Sometimes, when reading through reams of climate disinfo, what stands out isn't what one person writes, but when multiple, seemingly disparate people, all hit on the same line. We'll leave the full quantitative analysis to others (maybe you?) but for now, we just want to flag that not-racist Alex Epstein isn't the only one pushing the hilariously, intentionally ignorant disinformation line from the 90s "asking" 'what if climate change/CO2/fossil fuel emissions are actually a good thing.'
Spoiler alert: they're not, the latest Social Cost of Carbon came in at $185/tonne CO2, and even the real "CO2 fertilization" effect is no longer a good thing! But none of that matters, because deniers even debunk themselves with this stuff.
Over the Labor Day weekend, three pieces at three different disinfo outlets talking about three different subjects featured that same stupid idea: Maybe scientists who have spent decades calculating how bad climate change is and will be just forgot to look at fossil fuels' benefits.
At the Watts Up With That blog, a guest post (as usual) from Gregory Rummo, former chemical CEO, "lecturer of chemistry" at Palm Beach Atlantic University and writer for the Christian climate disinfo-spreading Cornwall Alliance, took issue with a sociologist's paper in a Chemistry journal. Now, far be it for us to play Ivory Tower gatekeeper, but Rummo's complaint about a journal publishing someone from a different field of study is hilariously ironic for denierland, given their history of slipping climate disinfo into dodgy journals for different fields of study, AND that deniers like WUWT's namesake have failed to get their (pseudo)science published in ANY journals.
Given the headline, "When a Chemistry Journal Publishes a Sociologist on Climate and Energy," and the way Rummo wrote his response, we assumed this was about a peer-reviewed study. But no, clicking through, and it turns out it's just a Chemical and Engineering News interview with developmental sociologist Holly Jean Buck, who has a message for the publication's chemical and engineering audience that Rummo didn't like: We have to stop fossil fuel emissions.
Apparently "like all too many anti-fossil fuel activists, Buck simply fails to take into account all the direct benefits of fossil fuels—the enormous amount of energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty." Except one of the main points of stopping climate change is to protect societies that burned fossil fuels to build and lift themselves of poverty — and polluted the global climate in the process. And besides, what good is a fancy new house if it burns down or floods?
But Rummo isn't mad that the author of "Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough" didn't address the benefits of fossil fuels in her actual scholarship about the need to nationalize the fossil fuel industry, he's mad that she didn't answer the interview questions in the way he would have, if he were given such an opportunity. That she didn't heap praise on the industry destroying the climate was just one of his lengthy list of gripes.
It's the same over at the Washington Times, where geophysicist David Deming claims in an op-ed headlined "the ignorant mob's climate crisis is a hoax," that "the positive benefits of carbon dioxide and warming ought to be balanced against any possible detrimental effects, yet they are rarely discussed."
Deming of course doesn't cite any supposed cost-benefit analysis that fails to account for the positive benefits, because no such analysis exists. But that doesn't stop deniers from pretending!
Coming closest to showing his work and linking to sources for the outrageous claim that the destruction of the climate in which 10,000 years of human infrastructure and agriculture have developed is somehow a good thing is professional 'not the white guy saying this for once' Vijay Jayaraj, with another of his op-eds for the fossil fueled CO2 Coalition. In the Daily Caller, Jayraj's op-ed headline proclaims "Climate change transformed India into an agricultural superpower – just ask my grandparents."
Jayaraj does not, of course, actually prove that. Instead, he gives credit where it's due, Norman Borlaug's green revolution, before then saying that the massive industrialization process "was helped by moderate increases in both temperatures and CO2 levels."
Jayaraj then goes on to cite NASA and the UN about the limited, narrow and specific benefits of warming or CO2 levels on plants, ignoring the larger "what about the costs?" question in precisely the way Deming and Rummo claim alarmists do about the benefits.
But in doing so, and laying out where official sources do very much acknowledge and calculate the precise "benefits" of warming and CO2 levels on plant life, Jayaraj manages to disprove his fellow deniers' assertions that people simply ignore those facts. Deniers only know about that science, because of the very scientific institutions they're accusing of covering up those facts!
