cite as: F. Bi. 2008. “Wall Street crisis” cancelled! Intl. J. Inact., 1:148

If you can solve a financial crisis by altering the scale of a graph axis, will you do it? Now, a Dow Jones plunge of about 500 points may sound like a lot, and it may even actually hurt your savings, but if you look at it the right way then perhaps it’s not so bad after all! Really! :-B

(This graph was inspired by Jennifer Marohasy’s recent ‘proof’ that there’s no global warming — in turn probably inspired by Ron Rychlak’s presentation at the Heartland denial-fest.)

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Tom Harris may need some helium. Intl. J. Inact., 1:143

Announcement: Sign the “Sue Us” Petition and urge Monckton and others
to sue Gore and Hansen as repeatedly threatened! 60 signatures so far!

Primo

Well, here’s a (long-overdue) update to my genealogy of climate conspiracy theories. It now includes

• the conspiracy theory laid out by Tom Harris in his presentation at the Heartland Institute’s “2008 International Conference on Climate Change” (specifically, Slides 5–7 and 13); and
• Peter Morgan’s theory, which was discussed by Matthew Dentith.

(As before, you can view the updated genealogy by clicking on the sultry girl.)

Secundo

And, speaking of Harris and Heartland… apparently the freedom-loving Heartland Institute, in an act of supreme inactivist freedom, has now removed the link to the conference proceedings from their web site! The audio recordings are now on a different page, but many of the hyperlinks are broken — including the link to Harris’s speech.

Fortunately, I’ve already archived Harris’s presentation and a section of his speech, so you can still continue to experience the joy of learning about “coordinated local activism” by listening to his mellifluous voice. ☻

Update 2008-09-19: The audios are now back — at different addresses. Perhaps Heartland simply moved the audios and forgot to update the hyperlinks to them.

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. The Way of the Astroturf. Intl. J. Inact., 1:118–121

The how…

Climate inactivist realist Tom Harris from the, um, “International Climate Science Coalition”, speaking at the “2008 International Conference on Climate Change” in March:

[...] We need regular high-impact media coverage of the findings of leading scientists — not just one or two publications, but we need to have hundreds all over the world. We need to have a high degree of information sharing and cooperation between groups, so that when Vincent Gray for example has an article published in New Zealand, we can take the same piece and we can (say) submit it to newspapers all over North America and Europe.

Then we have a nicely well-coordinated response, where letters to the editor and phone calls are made. “Congratulations on publishing that article!” You know, it’s interesting because I’ve had many of my articles opposed so strongly, by environmentalists through phone calls and letters to the editor, that they just simply dry up, they just won’t publish us again. So this does have feedback, I mean, these are people that run these newspapers, and they’re scared, and impressed, and encouraged, depending on the feedback they get.

We have to have grassroots organizations doing exactly that kind of thing: coordinated local activism.

And finally, as I said, we need unbiased polling and good press coverage.

(This is at 15′ 57″ into the 25MB, 20′ 40″ MP3, and Slide 20 in his PowerPoint presentation.)

Well, we all know what “information sharing” means here. But what about “coordinated local activism”? How does it work? Here’s a first guess:

Alice: Hello Mr. Editor, I’m Alice from the newly-formed Friends of Methane group, a member of the International Climate Science Coalition. I read your story that [...]

Bob: Good morning, I’m Bob, I heard from the International Climate Science Coalition about the story in your paper that [...]

Tom: Dear Editor, I am Tom Harris, Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition. I refer to your news article titled [...]

Nah, that won’t work well, because the editors will quickly get wind of what’s going on. And besides, if they also know that the ICSC is behind the propagation of the said news story in the first place, then it’ll be pure disaster! Of course, this means that the ICSC will have to hide the fact that it’s behind all the “grassroots activism”…

…and the why

The point of all these tactics, as helpfully highlighted on Slide 22 of Harris’s presentation,¹ is partly to change people’s “perceptions of public opinion” on climate regulation. But whose perceptions? While Kevin Grandia thinks that the target of astroturfing is the man on the street, I’m more of the opinion that it’s targeted primarily at the decision makers. I commented on In It,

As Korzybski said, “the map is not the territory.” But the map is what the politician sees. And while you expend all your energy to conquer huge amounts of actual territory, someone else simply colours parts of the map as his own, and sends the map to the politician.

The territory is the actual public opinion, while the map is a politician’s perception of this public opinion.

And if a politician perceives lots of active opposition to climate regulation — even if the opposition’s artificially drummed up — he may be tempted to adjust his policy proposals according to ‘public opinion’. And this, I surmise, is what the ICSC is trying to accomplish.

Footnotes

1. Interestingly, while Harris emphasizes this point in the slides, he skips over it in his speech.

Updates

• The speech excerpt
  • 2008-08-14: I’ve extracted and uploaded the segment of Harris’s speech from 15′ to 17′ (this is 2.5MB; the above-quoted remarks start at 57″).
  • 2008-08-15: I’ve now also uploaded the 2-minute segment (converted to Ogg Speex format) to Wikiality. Also, I adjusted the paragraphing in the above transcript to make it align better with the slide’s bullet points.
  • 2008-09-24: Corrected a transcription error (”publish this” → “publish us”).
  • 2008-09-25: The segment’s now also on YouTube. (More precisely, the section of the speech from 15′ 28″ to 16′ 26″.)
  • 2008-09-29: A better YouTube video.
  • 2008-10-09: I thought, “hmm… why not embed the YouTube video into this blog entry?” And so I did.
• The original recording of Harris’s complete speech
  • 2008-09-17: The Heartland Institute has removed Harris’s speech and slides from their web site. However, as stated above, I have archived the relevant portions.
  • 2008-09-19: The audio’s now back on the Heartland site, at a different address.

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. Milloy’s brilliant plan to stonewall climate change regulation. Intl. J. Inact., 1:10–14

I was originally going to talk about yet another pig-headed article on The Register¹, in which Andrew Orlowski praises Freeman Dyson for spewing complete nonsense². But that’ll be shooting fish in a barrel.

So instead I’ll discuss the talk which Steve Milloy³ gave during the “2008 International Conference on Climate Change” ⁴. Anyway, the talk is intriguingly titled How to Stop Climate Change Legislation in the US, and is available as a whopping 27MB, 23-minute-long MP3.

Milloy presents the problem

Well, what did Milloy say? Let’s hear him out. During the first five minutes there’s the stuff about how the anthropogenic global warming theory is “utter hogwash”, how Al Gore was wrong, and all that. But after that it starts getting interesting. At 5′ 9″:

So what is it [that has caused the push for global warming mitigation to go so far, to the point of a Lieberman-Warner Bill]? Well, for many people who come from my side of the political spectrum — libertarians, free-market conservatives — it comes as quite a bit of a surprise. … What do you do, when the people that represent business and free enterprise have switched sides? What do you do when these people are no longer fighting for free markets and free enterprise and for limited government regulation and for individual freedom?

Of course, it means that our “free-market conservatives” don’t actually represent the free market at all. But of course, that’s not the answer Milloy wants. Instead, he puts the cart before the horse and, instead of asking why free enterprises don’t like soi-disant “free-market conservatives”, he accuses the free enterprises of being infected with Traitorous Pinkoism:

What do you do when they all start siding with the enemy, and are all working against everything you stood for, stand for, and worked for? … We learnt this the hard way at JunkScience. When I first started out this business, industry was interested in good science.

Milloy tells us why, indeed, it is a problem

At 6′ 22″:

So here we are, 2008, and business is no longer our ally. Business is now pushing for global warming regulation. Why are they [businesses] doing that? Well, it’s a great money-making opportunity for one. … Regardless of what the science is, it doesn’t really make any difference. If you’re a company like General Electric, you can sell windmills. And if you set up a regulatory scheme where people get tax credits or are subsidized or otherwise incentivized to buy windmills, they will, and you make a lot of money.

Hmm, citizens save money, businesses make money. What’s not to like?

At 9′ 7″:

So, they [businesses] are ignoring the fact that this regulation’s making energy more expensive, less available, curtailing economic growth. They don’t really believe that it’s going to hurt them.

Wind energy becomes cheaper, citizens save money, businesses make money. The Green Economy is Doomed!

And now, Milloy presents his solution

At 14′ 30″, Milloy reveals his 12-million-dollar strategy to stonewall carbon regulation:

So, what do we do to our Free Enterprise Action Fund? Well, we try to be a problem for managements and shareholders. … We’re institutional shareholders, we’re kind of a small fund, about 12 million dollars. But we’re very good with the paperwork and kind of a pain in the rear end for these people. We primarily work through shareholder proposals, and we’re trying to get shareholders and CEOs to think about what they’re doing. We have filed numerous shareholder proposals with companies in the US Climate Action Partnership — GE, Dell, Pepsi, …

So that’s the plan — if businesses don’t like you, hijack them! Let’s proceed to 15′ 26″:

And when we approach the companies, we tell them, you know, you’re in a group — the US Climate Action Partnership — where none of you really have the same goal. There are companies like Duke Energy… you know, Duke Energy is an electric utility in Carolinas… most of what they burn to produce electricity is coal. Coal becomes a disfavoured fuel under greenhouse gas regulations.

Which brings us to 17′ 10″, where Milloy discusses the second part of his plan: Divide and Conquer. Except it’s not really his subplan, it’s the Plan of the Invisible Hand of the Free Market:

I personally think that, well, in the end, what’s going to kill climate regulation is not the science, or that the science should be what actually does it in. What’s going to kill it is the fact that these USCAP companies can’t arrive at an agreement on what they want. Because there’s no compromise between carbon tax, cap-and-trade, cap-and-trade auction… I don’t see what the common ground is, for any of those interests, so that may be our saving grace.

At 20′ 40″, Milloy reveals the last part of his plan — the weapon of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD):

None of them [companies] know — none of them know — that the woman who is the head lobbyist of USCAP, she’s married to a founder of the Natural Resources Defence Council, and current board member. Now if I’m a shareholder of — pick a company — Duke Energy, Pepsi, do I really want the value of my company relying on an environmentalist lobbyist? Who’s she going to cut the deal for? Is she going to cut the deal for the environmentalists, not for business?

At 22′ 17″:

We’re in trouble. We have twelve months or so to work on this.

Summary

So, ladies and gentlemen, we can now summarize Milloy’s science-filled plan to stop US climate change legislation:

• Hijack USCAP companies with $12 million;
• Divide and conquer by invoking the Invisible Hand;
• Bring on the Divine Sword of FUD;
• ???
• Profit!

Will it work? Well, in order to find out I’ll probably need to build some sort of model of how the business world works, but I’m too lazy to do that, so I’ll just say, “I don’t know.” What do you think, dear readers?

Footnotes

1. Perhaps it should call itself The Ostricher, with a tagline “Hiding in the sand that eats IT”.
2. Dyson wants us to believe that James Hansen travelled from 2006 to 1998 using Satanic time travel technology, in order to adjust his 1998 climate model predictions so that they work all the way to 2006. Or something.
3. For the uninitiated, Steve Milloy is the Fred Mbogo of all things science: he’s the founder of the Advancement for Sound Science Coalition (TASSC, or the ASS Coalition), where “Sound Science” refers to “Science” that e.g. tobacco and oil companies like. He’s also a (failed) portfolio manager of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, which doesn’t have much to do with free enterprise in general.
4. Also known as the New York denial-a-palooza, or the “John Coleman is going to sue Al Gore!” conference.

Update 2008-09-19: I’ve updated the link to the MP3 of the talk, and also uploaded a segment of it from 14′ to 16′. Also, some errors in the above transcripts have been corrected.

La vicenda dell’Iceberg che si è staccato dalla banchisa suscitando preoccupazione, e in qualche caso allarmismi sproporzionati, come spesso accade in tutto il mondo, Italia compresa, ha dato al “Giornale” l’occasione per ospitare un articolo critico, che merita però una critica assai più severa.

Scrive infatti Franco Battaglia nelle prime righe:

È bene avvisare subito i lettori che la scienza ha già dimostrato che col riscaldamento globale l’uomo non c’entra, come fa fede il Rapporto del N-Ipcc - presentato a New York lo scorso 3 marzo e naturalmente ignorato dal Tg1 - dall’inequivocabile titolo: «È la natura e non le attività umane a governare il clima». L’N-Ipcc è un organismo scientifico internazionale, simile all’Ipcc ma privo del controllo politico dei governi (la «N» sta per «non-governativo»), di cui fanno parte fisici dell’atmosfera, geologi, climatologi e scienziati di scienze affini.

L’articolo l’ho trovato grazie a una segnalazione pubblicata a commento di un post del blog “Progetto Galileo”, che giustamente aveva fatto notare varie incongruenze nelle corrispondenze dei quotidiani sull’argomento.

Lì si faceva notare che l’articolo è categorico, ma la frase che ho citato non è solo categorica: è una boiata pazzesca (non so se in buona fede).

E’ assai raro che la scienza dimostri o smentisca in modo inequivocabile nulla, e davvero è difficile accettare l’idea che possa averlo fatto su un argomento controverso come il mutamento climatico.

Io premetto che non ho competenze in tema di clima, ma ne ho qualcuna in tema di manipolazione della stampa e della pubblica opinione, in cui tipicamente chi vuole difendere interessi economici minacciati da una teoria scientifica utilizza un paravento con credenziali scientifiche molto più apparenti che reali, e che spesso vive di finanziamenti provenienti da parti in causa.

Consiglio (anche a Franco Battaglia, che non conosco) la lettura della pagina dedicata al report pubblicato da questo “panel” dal sito SOURCEWATCH - Your guide to the names behind the news (la tua guida ai nomi che stanno dietro le notizie), che scrive, tra le altre cose (la traduzione è mia):

La conferenza internazionale sui mutamenti climatici del 2008 si è tenuta al Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel di New York tra il 2 e il 4 marzo. La conferenza è stata organizzata e “sponsorizzata” dall’Heartland Institute, una “think tank” statunitense che negli scorsi anni ha ricevuto sostanziosi finanziamenti dalla Exxon per il suo lavoro nello sminuire il significato del riscaldamento globale.

Poi cita due articoli del Washington Post e del New York Times che guarda caso non sono giunti alla conclusione di Battaglia, e al contrario hanno sottolineato come questo Panel sia composto da una ventina di persone appena, neanche tutte con competenze scientifiche.

E qui viene da chiedersi se sia solo ingenuità quella che porta alcuni a trasformare - come fa l’articolo del Giornale - la legittima critica sui toni esagerati usati da tanti mass-media su uno specifico iceberg in una critica che presenta come non scientifiche le posizioni più diffuse e condivise in tema di riscaldamento globale e viceversa come “dimostrazione scientifica” il documento prodotto in un week-end in un costoso hotel di Manhattan da una ventina di speaker invitati a presenziare con soggiorno pagato e gettone di 1.000 dollari a testa.

Report #1 from the Global Warming Conference in New York City
Joseph Bast - March 03, 2008
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute and more than 50 cosponsors, got off to a fast and successful start … (read more)

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate (pdf)
Edited by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. - March 02, 2008
The public’s fear of anthropogenic global warming seems to be at a fever pitch. Polls show most people in most countries believe human greenhouse gas … (read more)

Media Advisory: Presentation of the Summary for Policymakers of the NIPCC Report on Global Warming
Diane Carol Bast - March 02, 2008
The Summary for Policymakers of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is being officially released at the 2008 International … (read more)

Policy Study (pdf): Understanding Visual Exhibits in the Global Warming Debate
Ronald J. Rychlak, J.D. - March 02, 2008
The manipulation of visuals–bar and line graphs, pie charts, even photographs–has proven to be a highly effective way “to offer up scary scenarios” … (read more)

Global Warming Visuals Often Distort Scientific Data
Diane Carol Bast - March 02, 2008
(Chicago, Illinois and New York, New York - March 3, 2008) A new study on the use of visual exhibits in the global warming debate–a tactic employed regularly … (read more)

Heartland Institute