against the scientific consensus on climate change, but as with nearly all his most popular positions, he simply rebranded a belief that was widely held by many conservatives well before his ascendance.

Beginning with the Tea Party, the grassroots movement against the Obama administration that was heavily funded by GOP megadonors with personal investments in the fossil fuel industry, conservative Republicans have long embraced climate-change denialism. In 2013, Pew found that while 61 percent of Republicans who did not align with the Tea Party believed in climate change, 70 percent of Tea Party members did not.

Since then, Republicans have only grown more unified in their denialism. Now more than 59 percent of Republicans in the House, and 73 percent of Republicans in the Senate, doubt humans’ impact on climate change, according to a ThinkProgress analysis. During Trump’s first 100 days, the House and Senate voted against environmental protections 42 times. Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has removed numerous references to climate change from EPA documents, and reportedly ordered staffers to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about climate change and mankind’s role in the crisis.

Partisanship soaks into every public discussion in America, and Republicans’ response to their party’s denialism is to be expected in these increasingly polarized times. But the Trump administration's anti-scientific and counter-factual stance on climate also seems to be swaying the opinion of voters not affiliated with the Republican Party. Independent voters have grown more doubtful of scientists’ warnings about climate change over the past year, according to Gallup.

Even as the U.S. spent more money on weather-related disasters in 2017 than in any previous before, as devastating hurricanes battered several southern states and the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, independents who believe global warming is caused by human activities fell to 62 percent from 70 percent the year before.

Scientists believe that warming temperatures likely contributed to the destructiveness of last year’s storms, and the cost of climate change is only expected to increase. Still, in a strange and notable finding, conservative Republicans become less likely to agree that “there is ‘solid evidence’ of recent global warming due ‘mostly’ to ‘human activity such as burning fossil fuels’” the more educated they are, according to the report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Trump’s campaign against climate science is working on conservatives and independents, and that is certainly worrying. But there is some good news for climate sanity buried in the latest public opinion surveys. A majority of Republicans in swing states won by Trump in the last election — namely Ohio and Pennsylvania — said they were more likely to support a candidate committed to transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, according to a poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research conducted in conjunction with the Sierra Club.

Trump has led the Republican Party to become the only major political party in the developed world to reject the science on climate change, which leaves the door wide open for Democrats to take bold positions to tackle the crisis. As polling shows, moderation simply won't work to win over Republicans who are trapped in denial.

Sophia Tesfaye is the Deputy Politics Editor at Salon.

no link

https://www.alternet.org/environment/wall-shame-top-10-climate-deniers-trump-administration

usual suspects plus

Earlier this month, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt fired a handful of university researchers from the EPA’s Scientific Advisory board and apparently forgot to tell them—at least two told the Huffington Post they learned about their dismissal from reporters. This came after Pruitt released new rules barring scientists who receive EPA research funding from sitting on the board and suggesting how their research be applied, opening the door for more industry-friendly advisers. University of Minnesota professor Deborah Swackhamer, a former chair of the board and one of those recently let go, called the move “scientific censorship.”

The 17 new appointees named for the board include red-state regulators and industry representatives. Robert Phalen, one of the only academics nominated, frequently spoke in opposition to air pollution-related regulations as a researcher with the University of California, Irvine, and in 2012 asserted, “Modern air is a little too clean for optimum health."

Former Vice President Al Gore, one of the leading voices fighting for action on climate change, met with President Trump during the transition to try to influence his thinking. “I haven’t had any conversations with [Trump] since his speech to withdraw from Paris," Gore told the Guardian last month. "I tried my best and thought he’d come to his senses but I've been proven wrong."

https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-greed-fear-and-our-own-biases-blind-us-realities-climate-change

Climate Science Special Report that the Trump administration released last Friday is straightforward and relentlessly sobering. Scientists from 13 government agencies agree that the long-term global warming trend is "unambiguous" and that human activity is responsible. There is, they tell us, "no convincing alternative explanation."

Meanwhile, the president whose administration released the report maintains that climate change is a hoax and he and his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, resist efforts to address it.

What's going on? How is this possible? Short-term economic self-interest (i.e., greed) is the driver for the energy industry, its supporters and their propaganda. But it's the psychological factors, and the biology in which they're grounded, that sustain denial. If we're going to mobilize Americans to address climate change, we first have to understand what they're thinking and why, and then help them change their minds.

The belief that human activity is not causing global warming is widespread outside of as well as within the White House. And it's remarkably resistant to evidence. Ninety-seven percent of scientific papers agree that humans are causing climate change, but 30 percent of American adults remain unconvinced.

Many attribute this denial to mistrust of science and the "elites" who are devoted to it. This is, at best, only partially true. A recent Pew survey shows a striking difference between trust in medical (and other scientists) and climate scientists. The vast majority of us still believe in the people who design our heart monitors and keep our planes flying.

Obviously, there are other reasons for climate denial. Fear of its possible apocalyptic consequences certainly encourages denial in all of us. But while most of us face the facts—perhaps with great reluctance—others turn stubbornly away.

Several studies show that such resolute deniers are far more likely to be politically conservative, white and older, and that twice as many are men. Researchers suggest that "social dominance orientation"—a tendency to conform to traditional values and to put faith in beneficial, protective hierarchic structures—predicts climate change denial.

This faith is, of course, molded by energy corporations, the scientists they hire and the politicians they fund. Our current resident, sitting at the top of the political hierarchy, undoubtedly hardens positions.

But this faith is more than a consequence of propaganda or a social construct. There are factors built into human biology that foster denial of climate change and resistance to doing anything about it. If we want to change consciousness and constructively address climate change, we have to take these factors into account.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert and others have pointed out that the human brain has evolved over millions of years to meet or avoid immediate, rather than long-term threats. We are primed to fight a human intruder now, not a natural disaster in some indefinite future. Our brain facilitates anger when we are insulted by another person, but insulates us from taking a distant destruction personally.

A recent Yale survey confirms the observation: A majority of Americans believe that climate change is happening, but only a "small minority" believe it will affect them. And, compounding this denial is our brains, which as Gilbert points out, are designed to react swiftly to dramatic events, but are far less sensitive to gradual changes, like progressively warmer temperatures.

Now, however, in the midst of ongoing environmental catastrophe, all of us—doubters as well as reluctant believers—have the opportunity and good reasons, to overcome our denial. This will be easiest for those who have been directly affected.

Disaster-traumatized people I've worked with, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, in the northeast after Superstorm Sandy, in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and, now, in Houston and Northern California, are rarely in denial. They appreciate that human factors—including global warming and the sacrifice of natural protections to energy exploitation and of zoning regulation to the greed of developers—killed relatives and friends, and contributed to their collapsed homes and destroyed neighborhoods.

Those of us who have so far been spared the full destructiveness of climate-related disasters are also neurologically primed for a teaching moment. The absence of direct trauma has left our higher brain functions, like judgment, self-awareness and compassion unimpaired. Meanwhile, we've registered emotionally compelling images of damage, destruction and death—water-bloated bodies, homeless children, flooded and crushed homes. Now is the time when all of us may be ready to translate what we have felt and know into action.This understanding of causes, as well as consequences, transcends age, race, class and political affiliation, and overrides the temporary restriction of abstract reasoning and judgment that may follow severe trauma. A healthy majority of hurricane-affected Texans, Floridians and Puerto Ricans—and Californians devastated by fires fueled by climate-heated timber and grass—will likely be open to learning and acting on the same lessons.

Mass and social media have a major role to play in keeping consciousness-affecting images of climate-related destruction alive, and in linking them to scientific evidence. The images will show us that the people suffering look very much like all of us—climate deniers as well as believers, white as well as black and brown, rich and poor alike. Clear presentation of the science will deepen emotional learning. And updates on survivors' ongoing pain and life-deforming dislocation can provide effective continuing education. Little by little, everyone, including deniers, will get the message that what has happened to others can happen to all of us.

This may be especially important for older people, who in disproportionate numbers deny climate change. They will be reminded that they are far less able to escape natural disasters than younger people, and will, if affected, have far greater difficulty replacing what they've lost. The horror stories of residents boiling to death in power-deprived nursing homes need to be recalled and honored, as do the disorienting, destabilizing long-term consequences for older people who have lost their homes and neighborhoods. Groups like the AARP can take the lead in this painful but necessary educational process, and in advocating for climate sparing legislation.

It’s important, also, to continue to memorialize the selfless efforts of neighbors helping neighbors during and after the storms and fires, as well as the stories of distant Americans' generosity. Seeing compassion in action will maximize activity in the parts of our brains that encourage fellow feeling. As they see and feel how satisfying it is to care for one another, even the most resistant climate deniers may want to join the rest of us in caring for the planet that sustains us all.

https://www.ecowatch.com/educated-republicans-climate-change-2509448249.html

Educated Republicans Are Less Likely to Believe in Climate Change

Just this week, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed a paper issuing a urgent plea to global leaders about the "current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change." The article, titled World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, is a wakeup call to anyone concerned about rapidly rising temperatures and stronger and more frequent extreme weather events.

But the dire warning could fall on deaf ears to a specific segment of the U.S. population: highly educated Republicans. According to a New York Times article by Kevin Quealy, a graphics editor and reporter for the publication's data-driven section, The Upshot, when it comes to belief in climate change, political identity rather than education matters most. [divergent graph]

Citing a Gallup survey from March 2015, Quealy wrote:

About one in four Republicans with only a high school education said they worried about climate change a great deal. But among college-educated Republicans, that figure decreases, sharply, to 8 percent.

This relationship persists even when pollsters pose different kinds of questions about climate change—when Republicans are asked if they believe global warming “will never happen," if they think it poses “a serious threat to way of life in your lifetime" or if it is caused by “natural changes in the environment."

This may seem counterintuitive, because better-educated Republicans are more likely to be aware of the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change. But in the realm of public opinion, climate change isn't really a scientific issue. It's a political one.

Even though better-educated Republicans may have more exposure to information about the science around climate change, they also have more exposure to partisan messages about it. And communications research says that matters more.

As Quealy explained, highly educated conservatives do not view climate change as a scientific issue but as a political issue. So don't expect this group to change their minds even if you throw a climate change study at them that's been signed by thousands of scientists from all over the world.

Indeed, the term "climate change" has become political football in recent years. Just look at the Republicans currently in the White House. President Donald Trump famously believes climate change is a hoax and he's stacked his cabinet with climate-deniers who have wiped the phrase from government websites and barred its own scientists from speaking about it.

The Times article is similar to a study published last year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Conservatives with higher scores display less concern about climate change, while liberals with higher scores display more concern," the authors wrote. "These patterns suggest that scientific knowledge may facilitate defending positions motivated by nonscientific concerns."

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/these-corporations-have-biggest-influence-climate-policy

For better or worse, corporations have a major influence on climate change policy. Just look at Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate owned by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch that has contributed hundreds of millions to federal candidates and lobbying over the last 25 years.

The "Corporate Carbon Policy Footprint," a new analysis from U.K. nonprofit InfluenceMap, now ranks Koch Industries as the company with the strongest opposition to the Paris climate agreement and most intensely lobbies against policies in line with the landmark global accord.

The InfluenceMap scoring system does not measure a company's actual greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, it measures "the extent to which a corporation is supporting or obstructing the climate policy process."

For the InfluenceMap report, researchers analyzed more than "30,000 pieces of evidence" on 250 global companies and 50 major trade associations on their lobbying records, advertising, public relations and sponsored research, according to Bloomberg.

The research group gave the Wichita-based company an "F" grade for its anti-climate actions:

"Koch Industries appears to be actively opposing almost all areas of climate legislation. In 2014 in the US, they were reportedly active in their opposition to a carbon tax, funding politicians and campaigns to oppose the tax. Similarly, in 2014 they appear to have opposed the U.S. EPA Clean Power Plan in consultation and through direct engagement with policy makers, and boasted about their success in blocking the US Cap and Trade Scheme in 2010. Additionally, they appear to be opposing measures to transition to a low carbon economy, advocating against renewable energy subsidies, and funding groups that have opposed energy efficiency standards, the repeal of fossil fuel subsidies and the need for action on climate change. They seem to be exceptionally active in opposing renewable energy standards across the U.S. Both the organization and its CEO, Charles Koch, appear to have questioned climate change science, and have reportedly funded climate denial. Senior executives are active in both the National Association of Manufacturers and ALEC, which also appear to be resisting climate change related regulations and policies."

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Silicon Valley tech giant Apple was ranked highest on the list and has an A+ for its support of climate change action and its positive engagement with a number of climate change policy areas.

Here are the report's key findings:

35 of the 50 most influential are actively lobbying against climate policy. They include companies in the fossil fuel value chain (ExxonMobil, Valero Energy, Chevron), energy intensive companies (BASF, ArcelorMittal, Bayer, Dow Chemical and Solvay) and electric utilities with large amounts of coal generating capacity (Southern Company, Duke Energy and American Electric Power).
Also in this group of 35 influential companies holding back climate policy are four powerful automotive manufacturers (Fiat Chrysler, Ford, BMW and Daimler). The research found the companies lobbying to delay or dilute efficiency and CO2 emissions standards and procedures both in Europe and North America. Depending on region, passenger vehicle emissions account for 12% or more of all greenhouse gas emissions.
On the other side, 15 of the 50 most influential are pushing for an ambitious climate policy agenda, favoring renewable power and electric vehicles. They include signatories to the RE100 initiative committing to buying 100% renewable power (Apple, Ikea, Unilever, Coca Cola and Nestle) as well as power sector companies (SSE, Enel, EDF, Iberdrola and National Grid) who are shifting their business models towards low carbon electricity generation.

"The data shows the climate policy agenda, in terms of corporate influencing, is being driven by a small number of massive global corporations," Dylan Tanner, InfluenceMap executive director, said in a statement. "It also shows a group of powerful of companies in the tech, consumer goods and utilities sectors increasingly pushing for policy to implement the Paris Agreement."

InfluenceMap also ranked "influencers" or powerful trade associations that actively lobby against climate policies. A number of trade associations received an "F" grade, but here are the bottom five: U.S. Chamber of Commerce; American Petroleum Institute; American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity; National Mining Association; and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Check out the full list here.

icn

With the lives of Texans and Floridians upended by back-to-back superstorms, one thing hasn't been shaken: climate change denial.

Hurricane Harvey, which broke the continental U.S. rainfall record with its deluge of southeast Texas, and Hurricane Irma, barreling toward South Florida as one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded, epitomize the consensus science warnings of heightened risks in a warming world. The last peer-reviewed National Climate Assessment, in 2014, highlighted extreme precipitation and the increasing intensity of Atlantic hurricanes as looming perils for the United States.

But steadfast opponents of action on global warming are either sticking to their guns or avoiding comment, while Trump administration officials declare it inappropriate to discuss climate amid tragedy.

Texaspoliticians have been particularly silent on climate change's tie to the storm that ravaged their state. InsideClimate News received no response from Texas' two senators, Republicans Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, or from Congressmen representing districts on the southeast coast that were affected by Harvey. The Washington Post also obtained no direct answer to a similar query to all 38 members of the Texas delegation.

Only Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, responded to the Post, by pointing to a CNN interview in which Bill Read, former director of the National Hurricane Center, said there was nothing uncommon about storms intensifying in the Gulf of Mexico. (Climate scientists would agree with Read, but they say that warmer air and oceans will, indeed, fuel more dangerous storms.) Another frequent argument is that the U.S. had been in a "hurricane drought" without "major hurricanes" for 12 years. (Researchers point out that that period included both Hurricane Ike and Superstorm Sandy.)

"You would hope that a tragedy of this magnitude would be a wake-up call for folks who have been staunchly denying climate change," said Sara Chieffo, vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. But she said she's seen no sign of changed hearts or minds among climate science deniers who represent the communities devastated by Harvey, which also happens to be an energy industry epicenter. The oil and gas industry is the leading contributor to the Congressional delegation representing the nation's leading oil and gas producing state, with $96.7 million in donations to U.S. House and Senate candidates from Texas in the past six years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

"You dance with the one that 'brung' you," said Ana Unruh Cohen, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), quoting the late Texas pundit Molly Ivins. "A lot of the Texas politicians are brought to Washington, D.C., with the funding of special interests, fossil fuel in particular, that don't support policies that would reduce their product being sold or used in America."

Her colleague, David Doniger, director of NRDC's climate and energy program, finds it telling that the Trump administration's rhetoric is to accuse opponents of "politicizing" the storms by making the connection to climate change. They'd like to keep the focus on recovery, and shoring up defenses—also crucial steps that need to be taken—while deflecting the more difficult discussion on how to mitigate climate change.

"We're going to keep it front and center," he said. "We ... don't have the luxury to focus only on resilience, without focusing on the climate pollution that's driving the next decade of storms."

Here is a sampling of climate change denial and dismissal in the week between Hurricanes Harvey and Irma:

U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins. Credit: Office of U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins

U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.)

Member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

"Climate change has existed to well before human history. So the question isn't whether or not our climate changes, nor is it really a question of whether the human race does have some sort of impact. The question is to what degree, and at what expense, and what sort of time frame, and how can we best address that, and does it call for harvesting other people's treasure?"

Scott Pruitt. Credit: Justin Merriman/Getty Images

Scott Pruitt

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator

"I think at this point to look at things like this and to talk about a cause and effect really isn't helping the people of Texas right now. ... So, I think for opportunistic media to use events like this to, without basis or support, just to simply engage in a cause-and-effect type of discussion, and not focus upon the needs of people, I think is misplaced."

Rick Perry. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Rick Perry

U.S. Energy Secretary and former Texas Governor

"Well, we can line up the science on both sides of this. This isn't the time to have that conversation, if you want to know the truth of the matter. I'm focused on search and rescue. I'm focused on making sure the people of southeast Texas and Louisiana are able to recover from this. I know everyone wants to run to the climate change debate, but that's very secondary at this particular time, and let's get back to taking care of our citizens."

Michael Brown. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Michael Brown

Radio host, former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director

"If climate change were to be responsible for an increase in both the number and severity of hurricanes, why has it been 12 years? Doesn't have squat to do with climate change."

Rush Limbaugh. Credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Rush Limbaugh

Radio host

"In the official meteorological circles, you have an abundance of people who believe that man-made climate change is real. And they believe that Al Gore is correct when he has written — and he couldn't be more wrong — that climate change is creating more hurricanes and stronger hurricanes. And, of course, when Harvey hit, it was the first hurricane that had hit in 12 years. There haven't been more hurricanes and no more dangerous than any others in previous years."

H. Sterling Burnett. Credit: Heartland Institute video

H. Sterling Burnett

Research fellow with Heartland Institute think tank in Dallas

"It's not clear how much of this is unprecedented. It's not clear how much was the severity of the storm and the amount of rain that fell—which was a lot—and how much is due just to the nature of the development we've seen in Houston on wetland that is sinking. The same thing's going on in Miami. It's not due to rising sea levels, but it's due to subsidence. If you build on a swamp, heavy buildings on land that was never meant to hold hug permanent structures, and you start sinking below sea level, you're going to be in trouble when the storms come, and the seas do rise."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

CLIMATE DENIAL

CLIMATE CHANGE

===

Deniers in charge: New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/climate-change-denialists-in-charge.html

...“It’s just a few years ago, we were talking about global warming, which is — we haven’t seen a lot of warming lately. I remember back in the ’70s when we were talking about the coming ice age. And, look, you know, we have — we’ve had a tough winter. And in the Midwest, we’re — we’re made of hardy stock. We’ve seen these kind of winters before. And we’ll shoulder through them. We’ll leave the scientific debates for the future.”

MSNBC interview, 2014.

“There’s no question that the activities that take place in this country and in countries around the world have some impact on the environment and some impact on climate. But Donald Trump and I say let’s follow the science, but for heaven’s sakes let’s not go rushing into the kind of restrictions on our economy that are putting Americans out of work and, frankly, are driving jobs out of this country.”

Stephen K. Bannon

The national debt is “not a manufactured crisis like global warming or the health care crisis. This is a — this is an existential crisis.”

Fox News, 2010.

Scott Pruitt

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

Mr. Pruitt on carbon dioxide and the environment on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” March 9.

David Kreutzer

“A common claim among proponents of action on climate change is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming science. One commonly cited statistic is that 97 percent of climatologists agree on global warming. … The 97 percent statistic is nothing more than a false talking point; no overwhelming consensus exists among climatologists on the magnitude of future warming or on the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

“The State of Climate Science: No Justification for Extreme Policies,” 2016 Heritage Foundation report, with Mr. Kreutzer as lead author.

James Inhofe

“The claim that global warming is caused by man-made emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science.”

Mr. Inhofe, circa 2003.

“Obama has built a culture of radical alarmists, and they’ll be back. You and I and the American people have won a great victory, but the war goes on. Stay vigilant.”

Video address this month to the Heartland Institute, a group devoted to discrediting climate change.

Lamar Smith

“Climate change is caused by a combination of factors, including natural cycles, solar variability and human activity. Scientists still disagree about how much each of these factors contributes to overall climate change. What climate alarmists say is sometimes untrue and often exaggerated. We should rely on good science, not science fiction, when we evaluate climate change.”

Op-ed article in USA Today, 2015.

Rick Perry

“It’s all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight. Al Gore is a prophet all right, a false prophet of a secular carbon cult, and now even moderate Democrats aren’t buying it.”

“Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington,” a 2010 book written by Mr. Perry.

“I believe the climate is changing. I believe some of it is naturally occurring, but some of it is also caused by man-made activity. The question is: How do we address it in a thoughtful way that doesn’t compromise economic growth, the affordability of energy or American jobs?”

ref

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-climate-deniers-use-conspiracy-theories-false-narratives-and-distractions-avoid

...

the end, participants discovered the point of the video when asked if they had observed the gorilla walking through the players. Half the participants didn’t notice the gorilla at all. The lesson? When we laser-focus on specific details (like players in white shirts), we can miss the gorilla in the room.

What does this have to do with climate change? I’m a cognitive psychologist interested in better understanding and countering the techniques used to distort the science of climate change. I’ve found that understanding why some people reject climate science offers insight into how they deny science. By better understanding the techniques employed, you can counter misinformation more effectively.

Every movement that has rejected a scientific consensus, whether it be on evolution, climate change or the link between smoking and cancer, exhibits the same (concisely summarized by the acronym FLICC). These are,,, and conspiracy theories. When someone wants to cast doubt on a scientific finding, FLICC is an integral part of the misinformation toolbox.

The five characteristics of science denial. (Skeptical Science, CC BY-ND

Logical fallacies are a broad umbrella, including a number of other misleading techniques. For example, red herring is a term that likely originated from the technique of using strong-smelling fish to throw dogs off a scent. Similarly, irrelevant information or arguments can be used to distract people from important information.

zombies:

http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/03/congress-climate-deniers/

Earlier this month, my co-author Tom Toles (the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post) and I published our new book, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.

Some great early reviews of the book can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Tom and I had a commentary excerpting parts of the book in Sunday's The Washington Post. In addition to calling out the most prominent current climate change denier of them all—Donald Trump, we profiled eight other leading climate change deniers in the world of politics, individuals whom—as the commentary notes—have been responsible for "clouding the climate change debate" and stalling action by participating in "a campaign of deliberate misinformation."

The Washington Post

Among the rogues gallery of leading climate change deniers are (from left to right, top to bottom): Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), fossil fuel shill Steve Milloy, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, self-styled "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, scientist-turned-denier-for-hire Fred Singer, the inimitable Sarah Palin, conservative funders Charles and David Koch (aka the Koch Brothers), and "swift-boat" architect Marc Morano.

Among other notable honorable mentions is U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Though Inhofe didn't make the rogues gallery above, he gets the attention he deserves in book.

From Chapter 6 of the book, "Hypocrisy, They Name is Climate Change Denial":

Consider Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a recipient of extensive funding over the years from the fossil fuel interests including ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers. He is perhaps best known for declaring that climate change is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and for introducing a snowball on the U.S. Senate floor as ostensible proof against global warming.

And Inhofe, of course, gets the full TTT (Tom Toles Treatment):

Tom Toles

When it comes to hypocrisy and irony, Inhofe is truly king. Under the heading of "you can't make this stuff up," there is, for example, this particular episode that we recount in the book:

Back in July 2011, Inhofe was selected as keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute's annual global warming denier "conference." He had to cancel out at the last minute however. He had grown ill swimming in a lake back in his home state of Oklahoma. The lake was suffering from an algal bloom as a result of the unprecedented heat and drought that Oklahoma experienced that summer—an event that scientists have determined was tied to climate change.

Though he quipped afterward, "the environment strikes back," he was obviously undeterred in his climate change-denying ways, remaining one of the most prominent advocates for fossil fuel interests in the U.S. Senate.

Which, finally, brings us to Inhofe's hometown newspaper, The Oklahoman, named the "Worst Newspaper in America," by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) for "conformance to the right-wing political views" of the paper's owners and its "alleged racist hiring practices" among other things.

The Oklahoman has an unusually atrocious record on all things environment. As CJR notes:

Where else can you find a big-city editorial page—run by a Christian Coalition devotee plucked from Washington D.C.'s right-wing Free Congress Foundation—that not only demonizes ... environmentalists ...

And it hardly comes as a surprise that The Oklahoman, like Inhofe, is a major promoter of climate change denialism, acting as thinly veiled advocates for the fossil fuel lobby that dominates their state rather than a conduit of objective news for their readers.

So how low could they go, you might ask? This is how low.

Stan Glantz has been called the "Ralph Nader of the anti-tobacco movement." He has led the effort to expose how tobacco interests hid the detrimental effects of their product on human health from the public and has advocated staunchly for policies to reduce smoking.

Glantz has explicitly likened the fossil fuel industry's campaign to deny the science of human-caused climate change to the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse health impacts of their product. Same modus operandi, even some of the same paid deniers-for-hire, like Fred Singer listed in the rogues gallery above.

Just last week, Glantz published a new high-profile study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) exposing how yet another industry tried to hide the adverse health impacts of their product. Glantz and colleagues found internal documents revealing that the junk food industry paid scientists to "play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead."

So, how does The Oklahoman cover this development? You guessed it: by turning the entire matter on its head, attempting to use it as an opportunity to blame the government rather than the powerful corporate interests who were exposed by Glantz's research. And, for good measure, they attempt to use the episode to attack the science of climate change!

Indeed, they attack me specifically, resurrecting untruthful climate change denier talking points about the the discredited 'climategate' affair, and the widely debunked attacks on the famous "hockey stick" curve my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s (if you want to learn the truth behind all of this, consider reading my previous book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars).

It is possible that such a twisted viewpoint, wherein an obvious example of industry malfeasance is used to attack the scientific community, including climate scientists specifically, could arise purely from profound ignorance, rather than cynicism and malice. Yes, anything is possible.

But in the end, we see that Hypocrisy: Thy Name is Truly Climate Change Denial. Thy Nickname might just be The Oklahoman.

mann

When it comes to hypocrisy and irony, Inhofe is truly king. Under the heading of "you can't make this stuff up," there is, for example, this particular episode that we recount in the book:

Back in July 2011, Inhofe was selected as keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute's annual global warming denier "conference." He had to cancel out at the last minute however. He had grown ill swimming in a lake back in his home state of Oklahoma. The lake was suffering from analgal bloom as a result of the unprecedented heat and drought that Oklahoma experienced that summer—an event that scientists have determined was tied to climate change.

Which, finally, brings us to Inhofe's hometown newspaper, The Oklahoman, named the "Worst Newspaper in America," by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) for "conformance to the right-wing political views" of the paper's owners and its "alleged racist hiring practices" among other things.

The Oklahoman has an unusually atrocious record on all things environment. As CJR notes:

And it hardly comes as a surprise that The Oklahoman, like Inhofe, is a major promoter of climate change denialism, acting as thinly veiled advocates for the fossil fuel lobby that dominates their state rather than a conduit of objective news for their readers.

So how low could they go, you might ask? This is how low.

Glantz has explicitly likened the fossil fuel industry's campaign to deny the science of human-caused climate change to the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse health impacts of their product. Same modus operandi, even some of the same paid deniers-for-hire, likeFred Singer listed in the rogues gallery above.

Just last week, Glantz published a new high-profile study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) exposing how yet another industry tried to hide the adverse health impacts of their product. Glantz and colleagues found internal documents revealing that the junk food industry paid scientists to "play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead."

http://www.ecowatch.com/michael-mann-climate-deniers-2009591213.html

handy update proxy ~RICO:

May 18, 2016

Kenneth Haapala was a signatory to a full page color advertisement in The New York Times titled “Abuse of Power” (PDF) sponsored by The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The ad serves as an open letter from 43 signatories including organizations and individuals in response to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, and the coalition of Attourneys General investigating groups denying man-made climate change. [9], [10]

“Attempts to intimidate CEI and our allies and silence our policy research are unconstitutional,” said CEI president Kent Lassman. “The First Amendment protects us and everyone has a duty to respect it – even state attorneys general. CEI will continue to fight for all Americans to support the causes in which they believe.” [9]

The Competitive Enterprise Institute received a subpoena from AG Walker on April 7, 2016. On April 20, CEI filed an objection to the subpoena calling it “offensive,” “un-American,” and “unlawful,” and are contending that AG Walker is “violating CEI’s First Amendment rights.” [9]

The “freedom of speech” argument was echoed by ExxonMobil's legal team, as well as numerous other conservative groups including the Pacific Legal Foundation, and Heritage Foundation and the recently-formed Free Speech in Science Project, a group created by the same lawyers who defended the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the past. [11]

The CEI letter lists the following signatories:

Kent Lassman — President & CEO, Competitive Enterprise Institute
C. Boyden Gray— Former White House Counsel
Andrew C. McCarthy — Former Chief Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York
**Michael B. Mukasey**— U.S. Attorney General, 2007-2009; U.S. District Judge, 1988-2006
Ross McKitrick— Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Ronald D. Rotunda — Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, Chapman University
**Richard S. Lindzen** — Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, MIT
**William Happer** — Emeritus Professor of Physics, Princeton University
**Jim DeMint**— President, The Heritage Foundation
James H. Amos, Jr. — President & CEO, National Center for Policy Analysis
**John A. Baden** — Chairman, Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment
Lisa B. Nelson — CEO, American Legislative Exchange Council
**Paul Driessen**— Author & Energy Policy Analyst
**Thomas J. Pyle** — President, Institute for Energy Research
Steven J. Allen — Vice President & Chief Investigative Officer, Capital Research Center
**David Ridenour** — President, National Center for Public Policy Research
**Steven J. Milloy** — Publisher, JunkScience.com
**Brooke Rollins**— President & CEO, Texas Public Policy Foundation
**Paul Gessing**— President, Rio Grande Foundation
Ron Arnold— Researcher & Author
William Perry Pendley— President, Mountain States Legal Foundation
Adam Brandon — President & CEO, FreedomWorks
Hank Campbell — President, American Council on Science and Health
**Craig Rucker** — Executive Director, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
Tom McCabe — CEO, Freedom Foundation
Richard B. Belzer— Economist
**Heather R. Higgins** — President & CEO,Independent Women's Voice
Joseph G. Lehman — President, Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Sabrina Schaeffer— Executive Director, Independent Women's Forum
Joseph Bast— President, The Heartland Institute
John C. Eastman— Founding Director, The Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence
Robert Alt— President & CEO, The Buckeye Institute
Michael Pack — President & CEO,The Claremont Institute
Josh Blackman— Assistant Professor, South Texas College of Law
Lynn Taylor — President, Tertium Quids
David Rothbard — President, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
**Tracie Sharp** — President & CEO, State Policy Network
**Kenneth Haapala** — President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
**Tim Phillips** — President, Americans for Prosperity
Myron Ebell— Director of the Center for Energy & Environment, Competitive Enterprise Institute
**George Landrith** — President, Frontiers of Freedom
John Tillman — CEO, Illinois Policy Institute
**Craig D. Idso**— Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change