And not just because of the obvious. For three days after the attack on the World Trade Center, all commercial aviation came to a standstill in the United States. For the first time since 1914, when Tony Jannus piloted a wooden, open-air Benoist XIV biplane in the first commercial passenger-carrying airline flight from St. Petersburg to Tampa, Florida, traffic in the friendly skies above the amber waves of grain came to a screeching halt. And in those three crucial days, our entire understanding of global warming underwent a fundamental transformation.
But this literally earth-shattering revelation has not been getting a lot of press since that horrible day. Public interest in climate change is dwindling into either resigned apathy, or growing skepticism about the risks of global warming; a 14 percent decline in people who believe the earth is becoming warmer. At the current conference in Copenhagen, the emphasis has shifted away from what the hell are we going to do to save the planet before it’s too late to world leaders bickering and squabbling in an unseemly power struggle over who gets to pollute the most. And while the talks are failing as politicians shuffle carbon credits around like magicians with a deck of cards, global warming deniers are busily promulgating ever more heated and bizarre conspiracy theories.
Christopher Hitchens followed up his long Slate column detailing the dangers of Sarah Palin's brand of populism with more harsh criticism on MSNBC's Morning Joe today.
[...]
Hitchens: Don't be too hard on her. She didn't write that piece and she probably hasn't read it. I doubt she could either read or write it. Everything she does is for effect, she's, and is always deniable. She could switch back in a minute. At the moment she thinks her tea party crowd wants to hear this kind of thing so she'll say that. She's been out to say, 'well, I don't know but I think the President ought to produce his birth certificate. I'm not saying it isn't a good question. Then later, cause she's got to go to the Gridiron dinner in Washington, and learn how to use a knife and fork and be taught by Fred Malek. She takes it back. She's a disgraceful opportunist and a real moral coward.
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From C-SPAN's Newsmakers, Rep. Joe Barton with more Climate-gate nonsense. Barton thinks it's a "fair question" to ask if climate scientists are "brainwashing themselves" into believing their peer reviewed studies on climate change. Of course he says he's not actually saying they're brainwashed...wink, wink. Just that it's fair to ask if they are.
Leave it to C-SPAN's resident winger Steve Scully to give him a chance to drum up the fear mongering a bit by jumping in there and asking him if they're trying to brainwash all Americans as well.
Gemen: I guess I’m still just a little bit puzzled by how so many scientists across such a spectrum in your view could have all gotten it so catastrophically wrong?
Barton: Well if they all believe in the theory and they’re funded and they’re part of a group that it’s in their academic, professional career to prove that theory right, they can kind of brainwash themselves. Now I’m not saying they’ve done that, but I’m saying that’s a fair question. And the more that comes out the more relevant that question becomes.
Scully: Are they brainwashing Americans?
Barton: I think some of them have tried to. I certainly, I mean when you read—again when you look at some of these emails and they say, you know, so and so is um…apparently gone over to the dark side and we may have to get him removed as, in his current position because he’s not with us any more—I think that’s troublesome. I mean the true scientific method, you put your theory out there and you put your data out there in an open transparent fashion and have people either try to prove it wrong, or have them replicate it and prove it right. That’s not happened in the climate issue.
The IPCC models, there are a number of them, but they’re all developed by the same people and they all have the same basic assumptions. And they’ve all been wrong. They keep predicting temperatures going up and up and somewhat up in an escalating fashion and that simply is not happening. So at some point in time you either have to change your theory and admit it’s wrong or just admit that it’s not a, it’s not a scientific theory. It’s some sort of an ideology.
He wrapped up the clip with this doozy:
Barton: I think I’ve got an open mind. Again, I want an environment that’s as benign and supportive of mankind that it’s possible to be, but I also want a modern lifestyle that—you know have hot water in the morning and air conditioning in the summer in Texas. I can hop in a private vehicle and take my family or my self where I want to in a convenient comfortable way. I don’t want to go back to the 1870’s where my great-grandparents lived on a dry land cotton farm in Texas with no running water and no electricity and their power source was their own muscles or animal power. I don’t want to do that. And an 83% reduction from the 2000 baseline of CO2 emissions in the United States—you couldn’t burn fossil fuels in the United States in the year 2050. Can’t be done.
Yep. We're going back to the days of horses and carriages and no running water if they try to cap CO2 by 83% in 41 years from now. I think the one with an agenda is Rep. Barton trying to keep those campaign donations flowing in.
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Chris Wallace pushed the phony "Climate-gate" story on FNS today and actually tried to make an argument supporting the deniers, but no matter how much Kim Strassel says otherwise, the hacked emails taken out of context prove nothing. Chris Wallace's logic is that since these freaks don't believe in real science, then science should welcome the debate.
Wallace: Now, oftentimes that phrase is used -- Holocaust deniers. But the Holocaust was a historical fact. We’re talking here about science, and science usually welcomes opposing views.
Huh? When science is explained then the discussion is over. It's that simple. Let's say the conservative crazies were arguing that the earth is flat and science comes in and disproves that hypothesis and proves that the world is round then there is no debate or an opposing view any longer. It's settled. The earth is round and no matter how many of the Inhofers cry that the earth is still flat, it's immaterial. What the Inhofers are doing is scientifically proving that they are certifiably insane.
Sen. Inhofe is a notorious global warming denier and after Chris Wallace promoted the fraudulent Climate-Gate hacked email story, he asked wacko Sen. Inhofe to explain the fact that this decade has been the warmest ever recorded if there is no such thing as climate change. here's what a conservative crank responds.
WALLACE: Whatever you want to say about the e-mails, Senator Inhofe, the fact is that just this week, the World Meteorological Organization said that this decade is the warmest on record and that 2009 is the fifth warmest year on record. Does that mean nothing?
INHOFE: It -- well, it means -- it means very little because that was based on the same flawed science, the IPC science, that we have been looking at.
Now, we have to say on the science thing that this is something that -- we saw this coming years ago, and for those individuals who doubt the fact that it’s flawed science, listen to what the U.K. Daily Telegraph said. They said it’s the worst scientific scandal of our generation. Publications all over have looked at this and decided that.
You see, proof means nothing in conservative circles. Science means nothing to conservative nitwits. The earth is flat dammit!
Anyway, Gore asks the question that a Sarah Palin could never answer logically: Why are the polar ice caps disappearing? The batshit crazy deniers like Palin don't know the caps exist maybe because she can't see them from her house...
MITCHELL: Congratulations on the book. You write in your new book, "Our Choice," "The global warming deniers' arguments are fraudulent and often nonsensical." Yet even today, one of the best-known voices in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, has an op-ed in the Washington Post, and she is escalating a major attack against Copenhagen and against -- against the summit. Palin calls it "junk science." She says, "The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst."
What's your response to that?
GORE: Well, you know, the -- the global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.
These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.
MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.
GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a -- a principle in physics. It's not a question of debate. It's like gravity; it exists.
Like gravity it exists. You see, there's the proven. In the mind of conservatives, it doesn't matter what's provable -- only what can be denied. And as we've come to expect from Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post, they reprinted a Sarah Palin op-ed that is littered with so much false information on climate change that it boggles the mind. They have turned the news paper op-ed section into a celebrity rag that could care less about truth and accuracy. I'm shocked the op-ed didn't come with Sarah Palin celebrity photos.
Amid the Copenhagen climate summit, Fred Hiatt has chosen to descend the paper to a new low, seeming to prove that there is somehow a balance between outright falsehoods and ignorance, on the one side, and scientific knowledge and honest discourse on the other.
And here's a response to Dean Baker at the dubious Politico:
Dean Baker: It’s amazing that the Post feels the need to print a column that is chock full of distortions and misinformation just because it was written by a celebrity (Sarah Palin’s pro-global warming diatribe).
Nontroversy feeds on empty, twisted brains. In this case, a general unfamiliarity with the language of scientific banter allows the "climategate" nontroversy to overwhelm the consensus on global warming. That consensus is built on literally hundreds of thousands of studies at this point; and indeed, the stolen emails contain a wealth of proof that temperatures are rising. Yet the media stovepipe magnifies, even invents, discrepancies and minimizes evidence, even as the ice melts.
"Consensus" is the key word here. Nontroversy always aims to distort or destroy consensus. Birther sites and ACORN fantasies exist for the sole purpose of undermining the democratic consensus of last November's election; and insofar as they have convinced a majority of Republicans, they have succeeded.
So don't tell me that nontroversy doesn't matter. It really, really matters. We need to understand its biological processes.
[...]
Pandemic Stage: "Liberal" mainstream media organizations now run the "facts" and narrative pre-established by the right wing noise machine as one side of a controversy.
In its effort to show "both sides" and report that controversy, the one thing CNN does not report is the actual science of climate change. The public is left with the impression, however unjustified, that scientists have probably done something wrong, and denialists are given exactly the "fair hearing" they don't get from scientific journals.
Anyone think Anderson Cooper could have let his audience know who funds Mr. Cato Institute Patrick Michaels for sharing his opinions. I know... ain't gonna' happen.
h/t Jamie for pointing out the piece at the HuffPo
From the makers of the Happy Tree Friends, comes the global warming denier anthem. Just in time for Copenhagen.
Inspired by the animator's denier Dad who has apparently said all of these things (hopefully not the gibberish), this is obviously a satire of global warming deniers, but you can probably trick them into replying, "Yeah, no one will die for another 40,000,000 years!"
Very good news, I think, on the climate change front. This is an excellent way to sidestep the political process and keep the necessary changes from getting bogged down in the politics:
The Obama administration will formally declare Monday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, a move that lays the groundwork for an economy-wide carbon cap even if Congress fails to enact climate legislation, sources familiar with the process said.
The move, which Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson will announce at an afternoon press conference, comes as the largest climate change conference in history gets underway in Copenhagen. It will finalize an initial "endangerment finding" by the government in April.
While an EPA spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, the agency sent out a press advisory that Jackson will make "a significant climate announcement at a press briefing" at 1:15 p.m. at EPA headquarters. Jackson will also speak at the U.N.-sponsored climate conference Wednesday; her address is titled "Taking Action at Home." Obama, who will attend the end of the U.N. talks Dec. 18, has sent a series of recent signals to the international community that the United States will curb its carbon output as part of a new global climate deal.
The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court decision in which the court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases qualify as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It could trigger a series of federal regulations affecting polluters, from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.
Businesses argue that such a finding would mean even emitters as small as a mom-and-pop grocery store would be forced to comply with onerous greenhouse gas regulations. The administration has crafted rules that would exempt facilities that emit less than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent annually. But it remains unclear if that exemption would hold up in court.
"An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery."
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According to President Bush's former press secretary, the former president's refusal to sign the Kyoto climate change deal in 2005 set the stage for current climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.
"Because [Bush] declined to go forward with Kyoto, which is ultimately the right thing to do because the major economies like China and India weren't at the table, he worked to get them at the table and now this meeting is the next logical step in that process," Perino told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.
