I think Steven Milloy has figured out a new way to create anti-environmentalist fear - panic mongering about compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Turns out that CFLs, like all fluorescent lights, have small amounts of mercury (in this case about 5mg or about 1/100th the amount in an old mercury thermometer).

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About $4.28 for the bulb and labor - unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about $2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favor of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) - a move already either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia.

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.

Notice the fear quotes around "safe"? Makes it sound like Milloy is suggesting there is no safe level of mercury, but back to this in a moment.

The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of $2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the $2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as $180 annually in energy costs - and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs - it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

See that? Install CFLs and if you break one your house becomes a toxic waste dump! Panic! Mercury!

This is very interesting. For one, people have dealt with household mercury use for a long time in the form of thermometers, and while it's definitely a good thing that those have been phased-out for alcohol thermometers, it's simply not true that mercury spills from fluorescent lights are going to bring about end-times. It's certainly toxic stuff - so are a lot of things you have about the house - but Steven Milloy, purely out of concern for your well-being, simply won't stand for any amount of toxic mercury exposure.

He's also desperately concerned for the environment, unlike Greenpeace.

Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the U.S., under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.

And let's not forget about the regulatory nightmare known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.

We'll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.

...

Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Should government (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) impose on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill?

It's true, you shouldn't throw away CFLs if you can avoid it. To recycle CFLs determine the nearest depo by going to earth911 or energystar.gov. But let's think about whether Milloy is being fully honest with us here (haha).

For one, it's very interesting how concerned Milloy is about mercury contamination of the environment when he's consistently taken the position it's harmless when it comes from coal-fired plants. Interesting, but still not a true example of selectivity or deception, just hypocrisy (hypocrisy is ok if you're telling the truth). But is he? Well, no.

Simply go to the GE site on CFLs and they'll give you a nice little discussion about the real risk of mercury exposure:

CFLs contain a very small amount of mercury sealed within the glass tubing - an average of 5 milligrams (roughly equivalent to the tip of a ball-point pen). Mercury is an essential, irreplaceable element in CFLs and is what allows the bulb to be an efficient light source. By comparison, older home thermometers contain 500 milligrams of mercury and many manual thermostats contain up to 3000 milligrams. It would take between 100 and 600 CFLs to equal those amounts.

Note every bulb broken doesn't result in a 2000 dollar clean-up bill unless you're just a total idiot. They also are nice enough to tell us the actual decrease in mercury in the environment as a result of using CFLs:

Mercury is an element (Hg on the periodic table) found naturally in the environment. Mercury emissions in the air can come from both natural and man-made sources. Utility power plants (mainly coal-fired) are the primary man-made source, as mercury that naturally exists in coal is released into the air when coal is burned to make electricity. Coal-fired power generation accounts for roughly 40% of the mercury emissions in the U.S. EPA is implementing policies to reduce airborne mercury emissions. Under regulations issued in 2005, coal-fired power plants will need to reduce their emissions by 70 percent by 2018.

CFLs present an opportunity to prevent mercury emissions from entering the environment because they help to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants. A coal-fired power plant will emit 13.6 milligrams of mercury to produce electricity required to use an incandescent light bulb, compared to 3.3 milligrams for a CFL.

Even in areas without significant coal-fired power generation as part of the electricity mix (e.g., Alaska and the Pacific Northwest), there are other, equally positive environmental impacts from saving energy through the use of CFLs: reduction of nitrogen oxides (which cause smog), and prevention of substantial quantities of CO2, a greenhouse gas (which is linked to global warming), as well as other air pollutants.

Airborne mercury poses a very low risk of exposure. However, when mercury emissions deposit into lakes and oceans, they can transform into methyl mercury that builds up in fish. Fish consumption is the most common pathway for human exposure to mercury. Pregnant women and young children are most vulnerable to the effects of this type of mercury exposure. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that most people are not exposed to harmful levels of mercury through fish consumption. However, the FDA and state agencies do issue public health advisories.

Finally the correct way to clean up a home mercury spill without calling in a SWAT team.

Because there is such a small amount of mercury in CFLs, your greatest risk if a bulb breaks is getting cut from glass shards. Research indicates that there is no immediate health risk to you or your family should a bulb break and it's cleaned up properly. You can minimize any risks by following these proper clean-up and disposal guidelines:

1. Sweep up—don't vacuum—all of the glass fragments and fine particles.
   
2. Place broken pieces in a sealed plastic bag and wipe the area with a damp paper towel to pick up any stray shards of glass or fine particles. Put the used towel in the plastic bag as well.
   
3. If weather permits, open windows to allow the room to ventilate.
   

These are the same precautions one takes for any fluorescent lighting, which has been around for quite a while without causing end-times from mercury contamination. It's funny that Milloy who has always accused environmentalists of panic-mongering (which they do) is so willing to do the same to deflect anything that represents societal environmental reform or efforts to prevent global warming. He also will selectively use information to try to create fear of safe and long-implemented technologies such as fluorescent lighting.

Labels: global warming denialism, steven milloy

About this time last year some GM-funded cranks at an outfit called CNW Marketing Research released this bogus report entitled Dust to Dust automotive report(PDF) which alleges that a Prius is less efficient than an H2.

Now, this was of course loved by all sorts of types who like inversions, you know, those little facts that seem to contradict popular knowledge and allow one to sound oh-so-smart when casually discussed during cocktail hour. Inversions are enormously appealing to people, and that is a cause to be very careful of them, because they often turn out to be myths.

In this case the inversion is that a Hummer, or Chevy Tahoe, is actually more efficient than a Prius because the cost of the hybrid car in production costs, transport, recycling of materials etc., ends up being more than the bigger, supposedly energy-wasting vehicles.

However, even a cursory read of this report shows immediate flaws. First of all, it is the most schizophrenically written piece of garbage I've ever seen. Good writing that is scientific starts with an abstract, then an introduction, a description of methods, then results and discussion. This giant document is a hodgepodge of snippets of information, charts, data, discussion of results wacky conclusions and most egregious no description of its methods. It's like a kid with ADD assembled it by cutting and pasting and it bears absolutely no signs of ever having been edited (at over 400 pages it's about as coherent as the Unabomber's manifesto).

The data collection methods are not transparent. Their model is not described. They make false statements like Prius batteries are not recycled. There is essentially no way to verify how their analysis was done, and even very simple analyses of the data they do include show that they're fudging the math. For instance, if mileage is in the denominator of their little equation, it's clear the first gigantic flaw is that the Prius is only given 100,000 lifetime miles while the H2 is given 240,000. That's a nice fast route to making a car seem more efficient, just divide by 2. I remember when Jake at pure pedantry discussed this and the study was pulled to pieces in about a dozen comments. And CNW's response is a joke. They say that Prius drivers only drive 6k miles a year on average and that number was calculated by multiplying that number times 15 years. Now, since they hide their methodology it's hard to prove that isn't how they calculated this. But it would suggest that a H2 driver drives on average 12k miles a year. Really? And where did they get this data on the average miles driven by make and model of car? Find it for me, please. Not to mention that if they did have access to that info many cars on the list are being driven thousands of miles less per year than the average household drives per car, while cars like the H1 are listed as going 300k miles, or more than twice the national average per year. Prius drivers are apparently not driving these cars even half as far as the national average - cars marketed to save money on gas. Nothing adds up. Others have also shown the numbers are bogus.

Here's how you spot an assertion that is just clearly bunk. If the most basic math suggests that a Hybrid owner (or society in general I guess) spends 300,000 dollars in 100,000 miles on driving their car ($3 x 100k miles), where is this money coming from? I know hybrids are subsidized, but how do you explain a $20k sticker price car costing more per mile than a $60k car when maintenance, gas, etc. are more? Where is the $280k coming from? Who is paying this? My guess (since their methods are hidden) is that they're factoring in development costs, and the Prius, as a newly developed car is going to have this as recent spending, while the hummer developed a decade ago and not exactly a high-tech product, gets spared an equivalent economic cost.

I'm not going to waste any more time debunking a clear piece of industry-funded denialism. It's made it's rounds of the interwebs and the people who like quoting it don't give a damn about facts, data, peer-review, documenting methods, consistent analysis, who wrote the report etc., as long as it confirms their prejudices. What I am upset with is the fact that George Will decided to cite this BS report in his Op-Ed for the WaPo yesterday.

Speaking of Hummers, perhaps it is environmentally responsible to buy one and squash a Prius with it. The Prius hybrid is, of course, fuel-efficient. There are, however, environmental costs to mining and smelting (in Canada) 1,000 tons a year of zinc for the battery-powered second motor, and the shipping of the zinc 10,000 miles -- trailing a cloud of carbon dioxide -- to Wales for refining and then to China for turning it into the component that is then sent to a battery factory in Japan.

Opinions differ as to whether acid rain from the Canadian mining and smelting operation is killing vegetation that once absorbed carbon dioxide. But a report from CNW Marketing Research ("Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal") concludes that in "dollars per lifetime mile," a Prius (expected life: 109,000 miles) costs $3.25, compared with $1.95 for a Hummer H3 (expected life: 207,000 miles).

The CNW report states that a hybrid makes economic and environmental sense for a purchaser living in the Los Angeles basin, where fuel costs are high and smog is worrisome. But environmental costs of the hybrid are exported from the basin.

Actually what the CNW report shows, Mr. Will, is that you can't smell BS when it's right under your nose (or you don't care to). I wonder at the role of Mr. Will's editors in allowing him to publish this based on such clearly bogus research. Not that pundits are ever a source of a great deal of wisdom, but sheesh. Shame on Mr. Will.

For an example of real "dust to dust" analysis by a real research outfit - MIT - read this (PDF). Now that's how you write a damn scientific report. If you had any doubt that CNW are denialist cranks, just compare the formatting and you'll be convinced they're hacks. Also see studies from Argonne National Labs.

Labels: CNW Marketing Research, George Will, global warming denialism

Hats off to Tim Lambert for some really excellent shredding of classic global warming denialism.

My favorite? When they change the axis of a graph to make effects disappear.

The article is not online, but most of it is available here.

They start off by taking a leaf from Michael Crichton's book -- they change the vertical scale on the graph of global temperatures by a factor of 20 to make the recent temperature increase look smaller. I used the same technique on the temperature data from the Vostok ice core and ice ages turn into tiny little bumps.

Why do those silly scientists think the climate was different during the last ice age? Using the Crichton/Davidson/Robson method the temperature is not noticeably different.

Wonderful stuff. Nice examples of false experts, selectivity, cherry-picking, and outright deception about statistics and absence of data.

Labels: global warming denialism

Who would say that?why Dave Scot at Uncommon Descent of course.

Well, it started already. Shifting economic priorities from food production to reducing CO2 emission has already started causing significant problems. The environmentalist whackos are at it again. Evidently unsatisfied with derailing nuclear power plant construction in the United States 30 years ago, a whackjob by the whackos that has gotten us into the foreign oil dependency mess we're in today instead of getting most of our electricity from nuclear power like France, their latest stupid panic is going to lead to the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. I don't often laud the French but they at least got their ducks in a row with nuclear power and the U.S. could have too if we'd had the good sense to ignore the environmentalist whackos. Will we never learn?

Yes, what a horrible thing we didn't ignore the environmentalists. Think about how much better we'd be without the clean water act, why, it's been years since we've had a nice beautiful fire on the Cuyahoga river. When was the last time? 1969? And that completely retarded clean air act? I liked leaded gasoline and acid rain, it gave buildings such character, and city air such an wonderful tinge of homey emissions.

Besides being just an appeal to consequences (although not in a direct attack on the science), this is once again an example of the "environmentalists will eat your children" canard. If any other demand had caused a market to create a increase in the cost of food, that would just be capitalism. But when concern from the environment does it? It's a holocaust! Millions will die! Environmentalists will eat your children!

What a load.

Labels: Dave Scot, global warming denialism, uncommon descent

For more fodder for the discussion of cranks, consider Michael Crichton. Uncommon Descent has just linked this 2003 lecture of his entitled "aliens cause global warming", in which Crichton links more weakly-justified scientific endeavors like SETI, with the debate of global warming (I'm sure he'd mention the Mars canard if it hadn't been three years ago too). And just look at this statement:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Now that's a hell of a statement. It's quite clear why UC likes this lecture and why they're linking it. After all, evolution represents consensus science, and Dave Scot in attacking global warming from an anti-consensus viewpoint is hitting two birds with one stone. But lets think about some other scientific consensuses (consensi?).

Relativity is certainly a scientific consensus, as is the theory of quantum mechanics. Gravity is most definitely a consensus theory. So is germ theory. The consensus among scientists is that the genetic code is responsible for gene transcription and translation. Does one really need to continue? Basically Crichton is saying that one should never believe settled science. And he's not just offering healthy skepticism about the completeness of theories, he's saying that if something becomes consensus it should be specifically disbelieved. Now that's something else. As proof he provides a bizarre reversal of the Thomas Kuhn argument (surely he's read Kuhn?) in which the past examples of paradigm shifts means that one should never believe anything! I think Orac would also call this the Galileo Gambit (Crichton then goes on to compare Lomborg to Galileo), which is the idea that anyone who believes something that contradicts the reigning "authority" is immediately correct, just like Galileo. The rest is a bunch of cherry-picked quotes, some insanely bad analogies, straw men and non sequiters. Easily dismissable as denialist garbage.

Crichton is clearly a smart guy. He understands some science quite well, well enough to write boiler-plate fiction with creative ideas about the implications of some science. But how did he get to this point about global warming? What made him lose it? This statement is almost completely insane, how did he get from there to here?

Labels: general discussion, global warming denialism, Michael Crichton

A good example of why denialists are cranks and not just representing an alternative viewpoint, is when they expand into other fields they use the same methodology to attack. I give you Uncommon Descent arguing against anthropomorphic climate change.

As record breaking cold sweeps the U.S. this Easter weekend, plunging temperatures 20 degrees below average for early April, nary a mention of global warming can be found in the news. Talk about putting a cold damper on Friday's release of the 2007 IPCC report on so-called global warming, the timing couldn’t have been better. Is someone trying to tell us something by making it snow in southern Texas in April just as the IPCC report is released? You can bet your bottom dollar that if the temperature in the U.S. was 20 degrees ABOVE normal we’d be hearing plenty from the global warming alarmists but they are mysteriously silent now. I can’t find a single major news source carried by Google News mentioning the record cold and global warming in the same article. Gee, I wonder why?

Ok. Does anyone else see the salient idiocy? It's pretty obvious to me, and it's a recurring problem with many of the lay global warming deniers. Quite simply, it is the idea these jackasses have that they can stick their hand out the window, feel it's cold, and then pontificate on a global phenomenon. Really, you have to be pretty ill-informed to fall for this kind of ridiculously simplistic attack on global warming, and in all the "off-topic" attacks on global warming from Dave Scott at UC, it's either this drivel, calling Al Gore fat, or suggesting his heating bill has something to do with climate science.

This is why it's denialism folks. There is no real content here. We don't have a real argument, real data, or real facts from the denialist opposition. We just get snide remarks, confusing analogies, and misrepresentation of the debate. Global warming doesn't mean it can't be cold ever. It just means over a given year, globally, temperatures will be on average warmer.

Labels: global warming denialism, uncommon descent

In honor of Mooney and Nisbet, I'm going to talk more about framing.

Has anyone noticed that the global warming denialist Steven Milloy of junkscience has a new frame? It's pretty novel, now global warming isn't just a conspiracy of environmentalists but of big evil corporations.

In 1999, environmentalists were just about the only special-interest group clamoring for greenhouse gas regulation and such regulation - that is, straightforward, mandatory emissions reductions under the Clean Air Act - is what they wanted given that the Senate wasn't going to ratify Kyoto without the participation of China, India and other developing nations.

Since that time, however, the spectrum of special interests clamoring for global warming regulation has significantly expanded, most importantly to big businesses that are now driving the debate - in Congress and not at the EPA.

Through its legislative power, Congress can not only mandate emissions reductions, but more importantly, it can also dole out the global warming pork.

Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley want Congress to establish a so-called cap-and-trade system so that they can profit from the trading of greenhouse gas emissions permits.

Industrial giants such as Dupont and Alcoa want Congress to give them "carbon credits" - essentially free money - for greenhouse gas emissions reductions already undertaken. Solar and wind energy firms, as well as the ethanol lobby, want Congress to award them subsidies and tax breaks.

All the new climate piggies that want to gorge themselves at the public trough have crowded out the environmentalists, transforming the global warming issue from an ostensibly serious save-the-planet crusade into a financial orgy complete with taxpayer pinata.

Maybe he realized how stupid it sounded when he made environmentalists out to be some insanely powerful lobby. Considering they've been largely ignored for about 7 years now, it makes sense that he'd want to jump on a new big bad conspiracy to explain why legislation to control greenhouse emissions is gaining favor. It's the big bad corporations trying to steal money from the public trough by decreasing their emissions!

Nice conspiracy-mongering there Milloy. What a joke.

**Fixed**

Labels: global warming denialism, steven milloy

It's amazing how persistent the "Quonset hut" canard is with the anti-global warming/anti-environmentalist types. Today we have Gregory Scoblete at TCS daily propagating the BS. Only this time, it's toilet paper.

Gore's hyper-alarmism (the planet has a fever!) has been taken to its logical conclusion by Beavan's "no impact" project. Rather than try to convince people and policy-makers to accept moderate changes in the name of reducing our output of carbon dioxide, addressing global warming is presented as an urgent choice between accepting planetary death or life-altering sacrifice. Since these sacrifices all tend to favor policies that liberals support anyway (a heavier regulatory burden, higher taxes, more home made yogurt), conservatives tend to react with suspicion.

Maybe they shouldn't, but if you believe, as Chait evidently does, that global warming is a serious threat meriting sweeping government action, shouldn't you be training your fire on people like Colin Beavan? Question for Chait: if people think that minimizing global warming requires giving up toilet paper, are you more or less likely to win converts?

See the false dichotomy? If you believe Gore, or what Jonathan Chait wrote for the LA Times last week, soon you will be deprived of your toilet paper and every modern convenience. We'll all be living in quonset huts!

No one is saying this. The fact that some guy in New York is testing out a no-impact life doesn't mean, for an instant, that that is the solution being advocated by those studying global warming, and it certainly isn't what Al Gore advocated last week when he testified in front of congress. Enough of the exaggerations already.

Labels: global warming denialism

Actor, statesman, and global warming denialist Fred Thompson is considering a presidential run. You know him, he's the guy who always plays that authoritarian character, the general, the admiral, the police chief, whatever.

Sorry but the last thing we need is another guy who regularly floats the latest global warming denialism talking points while acting like that makes him some kind of insightful genius.

I think we're ready for a president who believes in science again.

Labels: fred thompson, global warming denialism

Chris Mooney is a journalist, author of The Republican War On Science and generally a kick-ass advocate for real science being part of public policy. He has a post up at Huffington (a non-mercury causes autism post so it's OK) about how the real problem with Republicans not accepting mainstream climate science is the denialism industry that has been created to oppose it.

Inspired by Jonathan Chait's recent column in the LA Times, there's been some renewed commentary about why so many Republicans reject mainstream science on the issue of climate change.

...

However, the picture is more complicated, and I'd like to suggest that we consider some other factors:

1. The broad and longstanding conservative distrust of academia and "leftwing" campus intellectuals, including scientists. This allows many Republicans to dismiss large bodies of scientific research as essentially politicized and therefore safe to ignore.

2. The growth of ideological think tanks which provide alternative "facts" and alternative "knowledge" tailor-made for conservatives. It's not just that many Republicans reject mainline "science"; they actually have their own.

3. The growth of a rightwing media that quotes the think-tank "experts" and puts them on the air regularly--so that the sealed off alternative knowledge environment becomes complete and very hard for mainstream science to penetrate (especially when scientists themselves do not speak in a language designed to appeal to political conservatives).

...

If you cling to these information sources, you can continue to ignore mainstream climate science no matter how much certainty--and it's now at 90 percent--gets ascribed to the conclusion that humans are cooking the planet.

I think Mooney is dead on. The machinery that has been created by the denialists is impressive. Multiple "think tanks" constantly railing against science, news networks who, while promoting "balance", only speak to one side. And a generalized distrust of those smarty-pants intellectuals. But what this really means, is that to really defeat the denialism in this context, the denialist support structure - the think tanks - need to be roundly discredited.

I hope we can help.

Labels: Chris Mooney, global warming denialism

The WSJ just can not stand Al Gore, and environmentalism in general. For those with strong stomachs check out today's op-ed Al Gore's Lightbulbs.

The main thing I'll point out, is that they repeat what I call the "Quonset Hut Canard". That is, in order to be a real environmentalist, you have to go live in a quonset hut, eat nothing but berries, wipe with poison ivy and make love to itinerant bears. Or something.

Ever since Al Gore was elevated to celebrity with his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," the political world has been murmuring about a possible bid for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. Those murmurs rose to a low roar on Wednesday, when he granted an audience to two Congressional panels on climate change.

Mr. Gore -- who, if his personal lifestyle matched his rhetoric, would be carrying his possessions in a hobo bindle and sleeping in a boxcar -- at least had the good sense to arrive at the Capitol in a hybrid. "The Goracle" was greeted by throngs of cheering fans and media adulation.

This smear was killed weeks ago but the denialists at the WSJ continue to bleat about energy use as if all energy were equivalent. I could use 1 million killowatts of solar and the environmental impact would be essentially nil, or I could use 10,000 kW of coal and it would be an entirely different beast. The man uses carbon offsets, buys from green suppliers, and does what he can to offset his impact. His whole point is that we shouldn't have to live in quonset huts to be environmentalists, we just need to change the way we use and buy power, not go back to the stone ages.

What a tiresome old load of BS from the WSJ editorial page.

Labels: global warming denialism, WSJ

It's hard to describe what a rat's nest Stephen Milloy's site Junk Science is. But what is really frightening is how poor a news organization Fox News is for publishing Milloy's "views" on global warming. Guess what? Global warming is a conspiracy cooked up between Margaret Thatcher's conservative government (which was trying to destroy the coal unions), and the great eco-conspiracy to take over all corporations! Yes, the sinister greens have nearly taken over our government by subverting all these multi-national corporations (when they're not hiding behind the children that is)

As described in a 2004 book entitled, "Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation," left-leaning environmental groups, labor groups and human rights groups have been quietly working to harness (hijack?) the influence, power and resources of large publicly-owned corporations in order to implement the Left's social and political agenda.

...

The Rainforest Action Network's campaign against Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill resulted in the bank agreeing to give environmentalists a say in the bank lending process. The capitulation of Citigroup, America's largest bank, was quickly followed by similar surrenders by the next largest U.S. banks, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

At about the same time, the General Electric Company apparently made peace with environmentalists over the company's long-standing headache involving the clean-up of PCB sediments spilled decades ago in the Hudson River. Coincidentally (or not), at about the same time that GE's PCB problem went away, the company very publicly teamed up with environmental activists in May 2005 to champion global warming regulation.

Through a combination of coaxing and coercion, the Greens have now successfully insinuated themselves into corporate boardrooms to the point where they've gained critical mass in the form of USCAP.

The significance of the Greens' capture of big business is readily apparent.

America is on the verge of committing economic and political suicide by enacting global warming regulation. What’s the reason? Al Gore's hyped movie notwithstanding, there is no new or compelling science to support the notion that humans are harming global climate or that humans can control climate to any discernible extent.

...

And this pressure is only likely to increase. Perceiving that the global warming regulation train is moving, businesses naturally will seek to craft the process to their advantage. General Motors and Ford, for example, have fought against mandatory global warming regulation in the past. But their businesses are being crushed by retiree health care costs. It's possible that the companies might support global warming regulation in exchange for some form of legislative relief from their health care burdens.

...

Moreover, remember that the Greens' goal is to capture the corporation as a means to implement their social agenda, which goes far beyond the distraction of global warming to an unpalatable political vision that most of us would regard as socialistic.

But wait, where does Margaret Thatcher come in? Apparently her union-busting led to the theory of global warming!

When Margaret Thatcher became UK Prime Minister in 1979, her mandate was to reduce Britain's economic decline. Thatcher wanted to make the UK energy-independent through nuclear power - she didn't like her country's reliance on coal, which politically empowered the coal miner unions, or oil, which empowered Middle Eastern states.

So Thatcher latched onto Bolin's notion that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide warmed the planet in a harmful way, thereby providing the perfect political cover for advancing her nuclear power agenda without having to fight the miners or Arab oil states.

She empowered the U.K. Meteorological Office to begin global climate change research, a move that eventually led to the 1988 creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' group that has come to be the "official" international agency for global warming alarmism.

...

Then when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, many "peace-niks" and political activists moved over to environmental activism, bringing their "neo-Marxist" political philosophy with them. As Moore puts it, environmentalism became the "new guise for anti-capitalism."

Global warming alarmism was thus borne from this combination of official British policy, environmentalism's rejection of its own success and political opportunism by "unemployed" left-wing political activists.

...

Let the public see both sides of the story and then we'll see who's believable and who's not.

So you see? It's all a conspiracy between the anti-coal British Conservative Party, and those crafty environmentalists who have so much power they bend multinational corporations to their will and control global scientific opinion (for anti-capitalist propaganda) just like the illuminati.

Exactly how bent does one's mind have to be to believe this kind of tripe?

Labels: global warming denialism, Stephen Malloy

The administrations attempts to confuse and hide global warming science have hit a major obstacle, this guy

Waxman quoted an internal API document that identified climate change as the group's highest priority. He said a key API tactic was to spread doubt about climate change science, exaggerating scientific uncertainty and downplaying the role of humans in climate change.

"What bothers me is that you seem to take the exact same approach in the White House," Waxman told Cooney.

Cooney, soft-spoken but increasingly red-faced as the hours went by, repeatedly stressed that his job was to align reports with administration policy, as reflected by a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report that indicated some doubt about climate change models.

He denied his aim was to sow doubt or that he had any loyalty to the oil industry, even as lawmakers pointed to some 181 changes he made to one document, which Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said "had the effect of emphasizing or exaggerating the level of uncertainty surrounding global warming science."

"How is what you were doing ... any different than the work of the so-called scientists during the whole tobacco debate when they were sowing doubt about whether there was any link between tobacco and lung cancer?" Welch asked.

It isn't any different. It's denialism. Luckily we have Waxman to pursue this kind of fraud. It met three criteria, false experts, selectivity, and the all important impossible expectations (the exaggerating uncertainty part) Maybe we should have future awards for behavior like this? We can give denialism awards for the biggest perpetrators of lies, and conversely, anti-denialism awards for those who fight against legitimate science. We could call them Waxmans! Except, most people wouldn't want a statue that looks like that guy.

Labels: global warming denialism