Martin Hultman
Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden: Seeks to explore ‘connections between conservatism, xenophobia, and climate change denial’
A study of climate change denial”, is now collecting the world’s foremost researchers in this area. In the project, the network will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative think tanks.
“Climate change is an existential question for all society. We have these insights, but we come into conflict with them. Therefore, it is important to understand the mechanisms behind different forms of climate change denial, and how this influences the debate and political decisions,” says Associate Professor Martin Hultman, from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
A University in Sweden has set up what it claims is the “world’s first global research network looking into climate change denial.” Chalmers University of Technology is seeking to explore “connections between conservatism, xenophobia, and climate change denial.” The apparently well-funded research effort ” will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative think tanks.”
The project is a multi-year, interdisciplinary and international project, which is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.
“Thanks to this international platform, we can investigate how climate change denial arguments arise and are spread – and see differences and similarities in different cultural contexts,” says the coordinator Martin Hultman, an Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Environmental studies at Chalmers University of Technology. (martin.hultman@chalmers.se )
Via WattsUpWithThat.com: Blame this guy. “Climate change is an existential question for all society. We have these insights, but we come into conflict with them. Therefore, it is important to understand the mechanisms behind different forms of climate change denial, and how this influences the debate and political decisions,” says Martin Hultman, from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. CREDIT Ulrika Ernström/Chalmers University of Technology
The Chalmers University boasts it “will connect around 40 of the world’s foremost scientific experts in the area and pave the way for international comparisons.”
But the new effort to study “conservatism” and climate “denial” ignores the many politically left scientists who are now leading the charge against man-made climate change claims.
The new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” by Marc Morano, details the prestigious scientists of the Left, who are now dissenting on “global warming.”
(Move over Rachel Carson! – Morano’s Politically Incorrect Climate Book outselling ‘Silent Spring’ at Earth Day – Order Your Book Copy Now! ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’ By Marc Morano)
Book Excerpt – Chapter 9: “The Eroding ‘Consensus’ & Chapter
Not only are already skeptical scientists speaking out because of the smears and attempted intimidation. More and more scientists—including many on the political Left—have reexamined the evidence for man-made global warming claims and reversed their views.
Re-Evaluating the Evidence
Award-winning geophysicist and French politician Claude Allègre was one of the first scientists to warn about the dangers of global warming. Allègre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academies of Science, has authored more than one hundred scientific articles, written eleven books, and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States. Allègre was one of fifteen hundred scientists who signed a November 18, 1992, letter titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” arguing that the “potential risks” were “very great.” But in recent years Allègre has taken another look at the evidence and reversed himself. He is now France’s most outspoken global warming skeptic.
Allègre explains that global warming hysteria is motivated by money. “The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!” he has pointed out. Allègre mocked former vice president Al Gore’s 2007 Nobel Prize, calling it “a political gimmick” and saying, “The amount of nonsense in Al Gore’s film! It’s all politics; it’s designed to intervene in American politics.”
“The CO2 is in a very short proportion in the atmosphere. But my point is nothing has proved this is man-made climate change,” Allègre said in a French TV interview.
Dr. Ivar Giaever is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who was one of President Obama’s key scientific supporters in 2008. A former professor at the School of Engineering and School of Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he received the 1973 physics Nobel for his work on quantum tunneling. Giaever joined over seventy Nobel laureates in endorsing Barack Obama in an October 29, 2008 open letter, which read, in part, “The country urgently needs a visionary leader…. We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.”
But seven years after signing the letter, Giaever directly addressed the man he had campaigned for: “I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.” At the sixty-fifth Nobel Laureate Conference in Lindau, Germany, in 2015, which drew sixty-five recipients of the prize, Giaever called global warming “a non-problem.”
In his talk to the other laureates, titled “Global Warming Revisited,” Giaever called the president’s claim that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change” a “ridiculous statement…. How can he say that? I think Obama is a clever person, but he gets bad advice. Global warming is all wet.” Echoing Lovelock and Tol, he said, “Global warming has become a new religion.”
Giaever, who is originally from Norway, declared “I am a skeptic…. I don’t see that CO2 is the cause of all this problem.”
He was embarrassed that Gore and UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri had shared a Nobel prize in 2007: “These two people got the Nobel prize in peace, and I am ashamed of the Norwegian government who did that.”
The Nobel physicist questioned the basis for rising carbon dioxide fears. “When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory,” Giaever explained.
“The facts are that in the last 100 years we have measured the temperatures it has gone up .8 degrees and everything in the world has gotten better. So how can they say it’s going to get worse when we have the evidence? We live longer, better health, and better everything. But if it goes up another .8 degrees we are going to die I guess,” he noted.
“I would say that basically, global warming is a non-problem. Just leave it alone and it will take care of itself. It is almost very hard for me to understand why almost every government in Europe—except for the Polish government—is worried about global warming. It must be politics.”
Giaever pointed out that science is not by majority rule: “We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important.”
Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society to protest the group’s promotion of man-made climate change. “I resigned from the American Physical Society because of this statement. ‘The evidence is incontrovertible.’ That’s religion, That’s a religious statement…. The temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period,” Giaever said.
“We have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge amounts of money on global warming,” he added.
Robert Giegengack, former chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, publicly announced that he had voted for Gore in 2000 and said he could do so again: “I voted for Gore in 2000, yeah. I think that if he ran again, depending on who he ran against, I might vote for him. He’s a smart man.”
But he is not a fan of Gore’s film. After viewing An Inconvenient Truth, Giegengack said, “I was appalled. I was appalled because he either deliberately misrepresented the point he was making or didn’t understand it. So it was irresponsible of Al Gore.” As we have already seen from the interview of Giegengack I did for my film Climate Hustle, the Ivy League scientist sees nothing in the geological record to justify the belief that CO2 controls the climate.
“It was too bad, because I thought Al Gore had a brilliant opportunity that he blew it,” Giegengack said. “He could have done us all a real service, and what he chose to do instead was to polarize the argument. And I think the polarity in the argument really began with the Al Gore film,” he added.
“I think he was a true-believer, he was a zealot. And he disappointed me because he did not give his audience credit for enough intelligence.”
Renowned Princeton University physicist Freeman Dyson, who has been hailed as “Einstein’s successor,”31 is another scientific dissenter on the political Left. “‘I’m 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side,” Dyson explained in 2015. He called the UN climate pact “pointless” and explained, “pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn’t understand that.”
According to Dyson, “The effects of CO2 on climate are really very poorly understood. The experts all seem to think they understand it, I don’t think they do…. I like carbon dioxide, it’s very good for plants. It’s good for the vegetation, the farms, essentially carbon dioxide is vital for food production, vital for wildlife. It would be crazy to try to reduce CO2. Earth is growing greener as a result of carbon dioxide.”
“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said, referring to climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”
“I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong,” he said. “I think the notion that I always like to oppose the consensus in science is totally wrong. The fact is there’s only one subject that I’ve been controversial, which is climate,” he added. Dyson explained that climate change is “the only field in which I’m opposed to the majority. Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they’re not talking nonsense.”
Like many of his fellow skeptics on the Left, Dyson sees the faith in climate change as a religion: “There certainly is an enormous religion in which there are lots of true believers who think that climate change is evil and that we’re going to run into big catastrophes if we don’t do something drastic. That’s a sort of belief system which exists.”
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Former Greenpeace member, Finnish scientist Jarl R. Ahlbeck of Åbo Akademi University, who has authored two hundred scientific publications, is also a climate dissenter. “So far, real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming,” he explained.
Yet another left-of-center scientist to bail out of the global warming movement is physicist Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa. Rancourt has declared global warming a “corrupt social phenomenon. Strictly an imaginary problem of the 1st World middle-class. It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else.”
Rancourt, who has authored over one hundred articles in scientific journals, argues, “that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.”
Rancourt’s dissent on man-made climate fears does not sit well with many of his green friends: “When I tell environmental activists that global warming is not something to be concerned about, they attack me—they shun me, they do not allow me to have my materials published in their magazines.”
Rancourt’s explanation of why his fellow environmentalists are wrapped up in promoting climate alarm is blunt. “They look for comfortable lies that they can settle into and alleviate the guilt they feel about being on privileged end of the planet—a kind of survivor’s guilt. A lot of these environmentalists are guilt-laden individuals who need to alleviate the guilt without taking risks,” he said. “The modern environmental movement has hijacked itself by looking for an excuse to stay comfortable and stay away from the actual battle. Ward Churchill has called this pacifism as pathology. If you are really concerned about saving world’s forests or habitat destruction, then fight against habitat destruction, don’t go off in the tenuous thing about CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Actually address the question; otherwise you are weakening your effect as an activist.”
“Climate change ‘science’ is part of just another screw-the-brown-people scam,” he explained. “Carbon trading will be the largest financial extortion enterprise…. The whole climate change scam is now driven by the top-level financiers newly eyeing a multi-trillion-dollar paper economy of carbon trading and that this is the reason it’s now a dominant mainstream media and corporate messaging presence.”
Climate statistics professor Caleb Rossiter of American University is an outspoken anti-war activist with a flawless progressive record on a range of political issues. He is a former Democratic congressional candidate who campaigned against U.S.-backed wars in Central America and Southern Africa.
“I’ve spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for ‘friendly’ dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial,” he said. Rossiter is also outspoken about being a global warming skeptic.
As he told me in 2014, “I would say since 2004 I’ve been very lonely, Marc. I’ve been lonely working on the Hill for the Democratic Party.”
“My blood simply boils too hot when I read the blather, daily, about climate catastrophe. It is so well-meaning, and so misguided,” Rossiter, an adjunct professor in American University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, explained. He is particularly frustrated by the impact on the world’s poor. “Climate Justice in limiting carbon dioxide emissions is a crime against Africa, and it’s what motivated me to get involved again in this debate,” he said.
“I have assigned hundreds of climate articles as I taught and learned about the physics of climate, the construction of climate models, and the statistical evidence of extreme weather. I started to suspect that the cclimate change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.”
Rossiter dismisses CO2 as the climate control knob. “We always, as humans, are looking for cause-and-effect, but it’s extremely difficult to find it in a complex system like the Earth’s climate over thousands of years,” he explained.“For the IPCC to say nothing else can explain [global warming except mankind’s CO2 ] is the opposite of what we do in science. We are trying to test the known hypothesis that there is no effect to anthropogenic warming. And in to do that, you have to have data that removes all the other causes—factor out all the other elements, and isolate yours. It is simply not true that you can only model how temperature has changed from 1850 to today using a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. I can model it for you with baseball statistics from that same period if you give me enough time to scrub the models.”
Rossiter’s failure to follow his colleagues on the Left on the claims of global warming has isolated him. “What we are supposed to do as professors is follow the data to our conclusion, and then put it out there to be debated,” Rossiter explained. But his colleagues refuse to debate global warming. “I have invited the Union of concerned scientists, Greenpeace, Institute for policy studies, random members of Congress who I knew from when I worked up there on the Hill, to come to my classes at A.U. to debate—they simply refused,” he said. “There was an agreement among the groups who believe strongly that there’s catastrophic climate change not to debate because it gives credit to those of us who have questions about the certainty with which they operate.”
Rossiter dismissed Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize as the “worst Nobel Prize for peace since Henry Kissinger.” Rossiter chastised his colleagues on the political Left for “hopping into bed” with Gore when it comes to climate change. “I know why the Left is supporting Al Gore on this when they didn’t on anything else, it’s because it gives them the lever to move away from an industrial society to what they call a postindustrial society,” he said.
Rossiter says the political Left in the United States is using climate fears to achieve a “welcome license to dismember the carbon-driven capitalism.” Rossiter attempted to convince the liberal think tank Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) to allow an open debate on climate change. “I wrote a very long memo,” he said explaining to the director that “we need to stop and look at the data, I want to have a debate with the staff and the board. And he said, ‘No, we know your views Caleb.’…So it was because I could not reach the board and them directly, that I wrote the piece for the Wall Street Journal.”
When Rossiter called global warming “unproved science” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he found that his credentials as a long-time progressive could not protect him from the consequences of his climate skepticism.
“Two days later, I was handed my walking papers from a twenty-threeyears association with that think-tank,” he explained. “They felt it was best that I be terminated because my views on African Development, and Climate Change, and Climate Justice were divergent from theirs.”
The IPS email to Rossiter explained, “We would like to inform you that we are terminating your position as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies…. Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours.”
Many other politically left-of-center scientists are converts to skepticism. Philip Stott, a professor emeritus of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies has explained, “I come from the left wing
politically. I am fed up with environmentalists putting regressive costs and taxes on the poor.”He points out that global warming is “actually not very much about the science. It’s always been about economic and political choice.” According to Stott, “Climate science and these costs are sub-prime science, subprime economics and above all subprime politics.” He urges, “Let’s give this global warming nonsense its Waterloo.”
According to Stott, “The fundamental point has ever been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors. The very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins just one politically-selected factor is about as bonkers as it gets. How on Earth have folk been conned into believing such hubris? It is so like The Prophecies by Nostradamus—the vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote ‘evidence’ selectively after every major dramatic event, and retrospectively claim them as a ‘hit’!”
Stott has described in vivid terms how futile attempting to control the climate would be. “I want you to think of the world. I want you to think of the world from inner Siberia, to Greenland, then to Singapore, and then come to the Arab states and to Sahara. Ladies and gentlemen, in the temperature range I have just covered, it is from minus 20 degrees C, to nearly 50 degrees C, a range of 70 degrees C, in which humanity has adapted and learnt to live. We are talking about…a prediction of 2 to 3 degrees C, what a funk!” Stott explained.
“Humanity lives successfully from Greenland to Singapore to Saudi Arabia. 70 degrees C. And what is more, the carbon reductions will not produce an outcome that is predictable.” He contended “I would love to be able to think we can control climate, when of course it is indeed going to have to be adaptation, flexibility put to an outcome that we don’t know ’cause I actually don’t know what climate they’re wanting to produce for us. And actually ,I don’t think they know either,” Stott said.
As Stott pointed out, “The global warming ‘crisis’ is misguided. In hubristically seeking to ‘control’ climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that ‘doing something’ (emitting gases) at the margins and ‘not doing something’ (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.” He concluded, “We can no longer afford to cling to the anti-human doctrines of outdated environmentalist thinking. The ‘crisis’ is the global warming political agenda, not climate change.”
Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, has also diverged from his progressive colleagues on man-made climate change. “As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear mongering clap-trap about humancaused global warming to be a disservice to science,” Hertzberg wrote.
