Tag Archives: Stephen Schneider

The Big Ben Santer Problem, Pt 4: If Everyone was in Total Agreement, Why Would there be Any Need to Change Anything?

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To briefly recap the salient points of Naomi Oreskes’ tale of how Dr Ben Santer (as opposed to Erik Conway) was the catalyst leading her to expose skeptic climate scientists as ‘corporate-paid/corrupted merchants of doubt’: she innocently wrote a paper published in Science; she was personally attacked for exposing the truth of a ‘science consensus’ on man-caused global warming; her colleagues suggested she speak to Ben Santer who’d been similarly attacked while doing innocent science work; and she soon learned their mutual attackers were shills of the fossil fuel industry, and her exposé of this propelled her into heroic status.

Part of that tale hinges on Dr Santer, an atmospheric scientist, being supposedly attacked by greedy corporate interests and their shills for simply doing the right thing of altering the text of a finalized, approved chapter within the IPCC’s 1995 report so that it reflected what everyone already agreed upon.

Wait … what? That enigma situation right there with Dr Santer really looks hardly different from the fictional one seen famously in the Tom Cruise / Jack Nicholson movie, A Few Good Men: “If you gave an order that Santiago wasn’t to be touched, and your orders are always followed, then why would he be in danger, why would it be necessary to transfer him off the base?” Continue reading →

Hired Guns

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Enviro-activists love to say greedy fossil fuel industry executives hired lying shill scientists to misinform the public away from believing the settled science of catastrophic man-caused global warming. Yet the only thing which remotely looks like evidence to confirm this conspiracy is a worthless set of memos supposedly leaked out of the Western Fuels Association having the strategy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” That’s all the enviro-activists have. The impression I get from digging through all of this accusation is that we actually have the exact opposition situation ….. Continue reading →

Spreading the ‘Crooked Skeptic Climate Scientists’ Accusation within the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

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I detailed how Ross Gelbspan is found directly in IPCC climate scientist Dr Michael Mann’s emails in my August 7, 2013 post. In two of my other posts here, I showed how IPCC Vice Chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele had prominently accused a particular skeptic scientist of industry corruption, and how Ypersele cited Naomi Oreskes for his insinuation that the ClimateGate email leaks were the result of an effort “‘organized’ to undermine efforts to tackle global warming.” I can additionally add that the then-Chairman of the IPCC also suggested in regard to the ClimateGate email scandal, “it was entirely possible that ‘corporate interests’ had had a hand in the leak.” (full text here).

Now, let’s briefly examine one more time where the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation was passed around. Continue reading →

There’s always more – the Schneider/Hertsgaard error

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Around halfway down the page at my previous blog post, I briefly noted that the late IPCC scientist Dr Stephen Schneider seemed to make an error about the Global Climate Coalition’s efforts to “reposition the debate onto the issue of uncertainty.” Much like any other examination into facets of the accusation that skeptic climate scientists are paid fossil fuel industry shills, a look into this error only reveals more problems with the basic overall accusation and the people who push the accusation. Continue reading →

Naomi Oreskes’ Problems, pt 2

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A brief set of questions and answers illustrates how any sort of examination of the ‘skeptic climate scientists are industry-corrupted’ accusation doesn’t reveal a nice, tidy, open-and-shut case against such skeptics, all that’s seen is something begging for a deeper investigation of why the accusation exists at all. Continue reading →

‘Skeptic Climate Scientists Do Not Deserve Fair Media Balance.’ Spread This Line Widely; NEVER Check its Veracity and Don’t Examine its History.

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‘When a topic is soundly settled, it is egregiously stupid to consider long-debunked counterclaims, and Ross Gelbspan was among the first to see the stupidity of anyone doing exactly that in discussions about global warming.’ This would be a devastating statement if either of the two premises within it were demonstratively true. So, why would anyone make such a statement if either premise cannot stand on its merits? Continue reading →