Green wacko Tobacco
2008 was a bad year for global warming alarmists. Their credibility has been entirely destroyed by none other than Mother Nature. As George W. Bush leaves office, the world is actually cooler than it was when he came in.
Lacking facts, the Gorian Gaggle is trying to tie anyone who disagrees with their propaganda to the most evil of all industries (in their eyes): the tobacco producers. Before, anyone who disputed their prophesying of a future calamity was merely a “Holocaust denier.” That didn’t work, so now, we’re all labeled “tobacco scientists.”
Why is it that everything these people say sounds as if it’s echoing up from the playground or lifted from a note passed in study hall?
When I have appeared on television jointly with the president of Greenpeace USA, he has more than once struggled to yelp a “last word” variant of this “tobacco” theme. Ironically, however, JunkScience.com’s Steven Milloy has documented how it is the greens themselves who have adopted the tobacco industry’s tactics.
These include a strategy of information laundering through ignoring or misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific findings and cherry-picking facts, and attempting to shift the focus away to something other than research based on observation. Finally, of course, is their trademark effort to stifle legitimate debate and silence those who won’t accept their dogma.
As John Atkinson points out in the UK newspaper, the Register, “The climate science bandwagon has come about solely because of supposed anthropogenic climate change, which means that their funding is intrinsically tied to climate change happening and being man-made. A more self-interested group I could not find anywhere, even looking at the researchers who were paid by big tobacco companies to tell us cigarettes are safe.”
Further, the premise behind most alarmist slurs, of the “tobacco scientist” variety and the ritual claims of “ties” to “big oil” or “industry,” is that a scientist’s convictions and those of other dissenters are for sale. Yet it is illogical to assume that dissenters can be bought but alarmists cannot. Looking at the balance sheets on both sides, their logic would conclude that the greatest amount of corruption occurs on the alarmist side.
With federal expenditures on climate-related research soaring above $5 billion annually – more than we spend on AIDS or the National Cancer Institute – and hundreds of billions in “rents” to corporations pushing these schemes should the alarmist campaign succeed, the potentially corrupting factor of money cannot be ignored.
Someone saw a good investment in giving Al Gore $300 million for his “climate crisis” re-branding campaign. Gore’s advisor (and, officially, NASA astronomer) James Hansen and other activists receive enormous sums of money underwriting their alarmist activities, sums that no “skeptic” has ever been accused of receiving. Meanwhile Gore—the king of claiming that those who disagree are merely in it for the money—makes millions annually from all manner of enterprises premised upon the climate crisis, and his lucre will increase several fold upon passing the laws his alarmism demands.
The difficult truth is that the alarmists cannot logically fault the skeptics’ credibility without also faulting Gore’s credibility, and that of their heavily compensated alarmist mouthpieces. Yet no “skeptic” receives as much as Gore or even Hansen from shouting falsities about the issue.
The delicious irony found in the global warming alarmists’ claims is that it is they who closely resemble the “tobacco scientists” they accuse those who oppose them of being, and are quite plainly the ones stuck on “denial”. Until lately people like me agreed with them that the planet warmed about a degree after the end of the Little Ice Age; we “denied” that this simply had to be Man’s doing, and they set about denying past warming and cooling periods, perpetuating a strange fantasy that climate was stable until the horrors of industrialized society. Sounds like the first sign of a problem, no?
Now this denial goes to great lengths, including going back into the record to fudge the data, and working into their mix corrupt surface temperature measurements from instruments placed on asphalt parking lots, black tar roofs, heat vents and even hanging above a barbeque grill. Several even told National Public Radio recently that, given the failure of observations to comply with computer-modeled projections, well, the observations must be wrong.
All of the stress from their tobacco-scientist style denial has driven the alarmists to their collective wits’ end. Having heard the cries of alarm for so long we can now take inventory has to how these projections have played out, and the answer is: not very good. Christopher Booker notes in the London Telegraph how “the plummeting temperatures and abnormal snowfalls of the past two winters have thrown their army of media groupies into quite a tizzy”, as they scramble to claim that such things are further proof of warming. Maybe a smoke will take the edge off, boys.
The bizarre spectacle of scientists dismissing the obvious to push the absurd should indeed seem familiar, smacking as it does of those very same “tobacco scientists” the alarmists shriek about in a collective fit of what the couch-time crowd calls “projection”. Cooling has become the new warming, alarmism the new denial, and it is now quite clear who really resembles the “tobacco scientist” in the global warming game.
Original text can be found here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30255