COP25: Climate Science Deniers Attend on Behalf of Trump-Affiliated Lobby Group

A US thinktank with close ties to Donald Trump has obtained accreditation for a delegation of climate science deniers to the UN summit currently underway in Madrid.

Organisations accredited to attend on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received significant funding from oil giant ExxonMobil and the Koch family, include the UK’s Centre for Policy Studies, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute and the European Institute for Climate and Energy.World leaders are in Madrid, Spain for this year’s two-week UN climate talks, known as COP25. A list of delegates shows the CEI had obtained accreditation for eight individuals, many of whom are known for spreading climate science denial. The list is provisional, with a final list due to be released on Friday as the conference ends.

Read the story from Desmog by Richard Collett-White - “COP25: Climate Science Deniers Attend on Behalf of Trump-Affiliated Lobby Group.”

Shark Tank’s Steve Baxter joins climate science deniers and Islamophobes for Australian LibertyFest

Steve Baxter, climate science
deniers, Islamophobes, and other
libertarians gather at LibertyFest.

What do you get when you bring together some of Australia’s most fervent climate science deniers with anti-Islam activists, fledgling right-wing political groups, and an American “free market” Libertarian?

The answer, apparently, is the one-day conference titled LibertyFest scheduled for Brisbane this Saturday.

Two mainstays of Australia’s “fever swamp” of climate science denial, Professor Ian Plimer and Jennifer Marohasy, are set to kick-off the proceedings on Friday evening.

Organizing the conference is Brisbane-based group LibertyWorks, founded 18 months ago by local businessman and libertarian Andrew Cooper.

For those uninitiated, libertarians will tell you governments should be small and stay out of people’s lives, regulations should be drastically scaled back, and economic markets left to function with little to no regulation.

Read the RenewEconomy story by Graham Readfearn - “Shark Tank’s Steve Baxter joins climate science deniers and Islamophobes for Australian LibertyFest.”

Donald Trump urged to ditch his climate change denial by 630 major firms who warn it 'puts American prosperity at risk'

The US President-elect, Donald Trump, 
is facing calls not to abandon the
fight against climate change.

More than 630 companies and investors have called on Donald Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress to continue the move to a low-carbon economy, warning that failing to do so would “put American prosperity at risk”.

The US President-elect has talked about scrapping the United States’ international commitments to tackle global warming, such as the Paris Agreement, dismissed climate change as a hoax, and appointed a string of climate science deniers to senior positions in his administration.

His election has been described as a “very big challenge” to the world’s efforts to address the problem by UK Climate Change Minister Nick Hurd.

Read Ian Johnston’s story in the Independent - “Donald Trump urged to ditch his climate change denial by 630 major firms who warn it 'puts American prosperity at risk'.”

Climate deniers do many 'impossible things' at once

Anti-carbon tax protesters in front of
 Parliament House in Canberra in 2011.

Sometimes, climate science deniers will tell you that we can’t predict global temperatures in the future. Sometimes, they’ll say we’re heading for an ice age.

Occasionally, contrarians will say that no single weather event can prove human-caused global warming. But then they’ll point to somewhere that’s cold, claiming this disproves climate change.

Often, deniers will tell you that temperature records show that global warming stopped at some point around 1998. But also they’ll insist that those same temperature records can’t be relied on because NASA and the Bureau of Meteorology are all communist corruption monkeys. Or something.

Black is also white. Round is also flat. Wrong is also right?

A new research paper published in the journal Synthese has looked at several of these contradictory arguments that get thrown around the blogosphere, the Australian Senate and the opinion pages of the (mostly) conservative media.

The paper comes with the fun and enticing title: “The Alice in Wonderland mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism.”

Why Alice? Because, as the White Queen admitted: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Read Graham Readfearn’s story on The Guardian - “How climate science deniers can accept so many 'impossible things' all at once.”

Climate change denying Senator a challenge for our media

New Australian Senator, Malcolm Roberts
 suggests scientific charts
such as this have been "manipulated".
 

The election of Malcolm Roberts as a One Nation senator has put Australia’s media in a difficult spot.

In his first speech to Parliament on Tuesday, Roberts made many false claims about climate change. He said that climate change was a “scam” and implied that it was some sort of conspiracy between all the major international research agencies. “... there is no data proving human use of hydro-carbon fuels affects climate,” he said.

Most news outlets had stopped covering the views of climate science deniers in regular reporting. There is a clear scientific consensus that the world is warming and that human carbon emissions have caused it, so reporting the views of a few non-experts who push fanciful theories with no credible evidence is seen as “false balance”.

But journalists are in a different position when someone in an important office holds such views.

Read Michael Slezak’s story on The Guardian – “Debunking Malcolm Roberts: the case against a climate science denier.”

'We've blown it, but pessimism is not acceptable' - Naomi Oreskes

In 2000, Naomi Oreskes, a geologist by training, was working at the Scripps Institute for Oceanography in San Diego, an organization with a long history of climate change research.

“All the scientists around me spoke about climate change as if it were a settled matter. Proven scientifically. Manmade,” recalls Oreskes, a renowned Harvard professor specializing in the history of science. “Yet I noticed that in the media, the issue was reported as if there were a big debate over whether it was even real. That contrast led me to the work I published in 2004.”

Oreskes, whom The New York Times has called “one of the biggest names in climate science,” did what any interested party could have done then, but didn’t. She counted the scientific papers on climate change — 928 at the time — and determined that not one disagreed: all found that climate change was real, underway and manmade. She exploded the myth that any debate existed. The media took notice; and she, of course, came under attack from climate science deniers.

Read Justin Catanoso’s piece on Pulitzer Crisis Reporting - “Naomi Oreskes on Climate Change: We’ve Blown It… But Pessimism Is Not Acceptable.”