I believe vandals should be stood up to and that We The People have a right to learn about the expert understanding of critically important down to Earth matters, such as climate change understanding - without the constant cross screaming from the GOP's manufactured denial machine and it's PR bullies. Thus, this little collection of relevant reading.
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We The People of the United States have a moral, ethical right - along with a pragmatic need - to learn what scientists have learned about this planet's biosphere and climate engine without constant dishonest crossfire.
We should not tolerate serious scientists always being drown out by amoral, ruthless and frankly ignorant arguments - that an astoundingly ruthless GOP PR factory repeats over and over again, without ever learning a damned thing from the evidence in front of us.
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The Criminal Dimension of Climate Change
Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017), 270 pages, $27.95, paperback.
Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival, a book by Peter Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, with a foreword by leading climate scientist James Hansen, outlines the criminality of those who actively promote the continuing emission of carbon gases into the atmosphere despite having full knowledge of the consequences. These consequences include the breakdown of large ice sheets, rising sea levels, and the intensification of extreme weather events around the world, such as hurricanes, floods, and fires.
The book highlights the collusion of large parts of the mainstream media with climate change denial and its cover up, stating that,
There is no benign explanation for a full media blackout of a significant global development that was heralded by the United Nations Secretary-General. This blackout goes far beyond ignorance or negligence.
It is a willful obstruction of public knowledge of the extraordinary extent of global efforts to combat the greatest existential threat of all time by changing business-as-usual. We define this willful, methodical blocking of vital survival information as an unprecedented crime against life on the planet.
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Is there criminal liability for climate change denial?
December 11, 2018 By Bill Adams
… In the scientific community, there is no debate about the existence of man made climate change, whether it is dangerous for the planet, and most importantly, whether humans must take immediate and large scale corrective action.
Nevertheless, there are important actors in government, in the media, and in fossil fuel funded “think tanks” who continue to pump out misinformation about climate change in order to to convince the public it doesn’t exist and poses no threat. A must read for anyone seeking a full understanding of the history of climate change politics is Nathaniel Rich’s excellent NY Times narrative, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. In it, he details the decade between 1979 and 1989 when scientists raised the alarms about climate change spurring an honest bipartisan effort, ultimately to be buried in a campaign of deceit and cover-up.
However, many of these purveyors of misinformation are not merely exhibiting a genuine disbelief in the science of climate change. Rather, they intentionally deceive the public. The evidence of intent? There is no reasonable basis for the assertions they make.
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ACCOUNTABILITY in Houston, Texas
CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL SHOULD BE A CRIME
Brian Merchant | September 1, 2017
https://theoutline.com/post/2202/climate-change-denial-should-be-a-crime?
In the wake of Harvey, it’s time to treat science denial as gross negligence—and hold those who do the denying accountable.
… But it's high time to start taking this pointed refusal to prepare, this refusal to observe the basic tenets of science seriously — and call it what it is: Negligence. Criminal negligence, even.
CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL CAN AND WILL LEAVE PEOPLE DEAD.
According to the Texas penal code, “A person acts with criminal negligence, or is criminally negligent… when he ought to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur. The risk must be of such a nature and degree that the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise....”
The list of ways in which Talbott and his office should have been aware of the substantial risk of ignoring a robust body of scientific evidence, at the tragic expense of the people of Houston, is stunning. As a climate change skeptic, Talbott, who is trained not as a scientist but as an engineer, refused to consider projections of rising sea levels and heavier rainfall. He let developers pour concrete over prairielands that used to soak up that rainfall, exacerbating flooding.
He refused to acknowledge that constructing elevated buildings in a floodplain was probably redirecting floods elsewhere. All of the above led to a sharp rise in complaints from increasingly flooded homeowners, activists, and scientists.
Instead of preparing Houston for a climate-changed, flood-prone era, Mike Talbott and his office helped it evolve into a deadly urban aquarium waiting to happen.
This sort of science-denying recklessness is happening all over the country, in various guises, and many more lives are in danger. …
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Fossil Fuels on Trial: Where the Major Climate Change Lawsuits Stand Today
David Hasemyer | January 6, 2019
Some of the biggest oil and gas companies are embroiled in legal disputes with cities, states and children over the industry's role in global warming.
Updated Jan. 7, 2019, with U.S. Supreme Court declining an Exxon appeal.
A wave of legal challenges that is washing over the oil and gas industry, demanding accountability for climate change, started as a ripple after revelations that ExxonMobil had long recognized the threat fossil fuels pose to the world.
Over the past few years: Two states launched fraud investigations into Exxon over climate change, and one has followed with a lawsuit. Nine cities and counties, from New York to San Francisco, have sued major fossil fuel companies, seeking compensation for climate change damages. And determined children have filed lawsuits against the federal government and various state governments, claiming the governments have an obligation to safeguard the environment.
The litigation, reinforced by science, has the potential to reshape the way the world thinks about energy production and the consequences of global warming. It advocates a shift from fossil fuels to sustainable energy and draws attention to the vulnerability of coastal communities and infrastructure to extreme weather and sea level rise.
From a trove of internal Exxon documents, a narrative emerged in 2015 that put a spotlight on the conduct of the fossil fuel industry. An investigative series of stories by InsideClimate News, and later the Los Angeles Times, disclosed that the oil company understood the science of global warming, predicted its catastrophic consequences, and then spent millions to promote misinformation.
That evidence ignited a legal clamor that included calls for a federal criminal investigation of Exxon. …
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BY Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer | SEP 16, 2015
Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
After eight months of investigation, InsideClimate News presents this multi-part history of Exxon's engagement with the emerging science of climate change. The story spans four decades, and is based on primary sources including internal company files dating back to the late 1970s, interviews with former company employees, and other evidence, much of which is being published here for the first time.
It describes how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then, without revealing all that it had learned, worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.
This series was named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and has earned national recognition from many other quarters, including the National Press Foundation, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and the White House Correspondents' Association. Click here to see a full listing of honors.
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JOURNAL ARTICLE
Deceitful Tongues: Is Climate Change Denial a Crime?
William C. Tucker
Ecology Law Quarterly
Vol. 39, No. 3 (2012), pp. 831-894
Published by: University of California, Berkeley
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24113621
Page Count: 64
Topics: Criminal conspiracy, Climatology, Global warming, Mail fraud, Corporations, Wire fraud, Defendants, Negative externalities
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Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology
March 13, 2014
The importance of clearly communicating science to the public should not be underestimated. Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on.
With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.
The earthquake that rocked L'Aquila Italy in 2009 provides an interesting case study of botched communication. …
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Trump's failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity
By Jeffrey Sachs | November 23, 2018
… Yet Trump and his minions are the loyal servants of the fossil-fuel industry, which fill Republican party campaign coffers. Trump has also stalled the fight against climate change by pulling out of the Paris Agreement. The politicians thereby deprive the people of their lives and property out of profound cynicism, greed, and willful scientific ignorance.
The first job of government is to protect the public.
Real protection requires climate action on several fronts: educating the public about the growing dire risks of human-induced climate change; enacting legislation and regulations to ensure that families and businesses are kept out of harm's way, for example by stopping construction in flood plains, and investing in sustainable infrastructure to counteract rising sea levels; anticipating the rising frequency of high-intensity climate-related disasters through science-based preparedness following through on properly scaled disaster-response during and after storm events; and most importantly for the future, spearheading the rapid transition to zero-carbon energy to prevent much greater calamities in the years ahead. …
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10 misrepresentations about climate change
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Climate Myths sorted by taxonomy
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My bandwidth is fairly narrow, so please if you have other stories about reports, studies, or the court system holding climate science frauds to task for their acts of malicious Intellectual Vandalism against scientific integrity and a People's Right To Know, please do share!
Thanks, CC
citizenschallenge at gmail _ com
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