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The tired, old climate-change deniers who keep trying to get themselves taken seriously have launched another petition claiming that “having assessed the relevant scientific evidence, (they) do not find convincing support for the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, dangerous global warming.”

This new laundry list of paid skeptics and ideologues is yet another instalment in the periodic petition process that has confused the climate conversation since Dr. S. Fred Singer launched the first such stunt in 1992. In fact, usual suspects such as Singer, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels and Sherwood Idso are on both lists.

Connoisseurs will recognize more names, perennial Canadian deniers like Tim Patterson and Tim Ball, both alumni of an evolving series of oil-backed astroturf groups including the Friends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. The oily lobbyist and former APCO Worldwide PR guy Tom Harris, who was prominent in both of those organizations, is also the “brains” behind this effort.

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In the public relations version of waterboarding, the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has re-released a six-week-old petition claiming once again that the science academies of every country in the developing world are all wrong about global warming.

The petition features a familiar cast of characters - tobacco apologists and energy industry regulars - and is being plumped up by a PR guy who has moved full-time into climate change denial.

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National Research Council of Canada scientist Dr. Kenneth Tapping has offered whithering criticism of Investor's Business Daily for reporting that Tapping is among those who deny that greenhouse gases are the principal cause of current global warming.

IBD had reported the lobbyist Dr. Tim Patterson's favourite theory that greenhouse gases are irrelevant and that a drop in sunspots is actually going to set off a round of global cooling, and it suggested that Tapping agrees with this position. To which Tapping responds:

"If there is a cooling due to the solar activity cycle laying off for a bit, then the a period of solar cooling could be a much-needed respite giving us more time to attack the problem of greenhouse gases, with the caveat that if we do not, things will be far worse when things turn on again after a few decades."

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In a laughable Margaret Wente column (forgiving the redundancy) in the Globe and Mail this week, we were called upon to feel sorry for Carleton University professor Dr. Tim Patterson:

Prof. Patterson never set out to be a global-warming dissenter. “It’s my bad luck. I just go where the research takes me.”

This may be true in some parallel universe, but Prof. Patterson is famously reticent to let his research take him beyond 1980, when the evidence for his favorite thesis falls to ruins.

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When did the global warming hoax die?

Historians are likely to pinpoint 2007.

It will take another decade to insure it cannot be revived, but the avalanche of scientific studies and the cumulative impact of scientists who have publicly joined those who debunked the lies on which it has been based will be noted as the tipping point.

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It's frightening how easy it is to present a computer-assisted lie,  especially if you have no conscience about faking things like climate reconstruction graphs. It's also frightening that such a piece of fakery can find its way into the school system of a G8 country.

This graph was created by a German high school teacher named E.G. Beck. It's based on information that is more out of date than a Tim Patterson solar forcing graph, and is manipulated to specifically misrepresent both the scale and the recent climate curve.

RealClimate has the whole story.