November 29, 2015

Yet another claim that somebody is "behind" climate skeptics or has "bought" them

Like all the skeptics I know, I am still waiting for my cheque!

Warmists very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as classic bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

The guy below however was apparently aware of how unsubstantiated are the usual assertions about skeptics being "bought" so has tried to provide evidence of it.  He claims to have data on ALL the skeptics in the USA.  But he says that only some of them have corporate funding.  But those who DO have corportate funding are more likely to have issued anti-warming statements. And he has done no similar study of climate alarmists.

One wonders where he got his information about funding.  It would be pretty normal for ANY organization to be cagey about that.  Let me assume that his data on that are right, however.  So what do we have from his study:

1).  Some skeptics and skeptical organizations receive NO corporate funding.  That is a rather damaging admission.  Warmists normally talk as if ALL skepticism was "paid for".

2).  The skeptics who received funding write more.

Such trivial findings!  OF COURSE people who received funding wrote more.  Time is money and money is time.  If you are funded to write on some topic you will be able to divert some of your  time onto writing about that topic.  And you will write more on that topic if you have more time.  Money can buy time.  That money can buy time is in fact the only real conclusions of the study.  But who did not know that already?

A very uninformative study

What Warmists MUST close their eyes to is that any intelligent person can see huge holes in the Warmist story if he cares to  think about it.  You don't need funding to be skeptical.  You just need to know some very basic stuff.

For instance, the scare started with Al Gore and others warning us of a huge rise in the oceans as the polar ice melted. And if all the polar ice melted, that would indeed cause a large sea-level rise.  But will it?  91% of the earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica so Antarctica is where the game will play out.

Temperatures of the Antarctic vary with time and place but they are all WAY below zero -- averaging around -49 degrees at the pole in winter -- so you would have to bring those temperatures up by a LOT to melt any ice.  You would have to bring them up to above zero. Yet even in their wildest dreams, Warmists predict a temperature rise of only 6 degrees.  And what would that do?  Nothing.  It might change the temperature of some Antarctic ice from -30 degrees to -24 degrees but -24 degrees is still way too cold for anything to melt.  The surrounding sea ice (floating ice) might melt a bit but, as Archimedes discovered about 3,000 years ago, that doesn't raise the water level anyhow.

I have of course not gone into detail but that is the ballpark story.

So Warmism is patent nonsense and nobody needs to pay you to see that.  You do however have to have a vested interest to believe in it -- and the scientists who promote it do.  The scare gets them a golden shower of research grant money.  They live high on the hog as long as the scare lasts


Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change

Justin Farrell

Abstract

Drawing on large-scale computational data and methods, this research demonstrates how polarization efforts are influenced by a patterned network of political and financial actors. These dynamics, which have been notoriously difficult to quantify, are illustrated here with a computational analysis of climate change politics in the United States. The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change countermovement (164 organizations), as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993–2013 (40,785 texts, more than 39 million words).

Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time.

These findings provide new, and comprehensive, confirmation of dynamics long thought to be at the root of climate change politics and discourse. Beyond the specifics of climate change, this paper has important implications for understanding ideological polarization more generally, and the increasing role of private funding in determining why certain polarizing themes are created and amplified. Lastly, the paper suggests that future studies build on the novel approach taken here that integrates large-scale textual analysis with social networks.

PNAS November 23, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1509433112

A popularized version of the paper here.

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