Climate Denial and Manufacturing Legitimacy

The following post was originally published on ClimateCrocks as a guest post.

The scientific discussion has long since moved on from whether we are causing the increase in our planets temperature to fine tuning what effects this will have. We know it is happening, we are responsible for it and we are now in the process of finding out that we have been underestimating it.

Yet, the so-called sceptics have managed to delay action, very effectively spreading misinformation. A considerable amount of misinformation comes from the blogosphere, where familiar and long-debunked claims about climate change are repeated time and time again.

Monckton Responds To Peter Hadfield

Well Sort of…

Monckton didn’t respond directly to the videos Potholer54 (Peter Hadfield) made documenting and rebutting incorrect or dubious claims made by him.

No, he responded to a commenter who gave a simplified listing of the errors Potholer54 addressed:

This is a response by Christopher Monckton to the comment on the Nurse anti-science thread yesterday by anonymous commenter “The other Brian” who in typical troll style,tries to distract away from the post and point being made with noise.- Anthony

So instead of actually dealing with the excellent videos Potholer produced, he goes after a few lines of text. I think you can guess who made another excellent set of videos documenting how Monckton yet again contradicts himself:

The Failure of Climategate 2.0

It has been a few days since the release of a new batch of emails that were obtained by hacking servers at the University of East Anglia. And the usual suspects have been in a complete feeding frenzy digging through them to see if they can find some damning quotes/evidence.

Climate Change Deniers, The Merchants Of Doubt

Denial of the scientific evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming was the running theme during the 24 hour broadcast of the Climate Reality Project.

And one of the shorts that was broadcast, called “Doubt,” is wel worth a watch. It’s about how the fossil fuel industry took the tobacco industry’s playbook to confuse the public on the science of climate change. Not by disproving the facts, but just by creating enough doubt to make the public dismiss it.

The following quote from the short sums it up quite nicely:

How did the tobacco companies manage to lie to the public in face of all the scientific evidence?

They realized that the science didn’t need to be disproven. It was enough to create doubt in the minds of the public to keep them from recognizing the truth.

This misinformation and doubt peddling is something I often talk about. Like for example when Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said a potential new maunder minimum would cause a new little ice age, so we don’t need to do anything. Or the confusion Watts Up With That tries to create every time there is some sort of cold spell.

And the short DOUBT shows how eerily similar the tactics of the tobacco industry are to what we are seeing with climate change:

Deep Fried Flying

It has been a while since Anthony Watts posted the following remark on his blog:

I’ve never much thought there was much usefulness to waste vegetable oil used for automobile fuel, as there is a much more finite amount of waste frying oil available compared to petroleum. Ditto for chicken fat powered aviation. Would you want to fly on a plane that is chicken fat powered? Personally, it seems clucking ridiculous.

I just wish NASA would stick to space exploration.

Watts is complaining about an article posted by NASA where they explain an experiment they did with alternative fuels. And for this experiment they used chicken fat and beef tallow as the source for the fuel: