Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ Says ‘Climate Deniers’ Suffer Psychological Delusions
Climate change skeptics suffer from cognitive dissonance on global warming, a type of psychological disorder that prevents people from recognizing reality, the comedian and former TV show host told Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during a Facebook Live event.
“To the deniers out there. I want you to think about what is called cognitive dissonance,” Nye said, referring to situations wherein people prefer to bury their head in the sand instead of facing reality. It’s up to environmentalists and everybody else to save skeptics from themselves, he added.
“Instead of accepting that the climate is changing, deniers are denying the evidence and dismissing the authorities” simply because they don’t want to face a harsh reality, Nye said.
“I know it may not be very popular thing to say, but the long-term implications of doing nothing about climate change are catastrophic,” Nye said about what could happen if Americans don’t take seriously President Donald Trump’s skepticism.
Nye, who has a history of making dubious comments directed at skeptics, also brought up what he calls the connection between so-called denialism and the cigarette industry’s refusal to acknowledge the negative health properties of cigarettes.
“It’s amazing to me that fossil fuel companies continue to use the same tactics as the tobacco industry,” Nye told Sanders.
The comedian has made similar comments in the past.
“Was it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron?” Nye asked in a video interview with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano in April. “We’ll see what happens. Was it appropriate to jail people from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not addictive, and so on?”
“In these cases, for me, as a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizens,” the former children’s TV host said at the time. “So I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this.”
A Climate Scientist Is Smeared for Blowing the Whistle on ‘Corrected’ Data
by JULIE KELLY February 15, 2017 5:18 PM The scandal is growing, as Congress investigates and NOAA brings in outside experts to review a key study. Less than 72 hours after a federal whistleblower exposed shocking misconduct at a key U.S. climate agency, the CEO of the nation’s top scientific group was already dismissing the matter as no biggie. On February 7, Rush Holt, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told a congressional committee that allegations made by a high-level climate scientist were simply an “internal dispute between two factions” and insisted that the matter was “not the making of a big scandal.” (This was moments after Holt lectured the committee that science is “a set of principles dedicated to discovery,” and that it requires “humility in the face of evidence.” Who knew?) Three days earlier, on February 4, John Bates, a former official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — he was in charge of that agency’s climate-data archive — posted a lengthy account detailing how a 2015 report on global warming was mishandled. In the blog Climate Etc., Bates wrote a specific and carefully sourced 4,100-word exposé that accuses Tom Karl, his ex-colleague at NOAA, of influencing the results and release of a crucial paper that purports to refute the pause in global warming. Karl’s study was published in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders would meet in Paris to agree on a costly climate change pact; the international media and climate activists cheered Karl’s report as the final word disproving the global-warming pause. But Bates, an acclaimed expert in atmospheric sciences who left NOAA last year, says there’s a lot more to the story. He reveals that “in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets, . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming.” Karl’s report was “an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Agency protocol to properly archive data was not followed, and the computer that processed the data had suffered a “complete failure,” according to Bates. In a lengthy interview published in the Daily Mail the next day, Bates said: They had good data from buoys. …
What Consensus?! Boston Globe: ‘Many meteorologists question climate change science’
…BOSTON METEOROLOGIST FIRED FOR HAVING SKEPTICAL VIEW OF ‘GLOBAL WARMING’
Mish Michaels, a U.S. meteorologist, lost her job as a science reporter at WGBH’s show “Greater Boston” last week after colleagues raised concerns about her views on vaccines and climate change.
Mish Michaels, U.S. meteorologist and science reporter
They observe changes in the atmosphere like astronomers study the stars, analyzing everything from air pressure to water vapor and poring over computer models to arrive at a forecast.
But for all their scrutiny of weather data, many meteorologists part ways with their colleagues — climate scientists who study longer atmospheric trends — in one crucial respect: whether human activity is causing climate change.
Meteorologists are more skeptical than climate scientists, and that division was underscored by the recent departure of Mish Michaels from WGBH News.
Michaels, a former meteorologist at WBZ-TV, lost her job as a science reporter at WGBH’s show “Greater Boston” last week after colleagues raised concerns about her views on vaccines and climate change. She had previously questioned the safety of vaccines and the evidence that human activity was causing global warming, both widely held views in the scientific community.
A national survey last year by researchers at George Mason University in Virginia found that just 46 percent of broadcast meteorologists said they believed that climate change over the past 50 years has been “primarily or entirely” the result of human activity. By contrast, surveys of climate scientists have found that 97 percent attribute warming to human activity.
“Weather forecasters are people, too, and their political ideology plays a role in their views,” said Ed Maibach, who directs the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason and oversaw the study. “So conservative forecasters tend to be more skeptical than liberal forecasters.”
Among those skeptics is Tim Kelley, who has issued weather forecasts on New England Cable News since 1992. He describes himself as a “student of climate change,” but says his experience with the variability of computer models has made him skeptical that anyone can predict how greenhouse gases will change the environment in the coming decades.
“How can their computer models be better than ours?” he said. “We look at computer projections all the time, and we know how off they can be.”
Kelley acknowledges the climate is changing, but like many skeptics he questions whether rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the reason. He believes most …
French Socialist Presidential Candidate Offers Asylum To US Climate Scientists
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Leading French Presidential Candidate Emmanuel Macron has invited the entire US climate science community to relocate to France.
Climate scientists wary of Trump: Please come to France, says presidental hopeful
By Martin Enserink Feb. 10, 2017 , 8:15 AM
The mediagenic wunderkind of French presidential politics has a message for U.S. scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs working on climate change and worrying about their future under President Donald Trump: Come to France.
In a video posted to his Facebook and Twitter accounts late last night (and hashtagged #ScienceMarch), Emmanuel Macron renewed his commitment to fighting global warming and extended a warm welcome: “We want people working on climate change, energy, renewables, and new technologies. France is your nation.”
He may well get an opportunity to make good on his promise. Polls released this week suggest that Macron, the founder of a new center-left party who is campaigning on environmental protection, has soared past two more traditional candidates and is likely to face Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right National Front, in the 7 May runoffs. One poll says he’d defeat her with 63% of the votes.
For most scientists, moving to France is easier said than done, says Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “It’s not as if you can just pick up a NASA climate satellite and just reassign it to France,” Halpern says. “But politicians the world over now recognize that science is a global endeavor, and seem increasingly eager to ensure that it is not disrupted by political interference. Gag orders and immigration bans do make it more challenging for scientists to do their work.”
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Australia’s chief scientist falls for a fake news story — compares Trump to Joseph Stalin
…‘Michael Mann sues to silence critics, and errant courts ignore the First Amendment to help him’
A Libel Suit Threatens Catastrophe for the Climate of Public Debate
Michael Mann sues to silence critics, and errant courts ignore the First Amendment to help him.
The First Amendment provides robust protection for political and scientific debate, but it faces a new threat from a climate act
Warmist Michael Mann calls for ‘rebellion’ against Trump
Professor Michael Mann says the US is ‘firmly back in the madhouse’ as new president launches ‘dizzying, ongoing assault on science’
The Independent US
Court Battle: Warmist Michael Mann Losing, Gives Skeptic Tim Ball ‘Concessions’
Written by John O’Sullivan
In a week when mainstream fake news outlets try to sell him as the ‘World-leading climate change scientist’ Professor Michael Mann (above image: left) concedes legal ground in major court case about his alleged climate data fraud.
After the news leaked out defendant in the case, Dr Tim Ball (above image: right) told colleagues at Principia Scientific International (PSI):
“What my lawyers did was demand a series of concessions, all of which were agreed. I can’t discuss the details but, under the circumstances, it is a good outcome.”
The Supreme Court of British Columbia, Vancouver was where “world-leading” American professor, Michael E Mann was supposed to start his libel trial against retired Canadian climatologist Dr Tim Ball – until this crucial retreat. Such a delay – to possibly extend the case into an eight-year epic – plays into the hands of skeptics who early on dismissed Mann’s gambit as a cynical strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) to silence dissent.
Till now Dr Ball had been eager to make good use of up to a month’s worth of courtroom time granted to him to win over jurors. He had carefully prepared and assembled an array of the best scientific brains from the skeptic side.
Ball’s opponent is formidable in his field. At the turn of the millennium Mann was the golden boy of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They touted Mann’s graph (appearing on page 3 of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report [TAR]) as the smoking gun of man-made global warming. As you can see from the press header below, Mann’s still ‘world-leading’ to them.
The “concession” to Ball is a hugely embarrassing development. This is especially so in a week when Mann has been on the charge leading the wide media assault against President Trump for his alleged attacks on climate science. Government climate researchers are the keenest to discredit the new president on science policy.
For almost a generation literally thousands of climate scientists and science publications world-wide have relied on Mann’s graph as the cornerstone of the science to persuade governments to act on ‘catastrophic’ climate change.
For the “world leading climate scientist” the upside is that by giving ground to Ball Mann dodges the deadly bullet – for now. He has bought himself time till 2019 and his lawyers can continue to deny jurors …
Watch out, Mr. President. The environmentalists are coming for you « Hot Air
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posted at 8:31 pm on January 30, 2017 by Jazz Shaw
Donald Trump has been put on notice. (This is the… what? The 7,256th time he’s been put on notice?) The nation’s environmental activists aren’t going to take his regulatory and administrative changes without a fight. They’re lining up their legal teams and getting ready to tie the White House up in lawsuits such as they’ve never seen. Or at least so they say. (Associated Press)
The night before Donald Trump’s inauguration, five environmental lawyers filed a federal court brief defending an Obama administration clean-water rule that the new president and his Republican allies have targeted for elimination, considering it burdensome to landowners.
The move served as a warning that environmentalists, facing a hostile administration and a Republican-dominated Congress, are prepared to battle in court against what they fear will be a wave of unfavorable policies concerning climate change, wildlife protection, federal lands and pollution.
Advocacy groups nationwide are hiring more staff lawyers. They’re coordinating with private attorneys and firms that have volunteered to help. They’re reviewing statutes, setting priorities and seeking donations.
Let’s review, because this seems to be the marching orders. They are:
- Reviewing statutes
- Setting priorities
- Seeking donations
Yes, you need to get that “seeking donations” clause in there early, don’t you? Not to worry. I’m sure the President has taken notice and will soon be reconsidering his plans in the face of such a robust #Resist movement. What mere mortal could stand up to that hash tag?