Big Oil are not Climate Change Denialists

[GIGObuster]

@Chief_Pedant

Yes, dear. Of course, dear.

The point I’m trying making about labels has to do with the notion that the label itself has substance, versus what actually is.

Should Big Oil, for example, fund studies and institutions which have an incentive to show that “climate science” has it wrong, the application of a Denialist label may be very satisfying to those of us who want to show the climate science has it right. But the label itself is just a rhetorical label, and the assertion (for example) of “misrepresentation” is another easily applied label that represents a summary opinion.

Well then, the label of your opinions being arguments from ignorance is then appropriate, in this same thread it was pointed at the funding the Koch brothers made to Berkeley earth and Professor Muller, he was a very harsh critic of what the climate scientists had found and expected that the data the theory was based on was flawed. The Kochs then eagerly expected then that the funding they gave to him and Berkeley was going to demonstrate that climate change scientists had it wrong. It blew in the faces of the polluters when Muller came saying that he was wrong and the climate scientists were correct all along.

Did the Kochs took the conclusions from Berkeley Earth and reformed? Nah, they continue funding denial groups after what Muller concluded.

@Chief_Pedant

The Denialist label is deliberately pejorative in nature; analagous to me calling AGW Alarmists “Alarmists,” or referring to them as “Pollyannas” because they think a world which is currently happy to squander its children’s financial resources in self-indulgence will somehow band together and collectively sacrifice for the sake of their children’s environmental concerns.

And you still have your main premise wrong, the sacrifice is not as bad nor onerous as you assume.

@Chief_Pedant

I could just as easily apply a label of “Denier” to those whom I think misrepresent the entire history of how the world has worked so far or deny human nature or misrepresent what the energy requirements will actually be or…well; you get the idea.

Applying a broad “Denialist” label to any opposition argument is a rhetorical tool; it’s not a charge of substance, even though it may be accurate for any given point of fact.

And you only show that you are not paying attention again, I do differentiate between the skeptics and deniers, so far the evidence shows that most of the ones that oppose what the science is telling us are indeed denying it.

@Chief_Pedant

But that could be said on both sides of the ACC debate, and in fact we’ll see whether and how AGW Worriers (?)/Anti-Denialists (?) will have denied what I see the as the obvious facts of population growth, human nature and self-indulgence to live as richly as one can come 2020 when real CO2 output is supposed to start to decline under a 450 Scenario and the coming 2015 Accord kicks in.

Given how well we’ve done with kicking budget balancing down the road (and for the same reason of self interest/tragedy of the commons), I think we’ll find out soon enough which group of Deniers on which side of the debate gets the outcome they were predicting.

And again with the discredited idea that humanity can not limit the use of harmful products that result from technology because more users are coming, if that was the case then all our rivers and lakes would be choke full of algae because the population increased and more phosphates contaminated our rivers. As it turned out regulations and industry got together to limit or remove phosphates from detergents. And civilization and rivers did not die, nor huge sacrifices were needed.

[Kimstu]

@Kimstu

Either provide some actual evidence rebutting that substance, or sack up and admit that you are wrong.

@Chief_Pedant

Yes, dear.

Thank you.

@Chief Pedant

The point I’m trying making about labels has to do with the notion that the label itself has substance […]

the application of a Denialist label […] But the label itself is just a rhetorical label, and the assertion (for example) of “misrepresentation” is another easily applied label […]

The Denialist label is deliberately pejorative in nature; analagous to me calling AGW Alarmists “Alarmists,” or referring to them as “Pollyannas” […] I could just as easily apply a label of “Denier” […]

Applying a broad “Denialist” label to any opposition argument is a rhetorical tool […]

Your inability to provide any actual evidence to rebut the substance in question is noted. Your taking refuge in squid-ink clouds of deconstructive verbal obfuscation to avoid acknowledging your lack of a substantive argument was not really unexpected.

[wolfpup]

@Chief_Pedant

Applying a broad “Denialist” label to any opposition argument is a rhetorical tool; it’s not a charge of substance, even though it may be accurate for any given point of fact.

Here’s how it works. There are a large number of organizations dedicated exclusively to undermining the public perception of climate research – like WUWT, SEPP, CO2science, Junkscience, and countless others – and an even larger number of general right-wing lobby groups that promote denialism along with other right-wing causes, like the Heartland Institute, Heritage, CEI, Marshall, and many dozens of others. All of them are funded by Big Oil, along with entities like coal companies, the Koch brothers, power companies, and general industrial interests.

And the way they operate is by using media and the Internet to disseminate an insidious combination of half-truths, outright lies, and obfuscations, along with occasional actual facts supplied without the necessary context, deliberately intended to mislead*. This is not someone’s incidental sideline or a cottage industry, it’s a major industry that’s been well documented and is highly visible and pervasive, one that has involved prominent PR firms like APCO Worldwide which specialize in backroom-engineered spin, and this entire industry has just one objective: to make the public believe that the science around climate change is much less certain than it really is, if not completely wrong.

And the success of this campaign is reflected in the vast gulf that does indeed now exist between the science and the public perception of it, and the teeming hordes of cheerleaders on some of those sites that inhabit the comments sections, who refer to AGW as “a scam” and “a hoax”. Some of them seem to labor under the delusion that AGW has been pretty much refuted now, and the science is on its last legs and in a state of disrepute. This has been called the largest disinformation campaign in human history and I’m not so sure that’s really hyperbole, because I’d be hard pressed to think of a bigger one. The whole tobacco campaign was nothing compared to the magnitude of this one.

So I don’t know what label you would prefer to put on it, but “denialism” certainly sounds right to me. If you’re trying to make the point that the label is unfair because the poor beleaguered oil companies are only altruistically trying to point out that the problem may not be as big as scientists think, you’re just as astoundingly wrong as the poster who tried to imply that oil companies actually had a good-faith interest in funding real climate research. In fact they have occasionally done so as a PR gesture, just as they occasionally say things that are true (which is what the OP is all worked up about), but the veracity of a label like “denialism” rests on the fact that these incidents are vanishingly insignificant in the larger picture of what is really going on.

---

• Since someone is likely to pounce on the fact that I “admit” that denialist sites sometimes contain “facts”, I thought I should illustrate what I mean by facts with context omitted. An example would be correctly stating that a particular body of ice has been growing in recent years, omitting to mention that it’s atypical and that the vast majority of the world’s polar ice is melting. Or correctly stating that there is more Arctic ice this year than last, omitting to mention that last year was a record low and the decadal trend has been strongly downward. Or correctly stating that Antarctic sea ice has been increasing, omitting to mention that it’s seasonal and not a proxy for climate change, while most Antarctic land ice has been losing mass. And so on and so on. Climate change is complicated, and the spinmeisters never fail to exploit that fact.

One of my favorites that I came across recently on one of those sites was a chart comparing CO2 and temperature for some number of past decades. The reader was invited to decide for himself if he saw any relationship between the two. There clearly was not, and the CO2 line was pretty much flat, so apparently CO2 hasn’t been increasing, either. And if you think I’m going to say that the chart was fake, it wasn’t – it was based on accurate numbers.

The trouble was that the CO2 scale started at zero, while in the actual real world CO2 varies in a relatively narrow band between 180 and about 280 ppm and this relatively small variation is responsible for the ice ages and the intervening interglacials. So the CO2 graph was so compressed in the vertical scale that you couldn’t see anything. When I imported their own graph into Photoshop and scaled it reasonably, the lie was revealed, and you could see the increase and the relationship to temperature. Multiply this sort of deception by a factor of several billion other incidents, and there you have the denialist community. Please don’t try to tell us that the word doesn’t fit.

[Chief_Pedant]

I think you more or less have it right.

Thanks for taking the time to lay out a careful post; I do appreciate well written and thoughtful responses like this one.

Perhaps where we differ is how much of the Alarmist side is content to use similar marketing rhetoric to lobby for a position, and how hastily they are content to confuse a scientific method (for example, of creating models and analyzing existing things) with a scientifically-based prediction. I am astounded at the psychology which has taken hold across the Alarmist world, but that’s another thread.

It’s not that Denialism is a totally unfair label for Big Oil; it’s that it’s a rhetorical label chosen to be deliberately pejorative, and it is applied by the most fervent Alarmists as if they did not indulge themselves with massaging the message. There is plenty of denialism to be had on the Alarmist side.

I would be delighted to live long enough to see how the predictions actually turn out, because I’m confident that our human nature will prevent us from doing much about our energy appetite, and so for me, the extent to which Big Oil is a Denialist is a moot point. There will be an ongoing demand for all the oil they can produce and an ongoing demand for all the other energy we can produce as well. At the same time we are supposed to be really cutting back on oil energy to meet a 450 Scenario, (2020 or so) our financial irresponsibility will be finally catching up with us, and we’ll be in no mood to raise taxes on carbon or anything else for the sake of a predicted future common good.

[GIGObuster]

@Chief_Pedant

I think you more or less have it right.

Thanks for taking the time to lay out a careful post; I do appreciate well written and thoughtful responses like this one.

Perhaps where we differ is how much of the Alarmist side is content to use similar marketing rhetoric to lobby for a position, and how hastily they are content to confuse a scientific method (for example, of creating models and analyzing existing things) with a scientifically-based prediction. I am astounded at the psychology which has taken hold across the Alarmist world, but that’s another thread.

It’s not that Denialism is a totally unfair label for Big Oil; it’s that it’s a rhetorical label chosen to be deliberately pejorative, and it is applied by the most fervent Alarmists as if they did not indulge themselves with massaging the message. There is plenty of denialism to be had on the Alarmist side.

Still wrong, as **Kimstu **pointed out until you have a good cite you are only relying on false equivalence, and ignore what happened to the formerly skeptic Professor Muller. He not only checked the data but the models they used also confirmed what others had found before, that is why he is a former skeptic.

@Chief_Pedant

I would be delighted to live long enough to see how the predictions actually turn out, because I’m confident that our human nature will prevent us from doing much about our energy appetite, and so for me, the extent to which Big Oil is a Denialist is a moot point. There will be an ongoing demand for all the oil they can produce and an ongoing demand for all the other energy we can produce as well. At the same time we are supposed to be really cutting back on oil energy to meet a 450 Scenario, (2020 or so) our financial irresponsibility will be finally catching up with us, and we’ll be in no mood to raise taxes on carbon or anything else for the sake of a predicted future common good.

More arguments from ignorance, one big denialist point and supported by the denialist groups out there is that there would be no acceleration or loss of ice in Greenland and the Antarctic, or they claim that increases in other areas counteract the huge loses. The latest studies show that the process of an accelerated loss is going on now, and no, the increase in other areas is not counteracting that loss. it is indeed a fulfilled prediction, and I rather listen to the ones that were right on that rather than paying attention to the misleading pap coming from the fossil fuel funded groups.

Willis Eschenbach

October, 2011

Eschenbach disputed the accuracy of the Berkely Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project in an article at the skeptic blog Watts Up With That (WUWT). [7]

The BEST data had shown a similar amount of warming to NASA GISS, HadCRU, and NOAA surface temperature datasets, except that the project had received funding from private groups like the Koch brothers and included climate change skeptics Richard Muller on the team.

Initally, skeptic Anthony Watts had promised to accept whatever data the BEST study found, but once the data was released and proved to affirm global warming, he disputed it. [8], [9]

Eschenbach’s own critique of the BEST data was examined by SkepticalScience and found to be lacking. [10]

Mahy 16 - 18, 2010

**Eschenbach was a speaker at the Heartland Institute’s 2010 International Conference on Climate Change. [11]
**
May, 2010
**
Eschenbach contends that Greenland has only lost a small fraction of it’s total ice mass. [3]

SkepticalScience examined this argument, and explains that “Multiple lines of evidence indicate Greenland’s ice loss is accelerating and will contribute sea level rise in the order of metres over the next few centuries.” [12]

Another of his arguments is that a change of only a few degrees will not likely be an issue to worry about. This is another argument debunked by SkepticalScience.**

[tomndebb]

GIGObuster, knock it off. Arguing the accuracy of any anti-AGW claim is for another thread. This thread is only to discuss whether the oil companies are actually engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign that could be considered “denialist.”

[ /Moderating ]

[GIGObuster]

@tomndebb

GIGObuster, knock it off. Arguing the accuracy of any anti-AGW claim is for another thread. This thread is only to discuss whether the oil companies are actually engaged in a deliberate misinformation campaign that could be considered “denialist.”

[ /Moderating ]

Sorry about that,** Chief Pedant **was using a false equivalence and it had to be replied at, within the frame of the fossil fuel companies funding denial. His equivalence touches items coming from groups like the fossil fuel funded Heartland Institute and a complete refusal to look at the evidence found with the Koch brothers backfire that they got after funding the Berkeley Earth project. And that is why they were mentioned, claiming that both groups (the pro and the fossil fuel funded one) are the same is not accurate at all.

[tomndebb]

Just drop it. No more trying to sneak in one more “rebuttal.”

[ /Moderating ]

[GIGObuster]

@tomndebb

Just drop it. No more trying to sneak in one more “rebuttal.”

[ /Moderating ]

Fair enough, I will.