UPDATE: The Heartland Institute insists the information is fake, and is asking people to remove it. But since this is the same climate-denial group that published stolen scientist emails, I say “Fuck you.”
I was talking to a friend who lives in another state about how allergies are really, really bad this winter. I told him my eyes were burning and watering, and my nose runs all the time, too. We were kidding around: “Gee, wonder why that’s happening?” It was 52 degrees today in Philadelphia and the plants and flowers are starting to bud and bloom. More importantly, the leaf mold from the fall never got killed off, because we never got a sustained frost.
So of course I’m really happy to see that the Koch brothers are gearing up for an all-out propaganda effort to turn children into climate-change deniers:
Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.
“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial”:
Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is amajor controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather“), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.
Wojick will receive $5,000 per module, with twenty modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.
Everyone–everywhere—has noticed a rapid rise in allergy cases this year. In Atlanta, we’ve had maybe only 10-12 days below freezing so we know the other living things around us don’t know what the fuck to do. Now, somebody on this blog is gonna pop up and say that this is all a “normal cycle of climatic activity”. (Major Kong, where are you?)
You’d all rather have an ice age? Isn’t that what Major Kong will ask us? Once all the ice caps are melted and the Atlantic conveyor is no more, we’ll need all the oil and coal we can get to supply us with enough electricity to run the air conditioners necessary for us to not boil to death. Or we can start a war with Iran and wipe out 2/3rds of the earths population to bring us back into equilibrium. Either way the 1% will survive it all. Will Major Kong and the rest of his ilk……don’t bet on it.
This denier funding is peanuts. These documents show clearly that the constant claims of ‘well funded climate denialism’ were never true. Alarmists simply made them up.
For years I never really knew if deniers were well funded or not. Now I know they were never well funded.
Its the greenies who have been well funded all along.
Thank you Desmogblog. Nice work
Actually, Im, that’s where the pendulum will swing back to, in about 10,000 years.
It is a (relatively) “natural” cycle. It has happened before, we can read it in the geological record. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and subsequent collapse of the North Atlantic Conveyor led to weather much like that which N. Europe is experiencing today. So to to a lessor extent the collapse of the Missoula Ice Dams and the opening of the Colombia River “Seaway”, resulting in a “mini ice-age” here in Cascadia; and a couple hundred million years ago massive volcanic chain-eruptions led to palm-trees on the Arctic Coast. It’s all “natural”.
Man, on the other hand, the genetic manipulation in the development of the proto-humans space-faring aliens found roaming the savannas of N Africa sometime in the past half million years…
My ilk? Wow. Now I’m being attacked without provocation. Something I wrote must have mattered to someone.
But anyway.
This phrase,”His doctorate is in epistomology.” really caught my eye. It seems appropriate, as the whole anthropogenic warming argument is pretty much a rhetorical battle. The science is established: warming is real. There have been glacial advances and retreats at least four times in any time frame that matters. Each has caused the sea levels to rise and fall and etc. and etc. We’re in an interglacial warming period right now. Just read a little common Earth natural history covering the last half a million years. Like here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
Imhotep, I think you’d from a study of apocalyptic predictions. Start here: http://alma-geddon.com/
Your schtick is nothing new since about 2,800 B.C.E.
Get educated and free your mind from these traps.
This winter seems not much different from the one of 1932-1933. Temp data is here: http://www.fi.edu/weather/data2/index.html
It was unseasonable all over the north country, as well, as this piece tells: http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2012/02/natural-history-climate-change-and.html
Same goes for the 1950s: Unusually warm winters.
Philly weather data from 1872 forward is here: http://www.fi.edu/weather/data2/index.html
It’s weather. It fluctuates.
ummmm..you’d have to go back a little further than 1932 to disprove anthropogenic causes to the current warming.
Now if we could only figure out what causes people to be unable to connect dots.
Allie, I certainly wasn’t trying to disprove AGW with that data set. That was to make the point that weather varies.
If I were going to do that, I would refer you to the climatic records contained in the Vostok ice cores, the paleoclimatological record, the reason for the formation of the Chesapeake Bay and the closure of the Bering Strait land bridge, and on and on and on as proof that the present warming does not have human origins. The warming and cooling never stops and has never stopped cycling. Look at the Wisconsinan glaciation, look at the geology, look at the Milankovitch Cycles, look at how CO2 follows temperature change (not precedes it), look at how the Earth has mostly been warmer than it is now throughout its history, look at the cosmic origins of cloud formation (This is recent cloud chamber science conducted by the adult scientists at CERN — Maybe you’ve hear of CERN?), look at the fossil record, look at the Central England Termperature record set here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100022226/agw-i-refute-it-thus-central-england-temperatures-1659-to-2009/
Realize that AlGore’s CO2 hockey stick graph was probably the worst presentation of bad science in the history of the world in our time and the AGW scam is probably the biggest scientific error since the majority of the best thinkers (along with the pope and his power players) thought the Earth was the center of the solar system. (That delusion went on for 1,500 years and when smart people tried to refute it, they were called heretics and made to recant. Galileo, anyone?)
Good heavens, step outside the zealotry and get educated; don’t call me names.
I was talking to a friend who lives in another state about how allergies are really, really bad this winter. I told him my eyes were burning and watering.
You could spend $50 trillion to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, or you could spend $2.99 on a new air filter at Home Depot.
Which do you think will lead to the greatest reduction in allergy tears per dollar spent?
Dear Wateringeyesomg,
They would rather spend $50 trillion than $2.99 believe me. Just look at the UNs REDD program, where the carbon stored in rainforest trees will be sold to the highest payong corporate polluters. And in the process, take control away from the aboriginals who actually live in them. Its part of the UNs goal of creating a sustainable tax revenue regime through the creation of a trillion dollar global carbon market.
Just Google UN REDD Program sometime and read about how rainforest aboriginals are fighting the UNs program. Our MSM has reported none of it.
The CERN experiment only tested one-third of one out of four requirements to blame global warming on cosmic rays. At least two of the other requirements (strengthening solar magnetic field, fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth) have not been met over the past 50 years. The lead scientist in the CERN CLOUD experiment explicitly stated that the experiment “actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate.” Many other studies have concluded that cosmic rays play a minor role in cloud formation, and have not contributed in any significant way to the global warming over the past 50 years.
And remember kids,climate and weather are NOT the same thing.
(I have a degree in Geology and Earth Sciences with a minor in Weather and Climate.)
ilk: of the same kind. climate: the generally prevailing weather conditions. weather: the state of the atmosphere with respect to tempature, moisture, etc. Ergo, those who think that burning tons of carbon based fuels and dumping tons of toxic gasses into the atmosphere daily won’t impact that same atmosphere and change the climate are all of the same ilk. Sure the earth has warmed before. But that warm up had nothing to do with billions of people driving cars and burning crap to produce electricity. Those are NEW variables in the equation. And you deniers should give us a break with your $2.99 air filter nonsense. Better we should all be given a gas mask once a month by the government.
Bingo, Im, it has indeed happened before but never before have there been seven billion – billion humans contributing not only a hundred degrees (F) each but their flatulence both oral and anal as well as the carbon relocated from far beneath the soil into the atmosphere. Yes, it has happened before, but this time we did it.
Which is beside the point, a waste of effort, a boondoggle. It doens’t matter what (or who) started it, it’s happening, and we have about a hundred years to figure out how to survive it, or we won’t. Our grand-children, our last generation, will die horrible deaths. That’s what pisses me off the most about these heads-up-their-asses climate change deniers – beyond the short term, beyond the moment, they just don’t give a fuck.
“Yes, it has happened before, but this time we did it.”
And so what? Your point is?
It’s gong to play out the way it’s going to play out.
You behave like humans are the first species on the planet to ever overpopulate and shift the ecological dynamics of the whole place permanently. If you studied, you’d know this is untrue. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
Warming is a fact. Get over it and start adapting.
To paraphrase the stupendous Naomi Klein: “And so, Klein called for starkness–for recognizing that global warming is not something that can be fixed or moderated or addressed by us; it is, rather, something that, if we want to survive as a civilization and a species, demands something of us. She said her tentative title for her next book is “What Climate Change is Telling Us About How We Must Evolve”….and she credits the global warming deniers for at least recognizing that demand for what it implies.”
(Source: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/10/global-warming-local-farming-and-naomi-klein-a-trip-to-the-land-institute/ )
“It doens’t matter what (or who) started it, it’s happening, and we have about a hundred years to figure out how to survive it, or we won’t. Our grand-children, our last generation, will die horrible deaths.”
That’s amazingly nonsensical, apocalyptic gibberish.
Join the club of end-times fetishists: http://alma-geddon.com/
Huh? A $2.99 filter will do exactly what for outside air?
And how much will a filter like that actually filter out for indoor air?
Oh, and what does that filter get put on or into? How much does that cost? Multiplied by the number of or rooms needing to have the aid filtered?
Wow. Apples to oranges, eh?
Dear Wateringeye – Let’s see. You suggest that rather than spend $ 50 trillion (don’t you think that figure is kind of conservative?) to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we could instead go to Home Depot and buy a filter for $2.99.
I just want to bring it to our readers’ attention that such a filter takes out a little bit of dust from inside the dwelling. It does not take out any gaseous products of combustion, such as carbon dioxide.
A very low cost way to take carbon dioxide out the air is to plant a tree. Preferably lots of them. And then to let the tree grow, and not pave everything in sight.
Ten Bears – you’ve got it exactly right. In the name of corporate greed, and profits uber alles, we are well on our way to wiping out most vertebrate life forms on this planet if we don’t change and drastically – in the timeframe you have forecast.
Couple of tidbits of information – One – Your home insurance rates are going up. Heck, mine went up this past year for precisely this reason. The insurance companies will not come out and say “due to climate change” – but they will say to ‘frequent severe weather events’ – or something like that.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/environment/la-me-gs-insurance-rates-driven-up-by-global-warming-npr-reports-20120116,0,3679812.story
The main punch line is here:
“…The insurance execs interviewed allude to this by noting that in the past certain areas of the U.S. were targeted for higher rates because of earthquakes or frequent hurricanes or flooding. Now? There are so many disasters year upon year that the whole country is being reassessed for risk…”
See? The insurance companies can’t single out a “tornado alley” anymore, because extreme weather events are happening everywhere.
So, how about you denier geniuses head down to your insurance company and argue with them about your bill? I’m sure they will listen to reason.
Oh yes. We have had horribly had climate periods on Earth in the past where temperatures skyrocketed, and much life got wiped out.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51372
And here’s an interesting punch line from that article.
“…So where do we end up? … If higher CO2 warms the Earth, climate history makes sense. And if CO2 doesn’t warm, then we have to explain why the physicists are stupid, and we also have no way to explain what happened.
“And it’s really that simple…”
See? The ultra high temperature events in the Earth’s past have ALWAYS been associated with elevated CO2 levels.
You start shooting CO2 into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion in a car or a power plant, which from the standpoint of the Earth is some mini-volcano, and combine that with cutting down the forests, paving everything in the name of progress – and you will get exactly the future Ten Bears is talking about.
Period. End of story.
Kong, I have numerous times proposed at a wide variety of venues a twentieth century version of Pascal’s Wager: the Climate Change Denier’s Wager. Pascal was of course the fifteenth century ardent atheist, scientist and math master The Church so feared that upon his death cut off his head and it is now stored pickled somewhere in the Vatican basement. At some point in his life he was famously challenged by a “priest” that he would would hedge his odds and “convert” upon his deathbed. No word yet as to whither or no he did so, but my proposed wager is really rather simple: If I am wrong, I don’t lose a bloody damned thing. If you – Kong – are wrong, we lose the only planet we know of capable of sustaining our species – the human species – and our grand-children die. We don’t “destroy” the world, we just make it uninhabitable for humans.
You want to take that bet?
And I don’t even want hear “but there’s other planets… we just found one, Kepler 14 or 49 or something”. Finding new planets is cool. I’m a Mad Scientist, I love this stuff. But we have neither the time nor the resources or for that matter even the ability to move seven billion people to another planet.
Maybe we ought to just put our energies into not f*cking up the one we have.
We can get to the rest of the planets later. If we survive…
If weather is not climate, then why is the subject of this post — warmer than usual weather — spurring all you neoPythagoreans to start waving your arms and screaming, “Climate, climate, climate!”
Really, you guys use the word, “denier” in the same way the neocons have perjoratized the word, “liberal” in much the same way the Papists used to use the term, “heretic” during the inquisition. Your zealotry is religious in fervor and you know nothing about Earth history and are so self-unaware as to presume to viciously attack anyone who dares disagree with you. Thank god you people have nothing to do with the formation of public policy — despite the near-misses we’ve suffered in that regard recently — and thank god you’re so powerless that you’re relegated to arguing your woo-woo case on blog comments threads and that’s as far as it will ever get. Why not argue over the existence of god? At least then your righteousness will be appropriately assigned — deep in mass delusional superstitions.
“See? The ultra high temperature events in the Earth’s past have ALWAYS been associated with elevated CO2 levels.”
CO2 FOLLOWS TEMPERATURE CHANGE; it does not cause it.
Major Kong…..shame, shame, shame. “CO2 FOLLOWS TEMPERTURE CHANGE; IT DOES NOT CAUSE IT.” How in the world did your mind arrive at that place? That statement is absolutely backwards. Wouldn’t a Pythagorean, anti-Papist, anti-neocon, anti-religious aficionado(a) such as yourself immediately recognize how false that statement is? Or do you have some algebaric equation proving it’s correctness?
Wow!
Peter Gleick (AKA Mr. Climate Crock of the Week, AKA Mr. Integrity in Science) confesses to stealing the doc’s. Law suits on the way.
See you in jail Pete.
Wow, wow, wow!
It is so great being a climate denier. This is fun!