Monday, August 27, 2012

With Josh: Global warming a fraud

 
When I reached for the Plain Dealer today for my first word from the  outside world, I found this headline commanding the front page:

    Mandel blasts president, Brown, calls global warming 'inconclusive'

Whoa there, pony. Was Republican Josh off the reservation again? Well, it's true that he was down in Tampa to impress his GOP friends that he's a candidate of  action wherever there's trouble on the planet.

I pressed on to read the story, but got no further after I arrived at this paragraph:
'The state treasurer [Mandel] thinks scientific research on the matter is "inconclusive and riddled with fraud."
It quickly recalled Mandel's recent visit to Ohio's grimy coal mining district where the whiz kid  promised on the bible of his billionaire energy princes that he would end the "war on coal."  As one who grew up among coal mining families I wondered why he didn't bother to mention  the early deaths of miners  in the hands of negligent mine owners.

The above photo of melting ice fields  is from the on-line National Geographic, the left-wing, radical pubication that has never seen a global warming report  that it didn't embrace.  The heading on the photo said...

          The planet is heating up - and fast

Josh, Josh:  Among the magazine's listed advisors is a guy you doubtless know:  David Koch.  He couldn't be happy with National Geo.  But at least he can be confident that he has you in his pocket.

UPDATE:  Late word from the NY Times Monday afternoon:

"The amount of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen to the lowest level on record ,  a confirmation of the drastic  warming in the region and a likely harbinger of larger changes to come."





3 comments:

Russell C said...

Facetious remark of yours about Mandel being in the pocket of Koch industries, of course. But a serious question does arise out of that. Is there any evidence to support the assertion that fossil fuel industry execs actually paid money to people to lie about global warming…. i.e. physical evidence of money paid to skeptic scientists that bought demonstratively false, fabricated climate assessments, reports, opinions, etc?

And by 'evidence', I don't mean suggestions to go look at Naomi Oreskes' book or Hoggan/Littlemore's, or to look at ExxonSecrets' web pages. If you look for yourself, you see nothing but guilt-by-association stuff. All of which ultimately spirals back to an accusation on pg 34 of Ross Gelbspan's 1997 "The Heat is On.

I asked SEJ board member Robert McClure about that problem back in 2009, as seen at my 10/17 comments here http://www.invw.org/2009/10/sej-didnt-single-out-journo-who-questioned-al-gore/ , but he never did come up with a good answer. Weird, huh?

Surely you guys collectively would be able to come up with names by now to independently corroborate that accusation, couldn't you? With genuine hard evidence?

David Hess said...

There are several ways to regard Mandel's rejection of global warming. One is that he is simply and deliberately ignorant about the volume and authority of the scientific evidence of the causes. Another is that he is cynically pandering to the know-nothings on the crazy right of the Republican Party. Still another is that he is shilling for his billionaire benefactors in the energy industry. Take your pick. Whatever the case, one thing is clear. This fellow is not a serious person, certainly not one who should hold an office of public trust.

Russell C said...

And as commenter David Hess so conveniently leaves out, there is one more way to regard Mandel's rejection of [man-caused] global warming: He's been fully briefed on the skeptic side of the issue via reports such as the NIPCC ( http://www.nipccreport.org/reports/2011/2011report.html ).

Now if commenter Hess is as predictable as so many others I've run across, he will offer not one bit of expertise to show where the skeptics are wrong, but will instead say the NIPCC is corrupted by Exxon funding.... while appearing to be oblivious to the fatal problem I pointed out in my comment above.