In the days and weeks following the theft of climate scientists' emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in November, climate change skeptics and deniers flooded the blogosphere and mainstream press with reactions suggesting that the 'scandal' had proven global warming was a myth.
In many instances, the reactions sounded like a choreographed choir singing from the same sheet of talking points, or at least the same sheet of of well-worn memes and cliches, like 'smoking gun' and 'final nail in the coffin.'
My team at DeSmogBlog took a look at several unique phrases that flew around the denier echo chamber in the aftermath of the CRU email hack, and how those memes were often adopted by the mainstream media as a result. Here is a sampling of what we identified:
Smoking gun on Global Warming
11/20 Myron Ebell to NYTimes/Revkin "This is not a smoking gun, its a mushroom cloud"
11/20 Fox News Affiliates "Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails"
11/21 Fox News "Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails"
11/21 Tim Ball (Canada Free Press) "a remarkable hacking of files that provided not just a smoking gun, but an entire battery of machine guns."
11/22 CBS "The university commented on the hack and the purported "smoking gun" in a press release, which confirms that the document is genuine."
11/25 Noel Sheppard (Newsbusters) "Smoking gun found by bloggers, not MSM"
11/25 Tom Blumer (Pajamas Media) "Deconstructing Climategate's Smoking-gun email"
11/26 Steve Milloy (on Pajamas Media) "What’s the real smoking gun among the emails allegedly “hacked” from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit?"
Blue Dress moment for global warming
11/19 Chris Horner (on Planet Gore) "The Blue Dress Moment May have Arrived"
11/20 Chris Horner (on Big Government) "Global Warming's Blue Dress Moment"
11/20 Roy Spencer "Global Warming's Blue Dress Moment - The CRU Email Hack Scandal"
11/20 Roy Spencer (On Free Republic) "Global Warming's Blue Dress Moment - The CRU Email Hack Scandal"
11/23 The Patriot's Flag "ClimateGate's Blue Dress"
Repeated, quoted or linked to by countless small blogs
Final nail in the coffin of global warming
11/20 James Dellingpole "Climategate: Final Nail in the Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming"
11/20 Comment on Climate Audit - reposting Dellingpole article
11/20 Climate Realists - Reposting Dellingpole Article
11/20 David Icke - reposting Dellingpole Article
11/21 Free Republic - reposting Dellingpole article
11/24 Drudge Report "Greatest Scandal in Modern Science" links to Dellingpole
11/24 Sydney Daily Telegraph - "Final Nail in Rudd's Climate Change Coffin"
11/25 Fox News "Media Silent on Global Warming Scandal" by Greg Gutfeld - "These e-mails have been called "the nail in the coffin" of global warming hysteria. I wish that were true." (complaining some people still believe in global warming)
11/26 James Inhofe Wall Street Journal editorial "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in."
There should be investigation
11/21 Chris Horner on Pajamas Media "For some time, several individuals have asked why we don’t just initiate suit against the obviously dishonest tactics and claims by the global warming industry under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO)"
11/23 Matthew Moore Telegraph "Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, has called for an independent inquiry into claims that leading climate change scientists manipulated data to strengthen the case for man-made global warming"
11/23 Tony Romm - The Hill blog - "Inhofe to call for hearing into CRU, U.N. climate change research"
11/23 Drudge Report "Scientists manipulating data, calls for investigation "
11/24 James Inhofe on Washington Times radio interview - calling for investigation
11/24 James Inhofe on Fox News (video)
11/24 Fox News.com - "Key GOP Senator pushes for probe into climate change research"
11/24 Inhofe Staff - EPW Minority page "Inhofe Launches Climategate Investigation"
The Whitewash begins. Dellingpole trolled the internet to find a word bouncing around and used it as his headline, spreading it far and wide.
11/24 Green Hell Blog
11/24Youtube on CNN Titled Whitewash
11/27 Bishop HillJames Dellingpole (Telegraph)
11/27Tony Aardvark
11/27 Chris Booker (Telegraph)
The repetititve use of these phrases and cliches by deniers would probably make GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz proud. By sticking to a small set of familiar, eye-catching and dramatic-sounding memes, the denialosphere succeeded in getting many of the mainstream outlets covering the stolen emails scandal to follow suit by using the same language again and again.
So, instead of investigating who was behind the theft, or exploring the context of some of the supposedly scandalous things said in private emails between a handful of climate scientists, many mainstream outlets followed the lead of the denier choir by repeating their version of events. It's a classic case of misdirection - telling the same story over and over again until it's assumed to be true by lazy reporters who don't bother to question its veracity before repeating it again themselves. The lie is perpetuated, and, in the absence of diligent reporting, the quest for the truth is lost.
What remains in the case of the CRU email theft are a lot of unanswered questions. After spreading the warped version of events as told by deniers in the blogosphere - tired cliches and all - the mainstream media has moved on to other scandals without ever trying to identify the hacker or correcting the false premise that private email chatter between a handful of people could undermine a massive body of scientific evidence corroborated by experts around the world.
No wonder the public is increasingly confused.
Follow James Hoggan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/james_hoggan
After decades of denier funding through their web of conservative think tanks,
www.exxonsecrets.org/maps.php
Exxon undermined their rear-end supporters in 2009 by investing $600M on carbon-neutral, algae-based biofuel.
http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/energy_climate_con_vehicle_algae.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/business/energy-environment/14fuel.html
This suggests a) Exxon is slow and greedy but not stupid. They've known for decades that fossil fuels DO warm our planet and burning them isn't sustainable indefinitely. b) So, they've sought to retain dominance, even as petroleum production diminishes, due to climate concerns and peak oil (Note: concern over peaking oil is my inference. Exxon's web site doesn't mention it). c) They think algal oil may be their ticket, as it's 10x more efficient and thus way cheaper to produce than by other means.
Direct quotes from Exxon's biofuel web site:
"Growing algae consume carbon dioxide; this PROVIDES GREENHOUSE GAS MITIGATION BENEFITS."
"Since 2004 we have invested more than $1.5 billion in activities that REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS and improve energy efficiency, and we will spend at least $500 million on additional initiatives over the next few years."
Will photovoltaics ever get cheap enough for widespread consumer use at the residential level? Dunno how drastically, but recent developments suggest that the price will continue to drop for some time.
Of all the approaches, I'd personally bet on window paint (cheap concentrating solar collectors) and nanotech antennae.
Recent developments in photovoltaics:
https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_101047
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoantenna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowires
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-to-roll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_photovoltaic_cell#cite_note-idaho-26
(1) When different claims get bundled together.
(2) When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate.
(3) When scientists are pressured to toe the party line.
(4) When publishing and peer review in the discipline is cliquish.
(5) When dissenting opinions are excluded from the relevant peer-reviewed literature not because of weak evidence or bad arguments but as part of a strategy to marginalize dissent.
(6) When the actual peer-reviewed literature is misrepresented.
(7) When consensus is declared hurriedly or before it even exists.
(8) When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus.
(9) When “scientists say†or “science says†is a common locution.
(10) When it is being used to justify dramatic political or economic policies.
(11) When the “consensus†is maintained by an army of water-carrying journalists who defend it with uncritical and partisan zeal, and seem intent on helping certain scientists with their messaging rather than reporting on the field as objectively as possible.
(12) When we keep being told that there’s a scientific consensus.
Like it or not there IS a scientific consensus - and that consensus is that man-made global warming is real.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm
It is how consensus is recognized. Isn't is also how you are trying to deny consensus with your posts here?
FAIL!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70SlEqX7oY
also, here's the follow-up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJFZ88EH6i4
I'm not sure if you can post links on this forum, but if not, just search for "climate crock of the week east anglia" on youtube
The most damning item was found in the source code, the "Fudge Factor". I took the arbitrary numbers known as the fudge factor and plotted them out myself. They form a hockey stick. So if you ran any data through that program you'd get a hockey stick graph.
If you're doing real science, there is no "fudge factor".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwGVr8rItsE
http://scinewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/climategate-fudge-factor.html
Per testimony submitted by the programmer to U.K.'s Science and Technology Committee re- the "Fudge Factor" that code was "not the basis for any published article or dataset":
-------------------------------
A small sample of my computer programming code was included in the disclosed files. It has been argued that comments within the code such as "Fudge factor" and "shouldn't usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures" demonstrate that data have been manipulated in an inappropriate and undisclosed manner. My programs that were highlighted on BBC Newsnight that contained comments such as these were not the basis for any published article or dataset, and thus are not a valid indication of inappropriate data manipulation... rather than indicating that an undisclosed adjustment would be made, it was a warning to avoid using adjusted data without realising it. To re-iterate: I have made no adjustments to data except those that are scientifically justified and stated in published papers.
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http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc2802.htm
climastrology101: "If you're doing real science, there is no "fudge factor".
And if you're doing real skepticism (as opposed to denialism), you don't assuming something is true merely because you read it in some "skeptic" blog or saw it on TV.
"What remains in the case of the CRU email theft are a lot of unanswered questions. After spreading the warped version of events as told by deniers in the blogosphere - tired cliches and all - the mainstream media has moved on to other scandals without ever trying to identify the hacker or correcting the false premise that private email chatter between a handful of people could undermine a massive body of scientific evidence corroborated by experts around the world."
Expose Inhofe for the fraud he is. I think it can be done.
One day this whistleblower will step forward to collect his medals and praise.
Also, whistle blower protection laws did not exist at the time of the Watergate break-in.