Climate Change Deniers Are Being Proven Wrong — The Hard Way

Recently, record breaking heat-waves have occurred across certain parts of North America. Washington State has even had record breaking temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit, as have the states of Oregon, and California along with some parts of Canada, some of the hottest on record in human history.

Is it just me, or did someone warn us of this? Wasn’t their a politician — he had some documentary about some truth he called inconvenient if I remember correctly — who spent decades warning us of this? I think he actually elected him President at one point, but then somehow he didn’t become President — still not sure how that happened.

Oh, but I kid. Al Gore (who, if you didn’t know, was the man I sarcastically forgot the name of above) had spent years warning about what we’re currently experiencing. Every step of the way, Gore had to fight against those who did not believe his claims — sometimes due to good natured skepticism , but sometimes due to dishonestly.

One of those dishonest actors is Marc Morano, the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide To Climate Change and the founder of the website Climate Depot — which posts stories that are supposed to have “debunked” Climate Change. (Think of it as if the Drudge Report was only about climate denial — and somehow worse than it already is.)

The only mention Morano has of the recent heatwave on his website is an article he shared from “Not A Lot Of People Know,” a climate-change denial Wordpress blog, with the headline “Why Were US Heatwaves Worse In The Past, Roger?” The Roger in that headline is Roger Harrabin, a journalist on the environment for the BBC.

The article in question shows a number of graphs which make the point that a massive heatwave occurred in the 1930s. Of course, Harrabin didn’t actually claim that all heatwaves were caused by Climate Change, just that Climate Change has made them more comment. To quote a section of the article:

In fact scientists have got much better at linking extreme events to climate change, such as the heatwave that scorched Europe in 2019, which researchers say was made 100 times more likely due to CO2.

This does not mean without CO2 heatwaves would not occur, just that they are more likely to occur on a planet with Climate Change than without it.

For the sake of listening to the other side, I did give The Politically Incorrect Guide To Climate Change a read in order to find something to debunk, but none of the claims are truly worth debunking. The entire book is a hit and run of statements that are irrelevant and meaningless even if they are true (and many of them are not). Take this claim from chapter two:

John Holdren, chief science advisor to President Obama, is a leading proponent of the global warming scare who claimed in 2014 that “the thing that keeps me up at night the most is the climate change issue.” But back in 1971, he was warning that pollution and volcanic ash could “start a new ice age.”

Even if this is true, so what? Albert Einstein was a firm believer in alchemy — or the science of trying to turn urine into gold — does that mean we have to throw out relative motion because the man behind it believed something crazy?

By the way, that quote comes from Chapter Two, “Climate Change Deja Vu,” where Morano talks about previous “scares” (a better word would be “hypothesis”) that climate scientists have warned us about, including the infamous “global cooling.” (It should be noted that Climate Change can also create harsher winters as well as harsher summers, meaning both “global warming” and “global cooling” would be accurate terms depending on when we’re talking about. He quotes Thomas Friedman pointing this out — only to then use it nothing more than evidence that “the narrative is falling apart” or something.) However, Chapter Three, titled “‘Pulled From Thin Air’: The 97 Percent ‘Consensus’” sees Morano arguing that actually the climate scientists are on his side! In fact, throughout the book Morano quotes many different scientists who agree with him, from all different fields and walks of life. So, according to this book, Climate Scientists are insane lying morons who can’t make a graph to save their lives, and also they agree with him?

Of course, if people like Morano could at least pretend to be nothing more than citizens searching for the truth, maybe I could take them seriously, but they can’t. Morano openly declares himself a conservative ideologue — okay, he doesn’t directly say that, but he clearly is — as early as the book’s first chapter. Here’s Morano explaining his origin story:

But then, in 1992, I experienced an epiphany. My first doubts on the deforestation issue were raised by physicist Dixy Lee Ray, who attended the Rio Earth Summit and filed reports on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show debunking the claims that the Amazonian rainforest was about to disappear. I started investigating and was very surprised to find out that the green movement was in many cases wildly exaggerating deforestation claims.

But Morano didn’t only listen to Limbaugh, he got to work with Limbaugh:

I worked for Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh television show during its four-year run from 1992 to 1996.1 served as his onscreen television reporter and producer, and Limbaugh referred to me as “Our Man in Washington.” I had the dubious distinction of being the first journalist in history to have his television camera seized at the Clinton White House in 1993 while on assignment with the Limbaugh TV show.

Of course, nobody is surprised by this. Rush Limbaugh influenced basically all forms of right-wing smears we saw begin in the 1990s, and climate change denial is no exception.

But that is not to say that Morano is limited to being some clone of Limbaugh, he has actually broke some major scandals — albeit manufactured ones. In November 2009, Morano published thousands of illegally obtained emails from the Climatic Research Unit, leading to what became known as “Climategate.” In truth, the emails leaked showed that scientists sometimes disagree with each other. As RealClimate pointed out shortly after the leaks occured:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to “get rid of the MWP,” no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no “marching orders” from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Nine separate investigations by the British Government found no evidence of any ethics violation, but that didn’t stop the deniers from continuing to point to this as evidence things are being covered up. Of course, the Climate Change denial movement has to cling to whatever long debunked talking points they have left, primarily because they have so little to work with. Mind you, this has the effect of meaning that anything — and I do mean anything — that could be seen as evidence that “the narrative is falling apart” is seen as such. To quote Johann Hari:

The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative — See! The global warming story is falling apart! — to be reinforced by the media. It doesn’t matter that their alternative theories are based on demonstrably false claims, as they are with all the leading “thinkers” in this movement.

I should also note, Climate Change deniers really don’t like being called Climate Change deniers — despite the fact that’s objectively what they are. Going back to Morano, he writes in the opening pages of his book:

I am a climate skeptic, a doubter, a dissenter — and have been smeared as a “denier.” . . . The vicious name-calling starts with the “climate denier” epithet that is meant to evoke comparisons to Holocaust deniers.

Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody calls people like Morano Climate Change deniers as part of some plot to smear them by thinking them to Holocaust deniers, people call them Climate Change deniers because they deny Climate Change — it’s actually really simple.

If Morano truly is just a skeptic, he’s only skeptical in one direction. Throughout the book, Morano will mindlessly parrot easily debunked claims by people who share his view that Climate Change is not occurring. Take the claim by Patrick Moore, quoted at length by Morano, that “Ice ages have occurred when carbon dioxide levels were up to ten times as high as they are today.” Here’s Moore expanding on that claim:

The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming.

No it doesn’t, it would only “fundamentally contradict the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming” assuming that CO2 then entered the atmosphere. Ice contains CO2, so if the temperature remains cold enough for that CO2 to freeze into ice and therefore be removed from the atmosphere it would therefore not contribute to any kind of warming. In fact, some scientists believe that the most recent Ice Age occurred because — and I’m dramatically simplifying this — the oceans removed more CO2 from the atmosphere than it normally would.

This is why, although CO2 emissions were higher (assuming Moore is right on this, at least), the amount of CO2 located in the atmosphere was not. During the most recent Ice Age, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was 200 parts per million, at the start of the Industrial Revolution that was 280 per parts million and today it’s 387 parts per million. Again, the emissions by themselves don’t matter, what matters is the amount in the atmosphere — which is usually measured in parts per million.

Sometimes, it’s not even that the climate scientists are wrong, but that the celebrities who promote the climate science are also hypocrites. Of course, hypocrisy is bad and should be called out, but if a hypocrite is right, that matters more than their hypocrisy. (As Penn Jillette used to point out, if someone says one thing and does the other, I’m likely to agree with one of them.) Take Alan Moore’s 3/1/2016 article “The Top 12 Celebrity Climate Hypocrites” for the Media Research Center. Here’s what they say about Leonardo DiCaprio:

When Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t blaming conservatives for destroying the planet, he’s cruising in his private yacht, or flying among the four houses he owns on both coasts. DiCaprio seems to think that his own air travel doesn’t affect the environment the way he claims it does for other people, even telling the German newspaper Bild that he planned to “fly around the world doing good for the environment.”

Is DiCaprio a hypocrite? Probably, especially considering he uses private flights instead of public ones (although a celebrity like him has a high chance of being harassed on public flights). But how does that then debunk what various climate scientists — many of whom only fly coach — are telling us regarding the environment?

Of course, while Climate Change deniers have been wasting the time of the population with what they misleadingly call “debate,” real human consequences have occurred. The fact is, climate is a very important part of how humans interact with the environment and with each other. In Morano’s book, he makes fun of Bill Moyers for saying that Climate Change caused the Syrian Civil War, but it did. It was far from the only factor, but the war was caused by an extreme drought in Syria — and that drought was likely caused by Climate Change.

Extinct species ruin food-chains, the inability to have a proper growing season causes food shortages, and rising sea levels will result in entire countries becoming inhabitable to humans. The heatwave in the West Coast of the United States mentioned at the start of this article has resulted in fifty people dead from overheating, because it is that hot on the West Coast at the moment.

President Biden has taken Climate Change seriously, to his credit. He has re-entered the Paris Climate Accords and is the first President to have an Envoy to Climate Change, in the form of former Secretary of State John Kerry (who was Secretary of State when the Paris Climate Accords were signed). However, Joe Biden needs dramatic changes to our energy grid (which is literally melting due to heat) in order for the changes needed to occur, which he is not offering let along providing.

Joe Biden has made a big deal about Electric Cars during his administration, just as Barack Obama did before him, but Electric Cars are primarily powered by coal — which is one of the worst polluters on the planet. Unless Biden can fundamentally change our Electric Grid, then Electric Cars will be an incredibly small change at a time when big change is needed. As of right now, it takes more CO2 to make an Electric Car than it does a normal car, and over the course of its lifetime an Electric Car will only release three tons less of CO2 than a normal car would. Now, that’s not nothing, but unless we can get millions of people to go along with, odds are it won’t be the change that we need.

On the more radical end, there’s the Green New Deal, first proposed by Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. While many of the ideas of the Green New Deal are radical, the fact is that such changes might be needed if we want our planet to survive. As of writing, President Biden has not come up in favor of the Green New Deal — and during the 2020 Presidential Election he was one of the few Democrats running to remain neutral on it — but he definitely has been paying attention to the concerns of its supporters, and has even created his own plan which is a more moderate counterpart.

Of course, many of these solutions fall apart because they make it sound like Climate Change is a problem we created together. In truth, ten companies are responsible for roughly 71% of CO2 emission in the United States. Ideas that go after them — such as Cap and Trade or even a Carbon Tax — are rarely brought up in political debate these days. The Obama Administration made attempts pass both of them, and both of them failed. Obama then went on to give us the environmentally disastrous Cash For Clunkers program — which made finding a used car impossible for many Americans — and continued to give money to the coal industry.

Hopefully, President Biden can make the United States stop its massive carbon footprint. But if he can’t, then what we saw this week will be happening much more often, and it will be getting much worse.