The Seamonster does Dave Burton's sea level claims.

It's only by luck of being rained out that I've had a couple days to work on investigating and responding to Dave Burton's challenge.  In the process I've found that he's gotten around and that others have put effort into pointing out Dave's many calculated deceptions.  Since I don't know when I'll be able to finish working on Dave's comments, I figure I might share this from June of 2012.  It demonstrates quite clearly what kind of disingenuous character we are dealing with here.  (hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to repost http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2016/04/dave-burton-wants-to-level-seas-at-wuwt.html
another eye opener.)

The NC sea level rise saga: reply to Dave Burton

Posted on Monday, June 18th, 2012 

http://theseamonster.net/2012/06/the-nc-sea-level-rise-saga-reply-to-dave-burton/

Dave Burton of NC 20 published a reply here to recent post I did about natural and human-caused sea level rise, “Sea Level Rise 101“. This is a reply to his post and a clarification of some of his many misconceptions about sea level rise science.

I want to start by saying that my interests in the NC sea level rise issue are not at all political. I am neutral on what coastal communities should do as adaptation measures to sea level rise and other impacts of climate change. I also have mixed opinions about what role the state and federal government should play in such social adaptation (i.e., I am not condoning any changes in coastal regulatory policy). My only interest in this issue is science and truth. The people of North Carolina – indeed the members of NC 20 – should know about the real science of sea level rise. Not the junk science being created and promoted by climate change deniers like Dave Burton and John Droz, Jr.

Now, on to Dave’s response. First up, this graphic:

Is CO2Science.org 'criminally negligent'? Why not consider it?

Is misinformation about climate science criminally negligent?  I'm reminded of Professor Lawrence Torcello's question by the dialogue I'm having with some characters at an interesting YouTube video of Professor Stephen Schneider directly communicating with climate science contrarian types.  

In any event, this comments thread keeps getting dragged back to CO2Science.org as though it were some gold standard, rather than the personal gold mine of the Idso clan, selling a deceptive and harmful fiction to a gullible public.  

All the while these commenters ignore the many huge differences between the internal variability driven "Medieval Warm Period" and today's atmosphere with it's vastly enriched (thanks to us) insulation medium which is holding more heat within our planet's global climate system, yes that would include the oceans.  They also insist that there's been no warming in the past 18 years, go figure.  

While researching my response to a comment I came upon "More for the annals of climate misinformation" where Alicia Newton does a good job of describing the dishonest manipulation of data that website is guilty of.  It makes me wonder why this sort of deliberate deception with far reaching political and societal consequences is so casually accepted.  

I've taken the liberty of reposting the text as a public service and hopefully an invitation to consider saying enough of the crafty lies, time to come to terms with the real world.  

I follow Newton's article with long tracts of another educational write up by Höskuldur Búi Jónsson who continues this exploration into the ways in which CO2Science.org artfully reweaves and repackages serious scientific information in a way that totally distorts the actual truth within that information.  This I follow with various bits of biographical information regarding CO2Science.org.

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More for the annals of climate misinformation

19 Aug 2008 | written by Alicia Newton

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2008/08/more_for_the_annals_of_climate_1.html

I’m all for a website that distills climate science papers into something easily understood by the general public, especially if it avoids the hype and hysteria all too often employed by headline news.

Such is the claim of CO2 Science, a weekly newsletter published by the not for profit Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, with issues that include editorials, book and media reviews, and mini-reviews of the recent peer-reviewed literature.

But rather than its promise of “separating reality from rhetoric in the emotionally-charged debate that swirls around the subject of carbon dioxide and global change”, on the contrary CO2 Science twists the most recent science, ever so subtly, to suggest that there is no link between carbon dioxide levels and climate change.

For a case in point, check out the feature entitled “Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week”. This showcases records of temperature or environmental changes during the Medieval Warm Period (aka the Medieval Climate Anomaly). The conclusion is that if the MWP was warmer than present – still debated – obviously CO2 isn’t driving current warming. There is even a list of 576 scientists who have found evidence for the MWP – the thinly veiled conclusion being that they agree that an increase in CO2 isn’t behind the recent climate change.

Will, take a peek at Morano's Climate Hustle

Speaking of ClimateDepot's Marc Morano, that alpha attack-dog of the Republican/libertarian machine.  A character who I believe is an exemplar of the sorts of individuals who have became the force driving the past decades meltdown in constructive-dialogue and statesmanship.  With bigger than life egos and never learning from their mistakes.  Instead always doubling down with ever more self-certainly, extreme slander, hostility and misrepresentations - and never ever an ounce of self-skepticism; or curiosity about the available Earth observation information.

Will, I just found out that Marc's created a film Climate Hustle (yeah, talk about  bringing politics into it) and he's scheduled a world premier at the Cinéma du Panthéon in Paris during the upcoming climate conference.  Guess it's his way of making the case for willfully ignoring down to Earth realities.  

Graham Readfearn has written an article about Morano's "Climate Hustle" which I'm reposting for your edification (without ads even  ; ).  But first, here are some other information rich articles regarding this political thug and denier of our collective dependence on a healthy planet:

Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc Morano: Never forget we have Murdoch madness and Andrew Bolt

Peter Imrich | old dog thoughts.com | Posted on January 19, 2015

ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano has been called “the Matt Drudge of climate denial,” the “king of the skeptics,” and “a central cell of the climate-denial machine,” and he revels in these descriptions. Although he has no scientific expertise, he is adamant that manmade global warming is a “con job” based on “subprime science.”  

Morano gained prominence working for two of the most vocal climate deniers in the U.S.: Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who notoriously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” and Rush Limbaugh, who we named Climate Change Misinformer of the Year in 2011 for his steadfast denial of climate science and wild conspiracy theories about the climate change “hoax.” 

These days Morano is paid by an industry-funded group to run the climate denial website ClimateDepot.com. At Climate Depot, Morano serves as the de facto research department for the right-wing media’s attacks on climate science, and mobilizes his readers to target individual scientists and reporters for telling the public about climate change threats. … (link to read all of it)

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The Planet Wreckers  | 10 Jun 2012

Climate-change deniers are on the ropes - but so is our planet.

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This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax

Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry's presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change.

Somehow, he seems to be winning. 

By John. Richardson  |  MAR 30, 2010 

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7078/marc-morano-0410/

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Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Swift_Boat_Veterans_for_Truth

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Marc Morano's Climate Hustle Film Set For Paris Premiere With Same Old Denial Myths

Marc Morano is never short of a superlative or two, but when it has come to promoting his long-gestating documentary Climate Hustle, the climate science denialist extraodinaire has been outdoing himself. "We are putting together what I think is the most comprehensive, unique, entertaining and humorous climate documentary that has ever been done or attempted," Morano…

Pssst, pass it: 350.org "Petition to call on the Dept of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil"

I want to pass along this email message from the writer Bill McKibben and his 350.org group because the malicious dirty-tricks and tactical lying about what scientists have been trying to teach us is nothing less than a criminal offense against US citizens and in fact global citizens and the future.  

I'm not talking some vague future down the road either.  If you objectively look at the tempo of extreme (and increasingly destructive) weather events throughout the world, you'll recognize we are now talking about our imminent future being irreparably damaged, thanks to decades worth of "Reaganomics" inspired and greed driven strategic dirty tricks focused on misleading our leaders and the public about the critically important facts regarding what society's sky-rocketing emissions are doing to the global climate that we depend on for everything we hold near and dear.

(Followed by some videos and links to further information.)

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If only for the sake of history, let’s stand the hell up.

Petition to call on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil.

From Bill McKibben for 350.org

Dear Friends,

Earlier this morning, leaders from a wide variety of environmental and civil rights groups sent a short letter Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking for a federal investigation of the allegations that Exxon knew that climate change was real decades ago and lied about it.

This is rare and powerful unity—I don’t remember a moment like it since the first days of the Keystone fight, when the same wide spectrum of leaders wrote a very similar letter.

But encouraging as it is to see this solidarity, the reason for it makes me bitter. Ever since I read the first exposés of Exxon’s mendacity in Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, they’ve haunted me.

A corporation may never have done anything bigger and badder; just think how much would be different if Exxon had told the truth. We wouldn’t fully have solved global warming but we’d be well on the way—there would have been no 25 year phony pretend debate. There’d be a lot more solar panels, and a lot less carbon in the air. There'd be a lot more green jobs, and a lot fewer communities, most of them low income and communities of color, dealing with the terrible health impacts of pollution. None of you would have had to fight simply to get climate change taken seriously; instead we’d all be hard at work on solutions.¹

I think we should be angry. I don’t think we should be cynical and say ‘of course they knew.’ This behavior should shock us—it’s shocking. So can you please join us in asking the federal government to investigate Exxon?

Click here to sign a petition to call on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil.

Heartland Institute's training manual exposed

I've forced myself back to 'Steele's Climate Horror Series' via a January 27, 2015 podcast interview by Heartland Institute's Sterling Burnett with LandscapesandCycles' Mr. Jim Steele.  Spending the day transcribing the whole thing, the old fashioned way, got me feeling quite down and hopeless.  Another sad exercise of dropping into the rabbit hole where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.

I've been doing this for a while and I tell you dissecting the anatomy of the "climate science skeptics" disingenuous logic and ruthless rhetorical tricks gets increasingly depressing.  I mean, where does one go when staring into the reality that these Republican/libertarians really don't give a damned about learning, or this planet, or the future, only their own short term interests and rage at 'others' seems to matter to them.

They have absolute faith in their own convictions and an absolute refusal to listen to, let alone learn anything, from anyone, except their own one-sided kindergarten science in a vacuum.

It's appalling and tragic and our children will pay dearly for the public's apathy while We The People sheepishly accept an obvious con job.

Oh about that Heartland training manual, here's the Cliff Notes version:

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Heartland Institution's advanced class: