Debate no more! Jailed for scientific dissent?! Twenty climate scientists, including Top UN scientist, call for RICO investigation of climate skeptics in letter to Obama
Top UN scientist Dr. Kevin Trenberth and 19 other scientists have become so tired of debating global warming that they are now apparently seeking to jail those who disagree with them.
One of the scientists who signed the letter was Alan Robock of Rutgers University. Robock has expressed very positive views of Cuba’s Fidel Castro after trips there in 2010 and 2011. See: Rutger’s Prof. Alan Robock drools over Castro and his VIP treatment in 2010 trip to Cuba [email protected] – Robock’s enchanted meeting with Castro: I stayed at ‘nicest hotel…I went in a black Mercedes…I went to private meeting with Fidel & his family…we had photo taken together’
Prof. Robock & Fidel Castro in 2010
[Note: This call for treating skeptics as racketeers comes the same week that the New York Times promoted equating climate skeptics to Hitler. See: ‘The Next Genocide’- NYT OpEd: Climate ‘deniers’ present ‘intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s’
Update: World court should rule on climate science to quash skeptics, says Law Prof. Philippe Sands ]
Climate skeptics heading to jail?
Letter reproduced in full:
Letter to President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren
September 1, 2015
Dear President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren,
As you know, an overwhelming majority of climate scientists are convinced about the potentially serious adverse effects of human-induced climate change on human health, agriculture, and biodiversity. We applaud your efforts to regulate emissions and the other steps you are taking. Nonetheless, as climate scientists we are exceedingly concerned that America’s response to climate change – indeed, the world’s response to climate change – is insufficient. The risks posed by climate change, including increasing extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and increasing ocean acidity – and potential strategies for addressing them – are detailed in the Third National Climate Assessment (2014), Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The stability of the Earth’s climate over the past ten thousand years contributed to the growth of agriculture and therefore, a thriving human civilization. We are now at high risk of seriously destabilizing the Earth’s climate and irreparably harming people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.
We appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. One additional tool – recently proposed by Senator …
Fmr. Harvard Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl on ‘Merchants of Doubt’: ‘Morano is an incredibly good communicator…a very likable character’
Needless to say, the climate skeptics are automatically assumed to be the fraudsters. It would be much more logical to compare the fraudsters in the magic industry to the actual fraudsters in the climate debate, namely the climate alarmists, and the movie doesn’t find it important to present any evidence that their reverse link is the better one.
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Climate alarmist Ben Santer presents himself as a quiet, modest, peaceful guy who is afraid of violence etc. The movie would be much more attractive if he were allowed to show what kind of a man he actually is, e.g. quote his ClimateGate e-mail:
From: Ben Santer
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Well, the catchy scenes haven’t been included so this supernasty, near-murderous jerk named Ben Santer was painted as another boring sheep and the viewers must have been disappointed by this segment – which was both dishonest and uninteresting.
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At the end, the movie made me much less upset than I had expected. It is unquestionably a propaganda piece. But even when it gets to the schools, I have serious enough doubts about its ability to make a difference. It’s a very complex question what are the optimum characteristics of a propaganda movie to achieve a certain goal.
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The character of this movie is completely different from some of the good skeptical documentaries, like The Great Global Warming Swindle (TGGWS). TGGWS was filled with historical, scientific, and political facts, popularization of mechanisms uncovered by science, and lots of other things. There is no science and no true evidence in the Merchants of Doubt. After all, Naomi Oreskes doesn’t understand any science (or anything else that matters, for that matter). It’s a propaganda movie that invites you to hate the climate skeptics as well as the tobacco industry, the free markets, and anti-communists. It doesn’t really present good evidence that these topics are related or should be related. At the end, some people (or children) may find it enough to change their mind but I do think that people who buy the message of this movie are so terribly stupid and naive that they can’t possibly influence the fate of the civilized nations.
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Warmist film ‘Merchants of Doubt’ — comes back as insidious propaganda to kids in schools
The film’s backers also helped push the Los Angeles Times and a dozen other US papers[1] into banning “anti-fact” skeptic views.
Merchant of Doubt’s second target is the education system. The film comes conveniently packaged with classroom study guides for teachers and students. Green groups such as Cool Australia and Australian Youth Climate Coalition will waste no time in leveraging their influence in schools to get the film playing and streaming on the smart whiteboards.
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The dark art of “Education” – teaching the kiddies to vote for big-government – Merchants of Doubt was designed from inception as part of an education package. The film’s website includes study guides for high school and college students to “develop critical thinking skills that will allow them to sort through confusing messages and distinguish between truth, propaganda, and misinformation.”
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The website itself concedes that only 50% of Americans support the IPCC line that most of recent warming is human-caused. The documentary-makers blame “spin that’s masterfully orchestrated by some of the world’s largest corporations”.
Huh? This tirade about skeptic funding comes from eBay billionaires. Compared with funding to the climate industry, money going to skeptics would be lost below several decimal places.[4]…
Trust the New York Times? Says Skeptic Climate Scientists are Crooks (ignore NYT’s burden-of-proof wipeout)
…Climate Depot Responds to Sen. Whitehouse: ‘The warmists have it exactly backwards. It is the global warming proponents who are guilty of the tobacco tactics.’
Climate Depot Responds:
The warmists have it exactly backwards. It is the global warming proponents who are guilty of the tobacco tactics.
Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. Rips ‘Big Climate’ for having ‘similarities’ with ‘Big Tobacco’ & ‘Big NFL’ – Pielke Jr. specifically linked UN IPCC and Michael Mann’s tactics to ‘Big Tobacco’ and ‘Big NFL’ – Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., prof. of env. studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the U. of Colorado at Boulder:
Pielke Jr. Tweeted on January 30, 2014: ‘Big NFL & Big Climate both had academics serving as gatekeepers of peer reviewed journals to preserve a favored narrative & keep out dissenters’
‘The science issues of NFL/concussions has some similarities w/ tobacco/industry & also with those in climate science.’ — ‘There’s a lot of similarity between League of Denial (the NFL) & The Hockey Stick Illusion by @aDissentient in how leading academics (Michael Mann) behaved — not good’
‘Big Tobacco and Big NFL both tried to sow doubt and use uncertainty as a basis for trying to avoid legal culpability’ – ‘Big Tobacco is history, the IPCC is back on track, but the NFL continues to have its science problems’
Related Links:
Michael Mann lawyers up with Tobacco Lawyers! Represented by experienced defamation lawyer John B. Williams who successfully represented R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company – Mann’s lawyer ‘successfully defended R.J. Reynolds in commercial speech case filed by FTC challenging cartoon character, Joe Camel’
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NYE: ‘This is perfectly analogous to the cigarette industry and cancer, trying to introduce the idea that since you can’t prove any one thing, the whole thing is in — is in doubt.’
MORANO: ‘For Nye to bring up cigarettes – it’s the global warming scientists who are the ones fulfilling a narrative. I mean we have Michael Oppenheimer, one of the lead U.N. scientists, took an endowment from Barbra Streisand. Hollywood – he’s the climatologists to the stars. It’s so insulting to imply that somehow skeptical scientists
Democrat Sen. Whitehouse: Use RICO Laws to Prosecute Global Warming Skeptics
Writing in the Washington Post, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, offered a curious suggestion for dealing with global warming skeptics:
In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”
The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking. … The coordinated tactics of the climate denial network, Brulle’s report states, “span a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts that aim at undermining climate science.” Compare that again to the findings in the tobacco case.
The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.
That’s right — a sitting U.S. Senator is suggesting using RICO laws should be applied to global warming skeptics. Courts have been defining RICO down for some time and in ways that aren’t particularly helpful. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled RICO statutes could be applied to pro-life activists on the grounds that interstate commerce can be affected even when the organization being targeted doesn’t have economic motives.
Obviously, there’s a lot of money hanging …
Update: Does skeptic smearer Naomi Oreskes have a conflict-of-interest disclosure problem?
‘Claim that 97% of scientists support climate alarm cannot be supported’
http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/claim-that-97-of-scientists-support-climate-alarm-cannot-be-supported
Cook, being a PhD student in psychology with a background in communication studies, is hardly in a position to dismiss the membership of the American Meteorological Society as “fake experts.” As to fakery, I would refer readers to the analysis of Cook’s work by social psychologist Jose Duarte, noting that the word “fraud” appears 21 times in that essay alone, and it is not even the harshest of Duarte’s essays on Cook’s discredited methods. Economist Richard Tol has also published detailed excoriations of Cook’s work at as well as in the peer-reviewed literature, as have others.…
‘Consensus on climate change causes a myth’
‘Merchants of Doubt’: Film’s box office tally reveals a ‘dud’
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/emmerchants_of_doubtem_a_climate_change_dud.html…