Many people have already piled on Aaron Rodgers for his selfish and misinformed actions and words regarding Covid 19 vaccinations. I won’t focus so much on him since others have so ably pointed out his many errors. Instead, I’m going to look at what Kylee Zempel is doing in her article for The Federalist where she tries to claim that Rodgers dropped nine “truth bombs”. See Federalist Zempel article.
She frames these “bombs as things “you aren’t allowed to say”. Right wingnuts love to play this card. They like to pretend that others are trying to “cancel” them even as their words get plenty of publicity. Neither Rodgers nor Zempel will go to prison for spewing their misinformation, and The Federalist will not be shut down by the government for publishing their nonsense. Because the truth is not on Aaron Rodgers’ or Kylee Zempel’s side, they deserve to be criticized harshly. Yes, Rodgers and Zempel, you can say all of what you’ve said, no one’s stopping you, but you will deservedly be called a stupid, uninformed person for propagating false information.
I won’t call Rodgers’ claims to be “truth bombs” because they are actually lies and misleading statements. That said, how does Zempel react to Rodgers’ lies. First off, she doesn’t react to most of them, just repeats them, and so provides an excellent example of the copy-and-paste method of op-ed writing.
Lie #1: She simply quotes Rodgers on his claim that calling the unvaccinated “selfish” is media propaganda. Rodgers words are “You’re selfish for making a decision that’s in the best interest of your body”. Zempel and Rodgers show no awareness that his statement blatantly reflects selfishness. Of course, a person does want to make decisions in their own best interest, but if at the same time they are clearly ignoring the impacts of their decisions on others, they are being selfish. Men who disguised themselves as women in order to sneak on to lifeboats as the Titanic was sinking were clearly making decisions “in their own best interest” and thus perhaps survived the tragedy. They were also selfish cowards.
Lie #2: Rodgers claims personal health information should be private. This is something that is true in many cases, but it is not true in this case. Rodgers vaccination status is something that his employers had a right to know. If he had simply reported it to them honestly, his lying would not have been exposed and his personal information would not have hit the news. Contagious diseases don’t care about the privacy of your health information and so society has a right that trumps your desire for privacy.
Lie #3: This is really “lies”, not lie. Rodgers says that it’s a lie to call the pandemic a pandemic of the vaccinated because the vaccinated can still be infected, can still spread the disease, and even still die from it. He also says it must not be safe because the vaccine makers were given immunity from lawsuits. Recent studies show that the incidence of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are multiple times higher among the unvaccinated. Even though vaccinations do not prevent infections in every case, they do reduce transmission because they do prevent some cases and the cases last a shorter time. And the major reduction in hospitalizations and deaths is a huge advantage to getting vaccinated. The vaccination manufacturers got immunity because they needed more incentive to develop a new vaccine as fast as possible. That does not mean the vaccine wasn’t tested. And, significantly, at this point, the vaccines has now been administers to hundreds of millions of people around the world, with no pattern of harm or negative reactions.
Lie #4: Rodgers claims falsely that the left politicized vaccines. He bases this on a willful distortion of what Kamala Harris said. She said she would not take a vaccine if Trump were promoting it because Trump could not be trusted. She would take it if medical experts recommended it. Rodgers misquotes this into saying the left was saying Americans should not take the vaccines.
Lie #5: Here Rodgers brings up the fact that the vaccinated can still be infectious. Rodgers actually has said something true here, shocking, I know. However, he does not acknowledge that the vaccinated are not as infectious as the unvaccinated and he does not acknowledge the better outcomes for those who are vaccinated if they do become infected. He claims, without any evidence, that he must have caught the virus from a vaccinated person. This is a convenient accusation to make. As an unvaccinated person, and presumably also as someone who goes out in public on occasion, there would have been ample opportunities to become infected from other unvaccinated and unmasked individuals who are too numerous in this country.
Lie #6: Rodgers says he is allergic to an ingredient in the mRNA vaccines, and so pushes the idea that health care rules cannot always be applied the same to everyone. The problem here is that the Johnson & Johnson is not an mRNA vaccine, so he could have taken that one. He also does not mention what he is allergic to. Even though he should not have to divulge his allergies to the public, he certainly could have told his team doctor and/or the NFL doctors what his allergic concerns were that justify his not being vaccinated. He then of course should not have claimed to be “immunized”.
Lie #7: On Rodgers claims he will have a more robust immunity by catching Covid 19 rather than by getting a vaccine, Zempel steps into explain more about the Israeli study that seems to support this view. Zempel and Rodgers are like the climate deniers who jump on any study that seems to support their own view and which they claim overturns numerous studies that they don’t like. The Israeli study has in fact been criticized itself as severely flawed. There are studies that have measured the quantities of antibodies in people who were infected versus those who had a vaccine and the numbers were significantly better for the vaccinated. For those with mild Covid cases, the antibodies were very low. But the most important thing to consider is why would you want to risk hospitalization or death by waiting to be infected “naturally” versus getting a shot in the arm? As an athlete, why would you want to risk getting damaged lungs or heart inflammation from a severe case of Covid 19? It’s like Zempel and Rodgers are advocating for a kind of Russian roulette.
Lie #8: Rodgers whines about “cancel” culture, about shaming of those who aren’t vaccinated. Why can’t you shame those who aren’t vaccinated? It’s not like people should be shamed willy nilly. And they aren’t. Exceptions are always made for those who have valid reasons for not getting vaccinated. It’s just that many people aren’t getting vaccinated for invalid reasons, because of the misinformation that people like Rodgers and Zempel are too eager to spew.
Lie #9: Rodgers tries to deflect from the need to be vaccinated by claiming that more focus should be on getting people healthier in general. He emphasizes the comorbidities that put some people at risk. The problem with his whining here is two-fold. First, the government puts a lot of effort into encouraging healthy living. To their efforts you can add those of schools, health care providers, and employers. And note how Michelle Obama was criticized by rightwing people when she tried to promote healthier lunches and reducing obesity in children. Trump’s administration worked to reverse some of her initiatives. Also, even though obesity does seem to lower immune responses in general, not just to Covid, and obesity can interfere with treating breathing difficulties, it’s also been shown recently that the initial view that obesity was a major contributor to Covid hospitalizations and deaths may have been exaggerated. So, when Zempel points out that 78% of people hospitalized with Covid were overweight or obese, she fails to note that 74% of the population is overweight or obese. A lot of people were hospitalized who were overweight/obese because a lot of people in this country are in that category.
That’s a whole lot of lies from Rodgers and The Federalist’s Zempel. They won’t help America get past the pandemic. They will only help selfish, misinformed, easily fooled people hurt others (and sometimes themselves as well).
Someone using the web moniker of “Manhattan Contrarian” has written a series of over 20 blog posts purporting to expose global warming and its associated climate changes as the “Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time.” Such grandiose claims immediately invite skepticism, of course, but let’s look closely at this person’s claims, blog post by blog post, starting with the first, which was published in July 2013.
The main claim in his first post is that the global temperature data has been fraudulently adjusted by U. S. government agencies in order to exaggerate the rate of global warming. Of course, common sense would tell you that his claim is far-fetched. The fraudulent behavior he is accusing scientists of would have to be a coordinated effort not just of US scientists, but of scientists from countries all over the world. It would have to involve thousands of individuals who certainly are not in close communication with each other. It would have to continue over years as personnel changed at the various government agencies. It would have to have been done so cleverly that even when someone stole a bunch of emails, there would be no smoking guns revealed.
The blogger relies on two “authorities,” Joe D’Aleo and Steven Goddard. He could not have picked weaker ones. Goddard is so bad he doesn’t even get to post anymore at the climate denier site, Watt’s Up With That. D’Aleo is a meteorologist, but not too good at climate science. Goddard supposedly has found dozens of cases where temperatures were adjusted downwards for earlier years supposedly “to make the present appear warmer by comparison.” D’Aleo did a comparison of the US temperatures anomalies in the twentieth century as they were calculated in 1999 and then in 2011. He notes that 1934’s temperature was adjusted downward yet 1998 was adjusted upwards, thus making 1998 the warmest year at that point.
The problems with these two sources is that they are not giving us the full picture, nor are they considering the possibility that there are legitimate reasons to adjust temperatures. Though Goddard did find “dozens” of examples of downward adjustments for earlier years, did he even look for upward adjustments in those years? Did he consider why they were adjusted? Similarly, with D’Aleo, we can note that even though 1934 was adjusted downward in the charts he shows, other earlier years show little change. Also, the years since 1998 have been significantly warmer, thus showing that the trend is clearly upward.
There are good reasons for adjustments. See for example this article, where the writer takes on some people making similar claims as D’Aleo and Goddard: https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/02/paul-homewood-and-christopher-booker.html. Sometimes there are changes in the time of day the temperatures were taken at a given station, sometimes the station was moved, sometimes conditions changed near a given station, and sometimes the station provides temperatures significantly out of keeping with the temperatures at nearby stations. All of these mean that the raw data are not as accurate as they could be, and so adjustments are in order.
But just in case you think we should just go with the raw data anyway, consider that scientists have tried that approach as well. When then compare the trends using raw data and using adjusted data, the results are only slightly different. Just look at the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. If thousands of scientists were going to engage in a vast, sophisticated conspiracy to publish fraudulent data, they would want to make far greater adjustments. Instead, they want to be as accurate, as close to the real temperature as they can get, and so they make adjustments.
The Manhattan Contrarian pretends that if “there were a reasonable explanation [for the adjustments], the government should have come out with it a long time ago.” But government and non-government scientists have provided reasons. The Manhattan Contrarian is too lazy to look them up or too biased to understand them. And thus it is easy for him to blithely conclude that “the case for fraud has been proved.” In reality, the only thing he has proved is his own gullibility.
Marc Sheppard, a “software engineer and data analyst” and thus no more a scientist than I am, was recently given the privilege to spew his nonsense at the American Thinker web site (American Thinker). He compiles an impressive number of falsehoods and deceptive claims. Let’s take on a few of them so that, on the off chance someone stumbles upon this blog, there will be some record of his stupidity.
First, he bemoans the fact that it’s roughly 10 years since the so-called Climategate affair and yet people still haven’t given up on the ideas of climate change and anthropogenic global warming. His tactic here is partly the old one of repeating a lie in order to foster its acceptance, and thus he refers to “evidence of lying, cheating, and exaggeration.” Sheppard obviously ignores the conclusions of several investigations that cleared the people he is accusing of scientific deception. He just plunges on, trying to give the impression that his view—though it is in fact the false, deceptive one—was proven 10 years ago. To see how wrong he is, just look up those investigations or, better yet, read through the stolen emails yourself. You will find no sign of any conspiracy to lie about climate science.
He tries the same trick when he says that it’s false to claim there is a scientific consensus. He offers no evidence to support his view. He just says that those who have been paying attention “know” that there’s no consensus. And then he quotes Roy Spencer, one of the few people (and there are only a few) in the climate science world who consistently sides with the skeptics or deniers (what Sheppard likes to call “realists”). Unfortunately, Spencer’s statement is filled with nonsense. It deserves some detailed destruction. First, here’s the quote:
The belief in human-caused warming exceeding a level that what would be relatively benign, and maybe even beneficial, is just that – a belief. It is not based upon known, established, and quantified scientific principles. It is based upon the assumption that natural climate change does not exist.
Spencer makes two false claims here, both of them directly targeting the thousands of hard-working, serious climate scientists. First, he says the “belief” that human-caused warming might be harmful is only a belief, not something based on “known, established, and quantified scientific principles.” Should we actually believe that the work of thousands of scientists over the last few decades in climate-related research has not involved known, established and quantified scientific principles? How preposterous. But Spencer goes further and claims that these scientists also assume “natural climate change does not exist.” This again is a preposterous and false claim. Scientists have studied evidence of past climate and have clearly demonstrated it changes. Also, one main strand of climate studies is the attempt to determine to what extent “natural” (that is, non-human) factors are currently affecting climate and to what extent human factors, such as added CO2, are affecting the climate. One of the clear results of such studies is that the changes observed in the last 50 years cannot be accounted for by “natural” causes alone, but can be understood in the context of human activity.
Spencer exhibits the common denier argument that we can blame the current warming on natural factors. Yet what you never get from these deniers or skeptics is a clear, detailed explanation based on “known, established and quantified scientific principles” showing what specific factors or forces are changing the climate. They just wave their magic wand of “natural change” and think they are done.
Sheppard also tries to attack the notion of climate change as “settled science.” He relies on the essentially meaningless platitude that science is never settled. This is meaningless because it is a true statement that provides no value. While it is true that there is always the possibility of new discoveries and theories that will change our current understanding, it is also true that there are vast tracts of the scientific realm that are considered “settled science” with good reason. We don’t repeatedly experiment to see if an apple will fall to the ground due to gravity. There is no point. That part of the science of gravity is settled. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to understand gravity—there is much to learn there—but some basics of it are absolutely settled.
Sheppard shows his muddled thinking by using a false analogy to attempt to make his point about science never being settled. He claims that if we had considered computer science settled many decades ago we would still be trying to use vacuum tubes in computers. Here he is confusing technology with science, or the ability to craft or fabricate with the knowledge or theory behind computers. In the case of climate science, there is a consensus on key ideas, the science is in fact settled on how CO2 works in the atmosphere, on how much CO2 humans have added, on how much the global temperature has increased since the time of the Industrial Revolution, and on an on. Yes, there is more to learn about what is a highly complex system, but we’re simply not going to learn that increased CO2 doesn’t cause warming, and that that warming will have other effects, some of them negative, on human civilization.
His attack on the idea of a scientific consensus on climate change is equally clueless. He cites the infamous Global Warming Petition Project or “Oregon petition”, a list of about 32000 signatories who deny the idea of anthropogenic climate change or that it would have bad effects. The signatories include very few climate scientists and the number is, in comparison to the total number of scientists in the United States, a small number. He’s trying to argue for his own “minority report” consensus based on numbers, but wants to deny the overwhelmingly larger numbers of scientists who support the current climate change science. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/the-30000-global-warming_b_243092.html)
Sheppard’s last major argument against AGW is his claim that the temperature fluctuations of at least the last 150 years can be attributed to the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. However, while it is true that the peaks and valleys of the temperatures show an oscillation that matches that of the PDO, there is an overall trend in the temperatures that Sheppard ignores. Each peak in the temperature graph is higher than the previous one. And, no, there has been no cooling recently. Temperatures continue to be at or near records. Just because we don’t have a new record every year does not mean that global warming has paused. As explained at Skeptical Science, “Natural oscillations like PDO simply move heat around from oceans to air and vice-versa. They don’t have the ability to either create or retain heat, therefore they’re not capable of causing a long-term warming trend, just short-term temperature variations. Basically they’re an example of internal variability, not an external radiative forcing.” And also: “One way to test this skeptic theory is to plot the Global Temperature Anomaly alongside the PDO Index …. What we find is that although the PDO index appears to influence short-term temperature changes, global temperatures have a distinct upward trend, while the PDO Index does not. “
Sheppard succeeds in hitting many of the typical nutjob denier memes. When you encounter other deniers of climate science, see how many of these approaches are present.
- Rely on some of the very few people with a climate science background who take “lukewarmist” or even denial perspectives. There aren’t many that fall in this category so you will repeatedly see names such as Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, Willie Soon, John Christy, Roger Pielke Jr., and Sallie Baliunas.
- Try to counter the overwhelming evidence of a scientific consensus by referring to the laughably inept “Oregon” petition or cite the meaningless idea that “science is never settled.” Actually, with many scientific ideas, there comes a time when further proof simply is not needed and is a waste of resources. It is to that point with the idea that human activity is changing the climate. Now we need to move on past that general idea to more research on how that change occurs, how it can be reduced, and how we can more accurately predict future changes.
- Refer to the ClimateGate affair as something that actually proved malfeasance on the part of scientists though several investigations showed that nothing of the sort occurred. In other words, show no skepticism whatever toward ideas you like.
- Whine about the climate scientists demonizing the deniers as “deniers” and at the same time call the climate scientists frauds, liars, cheaters, and alarmists.
- Misunderstand climate science, and thus erroneously blame the PDO for warmer temperatures. Note how often so-called skeptics will come up with various notions of what is really causing global warming, but none of their ideas ever pan out. And it’s not that their ideas receive no attention from scientists. Rather, if you examine the research, you will find careful, thorough explanations of why the PDO, or cosmic rays, or solar cycles are not the correction explanation.
Sheppard apparently would rather be called a “skeptic” or even a “realist” but there is a huge impediment to using those terms for such as he: he is not skeptical of his own explanations and he does not understand the reality of climate science.
Krystina Skurk wrote recently at the Federalist that environmentalists are the true culprits in the California forest fires (See The Federalist). Their supposed opposition to the use of prescribed burning and forest thinning, and their support for too many regulations has allegedly allowed the forests to become too prone to catastrophic fires. However, in accordance with her extensive history of association with conservative institutions, she reflects the tendencies of conservatives to oversimplify, misrepresent statistics, and ignore the valid points of the other side. Though she claims that blaming the fires on dry conditions or human causes “misses the big picture,” it is she who misses the big picture and lacks a comprehensive understanding of forest fires today.
In the light of Secretary of the Interior Zinke’s ignorant August opinion piece on forest fires and Trump’s more recent, and even more ignorant words about the California forest fires, it’s important to shed some honest light on this issue.
First off, are environmentalists opposed to the prescribed burning and forestry thinning practices she champions? She provides utterly no evidence that they are opposed. It is simply something she assumes and expects readers to accept uncritically. But if you do her homework for her, you will find that environmentalists take different positions on these practices. In general, environmentalists follow the scientific recommendations, which sometimes favor prescribed burning and thinning, and sometimes don’t. Scientific studies, for example, have shown that thinning a forest can actually increase its susceptibility to fire because the reduced density will allow more drying from the wind, and thus worse fires. Also, environmentalists are skeptical of many forest thinning proposals because often the thinning gets done, but not the necessary cleanup and management of the area afterwards, thus leading to greater fire danger and erosion. In recent years, the federal Canadian forests in British Columbia were logged at an increasing rate (perhaps as a response to reduced harvesting in the United States, by the way). However, the fire acreage there increased instead of decreasing. Note finally that the forests of the western United States cover vast amounts of often rugged land. There is literally no way we can perform enough prescribed burns or thin all the forests.
Skurk also tries to blame overregulation as the reason more forests in California are not logged (with the unproven assumption here that the environmentalists put all these regulations into place). But the statistic she cites does nothing to prove her point. She says that in one year in California private forest owners got permits for only 3 million of the 8 million privately owned timber acres. Does she actually think that every year there should be cutting permits for a high percentage of the timberland? What if that timberland is not economically feasible to log because it is in remote and rugged areas? What if it has been previously logged and needs to regrow?
She tries to shock the reader into thinking that the number of acres is rising exponentially by giving the statistic that “In 1993, 1,797,574 acres of wildlands burned, but in 2017 this number jumped to 10,026,086 acres.” While it is true that in the last thirty years there has been an overall upward trend in the acres burn, a look at the year to year numbers shows a great degree of variation, not a sudden jump from 1.7 to 10.0 million acres. Skurk cherry-picked the lowest value she could find as her comparison point, but there have been numbers almost as high as 2017 at several points in the last 25 years. Note also that in earlier years, the number of acres was possibly much higher. The data for the early twentieth century is not as reliable or systematic, but the National Interagency Fire Center reports that 1930 may have seen as many as 52 million acres burned.
Environmentalists are not to blame for the increase in intense forest fires. For that, you can blame many decades of excessive fire suppression, starting well before the environmental movement took off, and now in more recent decades the effects of climate change. While it is true that we could increase the amount of prescribed burning and do more thinning of the forests, the gains will be limited. We simply can’t do enough prescribed burns nor can we thin the forests sufficiently, especially the vast, remote forests in the rugged areas of the West. Efforts will need to be focused on areas where more people live, and at the same time people must understand the risks of building homes in the midst of fire-prone areas. We also must recognize that a real reason for less timber cutting is a changing market. Wood products have been replaced by products made of other materials, or have been replaced by cheaper wood from overseas. Trump can open up more federal forest to logging, but it won’t make much difference if there is not enough demand for the product.
In the end, Skurk’s essay is just an evidence-free smear of enviromentalists. It puts her in good company with the many science-denying conservatives, but it does nothing to help us understand the true nature of the challenges the world will face from a changing climate.
On a regular basis, the Investor’s Business Daily publishes editorials and articles denying global warming. For an outfit purporting to help people invest their money, it is strange that they provide false, misleading, poorly sourced information. If you are stupid enough to make any investment decisions based on the false idea that global warming is a hoax, you will get burned.
A couple of months ago, they claimed that the temperature record in its raw form—that is, before any adjustments are made to the raw data, shows no warming in over 100 years (see IBD article). This claim is based on the idea that the adjustments to the raw temperature data that the NOAA makes are all part of an extensive, long-term effort to create the myth of a rise in temperature. The adjustments supposedly always lower older temperatures and raise more recent temperatures to create an illusion of an increase over time.
There is no merit to these claims.
Just a few years ago, a group led by Richard Muller, a scientist who was skeptical of the reported upward trend, undertook a careful study of the temperature data. Known as the Berkeley Earth study, it showed that the upward trend was real. They looked at the raw data and at the adjusted data. The trend was clear and undeniable in both cases. From factcheck.org: “Berkeley Earth, a climate science nonprofit founded in early 2010 by scientists expressing skepticism at the time about global warming, has also found no undue manipulation of temperature data in its own analyses.”
Are the adjustments that NOAA makes to the raw data always downward for old dates and upward for recent dates? Of course not. See for example the chart at Fact Check charts. It shows the kinds of adjustments made for a period in the mid-twentieth century. Some adjustments were up and some were down. NOAA states the reasoning on their web site. The reasoning is sound since it involves taking into account changes to how the temperatures were taken in a given locale. Temperature stations have had their hardware changed, their siting changed, the timing of the temperature readings changed, the environment around them has changed, and so on. It simply makes sense to take these changes into account and try to adjust for them.
The IBD editorial cites three people in its attempt to bolster their claims. Every one of these are climate science deniers who have been roundly and rightly criticized for their illogical and easily debunked views. They are Paul Homewood, James Delingpole, and Tony Heller (also known by his web moniker of Steven Goddard).
The IBD calls Paul Homewood a “climate analyst”. He is in fact a retired accountant (according to Washington Post) whose evidence-free claims have been picked up by climate science deniers elsewhere. Homewood’s approach is to find a few temperature stations where the adjustments made a large difference. He clearly does not look at the whole set of stations. To do so would clearly not show pattern he is claiming exists.
James Delingpole is a British journalist with a long history of climate science denial. The IBD cites his claim that the NOAA has never convincingly explained why they adjust the raw temperatures and how the adjustments create a more accurate record. No evidence in favor of Delingpole’s claim is provided by the IBD editorial—it’s a mere assertion. As mentioned above, it is not hard at all to find reasonable, sensible explanations for the adjustments that are made and the NOAA makes these known. To give one example from the NOAA’s web site, “The most important bias in the U.S. temperature record occurred with the systematic change in observing times from the afternoon, when it is warm, to morning, when it is cooler. This shift has resulted in a well-documented increasing cool bias over the last several decades and is addressed by applying a correction to the data.”
Tony Heller (aka Steven Goddard) is pretty much a laughingstock in the world of climate science. His claims about sea ice extent and temperature trends have been repeatedly debunked. For several examples, see Expose of Goddard Lies. It’s clear from these examples that Heller is either incompetent or willfully deceptive when trying to understand or present climate data.
These three are the best that IBD can offer to counter the thousands of highly educated scientists who have carefully researched the temperature trends and the reasons for the upward swing. Since I don’t see how giving false information will help their readers make sound business decisions, I can only speculate on what IBD is trying to accomplish. One clear possibility is that they have no real interest in helping their readers invest, but rather want to protect the fossil fuel industry and those who have major holdings there. Yet the fossil fuel industry is a dying industry. It’s death will be a lingering one, though it would be healthier for the planet if it were quicker. We would be better served by accelerating the development of less harmful energy sources. That’s where the growth already is and will continue to be.
Julie Kelly, a freelance writer for various conservative sites, has written another in what is a long line of attempts by conservative hacks to pretend global warming is not occurring (Link to Kelly’s article). Like other climate denialists who have written in this vein, she plays fast and loose with the facts, and shows an abysmally low understanding of the science.
The only correct point she makes is that climate scientists and environmentalists were upset by the election of Trump and by the anti-science policies he has begun to implement. Other than that, her idea that 2017 was a disastrous year for those who believe in anthropogenic global warming falls flat on its face.
She starts by hyping the recent unusual cold snap in much of the country, as if a short-term event in one relatively small part of the world might indicate that global warming is a hoax. She ignores the fact that the overall global temperature during this cold snap in the US is still above average, and she ignores the fact that even parts of the US, such as much of the West and Alaska, are basking in relative warmth. She claims that a map posted by the Weather Channel does not clearly indicate the overall global warmth the Weather Channel said it did. Unfortunately, her article links, not to the map she is referring to, but to a map of the world’s countries at geology.com, a map with no information on climate or weather. Maps of the global temperature anomaly that I could find do show a clear warming overall. Also, the numbers behind the map show overall warming. That is why it is generally a bad and potentially deceptive practice to “eyeball” a map or other kind of visual representation of data and claim it proves one thing or the other, but that is just what Kelly did.
She then mocks the idea that global warming might have something to do with the cold air plunging unusually far south. Some scientists have pointed out that the global temperature changes could alter the jet streams, thus allowing Arctic air to more easily and powerfully escape toward the south. She offers no refutation of this idea, just presents the exaggeration that “climate experts [blamed] every destructive weather event this year…on anthropogenic global warming” and call the “most brutal cold snap in decades as nothing more than a normal appearance by Old Man Winter.”
Of course, climate scientists did not blame every extreme weather event on global warming. What they have done is show how global warming contributes to the intensity of weather events. There is a big difference between cause and contribute. It’s certainly not surprising that if you have an ocean with more heat and an atmosphere with more heat and more moisture, you are going to increase the chances of more powerful storms. It’s certainly reasonable also that the changes that are occurring in the earth’s land surface, ocean areas, and atmosphere can include alterations to the way the earth’s systems function, such as changes in ocean currents, precipitation patterns, and the jet streams.
Ms. Kelly ends her essay with the most laughable idea yet, the idea that some scientists think that global cooling is upon us. For proof, she links to a short piece by Marc Morano, an infamous climate change denier. He in turn briefly refers to a veritable who’s who of climate denying pseudo-scientific “experts”. Here are some of these experts:
- Don Easterbrook, an “eminent geologist” who has been forecasting global cooling for years, but it has never happened. Easterbrook is a professor emeritus of geology from Western Washington University, but his views have been unanimously rejected by the current geology faculty.
- Henrik Svensmark, who theorizes that the sun’s activity, through the changes in its magnetic field and subsequent changes in shielding the earth from galactic cosmic rays, affects cloud cover and thus the temperature of the earth. Unfortunately for Svensmark, there is no correlation between historical trends in sun activity and the global temperature.
- Habibullo Abdussamatov, a Russian solar physicist, who has predicted for years that the next Little Ice Age is upon us. Similar to Svensmark, he bases his claims on the sun’s activity, but the actual data keep proving him wrong.
- Joe Bastardi, a former meteorologist, who believes CO2 plays no significant role in global warming. He claimed at least as early as 2009 that the global temperature would drop by at least a degree in the next 20 to 30 years.
These people are making predictions about global cooling and getting proved wrong again and again. Global temperatures hit records in 2014, then 2015, and then again in 2016, with 2017 guaranteed to be close to those three record years (and it looks like it will be a record high year for years that are not influenced by an El Nino). We don’t need to wait 20 or 30 years to see if global cooling will occur. We know it won’t and, besides, we can’t afford to wait.
Unfortunately, if you monitor the rightwing media, you will see articles at least once a week trying to pretend that global warming is not happening, that it is a hoax somehow perpetrated by an amazingly sophisticated conspiracy of thousands of scientists all over the world. Writers like Julie Kelly lie and deceive, and thus do our country, our environment, and our children great harm.
One of Steven Milloy’s claims to infamy is that he runs a web site called JunkScience.com where he purports to debunk all sorts of “junk”, which is anything he thinks is false science. However, you should be aware that JunkScience.com was originally funded by the tobacco industry, then later gained funding from many major industry polluters. That’s who Milloy has worked for and lied for over many years.
His latest attempt to deceive is regarding recent moves by the new EPA director to remove scientists from some of the advisory committees. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (link to Milloy op-ed), Milloy lauds this action as something that will bring “scientific integrity” to the EPA. What he really is trying to do is erode the public’s trust in real scientists and enable polluters to profit more while poisoning our country and its people.
Milloy starts his deception by saying that there is no evidence to support the idea that fine particulate matter (PM) kills thousands of people. In fact, there is ample evidence and it continues to grow. Everyone’s homework assignment is to do an internet search on this topic. You will see the usual blatantly biased right-wing sites repeating the same old tired lies, and then you will find many other sites pointing to valid scientific studies that prove the harmfulness of fine particulates. The right-wing sites will seldom if ever point to a serious scientific study.
Milloy tries to bolster his case by saying that an advisory committee (CASAC) to the EPA in 1996 “concluded that the scientific evidence did not support the agency’s regulatory conclusion,” and he links to a CASAC published report (link to CASAC report). Yet when I looked at this publication, I found praise for the EPA’s work on PM: for example, the EPA report was “its best ever example of a true integrative summary of the state of knowledge about the health effects of airborne PM.” It is true that some CASAC members thought the EPA’s case “may be overstated” but other members felt it was appropriate. The committee definitely did not say there was no support for the idea of increased mortality from fine particulates.
Milloy tries to cast doubt on the EPA and the scientists it employs by claiming that the CASAC became more biased as the years went on, and that’s why its membership must be radically changed. Yet Milloy’s claim is obvious bunk. For one thing, he points to changes during the Bush administration where more and more committee members were recipients of EPA grants and thus supposedly were simply doing the agency’s bidding by producing studies that came to pre-determined conclusions. Then the membership became even more biased with more scientists getting EPA grants during the Obama administration.
But are we really supposed to believe that the Republican Bush administration, an administration so deeply tied to the fossil fuel industry, would be packing EPA-related committees with biased scientists? The CASAC actually recommended tighter restrictions on PM in 2006 during the Bush years, and I’m sure they would not make scientifically unsupportable claims, knowing that their claims were likely to be scrutinized closely. Yet this is what Milloy is saying. He thinks that to make committees more unbiased you should fire the scientists who do real science and hire people from the industries being regulated. However, it’s obvious that anyone who comes from an industry background is highly likely to be biased. Their current and future paychecks may very directly depend on the views they express. The scientists on the committee, if they truly wanted to get more grants, would not push a specific conclusion; they would push for the need for more research.
And are the EPA scientists biased? No. One only need look at the source of the many studies on particulate matter. You will find that they are done by researchers from around the world. If the EPA scientists were biased, their conclusions would differ from those of non-American scientists. And, no, it’s not reasonable to reply that all the scientists around the world are in a global conspiracy to trick everyone in to believing false ideas so that they can achieve world domination.
There will always be people who persist in taking contrarian points of view. Just the other day, I saw lengthy comments on a science web site by someone confidently attacking Einstein’s theories, only of course to be mercilessly shredded by people who understood the theories better and could even explain them! Yet Milloy is in a different category. He is not limited to making crackpot claims in a comment thread. He gets to appear in major publications and he was part of Trump’s EPA transition team, so his wrong and potentially dangerous ideas get more distribution than they deserve.
That’s a problem that America faces more now than perhaps at any time in the past, and it’s not likely to get better until people take upon themselves the responsibility to educate themselves and view anything they read or hear with a healthy skepticism, whether it’s from scientists or non-scientists.
Trump, of course, does not have the intelligence to understand the science nor does he have the wisdom or judgment to select advisors who know the science. It is that type of ignorance that all citizens of a democracy must constantly fight against, or the ignorant among them will throw away that democracy.
Kerry Jackson recently scribbled a piece on climate change for Investor’s Business Daily (see http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/global-warming-the-imminent-crisis-that-never-arrives/). His point is that predictions about climate warming are often wrong and scientists have allegedly admitted that there really has been a pause in the warming and that the climate models failed to predict it. Jackson is wrong on every count.
He begins by listing some predictions that supposedly have not come true. First problem here is that the people he names as the “predictors”, such as Al Gore, the Guardian newspaper, and the French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius, are not scientists. Why doesn’t Jackson identify some well-known scientists and list specific predictions? In addition, some of the predictions he lists have a not been proven wrong. He lists some claims that fall in the category of “if we don’t act soon, we’ll face catastrophe.” Yet, such claims have not been proven false and won’t be proven false, if ever, for years. The danger of not acting now is that the climate is like an aircraft carrier. If it’s on a collision course, you must start changing the path immediately. You can’t say, “Well, we haven’t collided with anything yet, so why do anything now?”
But Jackson’s two biggest errors come when he says that scientists now admit there was a pause and that the models failed to predict it. The so-called pause, according to all the evidence taken together, did not happen. There was a period of slower growth in surface temperatures but there was continued gain in heat in the ocean. So, when you consider the heat content of the oceans, the land, and the atmosphere, the trend has continued upwards. There has never been a “leveling off” as Scott Pruitt claimed. Second, the models are not meant to predict short-term variations in climate. If you are examining a 15- or 20-year period, you’re simply not looking at the time spans that models are aimed at. Their goal is to show long-term trends, and in this they have been quite accurate. If you are expecting the models to show such short-term variability, you do not understand what the models are designed for and your criticism of them is without merit.
The deniers love to criticize the models as being imperfect. However, scientists readily admit that they are not perfect. Given the complexity and scale of the climate system along with the fact that we can’t have sensors placed every few feet apart all over the world and atmosphere, it’s not surprising that models will offer an approximation of reality. What scientists can and will continue to do is to revise the models by incorporating more and more data, and a more and more sophisticated understanding of the forces that affect climate.
Santer et al. were doing what scientists are supposed to do. They saw an interesting, but unexplained disparity between the warming rates in the land surface temperature data and the satellite data for the troposphere and they presented some hypotheses regarding these disparities. On the other hand, people like Kerry Jackson do no science, aren’t really trying to understand the science, but rather want to quibble and carp in order to sow doubt. Their actions are poorly argued but there are enough of them all over the internet that they have a malicious effect. The fossil fuel industry gets to rake in a few more billion dollars and the rest of us will pay.
There is such a superabundance of right-wing commentators and bloggers that it is useful to categorize them by their intellectual ability. There are perhaps one or two that merit membership in the “A” level. Those would be David Brooks and George Will but in recent years their output has become more slanted and more vacuous. At the opposite end, one can identify such writers as Brandon Morse as a definite D-lister, or perhaps even lower. He is a young libertarian who has written for the Blaze and gained some publicity during the GamerGate affair.
A recent piece of his about Bill Nye, the Science Guy shows his abysmal abilities as a thinker (See the Blaze, April 24, 2017). Morse complains about three things, Nye’s stance on transgenderism, his views on climate, and his status as a scientist.
Morse uses Nye’s view of transgenderism and climate change to assert that he is a “psuedo-scientist” [sic]. Because one of Nye’s presentations showed that he clearly accepts transgenderism as a valid condition or identity for some people, Morse thinks that Nye’s is being unscientific, that he is ignoring sound science. As proof, Morse finds one psychiatrist from Canada who believes that such people are mentally ill. However, if you go to the APA web site, you will find a view much more sympathetic to transgender people.
Morse’s view of sexuality is extremely simplistic. If you have two X chromosomes, ovaries, and other female characteristics, then you are a woman; it doesn’t matter how you feel or what you think. If you are a man physically, and thus can’t menstruate and can’t give birth, then there is no way that you can consider yourself a woman stuck in a man’s body. However, Morse’s view is at odds with reality, and thus is the unscientific view. Transgender people don’t claim that they can function in all ways like someone of the sex that is opposite of what they were born with physically. And note too that sexuality and gender identity, though not fully understood, are clearly much more than obvious physical characteristics. One’s endocrine makeup and environmental factors play roles as well.
Just because most people seem to fit into one of two types, heterosexual male or heterosexual female, Morse wants to view all who are different from those types as mentally ill, deviant, or abnormal. If he did his research, he would learn that human sexuality is far more diverse than two simple types, and even within those types there is a great range of behavior and traits.
And then Morse tries further demean Nye as a scientist by bringing up a debate Nye had with William Happer. In that debate Nye had pointed out that the oceans were warming, a claim Morse says has been disproven. Morse is wrong. If one follows the links to the article about an ocean warming study, the article actually says that it is only the deep abysses that have not shown warming. The ocean water in the top mile or so has warmed (and that’s a lot of water, by the way, and thus a lot of heat). Obviously, Morse did not read the article.
Morse then attacks Nye with the claim that because Happer is a “real scientist”, we must listen to him and not to Nye. Happer says that people are overly alarmed about climate change and we shouldn’t change policy over what are flawed models of climate behavior. Unfortunately for Morse, he has not done his homework. Happer does qualify as a scientist, but he does not qualify as a climate scientist. He is a retired physicist, and he is notorious for his unconventional and easily disproven views on climate science. For example, he once tried to persuade against any regulation of CO2 as a pollutant, saying, “Carbon dioxide is a perfectly natural gas, it’s just like water vapor, it’s something that plants love.” In spite of being a physicist and supposedly intelligent person, he seems to have missed the point that it doesn’t matter whether we call CO2 a pollutant or not. The issue is that increased levels of it in the atmosphere hold in more heat. That’s a simple fact of physics. I like P. Z. Myers response to this statement by Happer: “[W]ell, we make about a pound of poop every day, it’s perfectly natural, plants love it, but do we really believe more sewage would make the world a better place for humans?”
What’s important is not if someone is a scientist and someone else isn’t. What is important is whether a person understands the science. Nye clearly does and Happer clearly doesn’t. What Morse is trying to do by bringing Happer in on his side is an argument from authority. The problem here is that one could bring in far more and vastly better qualified authorities (that is, actual climate scientists, not retired physicists) who accept the idea of anthropogenic global warming, and thus would win the “authority” game hands down. Happer may fit the definition of a scientist in the sense of someone who does (or once did) scientific research, but if he refuses to accept obvious facts about CO2, he could be a professor emeritus of a dozen scientific fields, and he would deserve to be ignored.
An informed public would see through people like Brandon Morse and William Happer quickly, but this is America, where the rightwing works tirelessly to con and confuse.
I’ve seen some Facebook comments and tweets saying that we on the left should give Trump a chance and work with him. This is a puzzling request. For one thing, it’s a given. Trump is president; no one denies that. There were certainly some irregularities in the election process—years of voter suppression tactics by Republicans, the unethical actions of the FBI director days before the election, the inability to verify election results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—some of which could have been enough to tip a close election from one candidate to another. However, the Electoral College voted and Congress accepted the result, so Trump is president.
And if Trump is president, he automatically gets a chance. He has a Republican Congress to pass legislation for him, so no matter what progressives say and do, he will in fact have no excuse for any failures to achieve his goals and fulfill his many promises.
But why exactly should people on the left give Trump a chance and work with him? After all, we can see that his ideas are wrong, his words are often morally repulsive, insulting, and divisive, and he has surrounded himself with a cabinet of billionaires who have never shown any interest in helping the common person. If Trump has bad ideas and says stupid things, the moral obligation of anyone on the left or right is to point out how wrong and stupid he is. The hope is that he, or one of his advisors, will come to their senses for a moment and therefore propose a better idea. I suspect the chances of this are slight but it would be worse to be silent in the face of the disastrous policies he has promoted so far.
Also, don’t forget for one second that the Republicans refused to accept and work with Obama for eight years. From day one, they devoted themselves to blocking his administration in any way they could. Why is it that a significant percentage of those on the rightwing believed the obvious lies that Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim? It’s because many on the right, including Donald Trump, pushed these lies in order to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. The Republicans in Congress mounted the most obstructionist campaign ever seen in the history of this country’s Congress.
And you think progressives should grow up, accept Trump, and work with him? Get real. Politics is sometimes contentious, sometimes means a clash of ideas and movements. That’s life. Accept it, grow up, and learn why progressives see through Trump’s lies and are concerned for this country’s future. Those who voted for Trump clearly had a lot of anger, but it’s unfortunate that they were fooled about the sources of the problems that led to their anger and it’s unfortunate that they were fooled by decades of propaganda against Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is not perfect. I doubt if she would have reined in the greed and corruption of Wall Street, nor helped enough to reduce the growing economic inequality in this country. However, she would have made a vastly better president than Trump. Trump proved that already during his days as the president-elect, and his continued lies and childish ranting have proved it each day of his presidency.
So, don’t whine rightwingers. Trump gets his chance every time he acts, every time he speaks, and every time he tweets. And every time he does something stupid, every time he lies, he deserves to have that mistake, that lie, mercilessly thrown back in his face. So far, all he has done is blow the chances he has gained as the head of this country.
