Climate Buffoons' Real Motives: 5 Reasons They Still Spout Debunked Garbage

By Lindsay Abrams, Salon

06 March 14

From greed to idiocy, here's the true agenda of deniers who still claim climate change isn't happening

alifornia's record-breaking drought. Britain's record-breaking floods. Australia's unprecedented heat wave. And the polar vortex, times three. The only thing that matched the degree of extreme weather we saw this past winter was the extreme amount of climate denial that arose in response.

The overwhelming majority of Americans, and nearly all scientists, believe that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Yet some very loud, very wrong people continue to insist otherwise. The drought and the floods have both become excuses to debate whether climate change was responsible, and from there, to question the legitimacy of climate science. The heat wave Down Under was ignored in favor of the United States' chilly weather - and yet, per Rush Limbaugh, the polar vortex itself was a "hoax" created by the left. In the wise words of Pat Robertson, it's "idiocy" to believe in global warming because it's cold outside. In the even wiser (?) words of Donald Trump:

So what gives? Obviously, a great deal. But a few recurring themes that cropped up over this winter's most aggressive denials may give us some idea of what's going on in deniers' heads.

Theory 1: They don't understand science

The most simplistic of climate deniers are those who looked out their windows this winter, saw that it was snowing, and reasoned that global warming therefore can't be real. This speaks to a basic confusion of the difference between weather and climate. (If you'd like a much more thorough debunking of weather-based climate change denial, read this.)

It's also a classic example of confirmation bias: Deniers get giddy when it snows because it appears to confirm their belief that Earth isn't really getting warmer. To understand why that doesn't make sense, one need only look at the average global temperatures. Yes, it was very cold in parts of the U.S., but zoom out and it becomes clear that last month, overall, was the fourth-warmest January in recorded history.

In some cases, it could be a fear of science that is driving this type of thinking. A recent study out of Columbia University delved further into the weather's influence on perceptions, and confirmed that people are far less likely to say they're concerned about climate change - or even that they believe it's happening - on unusually cold days. Climate change, the researchers reasoned, is a complex issue. And when faced with complex issues, people turn not to the most relevant source, but to the one that's most accessible: in this case, what's going on right outside.

A misunderstanding of what scientists take as "proof" may also be responsible for this confusion. While scientists generally agree that a warming climate will lead to extreme weather conditions like drought and stronger, more frequent storms, they are unable to say that climate change definitively caused, say, the polar vortex, or California's current drought.

That doesn't mean that climate change has nothing to do with it. On the contrary: According to climatologist James Hansen, "Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change." And scientists do agree that climatic warming is making the effects of the drought worse. However, because we're talking about larger patterns, the drought isn't "proof" of climate change - just as cold weather isn't "proof" that it's a hoax. But it's still significant, in a way that cold weather, which is still reasonable to expect in the wintertime, is not.

Theory 2: Big industry is pulling their strings

If you want to see the insidious influence that industry has on climate denial, look no further than Patrick Moore, a darling of the conservative media. On the surface, Moore is everything deniers are looking for: a former co-founder of Greenpeace who has switched teams, proclaiming loudly that human activity is not the dominant cause of climate change. And his influence has been felt: CNBC personality Joe Kernen's recent rant - in which he compared the science of climate change to medieval witchcraft – was actually prompted by Moore's testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Moore wasn't actually the co-founder of Greenpeace, although he was a leading figure in the group's Canadian and international branches back in the '80s. But while his fans play up his association with the environmental group, they fail to mention his much stronger ties to fossil fuel-intensive industries: For over 20 years, he's been a paid spokesman for companies involved in "mining, energy, forestry, aquaculture, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing."

In a 2008 statement distancing themselves from their former member, Greenpeace explained:

Patrick Moore often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental 'expert' or even an 'environmentalist,' while offering anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance…He claims he 'saw the light' but what Moore really saw was an opportunity for financial gain. Since then he has gone from defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters.

Climate denial on a larger scale - the misinformation campaigns led by conservative and libertarian think tanks - is also supported by hefty donations from invested industries. Back in September, before the U.N. released its landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, a top official warned that major corporations were prepared to fund skeptics to undermine the work of climate scientists. That prediction bore out: The Koch brothers-affiliated Heartland Institute released its own report – tellingly named the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change – that questioned the IPCC report's validity. The report, like the Heartland Institute itself, failed on almost all measures of credibility, and was written by paid contributors.

Where's that money coming from? Heartland hasn't disclosed the sources of its funding in years (although leaked documents have done some of that work for it), but we know that ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute have been big donors in the past. Most of its money is funneled anonymously through the mysterious Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund - in 2012, Chicago industrialist Barre Seid was revealed as having used the fund to contribute millions to the institute's "global warming projects."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is another prime example of industry money muddying the conversation about climate change. Its response to the IPCC report: "We should be worried that the alarmist establishment continues using junk science to promote disastrous policies that will make the world much poorer and will consign poor people in poor countries to perpetual poverty." And its funding: Also not disclosed, although contributors to its annual fundraising dinner provide a hint. According to the Washington Post, the energy sector collectively pitched in $110,000.

Both organizations have a history of downplaying the dangers of smoking, thanks to their ties to the tobacco industry. Their latest activity simply updates the misinformation campaigning for climate change. Tobacco isn't bad for you, they insist, and neither are greenhouse gas emissions. Convinced?

Theory 3: Deniers hate regulations, and they really hate the EPA

Accepting that climate change is a real, human-caused problem requiring drastic, human-driven solutions means embracing the role of government regulation in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. And whether it's due to fears that regulations will drive up prices, or just impede on our freedoms, they know that the best way to challenge the EPA's recent attempts to do so is to undermine the legitimacy of their reasoning.

Seventeen out of the 22 Republican members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology are climate deniers, a position that, as ClimateProgress notes, "dovetails with their open disregard for the EPA and the work it does." The committee most recently backed the so-called Secret Science Reform Act, which Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., characterized as "an attempt by climate change deniers to stop the EPA from doing its job."

Just watch Fox News rail against the agency's efforts to spread "propaganda" to children about climate change. The way Stuart Varney incredulously says, "The EPA," you'd think the lesson plans he's talking about were being sponsored by the Heartland Institute:

Theory 4: They're unable to grasp the big picture

Just as they can take one cold day and say it contradicts the decades-long, global pattern of climate change, climate deniers are constantly prioritizing the here-and-now over the future. How else to explain why Newt Gingrich found it so hard to understand why John Kerry would call climate change "the greatest challenge of our generation"? Kerry's claim actually threw the former House speaker into the Twitter equivalent of a nervous breakdown:

We saw the same thing recently on Fox News, which used plenty of snowy footage to emphasize the ridiculousness of Obama spending money now to combat a problem that will only "maybe" affect us later:

Theory 5: They just don't want to believe it

Climate change is a terrifying prospect, one that scientists warn will change, and potentially destroy, nearly everything about life as we know it. Is it any wonder that some people just refuse to accept the idea of that happening?

Putting forward a theory of his own, Chris Hayes posited that it's just "sexier and more fun" to mock climate change than to admit how screwed we are.

Even worse, of course, is admitting that it's our fault. That's why deniers will continue to insist that observed climate changes are "natural" and "cyclical," and why young Earth creationists Tony Perkins and Ken Ham attribute them to an act of God.

All that really matters now, of course, is what we can do to, if not convert the deniers, then at least push them back into the margins where they belong. Toward that end, it's possible that this awful winter may turn out to have been a good thing. The "silver lining" of the extreme weather we've been seeing, U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres suggested Wednesday, is that climate change is now becoming too real to ignore: "It's unfortunate that we have to have these weather events," she told the Guardian, but they're also a reminder that "solving climate change, addressing climate change in a timely way, is not a partisan issue."

The weather "is giving us a pattern of abnormality that's becoming the norm," Figueres continued. "These very strange extreme weather events are going to continue in their frequency and their severity … It's not that climate change is going to be here in the future, we are experiencing climate change." And sooner or later, it's going to become impossible to deny.

America's Staggering Hypocrisy in Ukraine

By Robert Parry, Consortium Times

05 March 14

ince World War II - and extending well into the Twenty-first Century - the United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya.

So, what is one to make of Secretary of State John Kerry's pronouncement that Russia's military intervention in the Crimea section of Ukraine - at the behest of the country's deposed president - is a violation of international law that the United States would never countenance?

Kerry decried the Russian intervention as "a Nineteenth Century act in the Twenty-first Century." However, if memory serves, Sen. Kerry in 2002 voted along with most other members of the U.S. Congress to authorize President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was also part of the Twenty-first Century. And, Kerry is a member of the Obama administration, which like its Bush predecessor, has been sending drones into the national territory of other nations to blow up various "enemy combatants."

Are Kerry and pretty much everyone else in Official Washington so lacking in self-awareness that they don't realize that they are condemning actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that are far less egregious than what they themselves have done?

If Putin is violating international law by sending Russian troops into the Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias ousted Ukraine's democratically elected president - and after he requested protection for the ethnic Russians living in the country's south and east - then why hasn't the U.S. government turned over George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and indeed John Kerry to the International Criminal Court for their far more criminal invasion of Iraq?

In 2003, when the Bush-Cheney administration dispatched troops halfway around the world to invade Iraq under the false pretense of seizing its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. touched off a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left their country a bitterly divided mess. But there has been virtually no accountability.

And, why haven't many of the leading Washington journalists who pimped for those false WMD claims at least been fired from their prestigious jobs, if not also trundled off to The Hague for prosecution as propagandists for aggressive war?

Remarkably, many of these same "journalists" are propagandizing for more U.S. wars today, such as attacks on Syria and Iran, even as they demand harsh penalties for Russia over its intervention in the Crimea, which incidentally was an historic part of Russia dating back centuries.

The WPost's Double Standards

A stunning example of the U.S. media's double standards is the Washington Post's editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, who pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 by treating the existence of Iraq's non-existent WMD as "flat fact," not an allegation in dispute. After the U.S. invasion and months of fruitless searching for the promised WMD caches, Hiatt finally acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its claims about the WMD.

"If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]

Yes, that is a principle of journalism, if something isn't true, we're not supposed to say that it is. Yet, despite the enormous cost in blood and treasure from the Iraq War - and despite the undeniable fact that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a clear violation of international law - nothing happened to Hiatt. He remains in the same job today, more than a decade later.

His editorials also continue to state dubious points as "flat fact." For instance, the Post's belligerent editorial on Monday, entitled online as "President Obama's foreign policy is based on fantasy," resurfaces the discredited claim that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.

The Post wrote, "Since the Syrian dictator crossed Mr. Obama's red line with a chemical weapons attack that killed 1,400 civilians, the dictator's military and diplomatic position has steadily strengthened."

Note how there is no attribution or doubt expressed regarding either the guilt of the Syrian government or the number of casualties. Just "flat fact." The reality, however, is that the U.S. government assertions blaming the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad for the poison gas attack and the death tally of 1,400 have both crumbled under examination.

The U.S. casualty figure of "1,429" always was regarded as a wild exaggeration, since doctors on the scene cited a much lower death toll of a few hundred, and the Wall Street Journal later reported that the strangely precise number was ascertained by the CIA applying facial recognition software to images of dead bodies posted on YouTube and then subtracting duplicates and those in bloody shrouds.

The problems with this "methodology" were obvious, since there was no way to know the dates when the YouTube videos were taken and the absence of bloody shrouds did not prove that the cause of death was poison gas.

More significantly, the U.S. claims about where the missiles were launched - more than nine kilometers from the impact site - turned out to be false, since expert analysis of the one missile that was found to carry Sarin gas had a maximum range of around two kilometers. That meant that the launch site was within territory controlled by the Syrian opposition, not the government. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mistaken Guns of Last August."]

Though it remains unclear which side was to blame for the chemical attack, the Syrian government's guilt surely was not a "slam dunk" anymore than the Iraqi government's possession of WMD in 2003. In such a case - especially on sensitive matters of war or peace - responsible journalists reflect the uncertainty, not simply assert an allegation as "flat fact."

However, since Hiatt was never punished for his earlier journalistic violation - even though it contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including some 4,500 U.S. soldiers - he is still around to commit the same offenses again, in an even more dangerous context, i.e., a confrontation between the United States and Russia, two nuclear-armed states.

Pushing for a New Cold War

And, what do Hiatt and other neocons at the Washington Post say about confronting the Russians over the Ukraine crisis, which was stoked by neocon holdovers in the U.S. State Department, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 to replace the CIA in the business of destabilizing targeted governments? [See Consortiumnews.com's "What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis."]

The Post is demanding a new Cold War with Russia in retaliation for its relatively non-violent interventions to protect pro-Russian provinces of two countries that were carved out of the old Soviet Union: Georgia where Russian troops have protected South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008 and in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have taken control of Crimea. In both cases, the pro-Russian areas felt threatened from their central governments and sought Moscow's assistance.

In the case of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi-led putsch - representing the interests of the western part of the country - overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who came from the eastern region. Then, under the watchful eye of the neo-Nazi storm troopers in Kiev, a rump parliament voted unanimously or near unanimously to enact a series of draconian laws offensive to the ethnic Russian areas in the east and south.

Having fled Kiev for his life, Yanukovych asked Russia for help, which led to Putin's request to the Russian parliament for the authority to deploy troops inside Ukraine, essentially taking control of Crimea in the south, an area that has been part of Russia for centuries.

Though the Russian case for intervention in both Georgia and Ukraine is much stronger than the excuses often used by the United States to intervene in other countries, the Washington Post was apoplectic about Russia's "violation" of suddenly sacred international law.

The Post wrote, "as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can't pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not."

The Post also laments what it sees as a "receding" tide of democracy around the world, but it is worth noting that the U.S. government has a long and sorry record of overthrowing democratic governments. Just a partial list since World War II would include: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002, Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and now Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014. The next target of a U.S.-embraced "democratic" coup looks to be Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.

Perhaps the closest U.S. parallel to the Russian intervention in Ukraine was President Bill Clinton's decision to invade Haiti in 1994 to reinstall Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office, though Russia has not gone nearly that far regarding Yanukovych in Ukraine. Russia has only intervened to prevent the fascist-spearheaded coup regime in Kiev from imposing its will on the country's ethnic Russian provinces.

Also, in the case of Aristide, the U.S. role wasn't as pro-democratic as Clinton's invasion on his behalf might suggest. Clinton ordered the action to reverse a 1991 military coup that ousted President Aristide with the support of President George H.W. Bush. Aristide was deposed a second time in 2004 in a coup partly engineered by the administration of President George W. Bush.

In other words, Clinton's intervention on behalf of a popularly elected leader in Haiti was the anomaly to the more typical U.S. pattern of collaborating with right-wing military officers in the overthrow of elected leaders who don't comply with Washington's wishes.

Thus, the overriding hypocrisy of the Washington Post, Secretary Kerry and indeed nearly all of Official Washington is their insistence that the United States actually promotes the principle of democracy or, for that matter, the rule of international law. Those are at best situational ethics when it comes to advancing U.S. interests around the world.