Yesterday some 400,000 Americans took to the streets of New York City and paraded their concern over global warming. As a result,
National Review Online's
John Fund took to his
escritoire to pronounce them hysterical followers of raving Liberals like Al Gore and Mayor DiBlasio "and various Hollywood actors" which we know is conserva-speak for high-profile raving Liberals.
Fund would have us believe that he was "our man in the street" running alongside environmental activists, as they marched, gauging the mood and motivation that brought them there. Whatever . . . he claims to have spoken with "many" and, lo and behold, these are his surprising findings:
. . . they certainly didn’t act like a movement that was winning. There was a tone of fatalism in the comments of many with whom I spoke; they despair that the kind of radical change they advocate probably won’t result from the normal democratic process. It’s no surprise then that the rhetoric of climate-change activists has become increasingly hysterical.
He then goes on to tell us that he is in no way surprised by climate activists' devolution into hysteria because they're influenced by people like bestselling author Naomi Klein who recently released a book on climate change called
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Fund trashes Klein's work in a short paragraph of cherry-picked excerpts, devoid of context, more befitting a college newsletter than the pages of
National Review.
Mr Fund goes on from there to cite the unsavory impact of Liberal arch-fiend Leonardo DiCaprio, who is releasing a new film [which is DiCaprio's day job] that Fund just knows he's going to hate because it contains a Godzilla-like "carbon monster." Or something.
In Fund's view, the reason for all of this frenzy is:
One reason the rhetoric has become so overheated is that the climate-change activists increasingly lack a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims.
Whereupon he trots out the usual climate skeptics urging us all to "Keep Calm and Buy the World a Koch."
There's Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute, a prolific writer of Op-Eds describing Anthropogenic Global Warming as a "conspiracy theory" or, at least a political vehicle, and who is one of "hundreds of scientists" that challenge the global warming "consensus."
In actual fact:
As an expert ‘friend to the court’ Gordon Fulks is presenting himself as an expert in climate science. A search reveals that he has written two peered reviewed papers – his PhD thesis [1975] and Techniques for Remote Sensing of Ionospheric Electron Density from a Spacecraft- 1981 – as well as data from prior to 1981. There is a truism that university students upon seeking work are already out of date such is the speed that new information enters science, with a 30 year gap between research into atmospheric physics and today’s climate science it seems improbable that Gordon Fulks is an expert in climate science.
Gordon Fulks presents his full expert bio via his ‘expert’ status with the Oregon thinktank Cascade Policy Institute - a right leaning, free market lobby group with wider funding links to the right wing network of thinktanks.
Part of his consultancy is presentations to ‘thinktanks’ including this piece for the Science and Public Policy Institute which is a dedicated climate denial group that draws frequently on the wisdom of Lord Monckton.
Fund then treats us to an anecdote about bumping into
Bjorn Lomborg director of the
Copenhagen Consensus Center, who:
. . . told me that all of the carbon-reduction targets advocated by the U.N. or the European Union would result in imperceptible differences in temperature, at enormous cost.
Which is pretty much what one might expect to hear from Bjorn Lomborg, since Bjorn Lomborg is not a climate scientist but a political scientist who specializes in Environmental Economics and authored a book, in 2001, entitled
A Skeptical Environmentalist.
After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.
On 6 January 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling sent a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question.
And, finally, Fund cites Roy Spencer who worked for NASA and has actually written three peer-reviewed articles on climate change. Fund just happened to run into Roy Spencer at a
Heartland Institute Conference on Climate Change
Denial.
Roy Spencer, had a starring role in a climate-change denial movie called The Great Global Warming Swindle and, when he's not on the movie lot, Spencer enjoys the privileged status of Official Climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh radio program.
Spencer also sits on the board of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a conservative Christian public policy group that promotes a free-market approach to care for the environment. He is a signatory to An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which states that "Earth and its ecosystems – created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting."
And, yes, I know you're dying to ask -- Spencer is, indeed, a creationist:
I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world. [...] Science has startled us with its many discoveries and advances, but it has hit a brick wall in its attempt to rid itself of the need for a creator and designer.
So, with sources like that, it's no wonder that John Fund is feeling jauntily confident that he's standing on solid ground when he pronounces that:
Maybe that’s why the climate-change extremists are basing fewer of their appeals on fact and more on hysteria. You scream the loudest when the opposition is about to tip over on you and pin you down.