The Big Con
by Tom Maertens
(An expurgated version of this ran in the Mankato Free Press, Feb. 20.)
Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute have written that, “One of our two major parties, the Republican, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme … and unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”
They could have been writing about Rudy Boschwitz’s recent op-ed denying global warming (Mankato Free Press, Feb. 11) which didn’t cite a single reputable scientific organization to support his claim. Instead, he trotted out the thoroughly discredited S. Fred Singer, a “rent-a-scientist” spokesman for the tobacco industry paid to deny the effects of second hand smoke, which the Surgeon General has found responsible for up to 61,000 American deaths every year.
Singer and the carbon industry-funded lobby are using the tobacco play-book again in arguing against science: “Doubt is our product,” and “The jury is still out.” As of 2007, Singer was affiliated with 11 groups that received funding from ExxonMobil, and has acknowledged serving as a consultant for Exxon, Texaco, Arco, Shell, Sun, Unocal, and others.
Boschwitz quotes Singer on past climate cycles, which are not in dispute, but fails to consider the future consequences of injecting 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide (plus other gases) into the atmosphere every year. Only about 1% of that escapes into outer space. The remaining CO2 creates the greenhouse effect and global warming. That’s why 2010 was the warmest year on record.
Boschwitz cites petitionproject.org as a source for his claims. That site asserts that it has over 31,000 signatories, and that all of them “have formal educations in fields of specialization that suitably qualify them to evaluate the research data” related to global warming. It provides no verifiable information about signatories, and according to the AP, has included such names as the cast of the TV program MASH.
The project claims that 12,715 people with B.S. or equivalent degrees have signed the petition. In other words, any elementary teacher with a B.S. in education is qualified to evaluate climate research data. Really?
Another one-third of the signers are engineers, not usually considered experts on climate science; likewise with the veterinarians, “general scientists,” foresters, and others cited by petitionproject.
This is what junk science looks like. If you don’t have experts, you tout the people you do have as experts, including “over 9,000 PhD’s,” all unverified, in something or other.
Moreover, many signatures were apparently obtained under false pretenses. The original “Oregon Petition" was sent out as a mass mailing -- designed to look like an official communication from the National Academy of Sciences -- by Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), an organization that Greenpeace says is supported by ExxonMobil. The NAS responded, saying it had nothing to do with the petition which “does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy." The Union of Concerned Scientists called the petition “a deliberate attempt to mislead scientists.”
Another of Boschwitz’s spurious claims is that global warming was worse during the Medieval Warming and Roman Warming periods, suggesting he doesn’t understand his own source, which specifies “Northern Hemisphere” right in the title. Other parts of the world were colder than average at the same time, as a 2009 study by Michael Mann of PennState showed, resulting in temperatures “well below recent levels globally."
Another favorite red-herring of the deniers, which Boschwitz parrots, is that scientists are in it for the money…”billions” he says. Indeed there is money being made in the climate business but it goes to lobbyists and deniers like Senator James Inhofe who con the American people on behalf of Big Oil and Coal. They perpetrate their anti-science hoax so that their corporatist allies don’t have to reduce pollution or CO2 emissions. The carbon industry pockets the profits and sticks us with the pollution. That saves the Koch brothers billions, which they spread around to profiteers like Inhofe; they are his biggest campaign contributors, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The deniers’ Big Con also stokes up the lunatic fringe, the ones who send death threats to scientists and their families, as Michael Mann has reported.
Boschwitz himself is a big-time money bundler and a registered lobbyist, which raises the question of whether he is being paid to repeat the Big Con. A prominent government watchdog, Craig Holman of Public Citizen, wrote last year that, “(Boschwitz’s) primary objective in setting up (t)his lobbying consulting firm is to avoid disclosure and to avoid lobbying ethics rules … which raises “serious questions.”
Yes, doesn’t it.
(An expurgated version of this ran in the Mankato Free Press, Feb. 20.)
Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute have written that, “One of our two major parties, the Republican, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme … and unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”
They could have been writing about Rudy Boschwitz’s recent op-ed denying global warming (Mankato Free Press, Feb. 11) which didn’t cite a single reputable scientific organization to support his claim. Instead, he trotted out the thoroughly discredited S. Fred Singer, a “rent-a-scientist” spokesman for the tobacco industry paid to deny the effects of second hand smoke, which the Surgeon General has found responsible for up to 61,000 American deaths every year.
Singer and the carbon industry-funded lobby are using the tobacco play-book again in arguing against science: “Doubt is our product,” and “The jury is still out.” As of 2007, Singer was affiliated with 11 groups that received funding from ExxonMobil, and has acknowledged serving as a consultant for Exxon, Texaco, Arco, Shell, Sun, Unocal, and others.
Boschwitz quotes Singer on past climate cycles, which are not in dispute, but fails to consider the future consequences of injecting 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide (plus other gases) into the atmosphere every year. Only about 1% of that escapes into outer space. The remaining CO2 creates the greenhouse effect and global warming. That’s why 2010 was the warmest year on record.
Boschwitz cites petitionproject.org as a source for his claims. That site asserts that it has over 31,000 signatories, and that all of them “have formal educations in fields of specialization that suitably qualify them to evaluate the research data” related to global warming. It provides no verifiable information about signatories, and according to the AP, has included such names as the cast of the TV program MASH.
The project claims that 12,715 people with B.S. or equivalent degrees have signed the petition. In other words, any elementary teacher with a B.S. in education is qualified to evaluate climate research data. Really?
Another one-third of the signers are engineers, not usually considered experts on climate science; likewise with the veterinarians, “general scientists,” foresters, and others cited by petitionproject.
This is what junk science looks like. If you don’t have experts, you tout the people you do have as experts, including “over 9,000 PhD’s,” all unverified, in something or other.
Moreover, many signatures were apparently obtained under false pretenses. The original “Oregon Petition" was sent out as a mass mailing -- designed to look like an official communication from the National Academy of Sciences -- by Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), an organization that Greenpeace says is supported by ExxonMobil. The NAS responded, saying it had nothing to do with the petition which “does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy." The Union of Concerned Scientists called the petition “a deliberate attempt to mislead scientists.”
Another of Boschwitz’s spurious claims is that global warming was worse during the Medieval Warming and Roman Warming periods, suggesting he doesn’t understand his own source, which specifies “Northern Hemisphere” right in the title. Other parts of the world were colder than average at the same time, as a 2009 study by Michael Mann of PennState showed, resulting in temperatures “well below recent levels globally."
Another favorite red-herring of the deniers, which Boschwitz parrots, is that scientists are in it for the money…”billions” he says. Indeed there is money being made in the climate business but it goes to lobbyists and deniers like Senator James Inhofe who con the American people on behalf of Big Oil and Coal. They perpetrate their anti-science hoax so that their corporatist allies don’t have to reduce pollution or CO2 emissions. The carbon industry pockets the profits and sticks us with the pollution. That saves the Koch brothers billions, which they spread around to profiteers like Inhofe; they are his biggest campaign contributors, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The deniers’ Big Con also stokes up the lunatic fringe, the ones who send death threats to scientists and their families, as Michael Mann has reported.
Boschwitz himself is a big-time money bundler and a registered lobbyist, which raises the question of whether he is being paid to repeat the Big Con. A prominent government watchdog, Craig Holman of Public Citizen, wrote last year that, “(Boschwitz’s) primary objective in setting up (t)his lobbying consulting firm is to avoid disclosure and to avoid lobbying ethics rules … which raises “serious questions.”
Yes, doesn’t it.
Labels: climate change
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home