500 Scientists Deny Global Warming? Not!

With all the hoopla surrounding Greta Thunberg and her passionate address to the U.N., did you happen to see, in your social media feed perhaps, a link to an odd news story which said something like, "500 Scientists Write U.N.: 'There Is No Climate Emergency.'"? Op-Ed-Disguised-As-News organizations such as Breitbart made sure this headline got lots of undeserved exposure.

Except 500 scientists didn't write to the U.N.

Oh, there was a letter to the U.N., all right. You can read it here. https://clintel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ecd-letter-to-un.pdf But the headline was dead wrong. It wasn't 500 scientists. Get past the headline, and it becomes "500 scientists and professionals."

Well, shit, it's bait-and-switch right from the start.

But it doesn't stop there. The letter actually has only 14 actual signatories. These signers are the ringleaders of an organization called the European Climate Declaration, which in turn is headed by the Amsterdam-based Climate Intelligence Foundation, or CLINTEL. They claim to represent 500 people based on a networked list, but as we shall see, that list is dubious. Their leader is a man named Guus Berkhout, who is a scientist from the Netherlands. What is he a scientist of? Why, oil and gas exploration, of course. That takes the wind out of the sails right there.

But wait, there's more! I mean - less. The list of scientists is unimpressive. You can find it here:
https://clintel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ED-brochureversieNWA4.pdf


There are 506 people on the list, not counting the leaders. But of those, most are engineers, field chemists, computer techs and some self-appointed "experts" as well. What a letdown.

Oh, there are a few impressive names. A few are retired people from NASA, for instance. But for the most part, these are the blue-collar non-researchers who make up the grunts of a former science team, not the actual experts themselves.

The leader of the U.S. contingent is a guy named Richard Lindzen, who is usually at the top of every list of climate-change-denying scientists. For whatever reason, climate change denial has a real foothold among meteorologists, and Lindzen is one of them. He's rallied people to his cause in the U.S., but not many. The number of signatories on CLINTEL's list who are from the U.S. is a measly 45 people. Given such resources for advertisement as Fox News, it's amazing that he got only 44 other people. Maybe next time he shouled put out a call for signatories on the Mark Levin radio show.

The only name on the list which stands out is Freeman Dyson. This highly acclaimed scientist at Princeton is well known among science fiction fans for coming up with the "Dyson Sphere," which is a structure surrounding a star to harvest every single photon of energy. But why would he sign this document? The answer is, he didn't. In fact, most of the "signatories" were only represented by the 14 who actually signed the U.N. letter.

Dyson was involved with CLINTEL in the past, but hasn't had much involvement with them since 2009. He openly acknowledges the reality of anthropogenic climate change, he only questions the scale of certain projections. So his name being included on this list is dubious at best. It indicates that this list is a growing compilation of people who were ever associated with this organization, even remotely, at least once, and that, my friends, is called fudging the numbers.

Even with over-inflating and over-estimating the numbers like this, the list is only a little over 500. That may seem like a lot, and indeed, some media outlets have been reporting that such a high number indicates that denial of global warming is not limited to a few fringe scientists. But remember, this list was slapped together from 23 countries in total. If you can draw from that many countries, it isn't difficult to get 500 people on just about any topic, from denying the holocaust to insisting that Americans never landed on the moon in 1969. Get the minority tin-foil hats from that many countries, and you'll always get several hundred. I'm actually surprised that this group only got 500 people. They should realistically have gotten more with such a broad base to draw upon.

So there you have it. Once again some backwater mavericks who happen to have PhD's they can't do anything with due to their ruined reputations have made a career for themselves by deliberately muddying the water. These are the same sort of people (and sometimes even the VERY same people!) who repeatedly told us such whoppers as, "Cigarettes don't necessarily cause cancer!" And, "CFC's aren't really eroding the ozone layer!" Or, remember this one? "Lead in gasoline is not a significant neurotoxin." That one still amazes me! "DDT is harmless to children."

These sort of backwater shits have been wrong before. They'll be wrong again. And they're wrong now.

Pull me once, shame on you. Pull me several times....

...and I'm a Rush Limbaugh fan!


Eric

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