GWPF Responds To New IPCC Report

Natural Variability To Dominate Weather Events Over Coming 20-30 Years

London: For many decades to come, and probably longer, mankind’s influence on the frequency of extreme weather events will be insignificant.

According to a preliminary report released by the IPCC, there will be no detectable influence of mankind’s influence on the Earth’s weather systems for at least thirty years, and possibly not until the end of this century.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, is in stark contrast to other statements made by the IPCC. It shows that mankind’s influence on the weather is far smaller than natural factors.

If and when mankind’s influence becomes apparent it may be just as likely to reduce the number of extreme weather events as increase them.

Surveying the state of scientific knowledge IPCC scientists say they cannot determine if mankind’s influence will result in more, or fewer, extreme weather events over the next thirty years or more.

The IPCC report says:

"Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain"

"This shows the depth of our ignorance of this subject," says Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of the GWPF. "Whilst it is always important to think about the future in the light of changes we observe to the Earth’s climate, in trying to draw conclusions so far ahead based on what we know, the IPCC scientists are speculating far beyond any reasonable scientific justification."

Even making the questionable assumption that our computer models are good enough to predict what will happen in the future, for projected changes by the end of the 21st century, the uncertainties in those computer models, and the range of natural climatic variability, are far larger than any predicted human-influenced effects.

Extreme weather events have always been with us, and will continue to be so. It is the international community's responsibility to make those likely to be subjected to them become more resilient.

Contact: Dr David Whitehouse; david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org

Dr Benny Peiser benny.peiser@thegwpf.org

Press release received via email





IPCC scientists test the Exit doors

This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists — facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong — are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid.

A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell:

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years.

This multipurpose prediction means that in the future, if it’s colder, they’re right; if it’s warmer, they’re right; and they have it covered for more or less storms, floods, droughts, blizzards and frost too.

And then there’s the perpetual-motion aspect of the threat. Greenhouse gases might not be dominant now (like they’ve been saying for the last 20 years) but they will be, they tell us. They will be! Look out! The storms are coming, we’re all doomed. (Well we definitely absolutely might be.) Got that?

If the century progresses without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, their impacts will come to dominate, it forecasts:

“It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, including heat waves, will continue to increase over most land areas…

“It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st Century over many areas of the globe…

“Mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely to increase…

“There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st Century in some seasons and areas…

“Low-probability high-impact changes associated with the crossing of poorly understood thresholds cannot be excluded, given the transient and complex nature of the climate system.”

Then look for the segue where the scientists and activist-journalists, quietly shift the goal-posts;

It’s impossible to read the draft without coming away with the impression that with or without anthropogenic climate change, extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more, simply because there are more and more people on planet Earth – particularly in the swelling “megacities” of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast.

That’s an EXIT clause and it reads like this: We might have been wrong about CO2 causing the disasters, but disasters are still coming. More people are going to die from climate catastrophes because there are lots more people! See, “we were right all along to be concerned about the climate”. (Just not quite right about the cause).

This is a handy excuse. Al Gore tried a segue like this out a couple of years ago — pretending that he was just fine tuning his altruistic saintly concern by saying quietly that CO2 wasn’t as bad as he’d thought but Black Carbon (!) was awful pollution. In other words, he’ll never admit he made a bad call, or has been caught pushing a scam, he’ll just say he was right all along, “carbon is still the issue, it’s just a slightly different form”.

These IPCC scientists are using the same technique: Climate Disasters are still the issue — it’s just a slightly different reason.

Repeat after me: AGW is still bad, skeptics are still wrong, and look over here at this slightly new twist on the predictions of disaster.

We all know there won’t be a slew of headlines trumpeting:

New IPCC leaked report; Weather could get warmer or colder!

“Storms might be not quite as bad, but could be much worse!”

“IPCC underestimate natural climate forces! Skeptics correct!”

Obviously this is an all-encompassing all-occasion document. For journalists fishing for disaster, there are ways to find it in the prophesies, and for scientists who want to be able to say “My predictions were right” in five years time, they can find just about any prediction under the sun somewhere in there and point to it to say “I told you so”.

Even Hulme is acknowledging that things are changing and the “climate” meme is receding.

As UK academic Mike Hulme and others have argued, such events will occur whether exacerbated by climate change or not; and vulnerable societies need protection irrespective of climate change.

He’s argued for a divorce, therefore, between the issues of adaptation, which he says could usefully be added into the overall process of overseas development assistance, and mitigation of emissions.

In other words, the money will still flow, it’s just being rebadged. But the developing nations don’t like that. They prefer the current arrangement when developed nations atone for carbon sins and “pay” the third world. The alternative is the same cash, but it’s called “aid” and that comes with more strings. Everyone wants to be paid their rightful due, and no one wants to be “indebted” in any sense.....

The shape-shifting here is entirely predictable. It means the machine adapts to reality, but hardly anyone one gets punished. A bit like the bailouts and fraud on Wall St — no one went to jail. (Occupy Climate anyone?) They just change the letterheads on the parasitic agencies that pretend to help the poor and care about lemurs, and all of them get away with the sloppy reasoning, wasteful practices, bullying, deceit, and corruption.

Unless of course, the internet foils that plan. May we always be free from the forces of censorship.

More HERE




Scientific consensus?: Governments (Yes: Governments) fighting over IPCC climate hoax details

IPCC expected to confirm link between climate change and extreme weather | Environment | guardian.co.uk

The final details are being fought over by governments, as the "summary for policymakers" of the report has to be agreed in full by every nation that chooses to be involved. But the conclusions are expected to be that emissions from human activities are increasing the frequency of extreme weather events. In particular, there are likely to be many more heatwaves, droughts and changes in rainfall patterns.

Jake Schmidt of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council said: "This report should be a wake-up call to those that believe that climate change is some distant issue that might impact someone else. The report documents that extreme weather is happening now and that global warming will bring very dangerous events in the future. From the report you can see that extreme weather will impact everyone in one way or another. This is a window into the future if our political response doesn't change quickly."

...Mike Hulme at the Tyndall Centre said it would be dangerous for governments to use this report in order to justify directing overseas aid only to those countries that could be proved to be suffering from climate change, rather than other problems. In that scenario, he said: "Funding will no longer go to those who are most at risk from climate-impacts and with low adaptive capacity, but will go to those who are lucky enough to live in regions of the world where weather extremes happen to be most attributable by climate models to human agency. These regions tend to be in mid-to-high latitudes, with lots of good weather data and well calibrated models. So, goodbye Africa."

SOURCE




Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels Helped End Slavery -- and saved the whales

Excerpt from Matt Ridley’s brilliant 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves explains how non-renewable, finite energy sources paradoxically made economic growth sustainable. With inanimate objects doing the work instead of slaves, we can, as he says, all “live the life of a Sun King.”

In 1807, as Parliament in London was preparing to pass at last William Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the slave trade, the largest factory complex in the world had just opened at Ancoats in Manchester. Powered by steam and lit by gas, both generated by coal, Murrays’ Mills drew curious visitors from all over the country and beyond to marvel at their modern machinery. There is a connection between these two events. The Lancashire cotton industry was rapidly converting from water power to coal. The world would follow suit and by the late twentieth century, 85 percent of all energy used by humankind would come from fossil fuels. It was fossil fuels that eventually made slavery–along with animal power, and wood, wind and water–uneconomic. Wilberforce’s ambition would have been harder to obtain without fossil fuels. ‘History supports this truth,” writes the economist Don Boudreaux. ‘Capitalism exterminated slavery.’

The story of energy is simple. Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles. Then there came a time when some people got other people to do the work for them, and the result was pyramids and leisure for a few, drudgery and exhaustion for the many. Then there was a gradual progression from one source of energy to another: human to animal to wind to fossil fuel. In each case, the amount of work one man could do for another was amplified by the animal or the machine. The Roman empire was built largely on human muscle power, in the shape of slaves. It was Spartacus and his friends who built the roads and houses, who tilled the ground and trampled the grapes. There were horses, forges and sailing ships as well, but the chief source of watts in Rome was people.

The period that followed the Roman empire, especially in Europe, saw the widespread replacement of that human muscle power by animal muscle power. The European early middle ages were the age of the ox. The invention of dried-grass hay enabled northern European to feed oxen through the winter. Slaves were replaced by beasts, more out of practicality than compassion one suspects. Oxen eat simpler food, complain less and are stronger than slaves… With the invention of the horse collar, oxen then gave way to horses, which can plough at nearly twice the speed of an ox thus doubling the productivity of a man and enabling each farmer either to feed more people or to spend more time consuming other’s work.

In turn oxen and horses were soon being replaced by inanimate power. The watermill, known to the Romans but comparatively little used, became so common in the Dark Ages that by the time of the Domesday Book (1086), there was one for every fifty people in southern England…. The windmill appeared first in the twelfth century and spread rapidly throughout the Low Countries, where water power was not an option. But it was peat, rather than wind, that gave the Dutch the power to become the world’s workshop in the 1600s. Peat dug on a vast scale from freshly drained bogs fuelled the brick, ceramic, beer, soap, salt and sugar industries. Harlem bleached linen for the whole of Germany. At a time when timber was scarce and expensive, peat gave the Dutch their chance.

Hay, water, and wind are ways of drawing upon the sun’s energy: the sun powers plants, rain and the wind. Timber is a way of drawing on a store of the sun’s energy laid down in previous decades–on solar capital, as it were. Peat is an older store of the sunlight–solar capital laid down over millennia. And coal, whose high energy content enabled the British to overtake the Dutch, is still older sunlight, mostly captured around 300 million years before. The secret of the industrial revolution was shifting from current solar power to stored solar power. Not that human muscle power disappeared: slavery continued, in Russia, the Caribbean and America as well as many other places. But gradually, erratically, more and more of the goods people made were made with fossil energy.

Fossil fuels cannot explain the start of the industrial revolution. But they do explain why it did not end. Once fossil fuels joined in, economic growth truly took off, and became almost infinitely capable of bursting through the Malthusian ceiling and raising living standards. Only then did growth become, in a word, sustainable. This leads to a shocking irony. Economic growth only became sustainable when it began to rely on non-renewable, non-green, non-clean power. Every economic boom in history, from Uruk onwards, had ended in bust because renewable sources of energy ran out: timber, cropland, pasture, labour, water, peat. All self-replenishing, but far too slowly, and easily exhausted by a swelling populace.

Coal not only did not run out, no matter how much was used: it actually became cheaper and more abundant as time went by, in marked contrast to charcoal, which always grew more expensive once its use expanded beyond a certain point, for the simple reason that people had to go further in search of timber. Had England never used coal, it could still have had an industrial miracle of sorts, because it could have (and did) use water power to drive the frames and looms that turned Lancashire into the cotton capital of the world. But water power, though renewable, is very much finite, and Britain’s industrial boom would have petered out as expansion became impossible, population pressure overtook income and wages fell, depressing demand.

This is not to imply that non-renewable resources are infinite–of course not. The Atlantic Ocean is not infinite, but that does not mean you have to worry about bumping into Newfoundland if you row a dinghy out of a harbour in Ireland. Some things are finite but vast; some things are infinitely renewable, but very limited. Non-renewable resources such as coal are sufficiently abundant to allow an expansion of both economic activity and population to the point where they can generate sustainable wealth for all the people of the planet without hitting a Malthusian ceiling, and can then hand the baton to some other form of energy.

The blinding brightness of this realisation still amazes me: we can build a civilisation in which everybody lives the life of the Sun King, because everybody is served by (and serves) a thousand servants, each of whose service is amplified by extraordinary amounts of inanimate energy and each of whom is also living like the Sun King.

SOURCE





When the BEST Ain’t Good Enough, Make Stuff Up

This story was intended for Spiked-Online, who may be publishing it at some point, but I wanted to get it out a bit sooner.
A new scientific study of the Earth’s temperature record aimed to rescue climate science’s reputation from the aftermath of the ‘Climategate’ affair. Advocates of climate policies have long argued that unimpeachable science has driven policy-making, but climate sceptics argued that due scientific process had not been observed. Climategate and other revelations that seemed to undermine climate science seemed to make the sceptics’ case. Rather than bringing clarity to the debate, however, the new study inadvertently demonstrates that the desire for unimpeachable scientific answers belies a fundamentally political debate.

The ‘Climategate’ affair broke In late 2009. Thousands of private emails between climate researchers based at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unity were leaked onto the internet, the contents of which raised questions about the propriety of high profile scientists. Whether or not they had done anything wrong, the authors of these emails seemed to have been caught taking liberties with statistics, concealing their data and methodology from scrutiny, and treating the critics of their research with contempt. In the wake of Climategate, Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, Richard Muller said,

Quite frankly as a scientist, I have a list of people whose papers I won’t read any more. You’re not allowed to do this in science; this is not up to our standards. [...] This is why I’m leading a group to re-do all this in a totally transparent way.

The first results from Muller’s group — Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) — have been released. Rather than being released through publication in a peer-reviewed journal, however, Muller and his associates took the somewhat unusual step of publishing draft copies of their studies, and made themselves available for comment in the media. Fuelling controversy further, Muller wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, which an editor gave the title, ‘The Case Against Global Warming Skepticism — There were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This comment came to the delight of climate activist journalists, scientists and other commentators. ‘Sceptical climate scientists concede Earth has warmed’, announced the New Scientist. ‘BEST reconfirm: warming is happening’, said the influential Carbon Brief blog, which is staffed predominantly by activists from environmental NGOs. Channel 4 News’s science correspondent, Tom Clarke was asked, ‘so does this finally vindicate climate change science’. ‘In a word, yes’, replied Clarke. According to Clarke, the BEST team’s discovery that the world is warming got those implicated by Climategate off the hook.

From the copy it had generated, it would seem that BEST had ended the debate. But climate scientist, and contributor to the BEST project, Judith Curry observed, ‘the spin on the press release and Muller’s subsequent statements have introduced unnecessary controversy into the BEST data and papers’. Curry’s comments were picked up by Daily Mail journalist, David Rose, who wrote

‘The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.’

Exciting stuff. But not what Curry had told Rose. ‘To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed to me [in Roses's Daily Mail article] are not quite right’, she wrote on her blog. Meanwhile, Muller himself was distancing himself from the headlines of the article in the Wall Street Journal. ‘It doesn’t represent the article’, he told a journalist in New Mexico. But sceptics pointed out that Muller had said,

Without good answers to [sceptics' concerns about various attempts to measure global warming and its effects], global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Confusion reigns. The coverage had by now been established as so much he-said-she-said. Sceptics pointed out that, in spite of the claims that the debate was now over, the BEST study still had argued that ‘human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated’. The data still reflected a stalling of global temperatures over the past decade, and the study’s attempt to rule out one of the main concerns sceptics have about the way temperature data is recorded appear to have some serious shortcomings. Even the project’s leader didn’t seem to be making consistent statements about what his research meant for the climate change debate. None of this phased the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Richard Black, who continued covering the affair in much the same way....

Had Black wished to overcome the limitations of mediocre journalism, to get to the heart of the debate, there are many well-informed sceptics he could have turned to for comment and advice. One such is Andrew Montford, author of ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ and a report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on the Climategate affair (PDF). ‘He’s not representing what the sceptic’s arguments are’, Montford told me.

The majority of sceptics say ‘yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that the world has warmed’. That’s really hasn’t been argued very much for a long time. There are few people out there arguing [against] that, but really not very many. What you read about sceptic objections in the newspapers is not really what the sceptics’ objections are.

Montford agrees that there is no definitive ‘sceptic’ argument. This fact mirrors the many varied positive claims that are made on the other ‘side’ of the climate debate, but which seem to emerge axiomatically from the fact that ‘climate change is happening’. For many sceptics, too much rests on the claim, however true it is, which is in the first place a question of degree with a considerable amount of latitude, even within the ‘scientific consensus’. A concatenation of non-sequiturs cascade from the first: about sea-level rise, species extinction, drought, famine, resources wars, and so on. And these consequences seem to cascade just as ‘inevitably’ to the remedy: the creation of powerful political institutions, a transformation of the global economy, and the de facto rationing of energy and regulation of lifestyle.

In short, the climate debate is by definition as complex as the whole of human social life and natural science combined. But such a complex state of affairs does not make for easy reportage, especially by journalists who don’t seem able to digest nuance and complexity, let alone reflect meaningfully on them. And so to take issue with any aspect of the debate is to seemingly deny that the earth has warmed approximately 0.7 degrees centigrade and that humans had some part in it.

So what does the BEST study really reveal, according to sceptics? And how has it changed things in the post-Climategate world? Montford tells me that,

[BEST] doesn’t really change anything. People like Steve McIntyre [the climate blogger who first raised issues with how historical temperature records were created] were saying long before Climategate: you’re not going to find a smoking gun in the temperature record, and you always had the satellite records which were telling pretty much the same story. [The Climategate researchers] are just being civil servants and trying to hide the fact that they’re not doing very much, they haven’t got many quality-control procedures, and they’ve got commercial incentives to keep everything under wraps. That’s the only reason for the secrecy.

So it would seem that few, if any, sceptics were claiming that there had been no warming, or that the scientific data had been plucked out of thin air. BEST merely confirmed what most sceptics agreed was probably happening anyway. Nonetheless, the BEST story was widely reported as representing a meaningful end to the climate debate. Muller had made ambiguous comments, which were amplified by an incautious sub-editor. A phantom news story appeared out of an uncontroversial study. Journalists were reporting from inside their own heads, not from the real world. And that is an interesting phenomenon, and one which needs some explanation.

More HERE




White House Involved in Warmist Smear Campaign

Remember when Governor Rick Perry burst into the presidential race? Arguably one of the things that made him quickly rise to the top was the answer he gave to a question about global warming at an August 17th event: "I think we're seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change."

Just a day later, the Washington Post described what Perry's campaign sent them as proof to back his statement:

... a link to something called the [Oregon] Petition Project, which claims to have collected the signatures of 31,487 "American scientists" on a petition that says there is "no convincing scientific evidence" that human release of greenhouse gasses will "cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate".

Now imagine, for a moment, news of such a petition being so inconvenient to the Obama administration in light of the upcoming U.N. climate conference in Durban, South Africa that they made efforts to marginalize it via a prominently placed op-ed saying that the petition had fake names in it.

Imagine that these efforts involved a relatively unknown scientist who coordinated his efforts to write the anti-skeptic op-ed with the White House Office of Science and Technology (headed by Obama Science Czar John Holdren), and with an enviro-activist group famous for slamming skeptic scientists -- like Greenpeace, for example.

Then again, there's no need to imagine -- all this apparently did happen, and John Holdren was involved, but it didn't take place just recently. It was aimed at the U.N. climate conference in Buenos Aires in 1998 during the Clinton/Gore administration, and was in response to a favorable article written by the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby about the then-17,000 signers of the petition and how the news of so many skeptics might derail the conference's efforts to "to put teeth into the treaty that came out of Kyoto" just a year earlier. And the enviro-activist group was Ozone Action, which was later merged into Greenpeace USA in 2000.

Back on August 26, 2010, I wrote a piece about the unhelpful appearance of Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, current head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), being tied to Ozone Action's initial 1998 efforts to marginalize the petition. On October 4, 2010, I wrote another article which went into much greater detail about the highly questionable efforts of Ozone Action to portray the petition as tainted by "fake" names.

I was unaware of the direct White House involvement until I ran across page 2 of this scan. Scientist George Woodwell is appealing for help from John Holdren, who was on Clinton's President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST):

The Globe does not wish to publish it, at least over my name alone. (Who is he?) The thought is that you would lend legitimacy and tip the scales in favor of publishing, especially if you cite (or allow others to cite) your PSAC connection. I would, of course, be delighted to have you as an author, even the author, if you are willing. ...

The issue has become urgent in that the Jacoby distortion is being circulated in Buenos Aires to stop any action at all. I am dealing with John Passaccantando of Ozone Action and Ann Kenzig, now in the White House on this project.

Woodwell misspells Ann Kinzig's last name. Kinzig was "an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in the Office of Science and Technology Policy" (OSTP), coincidentally at the same time when Jane Lubchenco was the chair of AAAS.

Additional evidence of Ozone Action's ties to the White House comes in the form of a March 1998 e-mail alert to them from the OSTP's Rosina Bierbaum regarding a Small Business Survival Committee (SBSC) press release describing faults in the IPCC:

Despite White House claims that the debate over global warming is in fact over, an examination of their substantiation of '2,000 scientists' reveals experts in Chinese medicines as well as 'urban studies', hotel administrators, 'masters of arts' psychiatrists...

In case anybody has missed the news of it, these sorts of crippling problems in the IPCC are substantiated in intricate detail within Donna Laframboise's brand-new book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert.

One more reason Ms. Bierbaum specifically alerts Ozone Action: the SBSC press release also notes climate scientist skeptics who signed the Leipzig Declaration, an effort put together by atmospheric scientist (and AT contributor) Dr. S. Fred Singer. Dr Singer was a harsh critic of Ozone Action back when that group focused purely on how chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) supposedly were a driver of ozone depletion, and he became one of the primary targets of that group and anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan. Those are the same enviro-activists I cover in my writings about how the fossil-fuel-industry-funding-corruption accusation against skeptics appears to be completely unsupportable.

Apparently, with White House assistance and Holdren's co-authorship, Woodwell got an op-ed in at the NY Times/International Herald Tribune, which, as I reported in my October 4, 2010 article, mimicked prior recent pieces by Ozone Action personnel about fake names being seen in the Oregon Petition Project. Not helping this narrative are confessions from SourceWatch (" ... environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list ... "), and DesmogBlog ("According to the May 1998 Associated Press article, the Oregon petition included names that were intentionally placed to prove the invalid methodology ... "). Problem is, I noted in another of my articles how SourceWatch's Sheldon Rampton had close ties to Ross Gelbspan, and the narrative in the short version of the AP article DeSmog links to is different from the long version, switching from "[s]everal environmental groups" questioning the names in the petition to simply Ozone Action questioning them.

Compare this to other like-minded tactics: the credibility of assertions about Tea Party people hurling Nazi epithets apparently had to be "helped along" at one rally via a planted sign orchestrated to be seen by a photographer associated with a "progressive" website, as Michelle Malkin summarized in her April 12, 2010 blog post. CBS news anchorman Dan Rather and whatever dislike he had for George W. Bush apparently had to be "helped along" with the use of forged National Guard documents. Then there were the efforts to portray Rush Limbaugh as a racist, which seemed to require the use of planted quotes Limbaugh never said.

Same tactic in the petition smear. Don't meet your critics in a head-to-head debate; instead, marginalize what they say, ridicule their efforts, and plant evidence if their efforts don't look ridiculous enough to tilt public opinion in your favor.

If there is one example of how far-left ideology can't defend itself, it is the entire idea of man-caused global warming. Just look at what its promoters must do to keep it alive in the face of withering criticism. The disturbing thing about it is how long they've kept up this juvenile tactic, thanks to a complicit mainstream media.

SOURCE

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