Poor climate scientists know they can’t win the science debate against the engineers, geologists, chemists and physicists who are better scientists, better informed, mostly unfunded and unleashed all over the Internet.
To avoid coughing up the “overwhelming evidence” the climate experts say they have, but can’t seem to find, they are pulling out the Panzers, resorting to pleas for RICO investigations. Treat the skeptical scientists like Racketeers, they say! And what’s their evidence for this conspiracy of corruption… oh lordy, these people are scientists, they must have emails, cheques, tapes and photos. Surely? But no, their evidence are pop-smear-books where the deepest darkest evidence is the common use of “tobacco tactics”! But every activist group under the sun, including honest groups, uses at least some of the exact same tactics. How does anyone point out flaws without “seeding doubt” about them? Either the flaws are real or they’re not, and that’s what a scientist discusses, not “motives”.
There is no law of science called “tobacco-tactics”. If man-made global warming is a dire threat, the evidence comes from instruments that measure the climate, not from smear-o-rama by association.
Indeed, the Team-Tobacco of climate are the believers not the skeptics
I looked up Tobacco Tactics for the first time:
A long-standing tactic of the tobacco industry and its supporters is to try to marginalise and denigrate its critics.
You mean like calling them “deniers”, denigrating their qualifications, printing fantasies about their funding, attacking their religious beliefs, and inventing spurious links to … wait, something as black as the tobacco industry, or the holocaust? How about stranding skeptics at airports, canceling their tickets, sacking them, removing climate skeptics titles and canceling email accounts. What about using students to protest emotionally at universities to stop the research even starting (see Lomborg, Bjorn, UWA)?
The Tobacco industry influenced scientists by commissioning research, and funding scientists, which is similar to the one-sided government funding that pours money at climate models we know are failing, yet doesn’t fund models built on solar factors and natural cycles. Then there is Ghost Writing, like say where Greenpeace writes a document for the IPCC, or where Greenpeace and WWF set the BBC journalistic policy?
In arguments and reasoning the tobacco groups “shift the debate away from the health issues”, just as climate scientists shift the debate away from the science and towards the pitiful tiny funding available to a few skeptics. Climate experts don’t want to talk about the missing hotspot, the uncertainties of ocean heat content measurements, the wild variations of past climates, or the way models fail dismally at predicting the last 18 years.
Legal strategies of Big Tobacco include FOI requests, which both skeptics and unskeptics use. Skeptics want the scientific data, that they shouldn’t even have to FOI. Climate unskeptics want the funding details of skeptical scientists so they can smear them by association and scare off potential donors.
We can build on this theme: please readers — fish for inspiration through the Tobacco Tactics files, and suggest away.
The letter calling for a RICO investigation into skeptical scientists:
Dear President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren,
As you know, an overwhelming majority of climate scientists are convinced about the potentially serious adverse effects of human-induced climate change on human health, agriculture, and biodiversity. We applaud your efforts to regulate emissions and the other steps you are taking. Nonetheless, as climate scientists we are exceedingly concerned that America’s response to climate change – indeed, the world’s response to climate change – is insufficient. The risks posed by climate change, including increasing extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and increasing ocean acidity – and potential strategies for addressing them – are detailed in the Third National Climate Assessment (2014), Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The stability of the Earth’s climate over the past ten thousand years contributed to the growth of agriculture and therefore, a thriving human civilization. We are now at high risk of seriously destabilizing the Earth’s climate and irreparably harming people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.
We appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. One additional tool – recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change. The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peer reviewed academic research (Brulle, 2013) and in recent books including: Doubt is their Product (Michaels, 2008), Climate Cover-Up (Hoggan & Littlemore, 2009), Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), The Climate War (Pooley, 2010), and in The Climate Deception Dossiers (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2015). We strongly endorse Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation.
The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking. If corporations in
the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth’s climate, before even more lasting damage is done.
Sincerely,
Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Edward Maibach, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Paul Dirmeyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Barry Klinger, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Paul Schopf, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
David Straus, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Edward Sarachik, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Michael Wallace, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Alan Robock, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
William Lau, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
T.N. Krishnamurti, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Vasu Misra, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Ben Kirtman, University of Miami, Miami, FL
Robert Dickinson, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Michela Biasutti, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Mark Cane, Columbia University, New York, NY
Lisa Goddard, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Alan Betts, Atmospheric Research, Pittsford, VT
h/t Climate Depot
UPDATE: RICO means Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering, and it allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do…