Denialism

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

GMCarter - 10 Apr 2007 17:02 GMT

In any form...same sh.t stinks whether it's Bush and climate changed
caused by humans (and greedy low life bastards like Bush/Cheney) or an
Ahmadinejad denying the Nazi holocaut against Jews, muslims, gays and
lesbians, gypsies, etc. Or fools that want to believe HIV doesn't
cause AIDS.

George M. Carter

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041007P.shtml
\There Is Climate Change Censorship - and it's the Deniers Who Dish it
Out
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK

Tuesday 10 April 2007

Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down
findings, and are then accused of silencing their critics.

The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of
climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists
contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle
over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves
consensus. This means that the panel's reports are conservative - even
timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific
document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians
sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens
their interests.

The scientists fight back, but they always have to make
concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of
the warning that "North America is expected to experience locally
severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and
cultural disruption from climate change related events".

This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the
rightwing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is
conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments
should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the
climate conspiracists no explanations are required. The world's most
conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a
conspiracy of screaming demagogues.

This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the
wrong way round. In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in
columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation
is repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying
to "shut down debate." Those who say that man-made global warming is
not taking place, they claim, are being censored.

Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid
example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters
sent - by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and
Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it
cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science.
These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were
merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is
a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in
the name of free speech.

In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4's film
The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to "invisible
censorship". He seems to have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of
prime-time television to expound his theory that climate change is a
green conspiracy. What did this censorship amount to? Complaints about
one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television
Commission. It found that "the views of the four complainants, as made
clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and
that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the
programmes when they agreed to take part". This, apparently, makes him
a martyr.

If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show
you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists
whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have
been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or
suppressed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279
climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded
to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following
constraints: 1. Pressure to eliminate the words "climate change",
"global warming", or other similar terms from their communications; 2.
Editing of scientific reports by their superiors that "changed the
meaning of scientific findings"; 3. Statements by officials at their
agencies that misrepresented their findings; 4. The disappearance or
unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials
relating to climate; 5. New or unusual administrative requirements
that impair climate-related work; 6. Situations in which scientists
have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a
project because of pressure to change scientific findings. They
reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five
years.

In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a
report by the Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references
to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions.
It added a reference to a study, partly funded by the American
Petroleum Institute, that suggested that temperatures are not rising.
Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.

After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising
emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his
superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to
appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station
and said that Knutson was "too tired" to conduct the interview. The
official explained to him that the "White House said no". All media
inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there
was no connection between global warming and hurricanes.

Last year Nasa's top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported
that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web
postings. He was told by Nasa's PR officials that there would be "dire
consequences" if he continued to call for rapid reductions in
greenhouse gases.

Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service
told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must
understand "the administration's position on climate change, polar
bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these
issues".

At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a
former White House aide who had previously worked at the American
Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to
government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush
administration. Though not a scientist, he had struck out evidence
that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that
there was serious scientific doubt about global warming.

The guardians of free speech in Britain aren't above attempting a
little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received
several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening
us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate
science. On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are
removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators
Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil
offends the corporation's "right of free speech".

After Martin Durkin's film was broadcast, one of the scientists it
featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate
change had been misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter
from Durkin's production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for
defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was
neither misrepresented nor misled.

Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people
complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking
place?

--------

Monbiot.com