Alt-Truth
gregladen | January 16, 2015A new documentary you'll want to see.
An eye-opening documentary exploring the tactics of climate change deniers.
An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that global warming caused by human activity is one of the most critical dangers our planet faces. But a well-organised band of professional spinners and obfuscators toil in the shadows to pretend there is a genuine debate on the subject. That's the argument put forward by this provocative new documentary from Robert Kenner, director of the Oscar nominated food industry expose, 'Food, Inc'. Adapted from the book of the same title by…
gregladen | January 10, 2015This is serious. A highly regarded and widely recognized planetery physicist put together the most dangerous scientific ingredients that exist: skepticism of the established science, a comprehensive list of hypotheses that stood in opposition to that established science, a huge amount of data, a healthy amount of funding including a good chunk from energy companies that mainly sell fossil carbon based fuels, and a hand selected research team of others who were also skeptics.
In the end, he came up with an explanation for what people call Global Warming. Personally, I believe him. I think…
gregladen | January 4, 2015The following is a letter from John Irving, posted originally on his Facebook page and reprinted here as a guest post:
NOTE: JOHN NOW HAS HIS OWN WEB SITE AND HAS POSTED HIS LETTER THERE. So do note that there are comments, including by John, below, but also go and visit his site!
John Irving
Dear Industrial Capitalists and members of the %0.01,
I feel obliged to inform you that you’ve made a huge strategic blunder and things aren’t probably going to work out very well for you soon.
You recall that way back in 1965 - 50 years ago this year - President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned about…
gregladen | December 10, 2014Matt Ridley is a British journalist whom some in the science community are now quietly referring to as an “anti-science writer.” He has taken up the cause of denying the widely held and deep scientific consensus on climate change. He has a recent blog post he seems to have been compelled to write in response to a new study on the use of tree rings as a proxyindicator for past temperatures. I’ll be writing about that research in a day or two. Ridley’s post is embarrassing, and especially annoying to me because for several years I used his book on evolutionary biology as a recommended (or…
gregladen | October 17, 2014Two items related only because these two seem to like each other and there are coeval happenings.
Mark Steyn and Dr. Michael Mann's book
Michael mann wrote a great book called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. It really is a good book, I highly recommend it.
Mark Steyn is a right wing talking head and shock jocky guy whose behavior is that of a seventh grader. Since Mann's book was published, numerous anti-science and anti-environment Internet trolls have posted bogus, harassing, one-star reviews on Amazon of Mann's book. Often, these reviews come in…
gregladen | September 29, 2014This is about the law suit filed by Michael Mann against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg because of accusations they made that were actionable. Michael Halpern summarized:
Competitive Enterprise Institute’s space technology and policy analyst, Rand Simberg, recently wrote a blog post in which he compared Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann to former university football coach and convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. CEI published the post on its own blog, and the National Review decided it was appropriate to pass along. Michael…
gregladen | September 22, 2014Who is Steve McIntyre? From DeSmogBlog.com:
Stephen McIntyre has been a long-time mining industry executive, mostly working on the “stock market side” of mining exploration deals. He published a blog called Climate Audit where he attempts to analyse in sometimes long and extensive detail the work of climate change scientists where he documents “statistical mistakes” in peer-reviewed scientific literature. ...
McIntyre has been described as a “persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003” and has been a prominent critic of…
gregladen | September 17, 2014The Open Atmospheric Society
Climate science pseudo-skeptic Anthony Watts recently bought and registered the domain "theoas.org" and has just announced the formation at that Internet address of a new society explicitly designed to organize people in meteorology and related areas intent on opposing the scientific consensus on climate change. And yes, there is a scientific consensus on climate change.
Dr. Roy Spencer once said to me that trying to organize climate skeptics would be like “trying to herd cats”. While this Society is not trying to “herd” anyone, nor is it specifically focused on…
gregladen | September 12, 2014Did you ever read a textbook on economic history, or an in-depth article on the relative value of goods over the centuries expressed in current US dollars? Have you ever encountered a graphic that shows long term trends in rainfall patterns or other climate variables, using a couple of simple lines, designed to give a general idea of relative conditions during different eras? Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about.
This is a graphic made by a major investment firm culling information from dozens or perhaps hundreds of sources into a single graphic. This is the graphic as it was…
gregladen | September 11, 2014Ken Cuccinelli posted a highly offensive cartoon on his facebook page in which Hillary Clinton is depicted in a position where she is about to be beheaded by a caricature of a Middle Eastern terrorist. That was posted on the even of the anniversary of 9/11.
You will know of Ken Cuccinelli as the anit-climate-science activist, who was involved in the fake scandal known as "Climategate."
Lowkell at Blue Virginia writes:
...this is appalling even by Ken Cuccinelli standards. First off, he links to a climate science "skeptic" website. Then, he channels Rand Paul's insane criticism of Hillary…
gregladen | August 15, 2014I just realized that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a brief with the court in relation to Mann vs. the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg (variously). This is disappointing and will probably color my opinion of EFF going forward on whatever else they do. Their brief isn't just ethically wrong, or something I disagree with. It is unintelligent and poorly considered. They simply got it wrong, as though they did not know anything about the law suit. It is embarrassing.
I wonder how they got talked/roped into this? I would really…
gregladen | August 5, 2014The National Review is a political magazine, and Mark Steyn, I think, writes for them (I really don't keep track). A while back Steyn and/or the National Review made some seemingly very defamatory statements about Michael Mann, the climate scientist. Career-damaging really icky accusations of fraud and such. They were bogus accusations, but they were also not just trollish yammering of the type we see all the time from the science denialist gaggle. So, Mann sued them.
I prefer the Law and Order version of law. Something happens on Monday, on Tuesday everything is confusing, on…
gregladen | August 3, 2014So, you accept the science of climate change and global warming as legit. But you often encounter people, at family gatherings, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, at social events, etc. who don't. Do you keep your mouth shut when someone says something clearly wrong that brings the science into question illegitimately? If you do, and others are listening, then one voice, a denialist voice, is influencing people. Probably better to say something.
The problems is that the denialist schtick involves having a lot of different arguments, with absolutely no regard as to legimacy, against the…
gregladen | July 22, 2014There is an old theory in psychology that characterizes humans as a bowl of Jell-O (Jelly for some of you). Life pokes at the Jell-O, the Jell-O jiggles. Eventually the jiggles begin to change the Jell-O, so certain kinds of pokes result in certain kinds of responses. The Jell-O gurgles, babbles, notices things, learns, develops, and eventually becomes self aware.
That is a great oversimplification of a theory that was, in turn, a great oversimplification of human development, yet it does seem to apply in many ways to human behavior. When it comes to climate change, people seem more…
gregladen | July 17, 2014Roger Pielke Jr, who is some form or another of climate change contrarian ... his main schtick is that global warming has no negative effects and he uses questionable analyses to "prove" this ... was brought on to the well respected FiveThirtyEight run by Nate Silver, blog site a while back. Soon after joining the team he seems to have stuck his foot deeply into his mouth a few times and got called on it. One could say that FiveThirtyEight's fame and respect has been earned by being straight forward and methodologically rigorous and professional in its handling of predictions about such…
gregladen | July 11, 2014The American Tradition Institute a.k.a. ATI a.k.a. Energy & Environmental Legal Institute is a "think" tank that supports or engages in climate science denialism. You can read about it here and here. Michael Mann is a climate scientist, famous for bringing to the world's attention the alarming problem of hockey-stick style global warming. According to Wikipedia:
The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize...
The ATI, Michael Mann, and the University of Virginia have been…
gregladen | June 27, 2014Who are the founders of Greenpeace? Not Patrick Moore.
Patrick Moore is a Hippie for Hire. He makes the claim that he co-founded Greenpeace, and charges a fee to show up at conferences or other venues, or sit on boards, to provide a story that anti-environmentalists, global warming deniers, and others, like to hear. The part where he takes your money to lie, as far as I can tell, is true. The part about how he co-founded Greenpeace is apparently not true.
Here’s what Greenpeace has to say about Patrick Moore:
Patrick Moore. Did Patrick Moore found Greenpeace? Greenpeace says no. They…
gregladen | June 27, 2014Another Great Video from Greenman Peter Sinclair:
More details and links HERE.
gregladen | June 21, 2014In 2009 someone wrote a blog post about climate change that made all the usual science denialist claims. Hurricanes have reduced therefore global warming is not real. In this case, hurricanes are one of the main threats of climate change (a straw man) and since they are not as common these days in the Atlantic as alarmists claimed the would be (cherry picking) global warming is not a concern. There were stronger storms in the past. Katrina wasn't really all that bad. Etc. etc.
The Ice Caps (he called sea ice "Ice Caps") are not really melting that bad and besides we don't really know what…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called "Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change."
I'll paste the abstract below but first I'll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream…