Lefties take money, too
In an interview with far-left New York Times, activist and part-time scientist Michael Oppenheimer says “nothing follows” from his taking moola from the EDF (Environmental Defense Fund; a radical group which awards “environmental justice grants”) and a “few hundred thousand from Barbara Streisand”.
Yet earlier in the interview, Oppenheimer suggests skeptical climate scientists like Willie Soon who accept funds from non-governmental sources cannot be trusted.
Oppenheimer is not a hypocrite. Science is a political tool to the Enlightened. Ideology says that capitalism must go, to be replaced by managed-from-above community of property. Therefore Science must—will—say the same thing. This is why the Science is “settled.” It is settled. It was settled long before we understood how poor climate models are. It will remain settled well after we recognize the world will not end in heat doom.
Heartland
I’ve been invited to speak at Heartland’s Tenth International Conference on Climate Change June 11 and 12th in DC on the subject of “attacks on scientists and the corruption of science.” Boy, do I know about that.
Bonus! Rumor has it that something to do with the much-anticipated Climate Hustle will also happen at this meeting. Could it be a premier? I won’t say. I can say that Yours Truly is in that documentary. Stay tuned for updates.
Autograph hounds are cautioned to bring their own pens.
Climate reparations
More proof wasn’t needed, but here from Nature magazine is witness that Science equals politics. “Global-warming limit of 2?oC hangs in the balance: Panel creates scientific baseline for debate about climate reparations.”
Reparations? Meaning redistributing monies from those who have lots to those who have little. And who could argue with that? It sounds fair. “Led by low-lying island nations and many of the poorest countries — which are likely to be hit hardest by rising seas and extreme weather…” We never tire of the old joke “World Ends: Poor Hardest Hit” do we.
“For many poor countries, the debate is about social justice…” Thus speaks a mind already made up. Climatology is social justice, Science is politics.
Prostitutes
Last week, Congresswoman “Barbara Lee proposed a resolution in the House of Representatives that claims women will eventually be forced into prostitution in order to obtain life-sustaining food and water for their families.”
“Women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change,” Lee’s resolution reads. It continues claiming, “Food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.”
Science is politics. I’ll let you guess the Congresswoman’s party.
Fight song
U.S. to submit plans to fight global warming; most others delay.
Ever notice how progressives (and neocons) always want to “fight” whatever it is they’re against? Fight HIV, fight cancer, fight global warming, fight fight fight. How militaristic.
For fun, I searched “join the fight against” and found I could take up arms against: extreme poverty, sexism, ISIS, hydro rates (yes), muscular atrophy, cruelty, women’s cancers (men deserve what’s coming to them), human trafficking, and many more.
Why, even “Feared terror group al-Qaeda discussed strategies to combat CLIMATE CHANGE“. Hard to behead climate, though.
If only we could join forces and fight together to combat the climate from changing! Why, if we spill enough of the right blood, we can keep the climate from changing completely. Yes, a complete static climate is what we’re after. We won’t stand for anything else! Let’s march! Let’s craft giant puppets!
Debate
Remember the debate over climate model goodness which ensued when our world-shaking “Why models run hot” came out?
Neither do I. Instead, panicked progressives, for whom the Science is settled, and despite loud and insistent warnings from people such as Yours Truly, managed to change the subject. And we let them.
Now don’t you feel back? Let’s get back to what’s really important, shall we?
The unstated premise when calculating the probability of climate disaster is the moral character of funding sources. Thus Oppenheimer derives a value of 1. QED, y’all.
“Ever notice how progressives (and neocons) always want to “fight” whatever it is they’re against?”
“War on drugs”
It’s not just the progressives and neocons.
““For many poor countries, the debate is about social justice…” Thus speaks a mind already made up. Climatology is social justice, Science is politics.”
How is it you’re unable to distinguish between science and politics?
Science gives a result. Policymakers make decisions based on that science. For some reason you want to blame scientists for the positions and decisions of policymakers that are based on science.
Look at it from the position of others. If you lived on an island that is going underwater, I suspect you’d rant high and low about the greedy West and thoughtless Americans and the Chinese who couldn’t care less about your homeland. And you’d have a point, even if it makes the West, the Americans, the Chinese and certain bloggers uncomfortable.
Dr. Briggs distinguishes between science and politics. What I think he’s saying is that politics is driving the results of the science. The goal is “social justice” whatever that means. AGW is a “result of science” that helps move the political agenda. Therefore, they will only recognize and fund AGW and call it settled because to accept the failings of the models sets back the political agenda. The end justifies the means so they discredit people instead of debate the science. The useful idiots won’t know that harmful AGW was grossly overstated until the political agenda is well on its way forward. A similar hustle to finding out what’s in a bill after it’s signed or lying about keeping your doctor until after the bill is ratified. The political agenda is moved forward despite the facts. Scientists don’t necessarily come forward in many cases because they fear their income will dry up or they may even support the same political agenda or they might have some level of integrity that keeps them from commenting on something they don’t study.
I am reading Atlas Shrugged right now and this is all very eerie.
David, your comment reminds me that in 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. The actual number turned out to be roughly zero.
David said : “Science gives a result. Policymakers make decisions based on that science. For some reason you want to blame scientists for the positions and decisions of policymakers that are based on science.”
You’re not paying attention. Briggs is all but saying it’s a chicken/egg question and Briggs suspects there’s a weasel who’d be happy with either.
Briggs point is that a policy decision has been made and the policy makers want scientific support. When scientists (Hansen?, Romm?, Mann?, … read the signatories on the ThinkProgress letter) are as political as the politicians, the argument about the chicken or the egg is irrelevant, a weasel is going to feed well.
The purported islands “lost” to the rising seas of Global Warming are in major river deltas off of India and Bangladesh. There are far too many other factors than to blame the purported rising global seas.
Paul W wrote:
“Scientists don’t necessarily come forward in many cases because they fear their income will dry up….”
I hear this alot. What is the evidence for it?
“When scientists (Hansen?, Romm?, Mann?, … read the signatories on the ThinkProgress letter) are as political as the politicians”
I don’t know what ThinkProgress letter you mean, and couldn’t find it via Google. But let me ask you this: should vaccine researchers recommend people get vaccinated? Should virologists talk with doctors and health organizations about how to best treat Ebola outbreaks? Should medical researchers who studied the effects of smoking not have recommended people stop smoking?
David : FYI
http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/open-letter-to-museums-from-scientists/
54 scientists are “concerned” about accepting donations from David Koch.
What is totally laughable is to watch PBS where:
Funding for Nature (David Koch)
Funding for NOVA (David Koch)
Don’t think I’ve seen too much skepticism about CAGW on those programs yet the signatories want to ingratiate themselves in the policies of museums.
“The purported islands “lost” to the rising seas of Global Warming are in major river deltas off of India and Bangladesh.”
I am thinking of small islands in the western Pacific. Kiribati has already bought land elsewhere. Vanuatu was just demolished by a cyclone, aided by warming ocean waters and rising seas.
“There are far too many other factors than to blame the purported rising global seas.”
Purported?? Sea-level rise is a fact, from melting ice and warmer water, and the western Pacific and northern Indian oceans are seeing rates much above the global average. Naturally places with other, natural issues, such as sinking land, are going to be the first to see the effects. No one expects them to be the last.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
“I hear this alot. What is the evidence for it?”
I think what happened to Dr. Soon after the “Why Climate Models Run Hot” paper is a pretty good recent example. Dr. Briggs is a case study himself. Take a look at what cost it’s been to him to be a “denier”. He’s been very open in his blog about it. Most of it is anecdotal because it’s much harder to find record of someone not getting a job or not receiving a grant.
Did a quick Google search and hit on this: http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/20/professor-fired-after-expressing-climate-change-skepticism/
David : “Vanuatu was just demolished by a cyclone, aided by warming ocean waters and rising seas” (Where is the ManMade component of that? – Seas have been rising since the LIA – The sea rise IS NOT accelerating – Global Ice has NOT changed markedly in 50 years)
Funny, that – the one island by India and Bangladesh “appeared” after a cyclone in 1970. India and Bangladesh got in a gunboat skirmish because they wanted access to the fossil fuels they thought might be there … it’s now back under water and Global Warming is now credited with resolving a military conflict.
According to Professor Nils-Axel Mörner the ocean level is not rising.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54200036/Sea-Level-is-Not-Rising-by-Professor-Nils-Axel-Morner#scribd
John wrote, “54 scientists are “concerned” about accepting donations from David Koch.”
I don’t blame them — the Koch brothers are some of the most dangerous people on the planet, movitated by pure greed. As the letter says, “We are concerned that the integrity of these institutions is compromised by association with special interests who obfuscate climate science, fight environmental regulation, oppose clean energy legislation, and seek to ease limits on industrial pollution.”
@Ray,
Maybe it’s rising, maybe it’s not, we can’t know. Sea level is volatile, it can change by 10s of meters over less than 0.1 km of distance and less than a minute of time.
The idea that such a volatile boundary can be measured to sufficient precision to detect changes of only a few mm per year is nonsense.
“Science gives a result. Policymakers make decisions based on that science. For some reason you want to blame scientists for the positions and decisions of policymakers that are based on science.”
This is the pure-as-snow scientist as priest mythos. Scientists aren’t humans. They don’t have opinions, ideological perspectives, self interest, feelings, biases. They are just a bunch of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants.
We should take the final step and insist they become celibate.
We should take the final step and insist they become celibate.
Certainly the opinion once held in a lot of high schools about science leaning students. Perhaps instinctive recognition of how dangerous some of them could be.
Careful DAV, I was one if those science nerds…
David: “the Koch brothers are some of the most dangerous people on the planet, movitated by pure greed.”
I thought it was Emmanuel Goldstein.
“…the Koch brothers are some of the most dangerous people on the planet, movitated by pure greed.”
Capitalism, which has brought incredible social benefits to billions of people around the world: wealth, health, happiness… is a philosophical/economic system essentially motivated by ‘pure greed.’
Communism, a philosophical/economic system that has brought dictatorship, poverty, including famine and death to millions, is a philosophical/economic system essentially motivated by egalitarianism.
I wonder if people like David, historically illiterate at least, are even cognizant of the fact that it was the aristocratic classes who looked down upon the early capitalists as crude, greedy and grubby. Shop keepers – or worse – people who traded in goods of any kind, were clearly not the sorts polite society would have wanted to associate with. Interesting to see this attitude is making a come back, or maybe it never really went away.
Or to put this another way, it seems some people go out of their way to sound like pompous jackasses…
Will (for a laugh)
David (you should agree with this as well)
Tom Nelson pointed this one out
http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/04/01/21989778/why-the-ceo-of-exxonmobil-equals-the-pilot-of-germangwings-flight-9525
All,
“David” is David Appell.
Appell’s comments go right to moderation, so he changed his name and slipped a few past the filter. But under “David” he started using vulgar language and the filter caught that. He then thought I had figured out his name change (I was not on the blog yesterday) and changed his name back to Appell. And so those comments also went into moderation.
And there they will stay. As they say, Don’t Feed The Trolls.
Whoops
I WAS thinking “David Apple” – but I thought – naw
Actually, re-reading those posts did, in hindsight, sound like classic Appell rhetoric. For example, make some outrageously absurd claim and then demand others waste their time refuting it. (Religious extremists in certain debates use exactly this rhetorical tactic.)
Paul W,
Well yes, that’s what the words on the page say.
I agree with you there.
It’s an unobtainable ideal rather akin to separation of publicly-funded science and politics.
An implausibly unwieldy scam, and obviously not very effective at moving any agendas along. I blame the politics, not the science. The term useless idiots comes to mind. Neither side has a monopoly on that commodity.
Yeah, before I even got through the first reply from “David”, I had a pretty good idea that it was indeed one of the warmists’ attack dogs: David Appel.
I just get the sense that there’s a Warmist Leadership that hands out responsibilities to their loyal lapdogs to go out and shout down what the skeptics have to say on any blogs deemed “unfriendly” to the Cause. “Appel: this week, you’ve got Curry and Briggs. No more conceding any semi-valid points. Ignore those and focus! Refute, refute, refute! Stay strong and shoot down everything in your sights. ” ” Laden: you’ve got Bishop Hill and Tom Fuller. Don’t fall asleep and let their commenters get in any uncontested posts for more than 30 minutes.” “Tobis: you’re on McIntyre and Tom Fuller for the rest of the month. Do what you do best. “