[TheClimate.Vote] June 29, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/June 29, 2019/

[benchmark moment ]
*US generates more electricity from renewables than coal for first time 
ever*
In April, renewables provided 23% compared to coal's 20%
'The fate of coal has been sealed. The market has spoken'
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/26/energy-renewable-electricity-coal-power


[PBS video report]
*Why is it so hot in Europe?*
PBS NewsHour
Published on Jun 28, 2019
An extreme heat wave is gripping much of Europe, breaking records and 
causing widespread misery. Temperatures soared well over 100 degrees 
Fahrenheit in France, Germany and Spain. While the heat is coming from 
sub-Saharan Africa, some researchers say climate change is exacerbating 
and prolonging it. They warn more record highs are likely--and along 
with them, more deaths. William Brangham reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61smwVyp8Iw
- - -
[Serious heatwave in Europe - report from CBC - 109F]
*Europe's heat wave breaks France's record high*
CBC News: The National
Published on Jun 28, 2019
Thousands of schools were closed, outdoor events cancelled and 
volunteers were visiting the elderly as France and other nations battle 
a record-setting heat wave baking much of Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbg2gUsFKnE
- - -
[formidable]
*France records all-time highest temperature of 44.3C - (112F)*
Record for mainland France falls in south-eastern Vaucluse departement 
as Europe swelters in heatwave
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/28/france-on-red-alert-as-heatwave-forecast-to-reach-record-45c
- - -
[California]
*Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore*
Temperatures lead to what appears to be largest local die-off in 15 
years, raising fears for broader ecosystem
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/28/california-mussels-cooked-heat
- - -
[Heatwave background]
*Abrupt Climate Change Mechanisms Causing Profoundly Disturbing European 
Heatwave: Part 1 of 2*
Feline "Shackleton the Explorer" puts on a brave faced cameo appearance 
as a prelude to my exceedingly profoundly disturbing chat on the ongoing 
European Heatwave. Almost 500 million people in Europe are being subject 
to exceedingly high heatwave temperatures in June that exceed those 
dangerous conditions in the 2003 July/August heatwave that killed 70,000 
Europeans (50,000 in France alone). A very slow, very wavy, persistently 
stuck Jet Stream ridge lies over Europe; carrying exceedingly hot dry 
air from the Sahara Desert northward, humidifying it over the rapidly 
warming Mediterranean Sea, and transporting this very hot humid air over 
vast regions of densely populated Europe, with its lack of air 
conditioning (2% in Germany; 5% in France).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awnHOZ_zH6M
- - -
[Heat stress ]
*European Sauna: A Profoundly Serious Heatwave: Part 2 of 2*
Paul Beckwith
Published on Jun 28, 2019
A packet of air sitting over the Sahara Desert gets rapidly warmed up by 
the relentless heat of the Sun in a cloudless sky, with single digit 
relative humidity (dry) conditions, and 50+ C temperatures. Transported 
northward by the stuck jet stream ridge, it crosses the rapidly warming 
water surface of the Mediterranean Sea where it reaches relative 
humidities of 70 to 80%. Saturated with water vapour, it continues 
northward guided under the jet stream ridge to cover vast areas of 
Europe with unbearable temperatures (reaching 45.9 C) and high 
humidities. And it is only June; what will July and August be like?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fu1gvMkEhw
- - -
[classic Australian video about the body and houses and heat]
*Why 25 degrees really is hot in the UK | Did You Know?*
ABC News (Australia)
Published on Sep 17, 2018
Do the Brits just need to toughen up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMqkuAb-HYg


Book review
*Petroleum and Propaganda*
*The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry*
by John W. Farley - May 01, 2012
...John W. Farley teaches physics at the University of Nevada, Las 
Vegas. "Our Last Chance to Save Humanity?" a review of James Hansen's 
Storms of My Grandchildren, appeared in Monthly Review in September 
2010. He blogs at rabett.blogspot.com.
- - -
James Powell was inspired to write this important new book because of a 
remarkable paradox: among climate scientists, there is a near-unanimous 
consensus that global warming is occurring now, is largely human-made, 
and will cause very severe environmental problems if humanity continues 
business as usual. However, among the lay public the picture is much 
more mixed: only about half of the U.S. public agrees with the climate 
scientists. Why the enormous discrepancy?

Powell argues that "in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing 
the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in 
history." Although Powell himself is not a climate science researcher, 
he has an appropriate background to understand the field: he holds a 
doctorate in geochemistry from MIT and became a geology professor, 
teaching at Oberlin College for over twenty years. He has been a college 
president at three institutions, and served for a dozen years on the 
National Science Board. Powell's book is a sharp attack on the 
global-warming denial "industry," a network comprised of corporate 
funding, think tanks, popularizers, and propagandists, who all work with 
a compliant mass media.
*Corporate Funders*
Powell details the support of ExxonMobil for denialism, but omits the 
combative Koch brothers, owners of Koch Energy, the world's largest 
privately held energy company. ExxonMobil is the biggest funder of 
global-warming denialism, spending nearly $16 million on more than forty 
organizations over the period 1998–2005. Powell also mentions in passing 
funding by ideological conservative foundations, motivated by opposition 
to government regulation of the economy.
*Think Tanks*
Chapter nine describes "Toxic Tanks"--think tanks that promote 
global-warming denial. These toxic tanks have swell-sounding names 
(e.g., "Frontiers of Freedom") that do not hint they are climate-change 
deniers. Powell describes in detail four (out of a much larger number) 
of these fossil-fuel-company-funded think tanks.

1. The now-defunct Global Climate Coalition (GCC) included Exxon-Mobil, 
Amoco, Chevron, American Petroleum Institute, Shell, Texaco, U.S. 
Chamber of Commerce, Chrysler, General Motors, Ford, and the American 
Forest and Paper Association. The GCC, established in 1989, operated 
from the offices of the National Association of Manufacturing. The GCC 
hired a PR firm which produced a video to combat the 1997 Kyoto 
Protocol. However, some of its member companies left the GCC; they 
thought it too risky to be publicly identified with global-warming 
denial, and feared the fate of Big Tobacco; it had ended up losing 
lawsuits for health-care costs of smokers, ultimately settling for 
damages of $251 billion. Beset by the defections, the GCC disbanded in 2001.

During its lifetime, the GCC established a research arm, the Science and 
Technology Assessment Committee, which was staffed by industry 
scientists. A committee led by Mobil Oil chemical engineer L. C. 
Bernstein produced a confidential 1995 report which was circulated to 
the members of GCC: oil and coal companies, electric utilities, 
attorneys, National Mining Association, etc. In a stunning admission, 
the Bernstein Report concluded that "the scientific basis for the 
greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of 
greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot 
be denied." The report knocked down one of the most popular contrarian 
arguments: that global warming could be attributed to changes in the 
Sun's brightness. In opposition to the contrarian view, the Bernstein 
Report stated that changes in the brightness of the Sun were too small 
by at least a factor of five to cause the temperature change observed in 
the last 120 years. It pointed out that the deniers had no alternative 
theory of their own, saying "The contrarian theories raise interesting 
questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they 
do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of 
greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change."

Thus, while the oil companies and their hired hands were proclaiming in 
public that global warming was not caused by burning fossil fuels, their 
own scientists were saying exactly the opposite in private. If you have 
never heard of the Bernstein Report, you have lots of company. It did 
not surface until 2007, a dozen years after it was written, during a 
discovery process in a California court proceeding.

2. Another ExxonMobil-funded think tank discussed by Powell is the 
Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which originated as a Libertarian 
propaganda outfit supported by Big Tobacco. The manager for industry 
affairs for Philip Morris, Roy E. Marden, served for years on the 
Heartland board of directors. The Heartland Institute raised $676,500 
from ExxonMobil between 1996 and 2006; after 2006 Heartland stopped 
identifying their contributors. The institute published a slim booklet, 
The Skeptic's Handbook, whose publication costs were paid by "an 
anonymous donor," and whose author, "Joanna Nova," is a pseudonym. Vast 
numbers of the handbook were distributed for free--and in total over 
150,000 copies have been distributed in fifteen languages. The 
recipients include 850 journalists, 26,000 schools, and 19,000 leaders 
and politicians. The largest single recipients are black churches (over 
25,000 copies) and trustees at colleges and universities (over 20,000 
copies). In addition, over 60,000 free copies have been downloaded from 
their website.

In February 2012, too late for inclusion in Powell's book, confidential 
documents from the Heartland Institute were leaked to bloggers. Damaging 
revelations included the identification of some corporate funders of 
Heartland: Microsoft, tobacco giant Altria, the pharmaceutical giant 
GlaxoSmithKline, and the General Motors Foundation. The documents 
describe payments by Heartland to some contrarian scientists: for 
example, Craig Idso, head of an organization of climate change deniers 
in Arizona, was receiving over $139,000 annually. The documents also 
describe Heartland's plans for a "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 
Classrooms," and the planned "curriculum that shows that the topic of 
climate change is controversial and uncertain--two key points that are 
effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."

3. The George C. Marshall Institute, in Washington, D.C., was originally 
established in 1984 to flack for Reagan's Star Wars program (officially 
SDI, the "Strategic Defense Initiative"), a scheme for shooting down 
incoming enemy missiles. A scholarly study by the American Physical 
Society found that Star Wars would not work, but nobody who mattered 
minded at all. If you think the goal was to defend the United States 
from attack, Star Wars showed itself to be useless against the 9/11 
attacks. But if you think that one of the real goals of SDI was to spend 
money, then the program was a big success: by September 2001, Star Wars 
had homed in on the taxpayer for over $40 billion.

The Marshall Institute adopted other issues in addition to Star Wars, 
including second-hand smoke and global warming. The Marshall Institute 
proclaims that the health hazards of second-hand smoke are unproven. 
Regarding global warming, the scientists associated with the Marshall 
Institute have claimed at different times that (a) the twentieth century 
is not unusually warm, (b) global warming stopped in 2005, and (c) in 
any event increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will stimulate 
plant growth, thus fertilizing the earth. Therefore, increased carbon 
dioxide will be good for the planet.

Some of the scientists at the Marshall Institute have scientific 
credentials, but in fields that are remote from global-warming research. 
For example, Sally Baliunas and Willy Soon are both associated with the 
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. If you think that global 
warming is caused by increased brightness of the Sun, then Baliunas and 
Soon, both astrophysicists, have the relevant scientific background. If 
you do not think that the Sun is causing global warming, then Baliunas 
and Soon do not have expertise in the relevant discipline.

The claim that the Sun is causing global warming was refuted decades 
ago. If it were true, then both the surface of the earth and the 
stratosphere would warm. But if increased atmospheric greenhouse gases 
caused global warming, then the surface of the earth would warm, while 
the stratosphere would cool. In fact, stratospheric cooling has been 
observed, and it includes both natural contributions (volcanoes) and 
human-made contributions.1

Since 1979, direct observation of the Sun's output by satellite has 
established a high-quality data base. The output exhibits periodic small 
(less than 0.1 percent peak-to-trough) oscillations, caused by the 
eleven-year sunspot cycle. After averaging over the sunspot cycle, there 
has been no increase from one cycle to the next in the intensity of the 
Sun. The latest solar data can been seen at the website of James Hansen 
and Makiko Sato.2

Baliunas and Soon published a paper in 2003 in the journal Climate 
Research. It claimed that there was nothing special about global 
temperatures in the twentieth century. Three editors for the journal 
resigned in protest against publishing the flawed paper.

The founder of the Marshall Institute, the late Frederick Seitz, was a 
distinguished physicist whose 1940 textbook, The Modern Theory of 
Solids, was a standard in solid-state physics, albeit a field very 
remote from climate-change science. Seitz served as President of the 
National Academy of Sciences and then President of Rockefeller 
University. Shortly before retiring from Rockefeller University, he 
began working as a consultant to R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, helping 
Reynolds to spend $45 million for research that was intended to 
discredit or downplay the health hazards of smoking. Seitz and Reynolds 
were especially interested in second-hand smoke. Seitz's scientific 
credentials were impressive in their own field, but utterly nonexistent 
in the fields of the hazards of smoking or climate change.

The Baliunas-Soon study was funded by the American Petroleum Institute. 
The Marshall Institute received $630,000 from ExxonMobil between 1998 
and 2005, in addition to funds received from the Sarah Mellon Scaife and 
John M. Olin Foundations. Like the Heartland Institute, the Marshall 
Institute no longer publishes its donor list. Baliunas was paid $52,000 
by the Marshall Institute in 1997 for serving as a director. The CEO of 
the Marshall Institute, William O'Keefe, was formerly the COO of the 
American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the GCC, mentioned above.

One executive director of the Marshall Institute, Matthew Crawford, 
became so disillusioned that he resigned after only five months on the 
job. Crawford wrote that "the trappings of scholarship were used to put 
a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions 
served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of 
my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just 
happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that 
funded the think tank."3

The current Chairman of the Board of Marshall is Princeton physicist 
Will Happer, who was also my doctoral advisor at Columbia University in 
the early 1970s. Happer has had a distinguished career in atomic and 
laser physics, with over 200 publications in the peer-reviewed 
scientific literature, but none of them about climate change. In spring 
2010, he testified before a committee of the U.S. House of 
Representatives that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are 
beneficial because they fertilize plant growth. It is a fact that the 
source of carbon for plant growth is atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 
support of his position, Happer noted that greenhouses use greatly 
elevated carbon dioxide levels to increase plant growth.

However, a German scientist, Justus Liebig, discovered in the 1830s 
"Liebig's Law of the Minimum": plant growth is controlled not by the 
total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting 
factor). For example, in a desert, the limiting factor is typically 
water, not atmospheric carbon dioxide. Experiments have been conducted 
to seek increased plant growth caused by increased atmospheric carbon 
dioxide levels in a realistic agricultural environment. These 
experiments have yielded meager results, as demonstrated in an article 
written by my University of Nevada, Las Vegas colleague Stan Smith and 
published in 2000 in Nature, perhaps the most prestigious academic 
journal in the natural sciences, or indeed anywhere.

Another study at Stanford University published in Science in 2002 
reached the same conclusions. "Most studies have looked at the effects 
of CO2 on plants in pots or on very simple ecosystems and concluded that 
plants are going to grow faster in the future," said Field, co-author of 
the Science study. "We got exactly the same results when we applied CO2 
alone, but when we factored in realistic treatments--warming, changes in 
nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation--growth was actually 
suppressed."4

Like fellow physicist Frederick Seitz, Happer has a great deal of 
expertise, but none in the relevant scientific discipline (plant biology 
in this case).

4. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) was founded in 1984 to 
oppose government regulation in an astonishing range of fields: air 
quality, dioxin, drug safety, fuel-efficiency standards, labeling of 
alcoholic beverages, rent control, and security law. If that were not 
enough, CEI also opposes government regulation of high technology, 
e-commerce, intellectual property, and telecommunications. Whatever the 
field, government regulation is always bad. CEI filed lawsuits in the 
late 1990s challenging the Big Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

The CEI's "expert" on global warming is Myron Ebell, who claimed, in a 
2007 interview in Vanity Fair, that the "hockey stick" paper by Michael 
Mann and co-authors was wrong: the oceans are not warming, warming is 
not causing animal habitats to shift, and global warming does not 
threaten polar bears. Ebell has attacked eminent climate scientist James 
Hansen because the latter was trained as a physicist, not as a climate 
scientist. It seems fair therefore to ask about Ebell's training. He 
holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and later studied political 
theory at the London School of Economics and history at Cambridge 
University.

CEI has been actively opposed to doing anything about global warming; it 
funded a PR program, "Earth Summit Alternatives," which generated 
articles and interviews opposing the results of the 1992 Rio Climate 
Summit. In 1997, CEI offered to provide experts to promote the claim 
that global warming is "a theory, not a fact." The experts included 
Sallie Baliunas, Patrick J. Michaels, and S. Fred Singer (on Singer, see 
below). In 2006, CEI ran television advertisements in fourteen U.S. 
cities to counteract Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Not 
surprisingly, CEI has received funding from Amoco, Philip Morris, and 
ExxonMobil, with ExxonMobil giving $2 million between 1998 and 2005.
*Popularizers and Propagandists*
Powell discusses and dismisses several non-scientist deniers, including 
former weatherman Anthony Watts, British journalist Christopher 
Monckton, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, and fictional thriller 
writer Michael Crichton. Powell also sketches a small number of 
contrarian scientists; in addition to Frederick Seitz, Sallie Baliunas, 
and Willie Soon, Powell discusses S. Fred Singer, Freeman Dyson, Richard 
Lindzen, and Tim Ball.

Singer, a physicist, is a "utility infielder" of contrarian science, 
with claimed expertise on second-hand smoke, the ozone hole, and global 
warming. His swell-sounding Science and Environmental Policy Program 
(SEPP) has only one employee--Fred Singer himself.

Freeman Dyson is a mathematical physicist at the Princeton Institute for 
Advanced Study. His mathematical abilities are impressive, but he knows 
very little about climate or climate science. Dyson is member of the 
Jasons, a group of scientists, mostly physicists, who advise the 
Pentagon. In the 1970s the Jasons did some computer modeling of climate, 
although nobody in the group had any background in climate science. 
Powell remarks, "If Dyson's last brush with climate models was in the 
1970's, no wonder he scoffs at the models and derides those who use 
them" (69). Dyson advocates developing a "supertree" that can gobble 
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it underground or convert it 
to useful liquid fuels. Selective breeding of plants goes back to Luther 
Burbank over a century ago, but there is no evidence that such a 
supertree is anything but a figment of Dyson's imagination.

Richard Lindzen actually does have climate-related expertise. He earned 
his Ph.D. from Harvard, and holds an endowed chair in meteorology at 
MIT. His CV runs to 350 publications, and he is a member of the National 
Academy of Sciences. He helped to prepare the 1995 and 2001 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

Lindzen is convinced that the climate system somehow has negative 
feedbacks that tend to cancel out the effect of any external change. He 
proposed a specific model that he thought would produce negative 
feedback, the "adaptive iris" model. Unfortunately for Lindzen, when 
field measurements were made, they disproved his model instead of 
confirming it. The vast majority of climate scientists believe the 
feedbacks are positive, over the time scales relevant to humanity, 
decades to hundreds of thousands of years, with negative feedbacks 
(caused by weathering of rocks) operating on a longer time scale of 
millions of years or longer.5 He claims that the mainstream climate 
scientists have not proven global warming. This naturally raises the 
issue of how much proof is required. Lindzen has such an extremely high 
standard of proof that he believes that the link between cigarette 
smoking and cancer is unproven.

Lindzen has accused mainstream science of selling out for money, while 
claiming that skeptics of global warming have lost their grants. 
Actually, Lindzen himself has been awarded over $3.5 million since 1975 
from the National Science Foundation alone.

Timothy Ball, a less well-known denier, is a former professor at the 
University of Winnipeg. Over the last decade he has given over 600 
public talks on science and the environment, at the breakneck pace of 
over one talk every six days. Between 2002 and 2007 he wrote thirty-nine 
opinion pieces and thirty-two letters to the editor in twenty-four 
Canadian newspapers, a rate of one a month. Despite this rapid pace, he 
found time to write for the denier website Tech Central Station, and to 
appear in both the denier documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle 
and in a Fox News special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, hosted by Glenn 
Beck. Ball was associated with Friends of Science, a great-sounding name 
but in practice funded by oil and gas companies. Ball then left Friends 
of Science in order to establish the (even greater sounding) Natural 
Resources Stewardship Project. Two of its three directors were PR flacks 
for energy industry clients.

In 2006, Ball rashly initiated a battle that ended in defeat. In an 
opinion piece published in the Calgary Herald newspaper, he claimed both 
that he held Canada's first Ph.D. in climatology, and that he was a 
professor of the subject at the University of Winnipeg for twenty-eight 
years. Ball also disparaged another Canadian professor, Dan Johnson, 
Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Lethbridge. 
Johnson wrote a letter to the Herald accusing Ball of inflating his 
(Ball's) resume, and claiming that Ball "did not show any evidence of 
research regarding climate and atmosphere." Ball sued everybody in sight.

In the ensuring legal battle, Ball confessed to inflating his resume, 
admitted that he had been a professor for only eight years (not 
twenty-eight), and acknowledged that his doctoral degree was in 
geography, not climatology. The Herald newspaper expressed confidence in 
Johnson's letter, and wrote "The plaintiff (Ball) is viewed as a paid 
promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a 
practicing scientist." In June 2007, the time came to show up in court; 
with his reputation in ruins, Ball dropped his lawsuit (72).

Four years later, Ball appeared to have learned nothing from his defeat 
in 2007. He wrote an article in 2011 for the Canada Free Press (CFP), a 
conservative website, in which he attacked Professor Andrew Weaver, a 
climate scientist at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Weaver sued. The CFP folded, issuing a groveling apology:
CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver 
"knows very little about climate science." We entirely accept that he 
has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and 
that Dr. Ball's attack on his credentials is unjustified…. CFP sincerely 
apologizes to Dr. Weaver and expresses regret for the embarrassment and 
distress caused by the unfounded allegations in the article by Dr. Ball.

The CFP removed Ball's article from its website, and for good measure 
removed nearly all of the 200 other articles that the prolific Ball had 
written from the CFP website as well.6
*Politicians and the Mainstream Media*
The oil companies control rafts of state and federal politicians through 
the system of campaign contributions. This is hardly news, and Powell 
devotes little space to the hordes of Senators and Congressional 
Representatives with campaign contributions from the energy industry. 
The fundraising champion in the Senate is James Inhofe (R-OK), who has 
received more oil company money than any other Senator, raking in over 
$662,000 between 2000 and 2008. Over in the House, Congressman Joe 
Barton has taken over $1 million in oil and gas company money during his 
twenty-seven-year House career.

Ken Cuccinelli, Attorney General of Virginia, is a favorite of the Tea 
Party, which was shown to be a Republican front group by Paul Street and 
Anthony Dimaggio.7 Cuccinelli issued a Civil Investigating Demand (CID) 
in 2010, demanding that the University of Virginia produce a wide range 
of documents relating to Michael Mann, a former professor at Virginia 
(and now at Penn State). Claiming to be determining whether or not Mann 
defrauded the taxpayers of Virginia by researching global warming, 
Cuccinelli demanded every document relating to Mann over the previous 
eleven years. To its credit, the University of Virginia rejected 
Cuccinelli's demands and fought him. Cuccinelli lost in court on August 
20, 2010, but his CID was dismissed without prejudice, meaning that he 
could file again. At the time of the original CID, three university 
committees had exonerated Mann, and three more committees exonerated him 
later. Cuccinelli attempted to continue his fishing expedition in August 
2010 when he filed a new CID, but in March 2012 it was also dismissed, 
this time with prejudice.

Powell compares global-warming deniers to various other groups, 
including: the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic Church (the book 
cover depicts the trial of Galileo); Lysenko and his associates, who did 
a tremendous amount of damage to biological science in the Soviet Union; 
Creationists, who do not believe in Darwinian evolution; and AIDS 
denialists, who deny that HIV causes AIDS. In fact, "there is more 
evidence that HIV causes AIDS than there is for any other single human 
disease caused by an infectious agent, past or present," according to 
Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus.

Powell also attributes some of the success of the deniers to a failure 
of the mass media. The mainstream media typically are limited to one of 
two "frames" of the issue:

The first is open support for climate change denial by Fox News, Rush 
Limbaugh, Glen Beck, etc. The second is "fake balance" from the more 
responsible mainstream media. The media loves controversy--at least if 
it can be kept within certain controlled limits. There must be two sides 
to every controversy. So climate change deniers, representing 3 percent 
of climate scientists (if that), are granted equal weight with the vast 
majority of climate scientists, representing 97 percent of climate 
scientists.8

In an Appendix, Powell lists thirty-three countries or regions whose 
scientific academies have accepted the basic findings of human-caused 
global warming, as well as sixty-seven professional societies. None of 
these scientific academies have denied the basic science of human-caused 
global warming. (Powell has excluded denier websites and front groups.)
*The Tobacco Strategy: "Doubt Is Our Product"*
One important source for Powell is Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's 
Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on 
Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.9 The global-warming deniers 
do not have to win the argument, they just have to get a draw. Their 
goal is to create the impression that there is a serious scientific 
controversy about whether or not modern anthropogenic global warming is 
really happening. The global-warming deniers are following today the 
same strategy adopted by the tobacco companies decades earlier--as one 
tobacco company executive proclaimed, "Doubt is our product."
*Climategate: Much Ado About Nothing*
Powell devotes chapter fourteen to "Climategate," which he justifiably 
subtitles "Much Ado About Nothing." In November 2009, some still-unknown 
person burgled the emails of the Climate Research Unit of the University 
of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. Thousands of emails were posted on 
the internet. The denialist network took a handful of emails out of 
context, and claimed that the emails showed global warming to be a big 
hoax. The burglary and ensuing propaganda uproar occurred just weeks 
before the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, and it is hard to 
believe that the timing was coincidental.

A series of investigations followed, in both the United States and the 
United Kingdom. Every single one exonerated the scientists on the issue 
of scientific integrity.

The denialists claimed that the emails proved that climate scientists 
were admitting one thing in private while proclaiming something else in 
public. Actually, the topics covered in the emails were also discussed 
in the published scientific literature. The denialists were not familiar 
with this because most of the denialists are not scientists and do not 
read scientific literature.

For example, an email from climate researcher Kevin Trenberth laments 
that "it's a travesty that we can't account for the lack of warming at 
the moment." The background is that we know that the earth is 
accumulating energy, but the temperature of the surface of the earth 
experiences short-term increases and short-term decreases along with a 
long-term increase. What Trenberth regretted was the lack of ability to 
predict how the energy flows among the various parts of the earth 
climate system (land surface, ocean surface, atmosphere, and deep 
ocean). Trenberth's email was announcing the publication of his article 
"An Imperative for Climate Change Planning: Tracking Earth's Global 
Energy."10 In it, these issues were discussed in detail. The Trenberth 
email did not differ in any essential way from the published article. 
The email, as a communication from one expert to another, used shorthand 
that made it possible for deniers to take it out of context and distort 
its meaning.

What the emails did show was that the climate scientists were frustrated 
by constant attacks by denialists.
*Sources, Dedication, and Limitations*
Powell's book ends with nineteen pages of notes and a seven-page 
bibliography. He draws upon a number of sources, including Naomi Oreskes 
and Erik Conway's admirable Merchants of Doubt; the Skeptical Science 
website which features frequently raised skeptical arguments; the blog 
realclimate.org (run by climate scientists); and helpful information 
from Greenpeace.

Powell's book is dedicated to James Hansen, Michael Mann, Benjamin 
Santer, and the late Stephen Schneider, "scientists of courage and 
integrity." James Hansen is a NASA scientist and one of the leading 
climate change researchers in the world. (For a review of Hansen's book 
Storms of My Grandchildren, see the September 2010 Monthly Review.11) 
Michael Mann, a physicist and climatologist currently at Penn State 
University, was the lead author on the famous "hockeystick" paper in 
1998, which became a lightning rod for attacks by deniers. Benjamin 
Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was a 
lead author for a chapter in the 1995 IPCC report. Santer was a target 
for many personal attacks by the deniers for his role. And the late 
Stephen Schneider, biology professor at Stanford and consultant to many 
government agencies, was an early (1980s) activist on the global-warming 
issue.

While Powell's book is invaluable, the climate science background 
consists of a skimpy three-page chapter, including only one graph. Also 
barely discussed are the impacts of global warming. And outside the 
purview of the book is what to do about global warming.

One significant omission in the book is that Powell attributes the 
attacks on global warming to fossil-fuel companies (mainly ExxonMobil), 
and their hired hands, following the strategy pioneered by Big Tobacco. 
He does not consider that efforts to transition to non-carbon-emitting 
forms of energy also provokes opposition, or at least lack of support, 
from the rest of business. Many non-carbon forms of energy are more 
expensive than fossil fuels. Business wants to minimize costs, including 
the cost of energy; renewable energy imposes additional costs on 
business. Also, the largest consequences of global warming will start to 
occur a few decades in the future, beyond the time horizon of big and 
small businesses. Business has to meet a payroll every month, and many 
businesses must keep the stockholders happy with quarterly statements of 
earnings. A problem, however severe, that is decades in the future is so 
far off that many businesses are unwilling to make sacrifices now to 
prevent the problems in the future.

Many non-energy businesses are perfectly happy to sit out the battle, 
letting ExxonMobil take the lead in organizing and funding 
global-warming denial efforts. For their part, many politicians are 
perfectly willing to do nothing, rather than impose additional costs on 
their campaign contributors. The "flack" by the deniers provides a 
wonderful excuse; since the science is (supposedly) uncertain, do not do 
anything.

While the Republicans come in for a lot of justifiable criticism, many 
Democrats are pretty bad also. Recall also that at the time of the 1997 
Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. Senate passed a Byrd-Hagel resolution 
expressing the Senate's opposition to the Kyoto treaty. It passed the 
U.S. Senate by a lopsided 95–0. Despite the title of Chris Mooney's 
book, The Republican War on Science, the Democratic Party is part of the 
problem as well, as demonstrated by the bipartisan and utterly 
overwhelming anti-Kyoto vote. Clinton and Gore went to Kyoto and signed 
the Kyoto Protocol but did not bother to take the treaty to the U.S. 
Senate for ratification where it would have been dead on arrival. So 
Clinton and Gore got credit for good intentions, thus winning on 
symbolism, while the fossil-fuel companies won on substance.

In the global-warming denial industry, the upper-level funders and 
fundraisers must be aware that the think tanks are partisans of their 
financial contributors. The lower-level employees may or may not be 
aware. Certainly many of the consumers of the propaganda are unaware of 
the industry funding. Not surprisingly, in recent years, many think 
tanks have stopped listing their financial contributors. And a few 
liberal and leftist writers have been sufficiently misled by the 
denialist arguments that they have become deniers themselves. But I 
would be astounded if they too were on the ExxonMobil payroll.

This arrangement is reminiscent of another large-scale opinion-forming 
project, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that was 
secretly funded by the CIA during the Cold War. The goal was to promote 
intellectuals who supported U.S. power and capitalism generally, 
criticizing the Soviet Union specifically and communism generally. 
Participants were not required to defend each and every U.S. policy, and 
this enhanced the credibility of the authors. The CCF supported 
magazines and conferences, and at its peak had branches in some 
thirty-five countries. Those at the top of the CCF knew about the CIA 
funding, while some contributors to magazines did not.

CIA funding was kept secret for two reasons: first, to promote the 
notion that Soviet citizens and their supporters were slaves to the 
government, while Western intellectuals were free men and women. Public 
acknowledgment of support by the CIA would ruin this pretty picture. (In 
fact, the 1967 exposure of the CIA funding led to the CCF becoming 
moribund.) The second reason was that many CCF intellectuals were social 
democrats, and U.S. conservatives would have objected to funding them.12

The CCF/CIA analogy holds lessons for the climate change denial 
industry. Those at the top of the organizations certainly know of their 
funding by fossil-fuel companies, but many members of the general public 
are unaware of the funding of denialist think tanks. Casual readers of 
denialist blogs are unaware of the funding, and it would be an error to 
assume that everyone spouting the denialist arguments is on the 
ExxonMobil payroll.
*Conclusion*
Powell is not a radical or leftist in any way, but his book could be 
evaluated bearing in mind Marx's dictum that the ideas of the ruling 
class become the ruling ideas of the whole society. The Inquisition of 
Climate Science explains in detail how the global-warming-denialist 
ideas that serve the interests of the oil companies (and fossil-fuels 
industry) become sincerely held beliefs for a significant fraction of 
society. Denialist ideas are rejected by the vast majority of climate 
scientists, and the oil companies themselves know better from their own 
scientists (as the Bernstein Report mentioned above shows). 
Nevertheless, they continue to promote and subsidize a denialist 
literature blocking the crystallization of mass demands for far-reaching 
social transformation, even though this is precisely what is required to 
avoid catastrophic global warming.

My bookshelf holds a number of books about global warming, but The 
Inquisition of Climate Science is unequalled, combining scientific 
accuracy with clarity of exposition. It is comprehensive in its scope 
despite its modest length of 232 pages. A typical chapter is ten pages 
long, with cute titles and subtitles ("Aren't You Embarrassed, Mr. 
Will?"). The book is written in a lively manner that is accessible to 
the lay public; Powell is able clearly to explain phenomena that only a 
few decades ago were unclear even to specialists. Inquisition is the 
definitive popular refutation of many of the denialist arguments that 
are frequently heard in the media and on the web. Everyone who cares 
about global warming should have a copy.
https://monthlyreview.org/2012/05/01/petroleum-and-propaganda/
- - -
[The best lists of denialist individuals and organizations is at DeSmogBlog]
*DeSmog Climate Disinformation Research Database*
An extensive database of individual climate deniers involved in the 
global warming denial industry.
DeSmogBlog thoroughly investigates the academic and industry backgrounds 
of those involved in the PR spin campaigns that are confusing the public 
and stalling action on global warming. If there's anyone or any 
organization, (i.e. scientist, self-professed "expert," think tank, 
industry association, company) that you would like to see researched and 
reported on DeSmogBlog,
https://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database



[WOTUS]
*Opinion: The proposed change to the definition of "waters of the United 
States" flouts sound science*
S. Mazeika P. Sullivan, Mark C. Rains, and Amanda D. Rodewald
PNAS June 11, 2019 116 (24) 11558-11561; 
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907489116

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corps of 
Engineers (hereafter, "the agencies") have issued a proposed rule (1) 
that would remove Clean Water Act (CWA) protections from more than half 
of wetlands and one-fifth of streams in the United States (2). This move 
sharply contrasts with reports indicating that US waters remain 
threatened by storms, droughts, contaminants, algal blooms, and other 
stressors. Even the EPA's National Water Quality Inventory detected poor 
conditions in 46% of stream and river miles and 32% of wetlands (3). In 
short, the proposed rule does not reflect the best-available science 
and, if enacted, will damage our nation's water resources.

Despite the CWA's mandate "to restore and maintain the chemical, 
physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters" (4), 
controversy persists over jurisdiction. For decades, the protected 
"waters of the United States" (WOTUS) included traditionally navigable 
waters (TNWs), such as large rivers, lakes, and territorial seas, as 
well as waters meaningfully connected to or affecting the integrity of 
TNWs. Operationalizing this connection has become a flashpoint for the 
science and politics of water protection...
- - -
The Trump administration's proposed rule largely ignores or 
misrepresents several conclusions of the Connectivity Report and SAB 
review. In relying more upon case law than science, the proposed rule 
would remove protection for millions of stream miles and acres of 
wetlands that keep waters and watersheds healthy. Some of our most 
vulnerable waters will lose protection, including ephemeral streams, 
non-floodplain wetlands, and some floodplain wetlands. The proposed rule 
is inconsistent with the best-available science regarding scale, 
structural and functional connectivity, and consideration of multiple 
dimensions of connectivity.

*Delicate Balance*
Clean water depends on complex and highly variable interactions among 
climate, geology, topography, land use–land cover, human perturbations, 
and ecosystem processes operating across multiple spatial and temporal 
scales. As such, the SAB cautioned that connectivity of any single 
waterbody must be evaluated from systems-level perspectives, such as 
watersheds and riverscapes, groundwater basins, and fluvial 
hydrosystems. Although the contribution of a single wetland or stream to 
water health may be small, the cumulative effects are striking. For 
example, ephemeral and intermittent streams constitute more than 
two-thirds of all streams in the conterminous United States (10), more 
than half of which feed public water systems supporting about a third of 
Americans. The proposed rule fails to consider watersheds from such a 
broad perspective, instead excluding the ephemeral streams and 
non-floodplain wetlands that maintain watershed integrity.

The proposed rule further deviates from science by improperly 
recognizing structural connectivity (i.e., how waterbodies are 
physically connected to one another) and functional connectivity (i.e., 
interactions among elements, such as the movement of sediments along 
river networks). Both mediate the movement of mass, energy, and biota 
among waterbodies (6, 10). Although streams are structurally connected 
to downstream waters through networks of continuous beds and banks, the 
proposed rule ignores the typical physical evidence (e.g., use of bed, 
banks, and an ordinary high-water mark) and suggests potentially using 
blue-line streams on U.S. Geological Survey topographic or National 
Hydrology Dataset maps as a way to indicate a jurisdictional stream. 
Although the agencies indicate that combining this information with 
other measures (for example, with fieldwork and the relative size of a 
stream, also known as "stream order") will be important to avoid 
overestimating flow and erroneously concluding the presence of a 
jurisdictional tributary, they fail to recognize the opposite problem. 
In fact, the poor resolution of currently mapped drainage networks can 
miss one-third of stream lengths relative to higher-resolution data 
(e.g., Light Detection and Ranging [LIDAR]) and thus lead to a gross 
underestimation of presence of streams...
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/24/11558



*This Day in Climate History - June 29, 2014- from D.R. Tucker*
June 29, 2014: On CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," Henry Paulson and Robert 
Rubin discuss the risky business of carbon pollution.
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/29/fmr-u-s-treasury-secy-rubin-on-climate-change-the-risk-here-is-catastrophic/ 

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/210939-former-treasury-secretary-gop-ready-for-serious-climate-discussion 

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/01/how-business-media-covered-risky-business-clima/199953 

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