The Streisand effect is kicking in

From Wikipedia:  "The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California inadvertently drew further public attention to it."

A Warmist site has just put up an article about the "the small network of hired pundits and scientists helping to sow doubt about climate science".  They then list the Devils concerned  and give a bit of information about each one.  So they are effectively letting the cat out of the bag about the "settled Science" claim.  They are making known to people I would never reach that the science is not settled -- and give information to their readers that could lead them to the dissenting voices concerned.  They are busting their own coverup of dissent.  And their list of villains is a long one -- further crashing the "consensus" claim.

Because the list is so long, I reproduce only a few  entries  below, including mine.  But the complete list is a handy guide to anyone interested in climate skepticism.

And you can even look below for people who have won the "Noble" [sic] Prize!  The authors' spelling is as defective as their science.  They are probably unaware that there once was a guy named Alfred Nobel

Their assertion that all the people they list are "hired" pundits is a psychopathic lie.  Most of us have never received a cent from anybody in connection with our writings on climate.  They just lie with gay abandon and no concern for evidence, as psychopaths do

In the months before the debut of the new documentary film "Merchants of Doubt," long-time climate denialist Fred Singer contacted more than two dozen bloggers, public relations specialists and scientists asking for help in derailing the documentary’s release.

"Can I sue for damages?” Singer asked in an email last October. "Can we get an injunction against the documentary?"

Singer is one of the "merchants of doubt" identified in the documentary, as are a number of other recipients of his email. The documentary, released nationwide last week, exposes the small network of hired pundits and scientists helping to sow doubt about climate science and delay legislative action on global warming in the United States.

Singer's email became public earlier this week when it was leaked to journalists.

Many of those copied on the email thread, such as Singer and communications specialist Steven Milloy, have financial ties to the tobacco, chemical, and oil and gas industries and have worked to defend them since the 1990s. Others seem relatively new to the denialist camp, such as climate scientist Judith Curry. All, however, have been vocal before Congress, on broadcast news or on the Internet in arguing that human activity is not the primarily driver of climate change.

Here is InsideClimate News' guide to those who were on the emails, in alphabetical order:

Timothy Ball

A retired geography professor from the University of Winnipeg, Ball says he doesn't believe humans are behind climate change. The "claim" of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that humans are almost solely responsible for global warming "is not proven except in their computer models and cannot be proven until we understand how much climate varies naturally," he wrote on his website.

Joe Bastardi

Bastardi has a bachelor's degree in meteorology and worked at Accuweather before joining WeatherBELL Analytics LLC, a meteorological consulting firm. Last September, Bastardi told the website beforeitsnews.com, "Nature, not man, rules the climate system." He said the people who participated in the People's Climate March were "more concerned with their political agenda than climate science," and that they shouldn't be "prostituting the weather and climate for [their] own needs."

William Briggs

Briggs is a statistician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and a consultant at New York Methodist Hospital. More than two decades ago, he spent a year as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. He is listed as an expert on the Heartland Institute's website, where he wrote, "Climate change is of no real interest to anyone except climatologists." Earlier this year, he co-wrote an article in the peer-reviewed Chinese Science Bulletin with fellow climate denialists Christopher Monckton and Willie Soon arguing that the IPCC's models are inaccurate and the world won't warm dangerously this century.

Judith Curry

Curry is a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. During a January 2014 hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Curry said the problem of climate change has been "vastly oversimplified." She said scientists should pay more attention to the role of natural variability in the climate system and the uncertainties in climate modeling. She also said the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is overly confident in attributing most of the warming to human activity.

Joe D'Aleo

D'Aleo is a former Weather Channel meteorologist and executive director of Icecap.us, a project that seeks to connect "respected scientists and journalists that are not deniers," but who don't believe human activity is the main driver of global warming. Last May, D'Aleo was one of 15 climate skeptics who wrote a rebuttal to the White House's National Climate Assessment report. "As this rebuttal makes clear, the NCA provides no scientific basis whatsoever for regulating CO2 emissions," they wrote.

Greenie Watch

The Greenie Watch blog is run by Australian social scientist John Ray. It questions the scientific evidence for global warming. "Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance," he wrote on his blog's home page. In response to the release of Fred Singer's emails about the film "Merchants of Doubt," Ray wrote, "We skeptics have got Warmists on the defense, a pathetic 'ad hominem' defense though it is."

William Happer

Happer is a physicist at Princeton University and an outspoken critic of global warming. He has repeatedly called global warming trends "exaggerated." In a TV interview last year, he compared the scientific community's treatment of carbon dioxide to "the demonization of poor Jews under Hitler." During President George H. W. Bush's term, Happer was director of the office of energy research at the Department of Energy.

Patrick J. Michaels

Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. He was long considered the most credible scientist in the climate denial campaign. He was the president of the American Association of State Climatologists and an IPCC author, sharing the 2007 Noble Peace Prize with other contributing scientists. But Michaels—who at one point estimated 40 percent of his funding came from the fossil fuel industry—has been caught repeatedly making inaccurate climate claims, including on Fox News and in the Washington Post and Forbes.

Roger Pielke

Roger Pielke Sr., a controversial climate scientist, said he believes that "humans have altered the climate system." However, he also supports the idea that warming has recently stopped and has argued against some well-established points of climate science, such as observed sea level rise and glacier melting. Pielke holds the position of senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies. He also is a senior research associate the University of Colorado in Boulder. It's unclear whether the intended recipient of an email thread concerning "Merchants of Doubt" was Pielke himself, or his son Roger Pielke Jr. His son is a policy researcher at the Center for Science and Technology in Colorado and has criticized those who have linked climate change to increasingly extreme weather.

S. Fred Singer

Singer is one of the earliest and most vocal scientists in the climate denial campaign. He was an academic and government space researcher for nearly four decades before working on behalf of the tobacco industry to discredit scientific evidence that smoking was bad for human health.  In the early 1990s, he started attacking global warming. He founded an anti climate-action think tank, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, using fossil fuel funds. The group has denied the existence of man-made climate change for 25 years. He also created the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a publication of junk science that counters the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's work. He has called the IPCC's latest assessment "a wonderful paper weight or door stop."

Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon

Soon, a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has posited that increased energy from the sun—not the burning of fossil fuels—is the biggest driver of modern climate change. His theory has been widely refuted by the scientific community, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences. In February, public documents showed that Soon received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests to publish "deliverables" in the form of articles about the solar-warming theory in scientific journals. He failed to disclose conflicts of interests to those journals and during congressional testimony. Soon also has ties to several conservative, climate-denying think tanks, including the Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

Roy Spencer

Spencer is a scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and a former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He says he believes natural fluctuations in the climate system could be the primary driver of global warming. During a Senate hearing in July 2013, Spencer told the committee humans "are having some influence" on climate change, "but it is impossible to know with any level of certainty how much influence."

Anthony Watts

Watts edits the blog Watts Up With That, which questions climate science and presents, "the untold story of the climate debate from the climate skeptic side." Watts studied electrical engineering and meteorology at Purdue University but never graduated. He then served as an on-air meteorologist for 25 years. He's a frequent speaker at anti-climate action events hosted by the Heartland Institute. "I believe that our [man-made] contribution [to climate change] may be far less than has been postulated," he told a California newspaper in 2007. "Our measurement network has been compromised—not intentionally, but accidentally and through carelessness."

SOURCE





SciAm abandons science

Their support for Warmism has rotted their brains. See the excerpt below.  They even call CO2 "the most prominent greenhouse gas" when Warmist scientists always concede that the major effect is from water vapor rather than from CO2.

And they claim that a fall in atmospheric CO2 of only 7ppm caused major effects.  We have seen much bigger changes that in recent times with NO effects.

The bit of speculation below is more a verbal fart than anything to do with science.  The CO2 fall is their only scientific datum.  The rest is just navel-gazing

The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations of the most prominent greenhouse gas and start a little ice age. Based on that dramatic shift, 1610 should be considered the start date of a new, proposed geologic epoch—the Anthropocene, or recent age of humanity—according to the authors of a new study.

"Placing the Anthropocene at this time highlights the idea that colonialism, global trade and the desire for wealth and profits began driving Earth towards a new state," argues ecologist Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds and University College London. "We are a geological force of nature, but that power is unlike any other force of nature in that it is reflexive, and can be used, withdrawn or modified."

Lewis and his U.C.L. colleague, geologist Mark Maslin, dub the decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide the "Orbis spike," from the Latin for world, because after 1492 human civilization has progressively globalized. They make the case that human impacts on the planet have been dramatic enough to warrant formal recognition of the Anthropocene epoch and that the Orbis spike should serve as the marker of the start of this new epoch in a paper published in Nature on March 12. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Researchers have advanced an array of proposals for when this putative new epoch might have begun. Some link it to the start of the mass extinction of large mammals such as woolly mammoths and giant kangaroos some 50,000 years ago or the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. Others say the Anthropocene is more recent, tied to the beginning of the uptick of atmospheric CO2 concentrations after the invention of an effective coal-burning steam engine.

SOURCE





Deceitful Warmist Movie a Huge Flop at the Box Office

The invaluable site for movie buffs who are also interested in the box-office business of film is BoxOfficeMojo. That site reports that “Merchants of Doubt” has earned $23,300 in the four theaters in which it opened on Friday. So that means … “Merchants of Doubt” had the 314th best opening weekend ever for a documentary film in the United States! What an achievement!

Overall, “Merchants of Doubt” finished $40 better than the 1999 opening of “American Movie” (#315), and just $55 behind 2008’s “Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot” (#313). Never heard of those movies? Neither has anyone else – and neither will anyone hear of, nor long remember, “Merchants of Doubt.” But, for those curious about the company this film keeps:

“American Movie” (1999) is a “documentary about an aspiring filmmaker’s attempts to finance his dream project by finally completing the low-budget horror film he abandoned years before.”

“Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot” (2008) is a documentary about “eight of the U.S.’s top high school basketball players [competing] in the first ‘Elite 24′ tournament at Rucker Park.” That film should have been helped by the fact that it was directed by Adam Yauch, better known as the late, great “MCA” of the legendary rap group Beastie Boys. It still only made a total of $50,804.

The market has spoken … again. The public just ain’t buying what the climate alarmists are selling – even at what is going to be an enormous loss for the producers of “Merchants of Doubt.” Couldn’t happen to a better group of film-makers whose piece of expensive propaganda demonized researchers who adhere to the scientific method. You’d be much better informed if you read Russell Cook’s excellent “Merchants of Smear.”

SOURCE

Steve Goddard offers some additional comments:

I just attended the premier in DC with Michael Mann and Katherine Hayhoe in the audience. It was a small theater and there was no one else in my row,

Most of the movie was about the tobacco industry in the 1960's.  Then they showed a few clips of skeptics, and intermixed them with clips of 1960's tobacco crooks. The idea was that anyone who questions a scientific theory, is a big tobacco paid child killer.

Katherine admitted after the movie that the only people who were going to watch it were people who already believed Al Gore's sci-fi flick.



EPA Administrator: Coffee at Risk Due to Climate Change

Climate change is bad for EVERYTHING.  Good that we don't seem to be having any.  We could always drink dandelion coffee, though.  It's not too bad if you grow your own dandelions and have it fresh.  And dandelions are worldwide!



 In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy said that “climate change puts the world’s coffee-growing regions at risk.”

“Climate change injects volatility into the global marketplace. Volatility leads to instability,” McCarthy said. “Take coffee. Now coffee is a temperature sensitive crop. Climate change puts the world’s coffee-growing regions at risk.

“Growth depends on a safe environment and a stable climate,” she said. “We can no longer accept the false premise that pollution is somehow part of the growing pains of growth. If that’s your premise, then the foundation of that growth was not built to last. It was wrongly designed.

“Climate change isn’t just a moral responsibility we must accept. It’s an economic opportunity we can seize.”

McCarthy not only emphasized the economic effects of climate change, but said that it posed a “national security concern.”

“Once you open your eyes, you’ll realize that climate is not just an environmental issue. It is a fundamental economic issue and national security challenge,” McCarthy said.

“It’s no surprise that according to the American Security Project, 70 percent of the world’s countries explicitly call climate change a national security concern.”

SOURCE





Heartland Institute President Rips Senators for Repeating Lies about Climate Scientists

Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast says Democratic U.S. Sens. Ed Markey, Barbara Boxer, and Sheldon Whitehouse should be ashamed of themselves for abusing their offices as part of a campaign to “stigmatize and demonize” those who are skeptical of a human-caused climate crisis.

Bast’s remarks come in response to the senators’ February 25 letter demanding funding, planning, and organizational details from The Heartland Institute and 99 other businesses and nonprofit organizations that question the causes and consequences of global warming.

“Shame on you for abusing your public office in an attempt to silence public debate on such an important public policy topic,” Bast wrote in his letter, mailed yesterday. “I am grateful that a majority of members on the Committee on Environment and Public Works has strongly condemned your views and tactics.”

The three Democratic senators sent their February 25 letter in the wake of misleading news reports about prominent climate scientist Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, who works for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Bast also defended Dr. Soon, who has presented scientific findings at several climate conferences organized by Heartland.

“You repeat the vicious libel that Dr. Wei-Hock ‘Willie’ Soon failed to disclose funding for his work,” Bast wrote. “Are you not aware that neither his employer, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, nor the journal that published the scholarly article in question, Science Bulletin, has found Dr. Soon violated any of their rules or disclosure policies? Who asked you to repeat that lie?”

“I am very proud to report that The Heartland Institute has spent millions of dollars over the past ten years supporting scientific research that contradicts alarmist claims about climate change,” Bast wrote. “The New York Times calls us ‘the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism.’ The Times is not a credible source on this topic, but you three probably find it persuasive.”

Bast also told Sens. Markey, Boxer, and Whitehouse that the totality of the information they will receive about Heartland’s funding, organization, and programs can be found on Heartland’s websites including www.heartland.org.

SOURCE





Another ship sets out to Antarctica to "show" impact of global warming

They are incapable of showing any such thing. It's just a thin  excuse for having fun in boats. If cooling were the current wisdom,  they would be saying that they were sailing to "show" the effect of cooling

Robert Swan is a “polar explorer, environmentalist and the first man ever to walk unsupported to both the North and South Poles,” according to his site 2041. Swan walked to the South Pole in 1984 and the North Pole in 1989. Since then, he has traveled to Antarctica 35 times. His journeys inspired him to launch 2041 to protect Antarctica. The name comes from the date when the world’s moratoriums on mining and drilling in Antarctica will expire. Its mission is “to build personal leadership skills among people who choose to embrace the challenge of sustaining all forms of life—in their families, communities, organizations and the planet.”

Next week, he and his 2041 team will journey to the last great wilderness on Earth. The International Antarctic Expedition 2015 will bring together people from around the world to “debate, discuss and determine firsthand the effects of climate change.” The team will assess the effects of temperature rise on Antarctica and, upon return, the team plans to educate the public and hopefully spur action on climate change.

Swan has been recognized for his work with an appointment as UN Goodwill Ambassador for Youth and Special Envoy to the Director General of UNESCO. He’s even been knighted as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Since 2003, he has taken 1,100 people from 72 nations to Antarctica “in hopes that it will ignite their passion for preservation.” Swan says, “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”

This year’s expedition begins on March 13, in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. From there, the team will embark on their ship, Sea Spirit, to Antarctica. With stops at Cuverville Island, Neko Harbour, Paradise Harbour and Lemaire Channel, the team will get an expansive tour of the icy continent. The team will also stop at King George Island, the location of the 2041 E-Base, the first education station in Antarctica made with sustainable products and powered by renewable energy. In 2008, Swan successfully became the first person in Antarctic history to live for two weeks solely on renewable energy. On March 25, the 2041 team will return to Ushuaia.

Dr. Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of 5 Gyres Institute, will be on Swan’s Antarctica expedition and will provide blog posts to EcoWatch. Stay tuned.

In a Ted Talk last October, Swan explains the importance of these expeditions: “We need to listen to what these places are telling us,” he said. “And if we don’t, we will end up with our own survival situation here on planet Earth.”

The gravity of Antarctica’s ice melt is severe. The continent holds 90 percent of the world’s ice and 70 percent of the world’s freshwater, according to Swan. The sea level rise from Antarctica’s ice melt would reshape the world as we know it. [It would but it isn't]

SOURCE

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