Jordan Harris is the Executive Director of the Conservative, privately funded Pegasus Institute. He wrote an embarrassing Opinion piece in the Louisville Courier Journal entitled "The Green New Deal is really the 'Green Scare' over climate change".
In my opinion, Jordan writes in a style and content which emphasizes naming calling and spouting “facts” without corresponding documentation. To get a taste of the Harris style, please read the third paragraph:
“… At this point, most of us who are literate accept that climate change is happening, yet despite claiming that addressing it is a top concern, policymakers and advocates on the left continue to promote nonsensical solutions (Facts? and sarcasm … my words) . Their efforts seem more like McCarthyism (Name Calling … my words) .
“Are you now, or have you ever, used a plastic straw?” (Sarcasm … my words) “
So let’s summarize a few of Jordan’s POV:
- “climate change is happening"
- “the contribution by humans cannot be effectively measured.”
- ”That is not to say human beings aren’t contributing, it is to say that we still, after all this time, don’t fully know the extent.”
- ”it remains unclear what governments should be doing about it all.”
IMO, Jordan believes the climate is changing but he has no idea why (human activity) or what to do about it. It appears Jordan he partially believes in climate change, but wants to do nothing about it, The end result, he supports the climate change deniers policy postions.
Just to review a few climate change facts:
- Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) 2013 It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century» (page 15) and «In this Summary for Policymakers, the following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result: (...) extremely likely: 95–100%» (page 2).,
- The 3% of scientific papers denying climate change are flawed:
- Cherry pickingwas the most common characteristic they shared.
- ‘Curve fitting’describes taking several different variables, usually with regular cycles, and stretching them out until the combination fits a given curve (in this case, temperature data).
- clear lack of plausible physics, which was another common theme we identified among contrarian climate research.
The meat of Jordan’s opinion piece centered around Bjørn Lomborg and William Nordhaus. Both are Nobel winning Economists. Bjørn used a cost — benefits analysis to prioritize climate change against other needs. Lomborg concluded the costs outweigh the benefits of mitigating climate change.
It appears Jordan did not research the critics of Bjørn Lomborg. After “GOOGLING and Bjorn Lomborg” I found:
Bjørn is an outlier in the climate change debate. Jordan is “unskeptical” when he uses outliers in a debate. One would think he is fitting his “facts” to meet his results.
We need to confront climate skeptics even slick one’s like Jordan Harris.