Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s environment editor.
Science denying cry-babies in the US have toddled over to the Federal court in Massachusetts to seek an injunction against the recent Department of Energy (DoE) working party report about greenhouse gas emissions. The report’s main finding, produced after examining much of the literature from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that computer models offered “little guidance” on how much of the climate responds to warming gases such as carbon dioxide. This observation is regularly ignored in mainstream media but it is hardly a new opinion. The available data leads to that inevitable conclusion despite all the political nonsense claims of ‘settled’ science. To go to court to seek to ban the report is a new low in the increasingly desperate attempt to keep the Net Zero fantasy alive using science scares that are increasingly being debunked.
Not only did the five highly credentialed scientists who wrote the report cast reasonable doubt on the role of climate computer models, they also quoted extensively from data that revealed most extreme weather events were not increasing and sea level rises in North America showed no increasing trend. Attribution claims of human involvement in individual weather events are widely used to spread climate fear, but these were said to be challenged by natural climate variation along with an admission that they were originally designed with ‘lawfare’ in mind. The authors went out of their way to highlight much of the science and many of the opinions contained in the IPCC assessment reports, but they also publicised areas that were conveniently downplayed such as the recent massive ‘greening’ of the planet due to higher levels of CO2.
In any other branch of science, the idea that civilised discussion and disagreement of matters that have crucial public policy importance should be banned by a lawsuit would be absurd – childish even.
But then this is not really about the science. The plaintiffs are worried that the report will be used to justify the removal of CO2 from a 2009 endangerment finding. This would inevitably lead to major rollbacks of rules backing the command-and-control Net Zero project. Announcing the lawsuit, the toys were flung out of the pram: “Two leading science and environment groups are going to court to challenge the Trump administration’s use of a secretively convened group of climate sceptics to prepare a now widely disparaged report in its attempt to undo the Endangerment Findings… the development of this corrupted report, cloaked in secrecy, and Administrator Zeldin’s [Head of the Environment Protection Agency EPA] use of it to undermine pollution protections, puts the American people in harm’s way and violates federal law.” At one point, the report was described as a “sham” and was conducted by “five known climate deniers”.
Needless to say, the two plaintiffs are straight out of Green Blob central casting. The Environmental Defense Fund is a large green activist group and uses ‘lawfare’ to promote its Net Zero advocacy. Donor filings suggest that in 2023 it received $162.9 million from tax-efficient foundations with notable contributors including the Bezos Earth Fund, Sloan and Valhalla funds. The second plaintiff, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), also accepts foundation money and in the past has received sizeable contributions from the MacArthur, Schmidt and Packard funds. Meanwhile, the UCS frequently adds to the gaiety of the nation, not least when on July 24th it issued an oddly precise warning that 169,899,454 people in the United States currently faced extreme weather alerts. In other words, during a typical American summer most of the population might need to top up their sunscreen. This and similar silly scares have led some to suggest the organisation should really be called the Union of Scientists We Should be Concerned About.
Meanwhile, activist ‘fact checkers’ continue to mobilise to find fault in the DoE’s climate report and the proposal by the EPA to rescind the 2009 gas endangerment findings. Last week it emerged that the Blob-funded Carbon Brief operation was ‘fact checking’, and now it appears Associated Press (AP) is engaged in a similar project. AP has written to the scientists quoted in the DoE report and is asking 10 questions “to get a broad sense of the documents’ scientific accuracy”. Noble work of course, but curiously not undertaken when other major reports from bodies such as the IPCC are published. The project is being headed by AP’s Seth Borenstein who has spent over a decade reporting on every climate scare imaginable. He is no stranger to the weird world of mainstream fact checking. In 2018 he helped write a reply to Scott Pruitt, then head of the EPA, that ran as follows:
PRUITT: Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s somewhat fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.
THE FACTS: What he calls arrogant is established science. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says if fossil fuel emissions continue on the current trajectory, temperatures by the end of the century will be around 6.5 degrees warmer than now (3.7°C).
Note how Borenstein dismissed a reasonable opinion from Pruitt by stating another opinion that the Earth will warm by nearly 4°C in 80 years. His opinion, increasingly seen as fanciful agitprop, is said to be “established science”. It might be argued that the only arrogance on show was in the headline which ran – “AP FACT CHECK: Climate science undercuts EPA chief’s view.” On a wider front, AP describes its fact-checking service as – “No spin. No agenda. Just journalism that respects your intelligence.”
For its part, AP received £8 million from tax-efficient foundations in 2022 to hire 20 journalists to help run a climate desk. Funders included the Hewlett, Rockefeller and Walton foundations. The standalone desk “will enhance the global understanding of climate change and its impact across the world”, promised AP. “Unbiased, fact-based journalism has never been more important or imperilled,” chipped in Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “AP retains complete editorial control of all content,” explained the AP press release announcing the large cash injection.
Meanwhile, Dr Roger Pielke Jr, whose work is quoted extensively in the DoE report, has been sent a questionnaire by the Borenstein operation. He notes that the last two questions ask him to assess what grade on a scale A to F he would give to the reports assuming they were handed in as an undergraduate assignment. Activist stupidity got the answer it deserved: “These are absolutely ridiculous questions and suggest that your goal here is not journalism but team sport.”
US Department of Energy: A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate. Authors – John Christy PhD, Judith Curry PhD, Steven Koonin PhD, Ross McKitrick PhD, Roy Spencer PhD.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
