Sun, 2009-09-13 14:41Richard Littlemore
Richard Littlemore's picture

Lorne Gunter: Enlisting "science" to help me believe what I want

The denier web has been alive with excitement over the past week about a presentation by the German meteorologist Dr. Mojib Latif, who told a recent scientific meeting in Geneva that he expects a temporary lull in global warming.

One of the National Post's most vigorous climate change deniers, Lorne Gunter, grabbed onto this story in a celebratory column titled: Global Warming Takes a Break. But Gunter has not suddenly decided to take science seriously. He dismissed as somehow unknowable Latif's ultimate conclusion: that climate change is a real and pressing problem and that even if global temperature increases stall, they will inevitably resume.

Nope. Gunter doesn't want to listen to a whole scientific sentence: but he's willing to bet our lives on a  fragment that bolsters his own agenda.

Fri, 2009-09-11 10:52Kevin Grandia
Kevin Grandia's picture

There Will Be Bells - the Global Climate Wake-Up Call

There will be a lot of noise around the world on Sept. 21st when people all over the globe - from New York to Guatemala to Dakar - join together in a Global Climate Wake Up Call.

Organized by the amazing folks at Avaaz, Oxfam, Greenpeace and 350.org the Global Wake-Up Call , will see people from all walks of life get together in public places to sound the alarm and urge our political leaders to stand up and take bold action at the Copenhagen Climate Treaty Summit scheduled for December of this year.

These will be peaceful, spontaneous "flash mobs" in public places where people will sound the alarms on their mobile phones, flood their governments with phone calls urging climate action, and make a tremendous noise. The images, sounds, and videos will be stitched together overnight for presentation to world leaders at the United Nations the next day.

To say that the Copenhagen Summit is a key moment in our history would be the understatement of the century. At this meeting our government representatives will decide the path we will take for the next decade: Will we continue to allow the unabated burning of dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil? Or will go down a path that starts to reduce this over reliance on fossil fuels and begins to take full advantage of clean, healthy, cheap and unlimited power sources like the sun and the wind?

Thu, 2009-09-10 10:39Brendan DeMelle
Brendan DeMelle's picture

New Report Urges U.S. To Avoid Reliance on International Carbon Offsets

Friends of the Earth U.S. released a new report today calling the use of international carbon offsets a “dangerous distraction” that could lead to climate disaster if relied upon too heavily as the U.S. Senate returns to debate energy and climate policy later this month. 

Offsets are a centerpiece of the Waxman-Markey energy bill that passed the House of Representatives in June, and are likely to appear in the Senate version as well.

The Friends of the Earth report warns that the U.S. must avoid the use of international carbon offsets, in which U.S. industries can skip making costly investments to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions by sending money overseas for clean energy projects in developing countries.  The theory is that these international investments will translate into equivalent reductions at the fraction of the price it would cost to change our ways here at home. 

Wed, 2009-09-09 09:05Kevin Grandia
Kevin Grandia's picture

The Right Wing Attack Machine Behind the Van Jones Affair

You probably won't be surprised when I tell you that Glenn Beck wasn't the mastermind behind the campaign to remove Van Jones from his position as a special advisor to the White House Council on Environmental Quality... that would be giving Beck way too much credit.

Turns out that the attack was orchestrated by a fringe group of free-marketeers called the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) who describe themselves as "grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal levels." You can read a complete backgrounder on AFP here. It suffices to say they get a lot of money from some of the biggest players in the right-wing attack machine.

It will also come as no surprise that AFP is also behind much of the healthcare reform townhall shenanigans

On Fox News forum AFP's director of policy, Phil Kerpen brags about how his organization brought down Van Jones:

"I spent the next two weeks researching everything I could find about Jones and the Apollo Alliance (much of which is still to be published, including a forthcoming paper from the Capital Research Center next month), the national umbrella organization for coordinating between the environmentalists, the labor unions, and the social justice street organizers that Jones has served as a board member and a primary national spokesman for."

This was all then fed to Glenn Beck who gleefully took it to town and hammered away on Van Jones. No kidding, Beck is bent on bringing this administration to its knees and rallying the right-wing fringe players to follow suit. And it won't stop here, the likes of Kerpen and AFP have found their rallying cry: "Don't argue clean energy, but instead paint Obama's policies as a socialist/communist plot to control America."

Mon, 2009-09-07 08:38Peter Sinclair
Peter Sinclair's picture

Climate Denial Crock of the Week/1998 Revisited

One of the enduring myths of climate denialism is that global warming stopped sometime in the last decade. I see it in the blaring headlines of pseudoscience websites, in comments on my videos, even some of our most "distinguished" journalists have been taken in.

 

Pages

Subscribe to DeSmogBlog