As Marine Biologist Walter Stark wrote last year: (Link Quadrant On Line)

Be scared, the experts tell us, be very scared. Well there is certainly cause for concern, but not about those “rising” temperatures, which refuse to confirm researchers’ computer models. A far bigger worry is the corruption that has turned ‘science’ into a synonym for shameless, cynical careerism.

So that the delegates to COP21 have something to fall back on, the Shrill are getting shriller.

Take the attack by Daily Kos’ Judah Freed on International Climate Science Coalition’s Tom Harris.

Tom posted a reply but it disappeared faster than a white ant in sunlight. Curiously, Mr Freed’s piece was titled “Facing the Facts and Fictions of the Climate Change Deniers.” Curious, because Mr Freed’s piece lacked facts and was full of fiction.

Here is some of Mr Harris’ responses. (LINK)

Mr. Freed writes: “Please see through this misleading public relations campaign by paid climate change deniers.”

Tom Harris responds: I am not now, nor have I ever been involved in a “public relations campaign,” paid or otherwise.

Freed writes: “Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) is touting guest editorials across North America that it is “ridiculous” to think that only industry-funded “deniers” are claiming that climate change is not real.”

Harris responds: We are not climate change deniers. Climate change has been “real” since the formation of the atmosphere billions of years ago. We advocate helping people adapt to the sometimes dangerous impacts of climate change and continuing the research so that someday we may be able to forecast future climate states. We have essentially no chance of controlling them, however.

Freed: “What’s ridiculous is that Harris and the ICSC themselves are industry-funded climate change deniers.”

Harris: ICSC funding has been 100% confidential since I took over as Executive Director in March 2008. This is obviously to protect our donors from attacks by aggressive climate campaigners….

How often do the Shrill resort to this untruth. The Alarmists funding far exceeds the pittance that we realists receive.

Harris:  I find it interesting that he seems to have no problem with climate campaigners who share his point of view receiving industry funding. I have no problem with that either, which is why we do not criticize them for it. It would be a motive intent logical fallacy to do otherwise. Indeed, we are jealous of their access to the vast resources of corporations.

Freed: “Harris himself had been the Ottawa operations director of the High Park Group, a Toronto-based public policy and public relations firm specializing in energy industry clients like the transnational Areva nuclear power group, the Canadian Electricity Association, and the Canadian Gas Association.”

Harris: For five months in 2006, I worked for High Park Group out of my basement office in Ottawa. Their clients included solar and wind power companies as well as those Freed names. Would this make them biased in the direction of the climate scare? No, they were just a communications company doing what communications companies do—conducting communications for their clients. I have never been involved in public relations or lobbying.

Freed: “According to geochemist and U.S. National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell, author of The Inquisition of Climate Science (Columbia University Press, 2011), rather than supporting open-minded scientific inquiry, closed-minded “denier organizations like the ICSC know the answers and seek only confirmation that they are right.””

Harris: The exact opposite is the case. ICSC repeatedly calls for “open-minded scientific inquiry” in which all reputable points of view are given a fair hearing. Perhaps Powell was speaking about climate alarmist groups when he spoke about entities that “know the answers and seek only confirmation that they are right.”

Freed: “Harris and the ICSC have promoted a skeptical climate change report produced by the Heartland Institute, identified by SourceWatch and others as a front for the ultra-conservative Koch Brothers, the primary backers of the Tea Party.”

Harris: According to the Heartland Web page http://blog.heartland.org/2014/04/response-to-a-critic-of-climate-realists-and-the-nipcc-reports/:

“None of the NIPCC reports — ZERO — have been funded with corporate money. They are funded by family foundations that have no interest in the energy sector. The Funding for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change reports (see www.climatechangereconsidered.org) comes from two family foundations.”

Note: Heartland have repeatedly stated that the only funding they have received from Koch was $25K for healthcare-related matters, not climate or energy.

It doesn’t matter how many times the funding lies about Heartland are debunked, the Shrill still repeat them. Shame. Another oft repeated falsehood by the Shrill….

Freed: “Harris does not reveal that Dr. Ball today is a paid science policy advisor to oil companies…”

Harris: Dr. Ball has previously explained that this statement is a complete falsehood. The death threats against Ball are, sadly, very real, as are those against some other scientists we work with.

Not content with those slurs, Mr Freed moves on….

Freed: “Among the tactics too often deployed to suppress evidence-based logic and critical thinking, the misleading irrationality and fear-mongering by Harris and ICSC smacks of the McCarthyism in the 1950s that repressed progressive post-war urges for social justice and open democracy.”

Harris: This is a complete straw man argument. We encourage rational thinking and a mature, respectful dialog, taken proper account of the importance of social justice and open democracy, discussions that are free of logical fallacies and name calling. I have written about this often; see http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/5257712-errors-in-thinking-are-sabotaging-climate-change-discussion/, for example.

Freed: “In the eyes of the climate change deniers, apparently, yesterday’s scary reds are today’s greens.

Harris: That may be true for some on our side of the climate debate but it does not apply to me or ICSC since I have never made that point. Indeed, I am not even right wing and regularly criticize Canada’s Conservative government for stupidity and even dishonesty on the climate debate.

Mr Harris may not say “yesterday’s scary reds are today’s greens,” However, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has stated it quite plainly.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, left the Green Movement when the Green Movement was taken over by Refugees from the fall of World Communism (link)

Patrick is the author of Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist in which he wrote that, after the collapse of World Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the environment movement was hi-jacked by the “political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology.”

Mr Harris closes with:

So, practically nothing that Judah Freed writes above is correct or even makes sense. It is good to see the attack though, as it shows we are right over the most effective target, the most vulnerable weakness of climate crusaders: the immature and highly uncertain science of climate change. It is revealing that Mr. Freed did not have anything to say at all about any of the science we promote. His piece, the parts that were not completely wrong, was mostly just logical fallacies.

Read all Mr Harris reply – HERE

On the Daily Kos site there is a poll showing that their small readership doesn’t believe fossil fuels are the primary cause of climate change.

The scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville are known throughout the environmental community as being skeptical that climate change (or global warming) will have a catastrophic effect on the earth. The crux of the matter is that their research, using satellite data to measure temperatures in the atmosphere, disagrees with climate models they say that overstates the earth’s warming. (link)

What John Christy and Roy Spencer (who then worked for NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center just down the street from UAH) announced at that press conference on March 29, 1990, was that their study of temperature data from satellites indicated the world was not warming as much as was believed.

Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville appeared before the US Congress Committee of Natural Resources.

Christy said that

• they agree, that there is climate change;
• they agree, humans play a role in that climate change;
• No, they agree, it’s not a catastrophic event.

“We had no clue at that time, 25 years ago, we would be in the center of a huge controversy almost 25 years to the day with congressional investigations, the secretary of state, the vice president telling us we don’t even believe in gravity. Who would have thought that 25 years ago?”

“I think we knew it was going to be an important new way of monitoring the climate. But you just never know if something like that is going to have legs scientifically. Whether somebody will come up with a new way of doing it better in two years.

Looking back, I’m kind of surprised this is still the leading way of doing this. Really our only competitors in the field have the same answer we do, very close to the same answer.” (link)

Alabama site AL.com interviewed Christy and Spencer. (LINK)

Eric Schultz / eschultz@al.com)

Some extracts:

AL.com: President Obama recently said that Republicans are going to have to change their opinions on the dangers of climate change. Is this a partisan issue?

Christy: Numbers are numbers. That’s what we produced. Those aren’t Republican numbers or Democratic numbers. Those are numbers. Those are observations from real satellites. Roy and I were the pioneers. We discovered how to do this with satellites before anyone else did. You can see this very strongly in the administration. Secretary of State John Kerry comes out and says it’s like denying gravity. The attack on skeptics was ramped up in the past month.

As this blog has noted before, the Shrill Alarmists are getting shriller.

AL.com: How do you respond to the perception that 97 percent of scientists agree on climate change? (The Wall Street Journal in 2013 reported on the “myth”of the 97 percent).

Christy: The impression people make with that statement is that 97 percent of scientists agree with my view of climate change, which typically is one of catastrophic change. So if a Senate hearing or the president or vice president says 97 percent of the scientists agree with me, that’s not true. The American Meteorological Society did their survey and they specifically asked the question, Is man the dominate controller of climate over the last 50 years? Only 52 percent said yes. That is not a consensus at all in science.

Recently Astrophysicist Dr Gordon Fulks wrote:

Science is NEVER about consensus and belief in any form.  Those who invoke such arguments are operating in the realm of politics and religion, probably because their science is weak.  We would never say that the earth is round because the majority of scientists believe it is.  We would simply produce a photo of the earth taken from the moon!

For those who refuse to understand that science is not a consensus activity, I like to talk about Albert Einstein, Alfred Weggner, Harlen Bretz, Barry Marshall, and Robin Warren, among others.

For those who think that the professional societies are the ultimate authority, I like to remind them that they are really labor unions looking out for the best financial interests of their members.

On renewables.

AL.com: What about the value of renewable energy sources?

Christy: I am for any energy source that is affordable and doesn’t destroy the environment. If carbon dioxide was a poisonous gas, I’d be against it. Carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem.

On satellite data.

Paul Gattis | pgattis@al.com

AL.com: Why is your research using satellite data a more effective way of measuring climate change than surface temperature? After all, humans live on the surface, not in the upper atmosphere.

Christy: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When you put more of it in the atmosphere, the radiation budget will respond appropriately. It’s just that what we found with the real data is that the way the earth responds is to shed a lot of that heat, not keep it in, which climate models do. So I’d rather base policy on observations than on climate models.

Read More at AL.com