Climate deniers are still creationists at an evolution debate

Despite the best efforts of KiwiBlogh, Whaleoil, Un PC, Poneke, No Minister (and to a much lesser extent in terms of influence, Mac Dr) - the on line right wing mafia have been screaming all month that the climate gate hacked emails revealed gate after gate after gate of evidence that climate change is a Greenpeace inspired hoax perpetrated by sneaky greenies and their liberal media mates to stop red meat eating SUV driving plasma TV watching real men from going about their business of consumer culture consumption at a standard of living utterly unsustainable for the planet.

The Herald has been trumpeting these climate denial fantasies as well with editorials and opinion pieces by Garth George (who argued sea rise couldn't occur because God had promised Noah with a rainbow that he wouldn't flood the earth again) and that awful Jim Hopkins (only in the South Island could wearing red rimmed glasses be considered a sign of wit). What amuses me most about the on line foaming of KiwiBlogh, Whaleoil, Un PC, Poneke, No Minister (and to s much lesser extent in terms of influence, Mac Dr) is the idea that IF they were right that the National Party (who are best friends forever with all those industries most likely to be pinged by environmental legislation aimed at cutting back on pollution) wouldn't seize upon this information and denounce the entire thing and get back to business as usual.

Here, I'll make it easy for KiwiBlogh, Whaleoil, Un PC, Poneke, No Minister (and to a much lesser extent in terms of influence, Mac Dr), here's John Key's face book address go right ahead and contact him directly and tell him the science isn't settled and that it's all a hoax. Go on.

Of course the reason why John isn't listening to his right wing on-line cheerleading squad is because the science IS settled, in the exact same way the science behind evolution is settled. The hacked climate gate emails do not in any way dispute the science that shows us man made pollution is causing the planet to heat dangerously, pushing us towards tipping points which could damage our ability as a modern civilization from continuing on as normal.

The reason the right wing hate the reality of climate change and are doing all they can to cling to climate denial is because their blessed unsustainable consumer capitalism has a dreadful Achilles heal, and that is the massive pollution we are pumping into our biosphere can damage our biosphere permanently. There is also a cultural element to it, can any of us really imagine Micheal Laws, Leighton Smith or Paul Henry admitting they are wrong and the tree huggers are right? Of course they wouldn't.

Let's remind ourselves of counter attack on climate denial assertions


Poneke climate denial deserves contempt

Kiwiblog 6 - 7 metres: Yeah — I know.

La-la Land again: Jim Hopkins gets it wrong

A visitor from La-la Land: Garth George gets it wrong (again)

Egg/face interface for Hide and the climate cranks

Herald censures IPCC on flimsy grounds

Dominion Post editorial as shaky as Herald’s

For those really concerned by all the noise the right wing have made regarding the science behind climate change that has been parroted by KiwiBlogh, Whaleoil, Un PC, Poneke, No Minister (and to much lesser extent in terms of influence, Mac Dr) - Real Climate does a blow by blow attack on the climate denial argument against the IPCC...

IPCC errors: facts and spin
Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

Let’s start with a few basic facts about the IPCC. The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. A large fraction of the relevant scientific community is thus involved in the effort. The three working groups are:

Working Group 1 (WG1), which deals with the physical climate science basis, as assessed by the climatologists, including several of the Realclimate authors.

Working Group 2 (WG2), which deals with impacts of climate change on society and ecosystems, as assessed by social scientists, ecologists, etc.

Working Group 3 (WG3) , which deals with mitigation options for limiting global warming, as assessed by energy experts, economists, etc.

Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007. Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record (see here and here for WG1 and WG2 respectively).

And let's not forget the big oil funding of climate denial...

Scepticism with a capital K – Manufacturing Doubt
You know why I think this constant attack on the science is a spin job? Because the bloody Republicans told us so. Why don’t more people know about the Frank Luntz Memorandum to the Bush White House, 2002, on how to shut down the global warming debate?

Winning the Global Warming Debate – An Overview

1: The scientific debate remains open: Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.

So in the exact same way the Tobacco Industry have attacked the science linking smoking and cancer, the climate deniers are attacking the science behind climate change. All this does is slow the necessary political action required to confront global warming.

It must be sad for deniers who have spent the last month crowing that they have won the debate when all that has been exposed is their own desire to cling to a bunch of lies wrapped up in hype so as to delay action.

Climate denial is a luxury the planet can not afford.