So now the effort to silence those who believe there is still a great deal learn about the science of climate change escalates with the latest “objective” piece by Newsweek written by Sharon Begley, Eve Conant, Sam Stein and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Matthew Philips in New York. One of the finest hatchet jobs ever written with nary an attempt at objective journalism. All environmental groups quoted (like the Sierra Club) are beyond reproach and all industries are evil. Excerpts from Global-Warming Deniers: A Well Funded Machine:
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by
contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created
a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.. . . As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk
about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of
actual action.. . The idea of a “variable Sun” has remained a constant in the naysayers’ arsenal to this day. . . Faced with this emerging consensus, the denial machine hardly blinked.. . . “There was an extraordinary campaign by the denial machine to find and
hire scientists to sow dissent and make it appear that the research
community was deeply divided,” says Dan Becker of the Sierra Club.. . .Now naysayers tried a new tactic: lists and petitions meant to portray science as hopelessly divided.. . Still, like a great beast that has been wounded, the denial machine is not what it once was.
They even take a swipe at our friends Richard Lindzen, Pat Michaels and Fred Singer: Lindzen, whose parents had fled Hitler’s Germany, is described by old
friends as the kind of man who, if you’re in the minority, opts to be
with you.
Industry found a friend in Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the
University of Virginia who keeps a small farm where he raises
prize-winning pumpkins and whose favorite weather, he once told a
reporter, is “anything severe.” (At a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on
coal-fired power plants, Michaels admitted that he received more than
$165,000 from industry; he now declines to comment on his industry
funding.
The article never addresses the true question at the center of this debate. What is the “correct” temperature of the earth supposed to be?
