What the other side reads on global warming.
Tom DeWeese has an article over at "Capitalist Magazine" called "Global Warming: The Other Side of the Story." Before I respond, I'd like to share a link on recent conclusions of the US Climate Change Science Program:
"The observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone."
--Washington Post
Tom DeWeese ought to give full disclosure that he is not a scientist and that he is president of the American Policy Center, a front group for corporations like Exxon Mobile. He is funded by and speaking on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. They have every right to make their view known, but there should be full disclosure.
This article is full of misleading citations. First, there is an implicit suggestion that the Heidelberg Appeal was a reaction against climate science. In fact, the HA makes no mention of global warming or climate change. It is merely a statment of support for technological and scientific ratherthan luddite responses to our ecological challenges. I believe in global warming and support the statements made in the HA. It turns out that the HA was funded by industries like the tobacco, fossil fuel, and asbestos industries, though this was not disclosed to the signators. 49 of the 72 Nobel laureates that signed the HA also signed the Union of Concerned Scientists "Scientists Warning to Humanity," which begins with the sentence "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course."
The article also mentions a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine. The OISM petition is a famous fraud. The petition was circulated with a letter from Frederick Seitz who was once p sident of the National Academy of Science. The name would have been familiar to many who received the letter, but they might not have known that after holding that post Seitz grew rich working as a consultant for RJ Reynolds. Attached with the letter was an article that was formatted to look as though it was clipped from the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." In fact, the article had not appeared in that publication, was not a peer reviewed scientific article, and has been extensively refuted. The signators of the OISM petition were fooled into thinking that it was circulated by the NAS and nearly all of them were not climate experts. Any article that cites this petition has absolutely zero credibility. It was a fraud.
DeWeese's article is heavy on quotations and citations from more than a decade ago. The year is 2006 and climate science has advanced. The article makes the case that scientists only support the view of anthropogenic climate change because they want money. Tha is absurd. In fact, the more profitable route has clearly been climate change denial. It has been profitable for DeWeese as he has profitted as president of the APC. It has been profitable for Seitz who moved from denying the effects of smoking on the lungs to denying the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere. It has been profitable for Dr Lindzen, another scientist cited by DeWeese, who makes thousands of dollars per appearance consulting and giving speeches for the fossil fuel industry. Lindzen, btw, has even had a major speech underwritten by America's good friends, the OPEC oil cartel.
If you haven't seen them already, you will shortly see commercials attacking Al Gore's evidence-based movie on global warming from a group called the "Competitive Enterprise Institute." Just like the group DeWeese is president of, CEI is backed by the fossil fuel industry with funding from Ford, GM, Texaco, and Exxon Mobile. To anyone that is knowledgable about the climate change issue, the ads seem more like SNL spoof, but some moght take them seriously. The CEI's second commercial cites studies that purportedly show that Arctic ice melts are exaggerated. Here is a quote from one of the authors of one of those studies in a press release:
"These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate. They are selectively using onlyparts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public."
--Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia
ifthenknots
Union of Koncerned Kossacks