Most Dangerous Global Warming Deniers (SLIDESHOW, POLL)

According to a new survey, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is connected to human-caused pollution (AKA Global Warming) is at its lowest point in three years. Only 57% of Americans now believe this inconvenient truth -- down from 77% in 2006, when Al Gore's film was released.

Maybe this disturbing trend is due to climate lobbyists and certain conservative politicians and pundits going all out for years now, trying to persuade the public that the growing mountain of scientific evidence supporting global warming is FAKE. Says climate professor Andrew Weaver, "It's a combination of poor communication by scientists, a lousy summer in the Eastern United States, people mixing up weather and climate and a full-court press by public relations firms and lobby groups trying to instill a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public."

So in honor of this troubling survey, HuffPost's No Impact Week, and the upcoming International Day Of Climate Action we bring you the who's who of climate change deniers and the question: who's the most dangerous global warming denier of them all? Let's be clear: an overwhelming majority of the legitimate scientific community has said that global warming is real, and caused by humans. These folks are declaring otherwise. The contenders are below.

Did we leave someone out? Hit the participate button below, give your submission a title and a caption with the appropriate quote, upload the image and hit submit! We'll incorporate the best submissions into the slideshow.

Most Dangerous Climate Change Deniers

 

Find a picture, click the participate button, add a title and upload your picture

Glenn Beck, conservative talk radio and television host

"The earth and the environment are the progressive replacement for God ... now because of our bad SUVs, according to Al Gore, the earth has a temperature. Uh oh. Unless you woke up yesterday, or today, where the temperature in the greater New York area was I believe right around 48 degrees, here in New York in late summer. There have been maybe, I don't know, what a week of typical summer days in New York this year. Period."

comments(710)

Rate This Photo

(Current Rank: loading...)

Harmless Dangerous

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Now Make Your Own Top 5

And Share with Your Friends

Average rating: loading... out of 10

Top 5 Global Warming Deniers

loading...

 | Become a fan

Picked These as the Top 5 Slides in the Slideshow

Top 5 Global Warming Deniers

Users Who Voted on this Slide

loading...

loading...

HuffPost Community Top 5 Slides:

«»

 | Become a fan

Top 5 Global Warming Deniers

 

Get HuffPost Green On Facebook and Twitter!

Comments

[RomeoMD25]

04:33 AM on 02/25/2010

This same fraud, perpetrated by government and special interest groups, is forcing inefficient wind and solar power energy sources upon us, that require more fossil fuel energy to build, require huge government subsidies to be viable at all and represent a insignificant fraction of the total energy we consume. In the meantime the policies from this fraud are sucking the energy needed to keep our economy humming by very efficient sources of energy from hydro, nuclear, oil, coal and natural gas, and they are being seriously inhibited or prohibited all together. A country without sufficient energy is a third-world country, subject to all the vagaries of third-world countries and banana republics.

And this insanity about outlawing incandescent light bulbs and replacing them with very environmentally unfriendly, mercury-laced, fluorescent bulbs that require special, expensive disposal handling, is beyond any reason or common sense. Who are these people who make these off-the-wall decisions?

[realpolitic]

07:08 PM on 02/24/2010

It is a wonder deniers can try to pretend there is no warming going on and that man is not responsible. it is like trying to ignore an elephant sitting on one's couch. "Oh, that is not an elephant sitting there. It just resembles one."

[RomeoMD25]

04:57 AM on 02/25/2010

Climate warming or cooling aka CO2 – is not the problem for mother nature including the human kind. Man made pollution is! Why are climate warming advocates completely ignoring pollution and keeps all the focus put on CO2? It looks like “deliberate” tunnel vision! We enjoy over 100.000 chemicals in our food and environment, many many are artificial made. Image what the effect from those are – to our environment !!!

[realpolitic]

06:56 PM on 02/25/2010

Global cooling of this kind?

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/418335main_land-ocean-full.jpg

You think co2 is not a pollutant. Just lock yourself in a room with enough of a co2 concentration in the air. You will soon get dizzy and pass out. You are, as usual, missing the elephant in the room.

[RomeoMD25]

02:47 AM on 02/24/2010

Exxon chief executive Rex Tillerson
firmly expressed Exxon’s support for climate change alarmists in stating, “I firmly believe it is not too late for Congress to consider a carbon tax as the better policy approach for addressing the risks of climate change.”

Exxon and their ilk are not concerned about a carbon tax eating into their profits because they know they won’t have to pay it – the tab will be picked up by the ignorant taxpayer at the fuel pump at an inflated cost which if anything will hand the transnational oil cartels an even bigger cut.

[climastrology101]

02:37 AM on 02/24/2010

Is there no room on this list for Huffpost's own commenters?

I'm dangerous, I tells ya!!

[Chip W]

12:55 AM on 11/25/2009

Personally, I don't know. I doubt if most of those who think they know do either.
It depends on who you choose to trust, and what you want to believe.

[deanfv]

12:39 PM on 11/20/2009

apparently the Hadley Climate Research site ( the ‘inventors’ of the hockey stick temperature graph) was hacked into and a bunch of very damning emails were found. Bottom line, those “scientists” were manipulating the data. I hope it gets legs and maybe even (dream upon a star) criminal charges against some of the prominent AGW proponents.

This site usually doesn't post rumors, i.e. Winner of the 2008 Best Science Blog Award. If true, major waves ahead...

Breaking News Story: Hadley CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released
Nov 19, 2009
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/#more-12937

[-Business-]

09:09 PM on 12/02/2009

That's interesting, they developed that? And only them? So I guess NASA is also in on that conspiracy when they conduct research on temperature levels over the last 130 years. Showing a major temperature increase sense 1960, of .6 degrees Celsius to the year 2000 (Here's the link: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/).

Now, the two major contributors to Earth's temperature is greenhouse gasses(or carbon dioxide, methane, etc), and solar activity. while a report released to the white house in 2001 (Another link, this report by US scientists, not the British ones in those e-mails: http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf), show that solar activity has not increased to spur this rise in temperature over the same period, but rather has remained constant with the rest of the remaining 90 years covered in the NASA data.

Solar activity has more of an impact than greenhouse gasses, yes. But in this current rise in temperatures it DOES NOT account for the growth, and with carbon levels increasing in the atmosphere, if solar activity does increase, we'll be in a great deal of trouble.

By the way, those e-mails you're talking about, I downloaded them, and read through 200 of them, out of 1034, none of those were illustrative of a conspiracy to hype global warming, and if it was so pervasive as the media claims.

[DocSkull]

09:47 PM on 02/24/2010

OMG, emails were taken? Why didn't someone tell us?

This some rather old news. Also Hadley and CRU aren't the same place. The 'hockey stick" paper was a thirds set of folks. The emails demonstrated that there was no conspiracy and besides some intentional misreading of three word sections of some emails, nothing has come of it.

[realpolitic]

06:36 AM on 11/17/2009

"Scientists believe climate change -- the warming of oceans -- has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/16/giant-jellyfish-swarm-nor_n_359478.html

[Richard2]

10:18 PM on 11/15/2009

A new Rasmussen poll, 11/15/09, finds that only 37% of Americans think climate change is caused by human activity, 47% think climate change is caused by planetary forces, and 5% think climate change is caused by other forces.

The 47% plus the 5% sum to 52% of Americans who think that if there is climate change it is caused by natural forces other than man-made ones.

[realpolitic]

03:33 AM on 11/16/2009

No one believe Rasmussen polls. They are famously inaccurate and always designed to favor the conservative's point of view. They are extremely ambiguously worded. In reality, only Fox news listens to Rasmussen. Here is an example....

Another awful Rasmussen poll

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200911110031

[Richard2]

12:54 PM on 11/16/2009

Rasmussen polls have credibility. They are accepted by the same people who accept the other major independent polls. The credibility of the Rasmussen polls is higher than that of any of the polls linked to cable TV channels, such as CNN, MSNBC, or FOX.

The results of the recent Rasmussen poll generally track the results of the recent Pew and Harris polls.

Public skepticism of CAGW is growing.

[realpolitic]

06:33 AM on 11/17/2009

The far right loves Rasmussen polls because they show President Obama lower in approval by 10 points than other polls. It is the same on any subject. Rasmussen is the darling of the far right and the only poll used on Fox News. The results of any Rasmussen poll are worthless to fair-minded people and not even used beyond Fox News.

"Again, you can pretty much throw out the Rasmussen numbers in terms of Obama's job approval since they're trending nearly ten points lower than many other pollsters' data." Since when do serious, 'independent' pollsters write columns urging the president to "shift right"? Rasmussen has on many occasions!

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200911140001

[rr52]

09:27 AM on 11/26/2009

No one is really, really tuned into climate change debate yet and since the union of the GOP with the religious right there are a lot of sheeple around. Americans don't want to give up their creature comforts and will cling to deniers until they are booted in the behind with a climate related tragedy themselves, i.e., flooding, fires, windstorms, etc.

[AcePilot101]

11:33 PM on 10/29/2009

The biggest enemy of global climate change is truth. The planet has gone through many periods of global warming and cooling (ice ages) without any help from human beings.
What is the real driving force of global warming?
Try to suspend your disbelief long enough to consider the tilt of the earth's axis which gives us summer and winter. Now, add to this the fact that the axis has a wobble cycle of about 26,000 years.
I can cite the Lake Vostok ice core study (25 years ago!) that proves carbon dioxide levels rise for about 21,000 years and then drop - at least 13 times in the past 400,000 years.
Please read this article below (first published in Science) or join the Flat Earth Society like all the other wobble-deniers! (Hint: Plato knew more about the Precession of the Equinoxes than Al Gore)
http://newsroom.melbourne.edu/news/n-119

[Publicola]

10:30 AM on 10/30/2009

Precession of the Equinoxes, aka axial precession, as an explanation for the rapid global warming over the past 100 years makes sense... until you actually think about it.

As you say, axial precession has a cycle of about 26,000 years, which means that in the past 100 years axial precession has gone through about (100/26,000 *100 =) 0.4% of its cycle, which is far from enough of a change to account for the rapid increase in the mean global temperature we've seen over over that same time interval.

There are other earth orbital cycles too though: orbital eccentricity, orbital inclination, axial tilt, and apsidal precession. Together, according to the Milankovitch theory of climate change they account for the initial driving force of historically-observed large-scale climate change oscillations.

Could this larger "Milankovitch cycling" account for the observed rapid global warming over the past 100 years? In a word, no. These cycles happen over timescales lasting tens of thousands of years and more, and we are currently in the middle of a of cycle which indicates that the long-term cooling trend that naturally began thousands of years ago should continue for tens of thousands of years.

That is, unless the earth's atmosphere is artificially altered by adding man-made greenhouse gases to it.

[instagladiator]

07:04 AM on 11/21/2009

Ah yes, the old Man-Made Global Warming "thing", sigh...

The sun IS the major driver for climate on earth, always has been and always will be. Then when you find that the earth has actually shifted its axis, exposing the poles and other portions of the earth, to more direct sunlight, hmmmm, and interesting thing happens. duh....
Man's so called pollution of the atmosphere is so minimal it's hardly worth mentioning.

Question "everything" and "do your own research".

Peace.

[OzzieTonto]

01:09 AM on 11/25/2009

Wake up, fool! The evidence is there, DIRECTLY, of human activity causing climate change. It's not about the weather: the evidence is chemical, in sources such as ice cores from Norwegian researches in Greenland, etc. It's unfortunately up to us to examine it, as the corporate media will not do it for us.

[Publicola]

11:37 PM on 10/27/2009

(Continued from my previous post, which may show up below this one)

Compare that >0.36C to the observed increase in the global mean temperature since the dawn of the fossil-fuel era, which again is about 1.1C. Via this non-RF short-cut derivation we see that a 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 since the dawn of the fossil-fuel era corresponds to a greater than one-third increase in the mean global temperature over that same time period.

And that, again, is still not taking into account the global warming also attributable to increased atmospheric CO2 indirectly via water vapor induction.

Now what say you, goodspkr (and you too, fumes):

Does a more than one-third increase in the observed global mean temperature correspond to fumes declaration that it is instead "no thermal advantage whatsoever"?

We report, you decide.

[goodspkr]

12:42 PM on 10/28/2009

Publicola,

I don't really understand what you are trying to say. But I do have a few questions.

Where in the world do you come up with the figure of 1.1 degrees C as being the increase in temperature since the dawn of the fossil-fuel era? Most temperature readings start in 1880 and go to the present (that is the time we had instruments) and account for about .6 degree C. Using what I think is your logic you would attribute all the increase in temperature due to CO2 yet no respectable scientist would say that.

There is a problem there. Heavy use of CO2 started after WWII. So we have about 64 years where climate change should have been going up. It seems we did have a period of 25 years where that happened (1975-2000). But we were in a cool period from 1945 to 1975 and over the past 10 years we haven't seen any increases. Now I look for fit for a theory, and the AGW theory certainly should fit more than 38% of the time.

Lord Kelvin "proved" that the earth could not be as old as the geologists said. He "proved" it using the conservation of energy. Unfortunately he didn't know that nuclear energy, not gravitation, provides the internal heat of the sun and the earth. Similarly, the AGW warmists have "proved" that CO2 causes global warming. Except when it doesn't (62% of the time).

[Publicola]

02:36 PM on 10/28/2009

goodspkr: "I don't really understand what you are trying to say."

If you don't understand my non-RF short-cut derivation here, goodspkr, then you don't understand logarithmic mathematics, to say nothing of not understanding my more precise derivation via radiative forcing.

In any event here again is the conclusion:

The 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 since the dawn of the fossil fuel era directly and alone corresponds to a major portion of the increase in mean global temperature that has occurred over that same time period.

And this scientifically-derived conclusion demonstrates that fumes' unsupported assertion that said 30% CO2 increase confers "no thermal advantage whatsoever" - which you agreed with - is false.

goodspkr: "Where in the world do you come up with the figure of 1.1 degrees C as being the increase in temperature since the dawn of the fossil-fuel era?"

That's what I get for looking too quickly at a graph - here's the graph; the number is actually ~0.9C:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png

Which further reinforces my point, since the proportion of temperature increase attributable to CO2 is in fact even greater.

goodspkr: "Using what I think is your logic you would attribute all the increase in temperature due to CO2"

No, you misunderstood what I wrote and what my numbers indicate, which again is that a *major portion* of the temperature increase is attributable to increased atmospheric CO2, not "all" of it.

(to be continued)

[Publicola]

03:26 PM on 10/28/2009

(directly continuing from my previous post)

Here are those proportions using the 0.9C number:

1: Using the 0.50C number derived via relative radiative forcing:

0.5/0.9 = 56%

2: Using the >0.36C number derived via the simpler, back-of-the-envelope method:

>0.36/0.9 = >40%

goodspkr: "There is a problem there."

First off, what I did here was demonstrate directly via math and physics that fumes' assertion that the CO2 increase since the start of the fossil fuel era confers "no thermal advantage whatsoever" - which again you agreed with - is bullcrap.

That was the primary point of my going through that derivation, and that's why my calculations started back then.

goodspkr: "we were in a cool period from 1945 to 1975"

Only if you want to cherry-pick your data for that time interval. Pick instead, say, 1938-1980 and said "cooling period" goes away.

In any event that time period - when CO2 was a far smaller forcing agent - was overwhelmed by other factors, notably the increase in human particulate and aerosol pollution and unusually strong volcanic activity. Environmental regulations and improved technologies since the 1970s have significantly blunted the particulate and aerosol pollution influence, while CO2 emissions have instead risen dramatically.

(to be continued in next post)

[goodspkr]

01:19 PM on 10/28/2009

Publicola,

I have no problem with your mathematics. But I do have some problems with your assumptions and facts. I've already spoken about the 1.1 degrees C. The fact that you come up with .5 degrees C as coming from the addition of CO2 in the atmosphere is also not at issue. However, you quickly made a statement that the temperature would increase even more due to the feedback of water vapor.

That is the point of difference between the warmist and the skeptics. Warmist see the water vapor becoming high level cirrus clouds which would hold more heat on the earth. They see the feedback a large and positive. Skeptics see the water vapor creating more low level clouds which would reflect solar radiation away from the earth cooling the planet. We see the feedback as negative.

If the warmists are correct, you have a very unstable climate. If the skeptics are correct the climate is much more stable. Clouds are the unknown in the "settled science" of AGW believers. You can read about it here.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071102152636.htm

[Publicola]

07:37 PM on 10/28/2009

goodspkr: "The fact that you come up with .5 degrees C as coming from the addition of CO2 in the atmosphere is also not at issue. "

That's a radical departure from your previous statements saying that fumes was right re- his unsupported assertion that the 30% atmospheric CO2 increase since the dawn of the fossil fuel burning era confers "no thermal advantage whatsoever."

goodspkr: "However, you quickly made a statement that the temperature would increase even more due to the feedback of water vapor."

First off, whether the scientific consensus is correct there or not, you do now agree that the 30% increase in atmosphere CO2 confers a substantial thermal increase on the earth-atmosphere system, right?

goodspkr: "That is the point of difference between the warmist and the skeptics"

Well, no, that is not *the* "point of "difference" - that's but one of many "points of difference." For example there's the "point of difference" that fumes asserted - and that you had agreed with - that the 30% atmospheric CO2 increase since the dawn of the fossil fuel era confers "no thermal advantage whatsoever"

Another "point of difference" is that people such as yourself keep failing to understand (denying?) that water vapor is not a global warming greenhouse gas forcing agent.

Nice change of the subject away from your being completely wrong on both of those "points of contention" though, and now you are on to yet another "point of contention."

(continued in next post)

[Publicola]

07:37 PM on 10/28/2009

(continued from previous post)

goodspkr: "Clouds are the unknown in the "settled science" of AGW believers. You can read about it here. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071102152636.htm"

You need to understand what you cite. Per this citing *if* that negative feedback applies to global warming - and they make it clear that they don't know if it does - then that means that global warming happens at a lower rate of increase, not that global warming doesn't keep happening. In any event whether it applies to global warming is speculative.

[Publicola]

11:32 PM on 10/27/2009

By the way goodspkr:

If you got lost with all that radiative forcing stuff - I didn't fully understand all that myself until I studied atmospheric physics in graduate school - there's a lay-person's short-cut of sorts that bypasses the RF stuff for those who understand logarithmic mathematics, which you present yourself as being able to do:

* As you say, it's essentially settled science that a doubling - that is, a 100% increase - of atmospheric CO2 confers a 1.2 C increase in the mean global temperature..

* Also as you say, atmospheric CO2's logarithmic relationship with that temperature means that you get progressively less impact per CO2 molecule added to the atmosphere.

* That second fact in turn means that a 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 will not result in 30% of a 100% increase in temperature - it will instead result in an increase *greater* than a 30%.of a 100% increase in temperature.

(The relationship drops off exponentially, so there's more bang for the buck in the first 30% increase than there is in the second 30% increase, and so on.)

* This means that a 30% increase in atmospheric CO2 confers a greater than (0.3*1.2C =) 0.36C increase in the mean global temperature.

Greater than 0.36C. (Which of course is in agreement with the 0.5C I had previously derived via relative radiative forcing.)

(continued in my next post, which may show up above this one)

[MJinCanada]

03:28 PM on 10/26/2009

This is the one that I find mindboggling:

Stephen Moore: "So you can’t, heh, have it both ways. You can’t say cooling is going to hurt agriculture and warming is going to hurt agriculture."

Has this guy ever grown anything besides an ego?

I've seen a lot of crops start out well, then get hit by late frost or early frost (or even snow), dry up in the summer heat (the seeds stop growing and filling out), wither away in drought, get devoured by grasshoppers, which thrive in great numbers after mild winters because it takes a couple of weeks of really cold weather to kill the eggs.

And those were the "normal" years.

One of the features of climate change -- even natural changes 500 and 1000 years ago -- is periods of unpredictable and extreme weather. There is not only archeological evidence for this; there are chronicles written by monks and scribes recording the times when villages went from relative prosperity and surplus for decades to starvation 2 years out of three -- and selling their children into slavery when cold rainy summers or droughts carried on for longer.

[envirogy]

01:57 PM on 10/26/2009

Skepticism has its place in everything. What gets me is the conspiracy theories that go along with Global Warming skepticism.

http://envirogy.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/a-convenient-conspiracy/

[realpolitic]

02:29 PM on 10/26/2009

Global warming deniers are anything but skeptical. They deny any article on warming before even reading it. They are ideologues!

[goodspkr]

04:39 PM on 10/26/2009

RP, I find you calling skeptics ideologues to be humorous. I do read what the warmists talk about so I can understand where they are coming from and understand the actual science behind AGW. I doubt that you do the same.

[fumes]

11:43 AM on 10/26/2009

Now, the total percent of our atmosphere that is CO2 is currently 0.035%. And so, we both agree that 0.035% CO2 considerable thermal advantage - right? About 91F, even.

So how is it that, in your mind, 0.035% CO2 can have a 91F thermal impact here on earth, while about a third of that amount - 0.012% CO2 - can have "no thermal advantage whatsoever"?

Do tell, fumes - because again inquiring minds want to know.

''Note that the Greenhouse Effect produces a temperature increase of about 33 °C (59 °F) with respect to black body predictions and not a surface temperature of 33 °C (91 °F) which is 32 °F higher. The average surface temperature is about 14 °C (57 °F). Also note that both the Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures are expressed to 2 significant figures even though the conversion formula produces 3.'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

[DocSkull]

12:25 PM on 10/26/2009

I can't figure out what you are asking and I don't see in the wikipedia page where it establishes that a third of the CO2 levels has no "thermal advantage" as you put it. The relationship between CO2 and temperature is not linear and the focus is on human-produced CO2 rather than the naturally produced CO2, if that is what you are getting at.

[fumes]

12:40 PM on 10/26/2009

sorry doc i screwed up again..

the top half of that post is a repost of publicola to me from downthread that i should have presented as such.. my bad!

[MJinCanada]

11:20 AM on 10/26/2009

Here's a few questions for climate change deniers:

1) If you think climate change is a hoax, please provide a logical explanation why tens of thousands of scientists -- climatologists, geologists, biologists, oceanographers, physicists, archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, and so on -- support the climate change theory and have spent years collecting data. What's in it for them?

2) Do any of you deniers work outdoors for a living and/or depend on good old Mother Earth for your livelihood? That is, do any of you work in the field in the farming, forestry, fishing, tourism or even construction industries? Are any of you hikers or hunters or any sort of outdoorsy people at all? Have you ever eaten food that you grew yourselves?

I've asked these questions before on climate change stories and haven't gotten an answer yet.

[goodspkr]

04:54 PM on 10/26/2009

I'll answer question 1. "What's in it for them?" Funding. Billions of dollars are readily available to scientist who study AGW and it's effects. If it is determined that there is no A in AGW, the money tree drys up.

I'm not sure what question 2 is all about? What difference does it make if you have eaten food that you grew yourselves?

[DocSkull]

07:46 PM on 10/26/2009

Billions!?! Really? Billions?!?

Could you give an example of a small fraction of the billion dollars? Can you show me a picture of a scientist's mansion and sports car?

Who pays the scientists all these billions of dollars?

I think you have a lot of nerve casting empty accusations at extremely well-educated people who work long hours for only moderate money.

[MJinCanada]

08:11 PM on 10/26/2009

Billions of bucks? Seriously? Who's paying them?

How much of it do you think these guys take home? Enough to make it worthwhile to freeze your butt off on a glacier for six months, or leaving your young family for a whole summer to study rock sediment layers?

Re second question: People who work or play closely with the land are seldom climate change deniers. It's like trying to find a WWII vet who doubts the Holocaust. It's a matter of witnessing changes in real life.