climate denial

Monsieur Fouche, Meet Professor Gleick

By now, Peter Gleick’s ethical indiscretions concerning the Heartland Institute are old news.  But for lawyers, they raise particularly interesting ethical issues because they highlight the question of really, whether there were ethical barriers broached at all. I initially thought that this was obviously the case: someone in my profession would get disbarred for doing …

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Debunking the Denialists

William Nordhaus, the distinguished climate change economist, has written a response to the Wall Street Journal‘s latest exercise in climate skepticism.  He does an excellent job of responding to many of the standard claims of climate skeptics. For one thing, the WSJ op-ed misrepresented Nordhaus’s own findings.  According to the op-ed, Nordhaus’s research supported “a …

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Climate “skepticism,” ideology, and sincerity

There’s an interesting discussion about a whole lot of things — for example, the sincerity of climate scientists and think tanks, the behavior of scientists, the relative funding of “skeptics” and climate scientists and others who believe climate change is happening and is caused by human activity — between my colleague Ann Carlson and Professor …

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Peter Gleick, the Heartland Institute, and Scientific Ethics

  The Heartland Institute is a climate denial shop well-funded by fossil fuel interests and standard right-wing extremist foundations, which has underwritten attacks on climate scientists and has plans to disrupt authentic climate science education in K-12 classrooms.  Peter Gleick is one of the most respected scientific researchers in the world, who has done extremely …

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More On the Republican Anti-Fact Shield

So after I posted my tantrum about George Will the other day, I felt a little guilty.  Maybe I had been too hard on The Tory Bowtie.  After all, maybe his putting “facts” in scare quotes was just a slip. Then I saw this piece on the Washington Post editorial page by Republican pollster Ed Rogers, …

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(What Remains Of) The Conservative Mind Melts Down

Once upon a time, George Will had a reputation as the thinking person’s conservative.  No more.  He’s not only a climate denier, but a couple of weeks ago he smeared Elizabeth Warren with a kind of red-baiting that I haven’t seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now he’s at it again, sort of.  …

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The Credibility of Climate Science

Climate denialists contend that climate science is either the result of a conspiracy of some kind  or of groupthink plus institutional incentives to support alarmist predictions.  The conspiracy theory makes even less sense than most conspiracy theories, because there would have to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of people involved, scattered across the world at  numerous …

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Hit-by-Pitches and Climate Denialism

Ann’s post regarding the potential effects of climate change on the number of hit batters raises some critical issues on the national pastime.  And of course, I’d be delighted to sign up for the field study.  But climate deniers already have a ready answer. After all, they will ask: how do we know that the …

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The Roots of Climate Skepticism

if you’re a libertarian, an evangelical, a populist, and a corporate officer — or any one of those three — it may be just a little easier to live in a world that lacks the kinds of deep interdependencies highlighted by climate science.

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Arguing Climate by Analogy, or: Stupid Like a Fox

Bill Clinton says that Republican climate-change deniers make the United States “look like a joke”: “I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right?” Clinton said. “You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that scientists are right?” Kathleen Parker, in a thoughtful …

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