Sad but true. Is it surprising that journalists-cum-propagandists are the norm? We're being attacked by people who want to force their (misguided) beliefs on the rest of us.
I'm working to insure that everyone gets a shot at the truth. Let me know what you think?
A resolution by the Motorcycle Riders Foundation, motorcycle and automotive groups to Congress to demand scientific transparency and truth for every motoring individual in the world.
Whereas Truth and Free Speech are the cornerstones of our society, motorcyclists all over the country want our rights and the truth to be respected
Whereas Critical Thinking is the backbone of science it needs to be held high for kids all over the world. America always endeavored to be the bastion of truth and free speech.
Whereas science is never settled and the public requires nothing but the truth as it affects their very existence.
Whereas children deserve to know the truth and scientific transparency. No matter who tries to hide the truth, it will surface and the real deniers will be exposed.
Whereas every law in this country that effects the lives, livelihoods, homes, businesses and transportation must be based on truth or they are meaningless.
Whereas criminal governments throughout history restricted free speech. We cannot allow any attack on free speech to infiltrate our government.
You are absolutely right. I have recently declined to apply to some editorial jobs overseeing climate coverage for which I was well qualified, having covered climate since before James Hansen's congressional testimony. I lost interest in the jobs when I read the descriptions, and it was clear they were interested in hype and hysteria, as you described, not the kind of journalism I have practiced for 7 decades, which includes viewing all claims, in any direction, with skepticism, and reflecting that in coverage.
"Covering Climate Now" is a climate crisis advocacy group run out of the Columbia School of Journalism. It has as members that include most wire services (AFP, AP, Bloomberg, UPI), many major and minor newspapers ) (including the Daily Camera), and just about all broadcast news outlets. They claim to reach over 2 billion people. Each week they will take a topic and try to have their members push a particular them. I believe they are behind much of the crisis coverage.
It is rather incomplete! They do not have Fox News. They do not have the New York Post or The Epoch Times, two of the most widely read newspapers in the world (they also do not have the NY Times or Washington Post).
Worst of all, they do not have the most widely accessed climate web site, WattsUpWithThat, or any of the other web sites run by leading climate scientists, such as this Substack Site, Climate, Etc., Dr Roy Spencer, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, CO2 Science, etc., etc., etc.
Another issue is that in media outlets and cutbacks, we have lost specialist science reporters whose experiences led them to some levels of appropriate skepticism.Plus they had some idea of the landscape of disciplines and whom to call. That expertise seems to have been lost. Also external NGO funding of reporting, which is not particularly interested in dispassionate looks at scientific controversies or even different narratives.
Agreed. The norms of the "climate beat" seem very different than those of, say, the "politics beat" where (some at least) believe their role is to hold the powerful accountable. On climate it sometimes seems that the climate beat exists to protect the powerful from being held accountable.
Upstream of norms in accounting for the difference in quality of coverage is the nature of the subject matter. There have been plenty of street-smart kids without formal training who started on the police desk and made themselves into perfectly adequate reporters of doings around City Hall and the State House. That's much more difficult to do given the multiple disciplines involved in the claims around climate science. This stuff is hard!
1. This says it all, tells me we are not dealing with science (shocker right?). "multiple journalists have told me in conversations that there is no way they can ever be seen to engage with me, as it is a professional hazard." Burn it all to the ground.
2. The sub-header, "Coverage of climate has become more about narrative promotion than news", change "promotion" to "control", narrative control is what we have been discussing.
And its everywhere.
See coveringclimatenow.org, orwellian star chamber at Columbia but as we are finding out that only scratches the surface.
Regarding the scare stories, no different than the book Koonin wrote, then he suffered personal attacks (sorry, "fact checks") by attack dogs like Hausfather. That Koonin then debunked.
One question I have for a future issue of Honest Broker is "what do climate modelers think about whether rates of change will accelerate in the future? Is the current rate of change (say in average temperatures for the US) likely to increase? Does it depend on assumptions about future emissions?
Sharon: Rates of temperature change in the future can only "accelerate" due to a few things. One is an increase in emissions. But climate modelers can't predict future emissions. A second is a change in the fraction of emissions that remains in the atmosphere which the IPCC says has been 56% for decades. The third is a change in the temperature gain per Gt of emissions. But the IPCC uses the same conversion from Gt CO2 to delta-T out to 2100 so that won't change according to their own models. Hence, the only acceleration of delta-T that is possible would be due to an increase in emissions and all the current data points in the opposite direction. Conclusion: delta-T aint gonna accelerate.
Thanks, Donald! I guess there might be some argument that there might be an increase in emissions (Chinese coal plants, who knows?). I guess my point is whether increases in temp are linear with regard to emissions or some other function. So take the trends from fossil fuels graph from EPA here https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data.. would the ave temp have gone up linearly or some other function? I think we could tell this from observed data. Maybe more years of 56% remaining in the atmosphere adds up to more total in the atmosphere? Sorry if these are dumb questions.. I'm a biologist.
Sharon: I think the point is that the rate of temperature gain doesn't willy nilly decide to go up or down on its own. If it were 100% determined by CO2 emissions (which from year to year it isn't) then it could only go up if emissions per year increased, the fraction remaining in the atmosphere increased, or the algorithm converting Gt CO2 to temperature gain changed. The IPCC uses the same algorithm from 2015 to 2100. The fraction remaining in the atmosphere (according to IPCC) hasn't changed in 40 years. Ergo, the whole business of scenarios has no science in it at all and it all comes down to future CO2 emissions which nobody can predict.
Thanks! It provides a convenient excuse for institutional and funding issues. "if only we could shut down fossil fuel use, we'd have no fires, floods hurricanes, etc." the associated point is that we can't protect without using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future (wildfire.. air resources, trucks, bulldozers, etc.) plus getting firefighters to the site.. and so on.
The most salient observation about the gang who promote these CC Fear Porn Narratives is they also just as vigorously promote dumb, ineffective non-solutions like Wind, Solar, Batteries & Hydrogen. And almost all of them are antagonistic to the REAL solutions which are Nuclear & Methanol. In fact their long historical opposition to Nuclear energy makes them more than anyone else the cause of excess GHG emissions.
Methanol is not ethanol. Methanol is distilled from any biomass (i.e. forest overgrowth that causes forest fires) or synthesized by reacting CO with H2. Unlike ethanol, methanol can be made with 100% carbon efficiency, that is 100% of the carbon captured from the atmosphere by the trees or brush goes into the methanol fuel. Whereas fermented corn ethanol has around a 20% carbon efficiency. You want that atmospheric CO2 to end up in your liquid fuel, not wasted, that's stupid.
Read the book by the Nobel Prize winning Chemist, George Olah: "Beyond Oil & Gas, The Methanol Economy". He examined all the alternatives to Oil & Gas for future energy supply and concluded methanol was the best alternative. It is widely being used in China for transport fuel, cooking fuel and home heating fuel. They make it from coal for ~13 cents/liter.
Can't say I'm deeply familiar with them. Many of these specialist outlets (like Carbon Brief, which I follow closely) have a weird mix of excellent work and not-so-much. It is really hard for the non-specialist to tell the difference.
The whats of the official Climate Narratives are pretty easy to describe. The probable whys aren't all that hard, either. There's a adage out there which goes something like "never fail to take advantage of a crisis". There are trillions of dollars at stake in response to a changing climate and many entrepreneurs out there looking to capture their share and preferably more...a lot more. Then there's basic human nature. People want to feel good and what could feel better than saving the planet and human life itself?
Here's the thing, though. This particular game is played all day every day in other spheres and in other contexts. A driving force of this particular game is "Politics". A cursory look at how the U.S. Federal Budget is spent tells you everything you need to know. Unfortunately, there are actual effects to a changing climate and it becoming just another part of the game is bad for everyone. It's good to know that despite the noise there are successes occurring. It would be even better if the narrative would become fact and science-based and leading to real-world solutions, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.
As always, I like to look at the underlying motivations for these observations. If climate change is an existential threat that’s already impacting just about every aspect of life, then that provides the rationale for taking drastic action. That action generally seems to involve more power accruing to government (at many levels) in order to control how people live (by raising the cost of energy, for example).
Power and Control. These are age old themes. Climate change is a powerful pretext for advancing this agenda. Of course the ones promoting it believe they will be part of the group that has the power and control.
Note that I’m not denying that climate change is occurring, nor that it shouldn’t be mitigated when possible. However, we keep seeing this tendency to exaggerate many aspects of it.
For some reason, power and control don’t resonate with me as the very root explanation for this persistent obsession with climate alarmism. What are those in power trying to control? I have a good friend who is deathly afraid of snakes. Even the tiniest benign garter snake gives her panic attacks. There is some suggestion that its possible for certain fears to be innate. I wonder if people are naturally afraid of weather calamities. In the olden days people had capricious and scary gods who controlled the weather--- Thor throwing thunderbolts.
The elites in power certainly are trying to control the weather even if it’s at the expense of the poor.
The evidence from evolutionary psychology demonstrates clearly that we organize our thinking according to narratives; that we are capable of believing anything; that when presented with contrary data we tend to double down on our beliefs; and that we tend to align within groups reflecting our tribal origins and when we do align, we become stupid and frequently delusional. It's a problem!!
Because the people who formerly reported on and even investigated have joined the climate beat a whole section of the media has been silenced in criticising what is mainly a political movement. The public swallow it all.
This silence has been bought and paid for by the likes of Bill Gates who pays for a section in the British Daily Telegraph to faithfully promote his views and nothing else. Pravda. Niet.
I don't disagree but these narratives predate Bill Gates. And in fact you see a lot of Net Zero scepticism at least in the Telegraph from e.g. Ross Clark
Interestingly enough I am planning to write about what causes Paradigm Shifts as an essay for my History study group. I plan to focus on the major and rapid changes to many governments' pandemic contingency plans in March 2020 and what caused the change. Donations from the Gates Foundation will figure as a major factor, in my mind.
An aside but there are many bugs in substack which a substantial author like yourself would be better flagging up rather than a private commenter.
Above when trying to reply to Richard I was flagged up as needing to subscribe to do so but clearly I am still a paid subscriber for several months yet.
The good (and I guess bad) news is that Substack does all the back office stuff. That said they are responsive on both Twitter and Notes if you have issues.
The fact that you are commenting here means that they see you as paid, so I'm glad you are here!
Sad but true. Is it surprising that journalists-cum-propagandists are the norm? We're being attacked by people who want to force their (misguided) beliefs on the rest of us.
I'm working to insure that everyone gets a shot at the truth. Let me know what you think?
A resolution by the Motorcycle Riders Foundation, motorcycle and automotive groups to Congress to demand scientific transparency and truth for every motoring individual in the world.
Whereas Truth and Free Speech are the cornerstones of our society, motorcyclists all over the country want our rights and the truth to be respected
Whereas Critical Thinking is the backbone of science it needs to be held high for kids all over the world. America always endeavored to be the bastion of truth and free speech.
Whereas science is never settled and the public requires nothing but the truth as it affects their very existence.
Whereas children deserve to know the truth and scientific transparency. No matter who tries to hide the truth, it will surface and the real deniers will be exposed.
Whereas every law in this country that effects the lives, livelihoods, homes, businesses and transportation must be based on truth or they are meaningless.
Whereas criminal governments throughout history restricted free speech. We cannot allow any attack on free speech to infiltrate our government.
A rough draft by K. Ball
You are absolutely right. I have recently declined to apply to some editorial jobs overseeing climate coverage for which I was well qualified, having covered climate since before James Hansen's congressional testimony. I lost interest in the jobs when I read the descriptions, and it was clear they were interested in hype and hysteria, as you described, not the kind of journalism I have practiced for 7 decades, which includes viewing all claims, in any direction, with skepticism, and reflecting that in coverage.
"Covering Climate Now" is a climate crisis advocacy group run out of the Columbia School of Journalism. It has as members that include most wire services (AFP, AP, Bloomberg, UPI), many major and minor newspapers ) (including the Daily Camera), and just about all broadcast news outlets. They claim to reach over 2 billion people. Each week they will take a topic and try to have their members push a particular them. I believe they are behind much of the crisis coverage.
I looked at the Partners List on their web site: https://coveringclimatenow.org/partners/partner-list/
It is rather incomplete! They do not have Fox News. They do not have the New York Post or The Epoch Times, two of the most widely read newspapers in the world (they also do not have the NY Times or Washington Post).
Worst of all, they do not have the most widely accessed climate web site, WattsUpWithThat, or any of the other web sites run by leading climate scientists, such as this Substack Site, Climate, Etc., Dr Roy Spencer, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, CO2 Science, etc., etc., etc.
Another issue is that in media outlets and cutbacks, we have lost specialist science reporters whose experiences led them to some levels of appropriate skepticism.Plus they had some idea of the landscape of disciplines and whom to call. That expertise seems to have been lost. Also external NGO funding of reporting, which is not particularly interested in dispassionate looks at scientific controversies or even different narratives.
Agreed. The norms of the "climate beat" seem very different than those of, say, the "politics beat" where (some at least) believe their role is to hold the powerful accountable. On climate it sometimes seems that the climate beat exists to protect the powerful from being held accountable.
Upstream of norms in accounting for the difference in quality of coverage is the nature of the subject matter. There have been plenty of street-smart kids without formal training who started on the police desk and made themselves into perfectly adequate reporters of doings around City Hall and the State House. That's much more difficult to do given the multiple disciplines involved in the claims around climate science. This stuff is hard!
1. This says it all, tells me we are not dealing with science (shocker right?). "multiple journalists have told me in conversations that there is no way they can ever be seen to engage with me, as it is a professional hazard." Burn it all to the ground.
2. The sub-header, "Coverage of climate has become more about narrative promotion than news", change "promotion" to "control", narrative control is what we have been discussing.
And its everywhere.
See coveringclimatenow.org, orwellian star chamber at Columbia but as we are finding out that only scratches the surface.
Regarding the scare stories, no different than the book Koonin wrote, then he suffered personal attacks (sorry, "fact checks") by attack dogs like Hausfather. That Koonin then debunked.
As always, i hope you survive the weekend.
We like you.
Ha! Thanks. I'll be here next week ;-)
I just posted about a recent one at the WaPo. I think part of it is that the new crop of climate reporters don't realize that there are scientists who know about adaptation. Because sadly, our disciplines are not cool. https://forestpolicypub.com/2023/04/28/science-friday-can-forest-trees-adapt-to-climate-change-i-questions-raised-in-recent-wapo-story/
One question I have for a future issue of Honest Broker is "what do climate modelers think about whether rates of change will accelerate in the future? Is the current rate of change (say in average temperatures for the US) likely to increase? Does it depend on assumptions about future emissions?
Thanks!
Great commentary and Qs!
Sharon: Rates of temperature change in the future can only "accelerate" due to a few things. One is an increase in emissions. But climate modelers can't predict future emissions. A second is a change in the fraction of emissions that remains in the atmosphere which the IPCC says has been 56% for decades. The third is a change in the temperature gain per Gt of emissions. But the IPCC uses the same conversion from Gt CO2 to delta-T out to 2100 so that won't change according to their own models. Hence, the only acceleration of delta-T that is possible would be due to an increase in emissions and all the current data points in the opposite direction. Conclusion: delta-T aint gonna accelerate.
Thanks, Donald! I guess there might be some argument that there might be an increase in emissions (Chinese coal plants, who knows?). I guess my point is whether increases in temp are linear with regard to emissions or some other function. So take the trends from fossil fuels graph from EPA here https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data.. would the ave temp have gone up linearly or some other function? I think we could tell this from observed data. Maybe more years of 56% remaining in the atmosphere adds up to more total in the atmosphere? Sorry if these are dumb questions.. I'm a biologist.
Sharon: I think the point is that the rate of temperature gain doesn't willy nilly decide to go up or down on its own. If it were 100% determined by CO2 emissions (which from year to year it isn't) then it could only go up if emissions per year increased, the fraction remaining in the atmosphere increased, or the algorithm converting Gt CO2 to temperature gain changed. The IPCC uses the same algorithm from 2015 to 2100. The fraction remaining in the atmosphere (according to IPCC) hasn't changed in 40 years. Ergo, the whole business of scenarios has no science in it at all and it all comes down to future CO2 emissions which nobody can predict.
This article by Fred Pearce is such an exception to the rule. I love sharing it
https://e360.yale.edu/features/its-not-just-climate-are-we-ignoring-other-causes-of-disasters
Agreed. Fred has done some very good work over the years (and paid the price also).
Thanks! It provides a convenient excuse for institutional and funding issues. "if only we could shut down fossil fuel use, we'd have no fires, floods hurricanes, etc." the associated point is that we can't protect without using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future (wildfire.. air resources, trucks, bulldozers, etc.) plus getting firefighters to the site.. and so on.
The most salient observation about the gang who promote these CC Fear Porn Narratives is they also just as vigorously promote dumb, ineffective non-solutions like Wind, Solar, Batteries & Hydrogen. And almost all of them are antagonistic to the REAL solutions which are Nuclear & Methanol. In fact their long historical opposition to Nuclear energy makes them more than anyone else the cause of excess GHG emissions.
Why methanol? Serious question and I have this aversion to burning food to get from A to B.
Methanol is not ethanol. Methanol is distilled from any biomass (i.e. forest overgrowth that causes forest fires) or synthesized by reacting CO with H2. Unlike ethanol, methanol can be made with 100% carbon efficiency, that is 100% of the carbon captured from the atmosphere by the trees or brush goes into the methanol fuel. Whereas fermented corn ethanol has around a 20% carbon efficiency. You want that atmospheric CO2 to end up in your liquid fuel, not wasted, that's stupid.
Read the book by the Nobel Prize winning Chemist, George Olah: "Beyond Oil & Gas, The Methanol Economy". He examined all the alternatives to Oil & Gas for future energy supply and concluded methanol was the best alternative. It is widely being used in China for transport fuel, cooking fuel and home heating fuel. They make it from coal for ~13 cents/liter.
Thanks, SmithFS
What do you think of "Covering Climate Now" as an organization that orchestrates one sided coverage?
Can't say I'm deeply familiar with them. Many of these specialist outlets (like Carbon Brief, which I follow closely) have a weird mix of excellent work and not-so-much. It is really hard for the non-specialist to tell the difference.
The whats of the official Climate Narratives are pretty easy to describe. The probable whys aren't all that hard, either. There's a adage out there which goes something like "never fail to take advantage of a crisis". There are trillions of dollars at stake in response to a changing climate and many entrepreneurs out there looking to capture their share and preferably more...a lot more. Then there's basic human nature. People want to feel good and what could feel better than saving the planet and human life itself?
Here's the thing, though. This particular game is played all day every day in other spheres and in other contexts. A driving force of this particular game is "Politics". A cursory look at how the U.S. Federal Budget is spent tells you everything you need to know. Unfortunately, there are actual effects to a changing climate and it becoming just another part of the game is bad for everyone. It's good to know that despite the noise there are successes occurring. It would be even better if the narrative would become fact and science-based and leading to real-world solutions, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
As always, I like to look at the underlying motivations for these observations. If climate change is an existential threat that’s already impacting just about every aspect of life, then that provides the rationale for taking drastic action. That action generally seems to involve more power accruing to government (at many levels) in order to control how people live (by raising the cost of energy, for example).
Power and Control. These are age old themes. Climate change is a powerful pretext for advancing this agenda. Of course the ones promoting it believe they will be part of the group that has the power and control.
Note that I’m not denying that climate change is occurring, nor that it shouldn’t be mitigated when possible. However, we keep seeing this tendency to exaggerate many aspects of it.
For some reason, power and control don’t resonate with me as the very root explanation for this persistent obsession with climate alarmism. What are those in power trying to control? I have a good friend who is deathly afraid of snakes. Even the tiniest benign garter snake gives her panic attacks. There is some suggestion that its possible for certain fears to be innate. I wonder if people are naturally afraid of weather calamities. In the olden days people had capricious and scary gods who controlled the weather--- Thor throwing thunderbolts.
The elites in power certainly are trying to control the weather even if it’s at the expense of the poor.
Good one! As usual.
The evidence from evolutionary psychology demonstrates clearly that we organize our thinking according to narratives; that we are capable of believing anything; that when presented with contrary data we tend to double down on our beliefs; and that we tend to align within groups reflecting our tribal origins and when we do align, we become stupid and frequently delusional. It's a problem!!
Thanks!
Pretty clear and nothing can be denied in it.
Because the people who formerly reported on and even investigated have joined the climate beat a whole section of the media has been silenced in criticising what is mainly a political movement. The public swallow it all.
This silence has been bought and paid for by the likes of Bill Gates who pays for a section in the British Daily Telegraph to faithfully promote his views and nothing else. Pravda. Niet.
I don't disagree but these narratives predate Bill Gates. And in fact you see a lot of Net Zero scepticism at least in the Telegraph from e.g. Ross Clark
True and I agree about Clark also. But my point was about his Global Health Bulletin. It is bought and paid for by Bill Gates.
Interestingly enough I am planning to write about what causes Paradigm Shifts as an essay for my History study group. I plan to focus on the major and rapid changes to many governments' pandemic contingency plans in March 2020 and what caused the change. Donations from the Gates Foundation will figure as a major factor, in my mind.
I wish you well.
You always seem sane and evidential.
An ability to stand back and pick something to pieces is rare indeed.
Agreed. Here I am keeping separate the views expressed opinion pages, which do show a greater diversity across outlets.
An aside but there are many bugs in substack which a substantial author like yourself would be better flagging up rather than a private commenter.
Above when trying to reply to Richard I was flagged up as needing to subscribe to do so but clearly I am still a paid subscriber for several months yet.
I leave it with you.
The good (and I guess bad) news is that Substack does all the back office stuff. That said they are responsive on both Twitter and Notes if you have issues.
The fact that you are commenting here means that they see you as paid, so I'm glad you are here!