Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2019 8:47:41 GMT
The Critical Year
In June of 1988, Hansen testified before Congress, saying that “the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” As 1988 was a strong el-niño year, it was easy to point to the thermometer and talk about hottest year on record. That same year, the IPCC was created. It was also 1988 when Al Gore set up the Senate Science, Technology, and Space Committee, famously choosing the hottest day of the year and making sure the room was not air-conditioned for the first meeting, and Gore became the chief warming promoter.
In that same year, Revelle wrote two letters to congress saying “My own personal belief is that we should wait another ten or twenty years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways.”
But Hansen was building an ideological platform. His people at NASA assembled confirming data, and by the mid-Nineties enough environmentalists had taken senior positions to really get the ball rolling. They quickly discovered they could use fearful and dramatic imagery to raise funds — nothing like a crisis to get people to open their checkbooks. News organizations sold more copies when they ran stories of doom and gloom — the more immediate the threat, the better.
Think tanks, NGOs, universities, the alternative power industry, consultants, government agencies, magazines, and others switched from scientific inquiry to rent seeking. Academics need to get their work published; an IPCC paper is a career mover, while publishing a paper finding no warming isn’t. The IPCC has an aggressive outreach/communications plan that has plenty of staffers. It’s a classic case of manufacturing consent.
It’s Not the Message, it’s the Messenger
The master consent-maker is a man you probably haven’t heard of: David Fenton. Fenton Communications is the leading “social change” PR firm. They are driven by their passionate belief that they are saving the planet and changing the world. Fenton is a charming man of the same vintage as James Hanson. He and his team have worked tirelessly to promote a few good causes that were substantiated by scientific research and many more causes that were not. His magic is powerful. He can put an image of polar bears on the cover of TIME Magazine. His firm is responsible for the propaganda sites RealClimate.org and IPCCFacts.org (an oxymoron), and probably for much Wikipedia manipulation. He has worked for Al Gore and the UN for at least the past twenty years. How many PR firms can claim they got a Nobel Prize for their clients?
Fenton’s powerful network, drives the image and credibility of the IPCC, so people automatically delegate their opinion without digging further. Fenton’s strategy: it’s not about the message, it’s about the messenger. Use brand names to promote the cause and attack skeptics with name calling, law suits, and character assassination.
Aside from a pile of leaked and embarrassing emails in 2009, and the chair of the IPCC stepping down under charges of sexually harassing a female researcher, the PR machine is working smoothly. Michael Mann has 30,000 Twitter followers (I’d love to know how he got them). The New York Times encourages the use of Nazi/genocidal language in describing skeptics. The word “denier” lumps legitimate skeptics with wing nuts like Rush Limbaugh. Even the Pope has shuffled into the CO2 spotlight, hurting the very people he vows to protect. James Hansen is now at Columbia University promoting a huge decarbonization campaign. The goal is now to produce a climate deal in Paris later this year, which now seems likely, but will probably be impossible to implement.
To sum up: a common statistical error called the law of small numbers led James Hansen to start a worldwide movement. He got help from a number of same-age cronies, took advantage of public fear and laziness, and now steers trillions of dollars via the budgets and subsidies of many governments toward decarbonization, undermining real environmental progress.
Just to be fair, both sides of the debate suffer from confirmation bias*. I am as guilty as anyone. It is complex, it’s not “settled,” and it makes sense to look for more evidence before we jump to conclusions.
