History has shown that the denier side (and not only regarding climate science) has and continue to push drivel to get their way.
This article was co-written by Dan Zegart, author of Civil Warriors, the legal siege on the tobacco industry. A leaked email chain reported earlier this week on DeSmog shines a harsh light on the behind-the-scenes coordination between...
Est. reading time: 7 minutes
But it is not the UCLA lawsuit, or Enstrom’s name alongside Soon’s on the Singer email string, where the similarities lie between Enstrom and Soon.
It is instead the willingness of both men to take large sums of money from industry-related interests and then to produce science that suits those interests’ needs.
While Soon was recently exposed for taking money from fossil fuel interests and failing to disclose it to Congress or science journals, while Enstrom has been taking large sums of money from tobacco companies over the years and often not disclosing it.
For almost thirty years, Enstrom’s research into smoking and health was funded by the cigarette makers.
In fact, Enstrom did so much work for Big Tobacco that when the United States Department of Justice summed up its civil RICO case against the cigarette makers [PDF] at the end of a months-long trial in a lengthy legal filing, Enstrom got his own chapter — one of just three scientists singled out by DOJ out of many dozens of tobacco-funded researchers for having been vital to the industry’s efforts to sow confusion about the health effects of smoking.
And if you think this has no relation on the subject of the thread, that would only show that a lot of history on what the industries are/were doing in the classrooms is not known or ignored.
But the major cigarette companies still try to get schools to accept all sorts of assistance—like book covers, industry sponsored tobacco
As the Merchants of Doubt report/book/documentary reported virtually the same tactics, experts and groups are pushing drivel to our education system.
This article was co-written by Dan Zegart, author of Civil Warriors, the legal siege on the tobacco industry. A leaked email chain reported earlier this week on DeSmog shines a harsh light on the behind-the-scenes coordination between...
Est. reading time: 7 minutes
The Harthland Institute for example continues to push for what is now old drivel:
The Heartland Institute recently conducted a mass mailing to K-12 and college teachers promoting its new “Climate Change Reconsidered” report. Heartland encouraged teachers to read the summary of the report and “use that work to inform your thinking—and your students—on this important issue.” What is this exactly?
Heartland’s report was written under the auspices of the “Nongovernmental International Panel of Climate Change” (NIPCC). If you read that sentence too quickly, you could easily confuse it with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That confusion is intentional.
The summary goes on to present what it calls the “Green and Red Team” approach. This is meant to mimic some sort of business practice that assigns workers into opposing groups, as in a court of law, with a prosecution and a defense team. But this artificial adversarial approach is not the way science works and sets up a false choice. Even if the “Red Team” is wrong, that does not mean the “Green Team” is right.
Moreover, this artificial setup allows Heartland to claim that its “Red Team” stands on equal footing to the “Green Team” of the IPCC; this is far from the case. Heartland’s report was crafted by a handful of well-known climate deniers, who were paid for their efforts. (Heartland apparently spent over $1.6 million on this NIPCC project.) The latest IPCC report, by contrast, was drafted by 259 scientists from 39 countries, supported by over 600 reviewers and contributors. IPCC scientists are unpaid and volunteer their expertise.
The “Summary of NIPCC’s Findings” should make confusing reading for teachers trying to understand more about climate. Did you know that “CO2 is a vital nutrient” that “‘greens’ the planet and helps feed the growing human population”? Have you heard that “global warming ceased around the end of the twentieth century”? Were you aware that at “the current level of ~400 ppm we still live in a CO2-starved world”?
None of these claims are true, of course, and these standard denialist myths have all been refuted in detail at sites such as SkepticalScience.com . But someone unfamiliar with these manipulative distortions might not know to look there. Herein lies the danger of the Heartland’s appeal to teachers.
My bias has the qualifying statement that its also factual. Many things that liberals believe in are objectively factual, like global warming is happening, and humans evolved from lesser animals. Teaching those things is not bias, its fact.