While many deniers haven’t yet given up hope of an armed rebellion to overthrow the 2020 election results, the incoming Biden-Harris administration combined with Boris Johnson’s green(wash)ing of the UK, have soured the mood in the denier blogs. And yesterday’s ExxonMobil announcement that they’re going to pollute a little less while polluting more can only add to the deniersphere's despair.
For example, over the weekend WUWT featured a guest blog post by Paul D. Hoffman – whose 100+ word byline notes that he has written this for the creationist Cornwall Alliance and includes career highlights like his serving as a State Director for then-Congressman Dick Cheney, Executive Director of a local Chamber of Commerce, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks at the US Department of the Interior.
Hoffman is also, it notes, "currently the publicist for Hope Springs Media and a consultant for Resource Management Strategies.” We couldn’t find anything on Resource Management Strategies, but Hope Springs Media is apparently the boutique PR firm specifically for fiction works by L. F. Hoffman, who, if we had to guess, is probably Paul’s wife.
Anyway, Paul, whose byline could have just read “old republican blogger,” tells WUWT readers that deniers “are losing the climate change debate. Not because we are wrong. Factually, win win every time! But, we are losing the hearts and minds of the people because we have failed to tap into their emotions.”
He continues that “climate alarmists don’t care about the facts” and “beat us down with children, like Greta Thunberg.” Apparently, per Hoffman, climate alarmists exploit emotions by using Greta Thunberg, who of course is famous as a climate activist in part for her Aspergers, a superpower of which include a lack of emotional affect and a focus on facts.
Anyway, Hoffman lists six “facts” that deniers for some reason haven't used to win “the battle for the minds of the people” not just politically, or even just at “the woke corporations like Amazon, Nike, Apple, or Google, but in the corporate boardrooms of the utility companies, the oil & gas industry, and the manufacturers.”
The bullet points may be described by Hoffman as facts, but that doesn’t make them true. He claims models have failed, which they haven’t, and that “there is no ideal average temperature,” because some places are cold and others are hot. Alternatively, he argues, if average temps do matter, then they used to change more and faster before humans burned fossil fuels … which of course isn’t true, and even if it were, past changes without human activity doesn’t mean human activity isn't causing changes now.
The final “fact” is simply that “there is overwhelming evidence that climate change is neither caused primarily by humans nor an existential threat to mankind or any other species.” Hoffman provides none of this apparently overwhelming evidence proving the negatives posited. Instead, he claims that deniers are losing because they “make our case using wonky science that even scientists don’t fully understand.”
The thing is that scientists DO understand it, and they disregard it. Because it is wrong.
This pattern of bold claims with no backing continues into policy, where Hoffman says that more renewables in Virginia will mean “a $1,000 per person per year increase in electric bills by 2030.” Then a couple paragraphs later, the same conveniently round and unsupported figure pops up again in his claim that Virginia’s participation in the Transportation and Climate Initiative “could cost each driver more than $1,000 per year!”
Since he didn’t cite his sources, it’s impossible to say whether these figures are accurate, so instead we’ll use exactly as much science to rebut the figures as he used to come up with them: they’re wrong.
But we do have some advice for L. F. Hoffman, whose works Paul publicizes. Surely your masterpieces of thinly veiled evangelical propaganda about the righteous who chose “nationalism over globalism” as told in The Third Peril, The Third Woe, and the forthcoming Third Day books of the Third Peril trilogy, deserve better than some third-rate denier publicist like Paul.
After all, no doubt a real publicist could improve your sales by at least $1,000 per year!