In 2020, RealClearEnergy claimed the mantle as the big new clearinghouse for professional, industry-funded climate denial, replacing the now-essentially-climate-unconcerned Daily Caller as the defacto home for Koch propaganda. But as the year (and technically, the decade!) come to a close, we’re going to take a look at how the other shining stars of the denial sky are faring.
Spoiler alert: they’re not exactly thriving. Particularly not internationally, as a bunch of formerly somewhat relevant and/or climategate-y blogs have all but given up climate posting. The UK set is feeling particularly lost at the moment. Richard Drake, for example, has a blog at CliScep headlined simply “Despair.” Though the context isn’t exactly clear, it seems things are not exactly exceeding its design expectations as a bustling hub for a variety of mostly England-based denier bloggers to pool their collective talents (and audience). Pete Ridley, one of the “occasional contributors and lurkers who is losing interest in Cliscep articles” laments in one comment they “are getting nowhere in our fight against [climate change] propaganda,”and says they “appear to be fighting a losing battle” in another.
Elsewhere in the denial blogosphere, it’s a similar picture. Even before Fred Singer’s passing this year, his Science and Public Policy Institute, once a leading denial organization, had been silent since early 2019. That was around the time when the CATO Institute shuttered its climate arm, though the Competitive Enterprise Institute made sure CATO’s Pat Michaels stayed employed as a denier so it’s not like Pat’s notoriously oily funding has dried up. Similarly, the deniers for hire at the CO2 Coalition have also picked up some of the slack left by the gradual dissolution of the once-key denial nodes, like The Cooler Heads Digest, which has only bothered to post in fits and starts over the past year.
Another industry group, the National Association of Manufacturers, appears to have had to reduce the output on its anti-ExxonKnew-lawsuit "Manufacturers' Accountability Project" this year, though the oil industry’s Energy in Depth blog continues apace on that front so poor ol' (and shrinking!)’ ExxonMobil won’t be left totally defenseless.
Back in the US, though, the politically-connected deniers are having one last go at trying to get the Trump administration to do... something that’ll stick. This time it’s submitting the Paris climate agreement to the Senate for treaty ratification, as suggested by (tobacco and) fossil fuel junk science peddler Steve Milloy in a WSJ op-ed, and echoed elsewhere. But that’s a dumb idea, because it’s explicitly not a treaty that would require Senate ratification, and even if it were, and it went to the Senate, and they didn’t ratify it, it wouldn’t matter, because President Biden could simply re-enter. Because again, it’s not a treaty. It’s an agreement under the already-ratified UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, so the attempted ratification, or not, of the Paris Agreement wouldn’t actually change anything.
Also not really changing much of anything is Watts Up With That. With Anthony Watts now employed by the Heartland Institute, there’s been a noticeable uptick in the use of his blog for Heartland’s press releases, and otherwise a drift towards ever-loonier areas. For example, in a now-relatively-rare actual climate science post, Watts points to a new paper by Nicolas Scafetta claiming that Jupiter’s orbit sends meteorites our way every so often, and this may be the real forcing behind climate change.
Before you start wondering if this is The Big Breakthrough deniers have been waiting for that explains the observed warming without greenhouse gasses, a “caveat” from Watts: “In the past, I have dismissed much of Scafetta’s work as being little more than ‘cyclomania’, i.e. finding spurious cyclic correlations in data where there really isn’t any.”
He says maybe this time it’s plausible, or maybe it’s “just another spurious correlation” from a notoriously unreliable denier. “Either way, “ Anthony concludes, “I thought it was worth discussing.”
That’s as good a place as any to see where we’re ending the decade in denierland. With work from deniers that even other deniers routinely dismiss because of their obvious failings nevertheless being posted for no particular reason other than discussion, it’s clearer than ever that their goal is endless debate.
Remember that next year, when things pick up as climate policy once again becomes a possibility!