Esquire Mag Features Climate Depot…Again: ‘It’s the Golden Age’ of Climate Skeptics – ‘Grinning ear-to-ear’
BY JACK HOLMES
MAR 12, 2017
Excerpts;
“We’re sleeping much better now,” said Marc Morano, the executive director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Morano, a former aide to Senator James Inhofe—of snowball infamy—has for decades disputed the scientific consensus on climate change in various capacities. He denies that the Earth is warming, that we could know for sure humans are predominantly causing it, and that we could do anything about it even if we did. (It’s important to cover your bases.) “We are grinning ear-to-ear, climate skeptics,” Morano said. “We have a rational, scientific approach coming to Washington under the Trump administration.” Morano, who has a B.A. in political science from George Mason University, is more of a traditionalist climate skeptic: Happer’s group takes a more proactive approach, but its message is still a distortion of the science…
In our conversations, both Happer and Morano said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who left his post as CEO of ExxonMobil to take the job, could be the biggest obstacle to their agenda in the White House. (That ExxonMobil has donated over half a million dollars to Morano’s organization over the years doesn’t seem to complicate things for him. Happer, whose organizations have also received funding from large fossil fuel companies and prominent conservative donor networks like the Bradley Foundation, described a “David and Goliath” scenario where the Sierra Club is Goliath.) …
Morano claims, that climate science is manufactured as part of a U.N. conspiracy. From a more practical standpoint, Morano wants the Trump administration to overturn Obama-era executive orders like the Clean Power Plan, defund the United Nations climate panel, and to “Clexit” (or “climate exit”) from the Paris Climate Accords. He also suggested, in glowing terms, that fellow traveler Happer may join the Trump administration as a “science czar.” After that, Morano wants the president to “unleash” fracking, oil drilling, and coal production, the latter of which he somewhat agreed was no longer even competitive due to the rise of cheap natural gas.
…
Media Freak Out Over EPA Chief Questioning Climate Change Dogma
On Friday, correspondents on the network morning shows were beside themselves as they breathlessly reported on Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt voicing skepticism of the liberal dogma about man-made global warming. The hostile coverage even included a call on Pruitt to resign over the comments.
CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King introduced a report on the controversy by fretting: “President Trump’s EPA administrator, who sued the agency repeatedly in his former job, has touched off a fierce new argument over climate change. In an interview yesterday, Scott Pruitt questioned the role that humans play in global warming.”
Correspondent Chip Reid followed:
In 2013, an intergovernmental panel of 2,000 scientists said it was, quote, “extremely likely that humans are the dominant cause of global warming.” That same sentiment is expressed on the EPA’s own website. But the new leader of that agency doesn’t seem to agree….EPA administrator Scott Pruitt yesterday questioned the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the environment.
The reporter warned: “This is not the first time the man tasked with protecting the environment has questioned global warming. In an op/ed last year, Pruitt said the debate over climate change ‘is far from settled,’ claiming scientists are still questioning ‘its connection to the actions of mankind.’”
Building on King and Reid’s hyperventilating, a soundbite ran of Sierra Club director Michael Brune ranting: “He should not be serving as head of the EPA and he should resign immediately.” Reid touted how Brune “says the new comments show Pruitt is not fit for the job.”
Warmists Freak Out Over EPA Chief’s Skepticism: ‘Outed himself as a pure climate denier’ – ‘Unqualified…extreme…irresponsible’
Scientists, environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers quickly denounced EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt after he said Thursday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change.
“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,” he said.
…
Sen. Tom Carper, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, tweeted about the comment, “I think 97% of the world’s scientists were surprised to learn this today! I know I was.”
…
With his latest comment, Pruitt’s mask has come off, said David Doniger, director of the Climate & Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“After obscuring his true views during his Senate confirmation hearings, Scott Pruitt has outed himself as a pure climate denier,” he said. “Having an EPA administrator who claims carbon pollution is not the primary cause of climate change is like having a U.S. surgeon general who says smoking is not the primary cause of lung cancer.”
…
Pruitt’s comment on Thursday is “nothing short of an atrocity,” said Aura Vasquez, director of Climate Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, a group that aims to build organizing power at the state and local level.
“Denying the science of this reality will impact millions of people on the front lines of a dangerously changing climate, especially low-income communities and communities of color,” she said.
…
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, co-chair of the Senate Climate Action Task Force issued a statement shortly after the interview calling Pruitt’s views “extreme” and “irresponsible.”
“Anyone who denies over a century’s worth of established science and basic facts is unqualified to be the administrator of the EPA. Now more than ever, the Senate needs to stand up to Scott Pruitt and his dangerous views,” he said in a statement.
…
Report: Media Warmists Use Photoshop And Fraud To Deceive on Antarctica ‘warmth’
Watts Up With That has a funny instance of warmist deception. You may have seen the headline, I did: Antarctica hits record high temperature at balmy 63.5°F . Where? Base Esperanza. Where is Base Esperanza in relation to what we normally think of as Antarctica?
Source: Climate Alarmists Use Photoshop And Fraud To Deceive…
WaPo Warmist Cherry Blossom Claims Refuted: ‘Nothing But Lies And Statistical Manipulations’
Reader David Reich left a comment in response to Kenneth Richard’s post on grape harvests and climate . I’ve decided to upgrade it as a post below. Both stories show that today’s climate is well within the range of our climate’s natural variability over the past 100 and 1000 years, and that today’s weather events aren’t unusual.
Source: WaPo Cherry Blossom Claims Refuted: “Nothing But Lies And Statistical Manipulations”!…
NYT Quietly Deletes Section Of Pruitt E-Mail Story That Contradicted Sierra Club, NRDC Talking Points
BY SIMON LOMAX FEBRUARY 24, 2017
A New York Times story that contradicted claims of wrongdoing against U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was quietly edited after publication to remove lines that challenged the talking points of environmental activist groups.
The Feb. 22 story was about thousands of newly released e-mails from Pruitt’s time as Oklahoma attorney general, showing communications between his office and the state’s energy industry. Environmental activists claim those discussions about how to challenge environmental regulations issued by the Obama administration should disqualify Pruitt from leading the EPA.
The Sierra Club, for example, claims Pruitt is “unfit to serve” and the e-mails released this week “are as bad as we thought,” according to the group’s executive director Michael Brune. The Natural Resources Defense Council, another group that strongly opposed Pruitt’s nomination, said the e-mails “confirm his critics’ worst fears.”
But when it was first published, the Times story reached a very different conclusion. “Despite the large volume of correspondence between Mr. Pruitt’s office and the industry players, the emails are unlikely to cause Mr. Pruitt significant new problems,” the newspaper reported. “They do expand on email exchanges or topics that previously had been disclosed.”
Conservative and libertarian news outlets RedState and Reason picked up on the Times’ reporting almost immediately. The Indiana Law Blog also quoted the same two sentences from the newspaper’s report.
The e-mails “turned up nothing that is particularly surprising or corrupt,” wrote Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason. “It turns out that an elected Republican politician was in frequent contact with constituent companies who wanted to make known their concerns about the impact of federal regulations on their businesses,” Bailey said.
Using the e-mails to attack Pruitt is “another tiresome example of selective political outrage” by activist groups that had very close ties to senior EPA officials during the Obama administration, Bailey concluded.…
NYT, WaPo, Time, CNN Praise ‘Republican’ Calls for Carbon Tax
…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. …
UK Guardian: Trump’s likely science adviser calls climate scientists ‘glassy-eyed cult’
The man tipped as frontrunner for the role of science adviser to Donald Trumphas described climate scientists as “a glassy-eyed cult” in the throes of a form of collective madness.
William Happer, an eminent physicist at Princeton University, met Trump last month to discuss the post and says that if he were offered the job he would take it. Happer is highly regarded in the academic community, but many would view his appointment as a further blow to the prospects of concerted international action on climate change.
“There’s a whole area of climate so-called science that is really more like a cult,” Happer told the Guardian. “It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science.”
Trump has previously described global warming as “very expensive … bullshit” and has signalled a continued hardline stance since taking power. He has nominated the former Texas governor Rick Perry, a staunch climate sceptic, as secretary of energy and hopes to put the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) under the leadership of Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, who has been one of the agency’s most hostile critics.
John Holdren, Barack Obama’s science adviser, said Happer’s outspoken opinions would be a “substantial handicap” for a job that has traditionally involved delivering mainstream scientific opinion to the heart of policymaking.
“Every national academy of science agrees that the science is solid, that climate change is real,” he said. “To call this a cult is absurd and … an insult to the people who have done this work.”
Happer also supports a controversial crackdown on the freedom of federal agency scientists to speak out about their findings, arguing that mixed messages on issues such as whether butter or margarine is healthier, have led to people disregarding all public health information.
“So many people are fed up of listening to the government lie to them about margarine and climate change that when something is actually true and beneficial
Renowned Princeton Physicist Tells Journalists: CO2 is a ‘non-problem.’ – ‘Let me be clear: I think it’s a good thing’
Renowned Princeton Physicist Schools New York Times Science Journalist On CO2 Science!
Renowned Princeton physicist William Happer told New York Times science journalist Andrew Revkin in an online video conference that he believes the world has got it all wrong when it comes to the implications of CO2 emissions into our atmosphere.
Happer told Revkin that “any dispassionate weighing of the facts would give you a negative cost of carbon” and that “more CO2 is good for the world“.
Moreover Happer believes that the whole climate issue has “distracted people from real problems” like massive pollution in places like China and India.
Happer adds that he thinks “enormous damage has been done to the environment by diverting money from real problems to completely made up problems.”
He tells the New York Times journalist that he absolutely sees CO2 as a “non-problem” and that he even sees the trace gas “as good“. He reiterates: “Let me be clear: It think it’s not a problem. I think it’s a good thing.”
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2017/02/15/renowned-princeton-physicist-schools-new-york-times-science-journalist-on-co2-science/#sthash.0rXa8j3w.R0j9ZEL4.dpuf…