Climate Change Denial is cultural – not scientific

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Skepticism-global-warming-10

The climate deniers of NZ range from pure denial like crazy old Cameron Slater, tiresome Leighton Smith and fringe Local City Councillors to the beige ‘it’s not as bad as the alarmists suggest’ Pete George and David Farrar.

The reality is that the science is in and the science gives a 95% certainty that human pollution has generated a vast jump in the types of gasses that rapidly increase the temperature of the planet.

This debate stopped being about science some time ago. Cameron Slater would prefer to go on a shooting rampage at a National Party conference than admit he has been wrong about climate change all this time. David Farrar would prefer to join the Greens than admit climate change will be severe and Peter George, well, who cares what Pete George does?

Those with a commercial vested interest in generating climate change skepticism are big oil and they use the exact same tactics as the tobacco industry embarked upon to create misinformation about smoking and cancer.

report put out by Greenpeace shows how Koch Industries spent tens of millions on inaccurate and misleading information regarding climate change.

-Koch Industries funded 20 organizations central to the global media echo chamber that was Climategate.

-In 2007, Koch Industries funded an astrophysicist to write an article about polar bears which, masquerading as a piece of peer-reviewed literature, attempted to refute the threat to the species due to climate change.

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-Koch Industries also funded a Danish think tank which produced a “dubious study about the Danish wind industry”, rejected by the Danish environment minister, which was then used to challenge President Obama’s support of wind power while funding groups which supported a “widely debunked study” which claimed that Spain’s support of renewable energy had lost the country jobs.

-Koch Industries  paid out huge amounts to other hard right climate denial think tanks like the Mercatus Center, Americans For Prosperity, The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

Let’s add this to what we already know about big oil sponsored climate denial…

Frank Luntz Memorandum to the Bush White House, 2002, on how to shut down the global warming debate?

Winning the Global Warming Debate – An Overview

1: The scientific debate remains open: Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.

So those with vested commercial interests to deny climate change is being induced by the pollution their industries create provide the quack science and rely on ideological storm troopers like Slater and beige partisans like Farrar and George to fight out of pure spite. None of them can admit they have been wrong all this time and they will die in a ditch to minimize the impacts of Climate Change at all costs.

This is a cultural bitterness for them, further proof that the white male is being beaten down by a rainbow coalition of hippies. For them, this stopped being about science a long time ago and is now just a sad societal face saving exercise that no one is listening to any longer.

White male climate deniers are about as relevant as tape recorders in an iPod world.

As progressives wrestle with the enormity of the consequences of adaptation to the new climate realties, we should always spare the time for a few contemptuous jabs at those who strive to hold the debate back.

Climate deniers are creationists in a debate about evolution.

 

14 COMMENTS

  1. What is wrong with this picture?

    Jobs worry as coal fired power station “storage” nears

    “Genesis had earlier planned to mothball the more than 30-year-old generating unit by early 2015, but has moved that forward because it made “commercial sense”.

    About 120 people work in the plant side of the power station.”

    Heartbreak for Huntly East miners

    “When corporate mismanagement and depressed global coal prices trickle down to the Huntly coalface they turn another screw into Darren O’Connor’s family.

    They crush Steven Lamb’s plans to own his marital home in north Hamilton and they send a pissed-off Ross Vernon in search of work across the Tasman.

    They cast a cloud of bad news and worry down Huntly’s Main St.”

    Hundreds of Jobs lost as Waikato wind farm cancelled

    A move by Contact Energy to back out of a windfarm on the Waikato’s west coast has blown away hundreds of potential jobs in a move described as another disappointment to a region buffeted by lay-offs.

    The Hauauru ma raki venture, planned for the coast between Port Waikato and Raglan, was expected to inject $180 million into the regional economy, including $115m of household income over a five-year construction period. It was also tipped to create an estimated 1033 jobs once operational and generate enough power for around 170,000 homes, with its 168 turbines dwarfing the 28 turbines at the region’s next biggest windfarm at Te Uku.

    But Contact Energy, after years of indecision on the project, yesterday announced in its annual result that it would completely pull out of the project, leaving its future uncertain.

    Waikato Chamber of Commerce CEO Sandra Perry said the news was just another disappointment for the region, especially for those in the energy sector following last week’s Huntly Coal Mine lay-offs.

    After the announcement that 93 jobs were to go at the Huntly Mine, Ms Perry was hopeful that some of the younger employees facing redundancy could retrain and head into new jobs – like the construction and maintenance of the windfarm.

    “Here was an opportunity for them to retrain in the skills needed for constructing the windfarm and that’s gone now, so it’s another disappointment for the region,” she said.

    It doesn’t take a genius to know that political action is required to fast track the Hauauru ma raki wind farm to end all this misery, and revitalise the region.

    Why aren’t the Green Party parliamentary caucus kicking up a stink about this?

    The Green Party MPs could put up a private members bill calling for some sort of enabling legislation to fast track the Hauauru ma raki project.

    They may not win it, but they might.

    One of the vital roles that smaller third parties play is to keep the big parties honest.

    Let us see where the new Cunliffe Labour Party stands. Will Labour stand with the unemployed working people of Waikato, and the Green Party?

    Or will Labour vote with National and Act to protect the fossil fuel companies to make sure the Hauuru ma raki wind farm project never goes ahead?

    • If a particular issue like this is bugging someone, the question they should ask is not “why isn’t someone else doing something about it” but “why aren’t I doing something about it” – join the Greens, Mana or Labour and help make a difference.

  2. Oh! to have such certainty. The tone of your argument reminds me, I’m sorry to say, of the Creationists who will not accept or concede any possibility of doubt, error, or lack of knowledge.

    Interesting that you use the phrase “quack science” – add that to empirical, theoretical, experimental, popular, folk, pseudo and junk science and you can see that ‘science’ is not necessarily exact and definitive.

  3. If we don’t address this from an engineering standpoint there will be no solution accept to use guns to force the will of a some countries on every other country in the world who hasn’t yet had a chance to burn up their natural resources in order to prosper.

    This needs to be addressed as an environmental remediation issue like we have done in the past with previous pollution problems caused by our technological advancement any solution that attempts to change peoples behaviour globally will be fruitless.

  4. Actually science is never “in”.

    Science cannot prove anything.

    Science can only disprove .

    Fact.

    Got that Bomber?

    The climate on this planet has NEVER EVER been stable.

    The drivers of climate change are not understood by anyone.

    The last major climate warming allowed human access to the american continents. What a woebegone alas that has turned out to be.

    Perhaps we should all be living in Ice Age times?

    Actually the last Ice Age probably allowed early humans to settle south east Asia and Australia Subsequent climate warming protected these early settlers from much later predatory empire builders.

    Actually currently dominant hominids did very well out of the last major bout of climate warming. We were small in population worked in small tribal groups scavenging and hunting.

    The climate changed.

    Now we are everywhere.

    What human activity caused all that climate change?

    Bomber stay out of things based on science, you do not understand what science is about.

    Check Eric the Red and Greenland.

    Check Thames river freezing.

    Not a hell of a lot of industrialisation going on back then.

    You are very good at making a fwit of yourself. just for once be careful and watch the climate change debate with detachment.

    • Kia ora Peter, thank you so much for your comments.

      If we cut through most of your bullshit however, I think it becomes pretty clear you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Using climate denial 101 attack lines like Eric the Red in Greenland and the Thames freezing over suggest you are either ignorant or malicious.

      As you well know, the axis of the planet over hundreds of thousands of years does create climate extremes, but that in no way, shape or form explains the current heating of the planet. Holding up extreme weather in the past to claim that industrialization isn’t the cause is stupidity of the lowest order.

      Kindest regards

      • It is easy, as you can see, Bomber, to bat down the deniers. Something that the authors over at The Standard take great sport in. But it is all childish ego-stroking one-up-man-ship.

        The real debate to be held is what we are going to do about it.

        We need to discuss putting some hard demands on the Labour and Green Parties to take concrete action against climate change.

        Unfortunately, it is unlikely this debate will be held at ‘The Standard’.

        I have identified five main watershed issues relating to climate change that I think need to be addressed by any incoming Lab/Green government.

        They are:

        The ETS:
        Will the wholly inadequate and totally ineffective ETS be abolished, and replaced with a carbon tax?

        Deep Sea Oil exploratory drilling:
        Will the enormously fraught and provenly dangerous search for unconventional hydrocarbons at the very edge of technology be allowed in New Zealand waters?

        Denniston Open Cast Coal Mine:
        Will this huge expansion in New Zealand’s export coal industry representing a massive increase in our CO2 emissions be stopped?

        Hauauru Ma Raki:
        Will a Lab/Green government put in place the right policy settings that New Zealand Wind Energy Association chief executive Eric Pyle says could see this project built.?

        Roads Of National Significance (RONS):
        Will the $billions set aside, earmarked for more motorways be switched to public transport instead?

  5. …..those with vested commercial interests to deny climate change is being induced by the pollution their industries create provide the quack science and rely on ideological storm troopers like Slater and beige partisans like Farrar and George to fight out of pure spite.

    Martyn Bradbury

    As you say bomber the debate has stopped being about science some time ago. The argument is settled.

    More subtle and possibly more dangerous to humanity’s chances of surviving this crisis, are those who openly admit to the science, but refuse to countenance any action to combat it.

    Currently, Lynn Prentice founder and moderator of the centre/left blogsite ‘The Standard’, also has a post on climate change and the IPCC report. However one thing you will not find anywhere in Lynn’s post, or even in the comments section, are any demands on our political leaders to take actions to address this threat .

    The issues are clear, we, as a country are currently planning to increase our CO2 emissions by a massive amount, firstly in an extremely risky hunt to exploit non-conventional (read extreme), oil reserves in our deep oceanic waters. Secondly with plans to open a massive open cast coal mine on the Denniston Plateau for the export market.

    Both of these dangerously reckless climate crimes Labour support, and the Greens, in exchange for cabinet posts, have signalled they could live with. (According to Meteria Turei, “There will be no bottom lines for coalition talks”).

    To even dare suggest that our politicians, (particularly Labour and Greens), are not doing enough, on these two issues, or other climate issues, like the cancelled Hauauru ma raki project, is to get ruthlessly stamped on and attract a ban.

    Why do clever people like Lynn Prentice who readily accepts the reality of human induced climate change, react so strongly against those who make demands of our political leaders to take some concrete real world actions to fight climate change?

    The Labour/Green consensus has been that it is political suicide to raise climate change as a major election issue. This consensus has been rigidly enforced. Any Labour MP who strayed from this consensus to raise the issue of climate change, no matter his experience and ranking, was given the message in no uncertain terms.

    Recently at least one Labour MP, Maryan Street, though so far only mildly, (and when overseas) has begun to break from the rigidly imposed Lab/Green consensus, that discussing climate change is electoral poison, saying that on a scale of One to Ten, public concern about climate change has risen from three and four, to currently tracking around seven or eight.

    Polling seems to back her up.

    “People want more action on climate change”

    64.4 per cent wanting Parliament to do more
    60.6 per cent wanting the Prime Minister to do more and
    62.9 per cent saying government officials should do more.

    The news isn’t good for Prime Minister John Key, with 15.4 per cent saying he’s doing the right amount, 26.1 per cent saying he should do more, and 34.5 per cent saying he should do much more. Just 2.7 per cent want him to do less.

    Horizon August 10, 2012

    Not surprisingly, the latest New Zealand poll shows that concern about climate change is strongest among respondents who voted for the Greens in the last general election (78.3 per cent).

    But Maori Party voters (77.2 per cent) felt nearly as strongly, followed by Mana (64.7 per cent) and Labour (60.3 per cent).

    Among respondents who voted National at the last election, more think climate change is not a problem (47 per cent) than think it is (40.6 per cent), placing them further to the right on the climate-denying spectrum than Conservative voters (52.6 per cent of whom consider it urgent or a problem for now) than even Act (44.6 per cent).

    (Maryan Street is also the Labour MP who led the move to remove notorious climate change ignorer David Shearer as Labour Leader, which triggered the recent Labour leadership contest.)

    • P.S. In his post on the IPCC report, in a strange paragraph that encapsulates his comfortable centrist views, Lynn Prentice while criticising the deniers, reserves his real venom for those he considers are overstating the danger.

      About the only thing that is more disturbing are the same types of people who “believe” any old crap about climate change causing imminent danger and the extinction of humans and/or the biosphere. They never check their own myths against source material either.

      lprent

      I wonder if Lynn considers stuff.co.nz to be “more disturbing” than the deniers.

      We have ’30 years to disaster stuff.co.nz

      Or James Hansen who writes that if we don’t act, biosphere destruction will be so complete, that any surviving humans left, will be confined to a few high ridges. Is Hansen and the other NASA scientists the “the same types of people who “believe” any old crap about climate change causing imminent danger and the extinction of humans and/or the biosphere”?

      What about Naomi Kline, is she the type who believes any old crap about climate change causing imminent danger, when she says that we should fight climate change as if our lives depend on it. Because they do.

      …. it’s time to come together, for real, and fight to preserve and extend what you care most about — which means engaging in the climate fight, really engaging, as if your life and your life’s work, even life itself, depended on it. Because they do.

      Naomi Kleine “I’d Rather Fight Like Hell”

      I think it is way past time for political conservatives like Lynn Prentice to wake up and stop fighting their rearguard action on behalf of the fossil fuel companies.

  6. STOCKHOLM — The world’s top climate scientists on Friday formally embraced an upper limit on greenhouse gases for the first time, establishing a target level at which humanity must stop spewing them into the atmosphere or face irreversible climatic changes. They warned that the target is likely to be exceeded in a matter of decades unless steps are taken soon to reduce emissions.

    JUSTIN GILLIS The New York Times

    Click to the link to find out what these assembled scientists have determined that this limit should be –

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/science/global-climate-change-report.html?hp&_r=1&

  7. In the 19th Century the Waikato saw the bitterest wars of this country’s history. Now the Waikato is becoming the battleground of some of bitterest wars of the 21st Century in which the fate of millions and the continued existence of some of our Island neighboring nations is at stake.

    1033 permanent jobs in the Waikato have been cancelled due to the greed of the fossil fuel nutters who are importing cheap Indonesian coal to power the Huntly Power station, so cheap that it has undercut the planned Hauauru ma raki windfarm project.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/9066601/Waikato-windfarm-backtrack-costs-hundreds-of-jobs

    The same cheap imported Indonesian coal is also displacing dozens of local coal miners who have also lost their jobs and face prospects of no other openings due to the cancellation of the Hauauru ma raki project.

    http://www.epmu.org.nz/news/show/173483

    Meanwhile back in Indonesia virgin rainforest is being destroyed union activists are being murdered rivers are being polluted, native people are being evicted from their homes and diseases related to coal dust are becoming rampant amongst local poor people, especially children.

    http://www.downtoearth-indonesia.org/story/deadly-coal-coal-exploitation-and-kalimantans-blighted-generation

    And in North Waikato a dirty open cast coal mine being forced on the local people by Fonterra is being fought vigorously.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/9161719/Oram-Fonterras-burning-issue

  8. We must embrace and accelerate the clean energy transition that is already underway. Renewable energy is currently the fastest growing power source. Globally, renewable generation is estimated to rise to 25% of gross power generation in 2018. But the biggest barrier to even greater expansion is uncertainty around renewable energy policies. This is an area where governments could create strong signals to investors about the future.

    Stephanie Tunmore Common Dreams

    Dozens are being laid off from a failing coal industry
    http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/business/9048873/Heartbreak-for-Huntly-East-miners

    The government refuses to act to allow the Hauauru ma raki wind farm to go ahead, creating hundreds of jobs just down the road from Huntly where the coal industry is laying off dozens of workers.
    http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/9066601/Waikato-windfarm-backtrack-costs-hundreds-of-jobs

    Yet our opposition parties keep their silence at this scandal

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