‘Climate denier’ MP Craig Kelly roasted on British TV

Senior Liberal MP Craig Kelly has come under fire over his climate denial in a trainwreck interview on morning television in the UK.

Craig Kelly was slammed by the hosts of Good Morning Britain.

As deadly fires continue burning across the south and east of Australia, Mr Kelly was fronting Good Morning Britain to defend the Prime Minister and his own comments about climate change, oil and coal.

It comes after Mr Kelly told the BBC on Saturday that fires were a result of “drying” of the environment but that Australian scientists had disproved any link between climate change and drought.

Read the story from The New Daily - “‘Climate denier’ MP Craig Kelly roasted on British TV.”

Climate deniers want to protect the status quo that made them rich

From my vantage point outside the glass doors, the sea of grey hair and balding pates had the appearance of a golf society event or an active retirement group. Instead, it was the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s first climate denial group, the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) in Dublin in May. All media were barred from attending.

Singer Gigi Love protests outside Trump Tower in New York.
Climate sceptics are prepared to ‘bet their children’s lives on the
 faux optimism being peddled by contrarians’. 

Its guest speaker was the retired physicist and noted US climate contrarian, Richard Lindzen. His jeremiad against the “narrative of hysteria” on climate change was lapped up by an audience largely composed of male engineers and meteorologists – mostly retired. This demographic profile of attendees at climate denier meetings has been replicated in London, Washington and elsewhere.

Read the piece on The Guardian by John Gibbons - “Climate deniers want to protect the status quo that made them rich.”

5 Shades of Climate Denial, All on Display in the Trump White House

Whether dismissing global warming as a hoax, questioning humanity's role in it, exaggerating the unknowns, playing down the urgency of action, or playing up the costs, President Donald Trump and his team have served up every flavor of climate denial.

We developed a guide to what the science says about the five types of
climate denial we've heard from Donald Trump and his team.
Behind Trump are Vice President Mike Pence, EPA Administrator
Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

Although the arguments varied—as if they were different shades or stages of denial—they all served the same purpose: to create an exaggerated sense of dispute in order to bolster a case against decisive climate action. The latest gambit is to avoid the subject entirely.

In his announcement last week that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump didn't bother addressing temperature trends, carbon concentrations, sea level rise, extreme weather or changing wildlife and vegetation patterns, the kinds of climate change information that his administration has also been scrubbing from government websites. He certainly didn't talk about the 2-degree Celsius goal of the Paris accord or the carbon budget for keeping that goal within reach. Trump didn't even use the words "climate change."

Read the Inside Climate News story - “5 Shades of Climate Denial, All on Display in the Trump White House.”

Ivanka Trump will not save the planet

Ivanka Trump gets on an elevator at Trump
 Tower, Friday, Nov. 11, 2016, in New York.

When it comes to climate policy, President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle is shaping up to be a bleak wasteland of climate denial and Koch-funded fossil fuel cronyism. So climate activists could be forgiven for clinging to what seems like a potential bright spot in the incoming Trump administration’s relationship with climate action: the emergence of First Daughter Ivanka Trump as a climate champion.

The news about Ivanka’s interest in climate change has come fast and furious over the past week. Last Thursday, Politico published an account from an anonymous source claiming that Ivanka hoped to make climate change “one of her signature issues,” and she was currently “in the early stages of exploring how to use her spotlight to speak out on the issue.”

Then, over the weekend, New York Magazine reported that Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with Ivanka to talk about climate issues and gave her a copy of his climate change documentary, Before the Flood. But both of those accounts pale in comparison to the interest sparked by the news that Ivanka would meet with former Vice President Al Gore on Monday to discuss climate issues.

Read the Think Progress story by Natasha Geiling – “Ivanka Trump will not save the planet.”

No longer taken seriously, we're seeing the last gasp of climate denial groups

Lord Lawson (left) and Dr Benny Peiser, Director,
Global Warming Policy Foundation appear before
the Science and Technology Committee in
Portcullis House, London.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is an anti-climate policy advocacy group in the UK that often releases misleading scientific “reports.” The group also hosts annual lectures, and this year, they booked a room at the Royal Society. Many members of the Royal Society expressed concern that the GWPF would exploit the organization’s credibility, and asked that the event be cancelled.

The Royal Society’s governing council met and decided to allow the event to proceed, for fear that cancellation would give it “an unwarranted higher profile.” As a spokesperson for the Royal Society told DeSmog UK:

‘The evidence shows us that the earth is warming and that recent warming is largely caused by human activities. Once that is accepted, there is scope for debate on the policy responses and that is the area that the GWPF claims to be interested in.

If the GWPF uses this opportunity to misrepresent the scientific evidence it would undermine the legitimacy of its views on policy responses to climate change.’

The lecture was delivered by writer Matt Ridley, and predictably, as is the norm for Ridley, the first three-quarters of his talk indeed misrepresented the scientific evidence. While Ridley doesn’t deny the most basic aspects of human-caused global warming, he is a self-prescribed “lukewarmer;” a group that falls into the category of Stage 3 climate denial.

Read Dana Nuccitelli’s story on The Guardian - “No longer taken seriously, we're seeing the last gasp of climate denial groups.”

The Remarkable Inconsistency Of Climate Denial

This is a year of politics. That means everyone has opinions about where the world should be headed and how we should get there.

No matter how weird this political season has been, however, there remains a key difference between opinions and facts. That difference comes into the starkest relief when people must face their own inconsistencies in reconciling the two domains.

And nowhere is the gap between opinions and facts more apparent than the subject of climate change. As a recent action by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) demonstrates, for climate deniers there is a chasm between what is said and what is done.

The basic dilemma of climate denial is that, for decades, science has pointed to two very clear conclusions. First is the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming. Second is the overwhelming evidence that the warming is due to human activity (mostly in the form of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use).

Read Adam Frank’s story on NPR - “The Remarkable Inconsistency Of Climate Denial.”

Rebooting the climate movement

Until recently, the climate movement has relied on climate denial — be it outright denial of the science or political denial of the need to act — as a major uniting force.

For the ecosystem of groups, people and organizations that make up the climate movement, it was a metaphorical sun. Now, though, the era of climate denial as we’ve known it is gasping its last breaths. As a Guardian headline read in December, “The Paris agreement signals that deniers have lost the climate wars.” Without that unifying force, cracks in the climate movement are starting to deepen. Looking forward, our challenge is whether we can see these cracks as a chance to learn and adapt to an era where this movement shifts from the defensive to the offensive. To do that, however, we’re going to need to build the DNA of the climate movement.

Read the Waging Nonviolence story - “Why the climate movement needs a reboot.”

Schwarzenegger and Bill Nye tackle the 'stages' of climate change

B

ill Nye teamed up with Arnold Schwarzenegger to confront climate denial head on in an episode of National Geographic’s Explorer, Bill Nye’s Global Meltdown.

Arnold Schwarzenger - head-to-head with
Bill Nye about climate change.

The episode opens with Bill Nye telling his psychiatrist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I don’t know, I’m just not myself lately. Everything seems so meaningless and empty.”

“Go on,” says Schwarzenegger. “I know the planet is getting hotter and hotter,” says Nye. “And I know we’re going to have forest fires and droughts and floods like you’ve never seen. We’re going to have storms and hurricanes and species are disappearing.”

Nye, exasperated, concludes, “Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening.” Schwarzenegger’s prognosis: “It sounds to me like you are suffering from climate change grief.” Schwarzenegger tells Nye he is dealing with the first stage of grief: denial.

Read the EcoWatch story - “Bill Nye + Arnold Schwarzenegger Confront Climate Denial Head On.”

Climate contrarians given oxygen as IPCC report nears

Rupert Murdoch - giving oxygen
to the climate contrarians.
 

Denial in any sense is classic in its format, and with imminent arrival of the fifth Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change, the climate denial machine in full swing.

The world-wide Murdoch press is leading the charge giving oxygen to the climate contrarians and within that cherry-picking what is already known and binging on doubt.

The Guardian in a story headed: “The five stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report” we are alerted to how the contrarians are already at the barricades spreading their misinformation.