« The Ignorance of the Anti-Nuclear Power Press | Obama praises Chile's policies that he won't permit for us »
PrintMarch 21, 2011
Google to fight global warming 'ignorance'
SolveClimateNews.com blessed us with an article telling how Google "has brought together a team of 21 climate researchers to improve the way the science of global warming is communicated using new media". This, no doubt in response to widespread reports of a Gallup poll showing ever-decreasing concern by the public about global warming, which must also explain why the GOP-controlled US House is moving forward with actions to thwart greenhouse gas regulations. Ignorance run amok, thus Google's experts are here to save the day.
If only that were the case. The enormous irony here is the very service Google itself provides: people can do their own fact checking on the so-called global warming crisis and all facets related to it.
The article quotes one member of the Google team:
"The uncertainty argument, that we really don't know what is going on and that climate scientists are corrupt, has been reasonably effective in the last few years," said Andrew Dessler, also a Google fellow and a climate scientist at Texas A&M University...People who are opposed to regulation ... [are] not trying to prove that climate change [science] is wrong. They're trying to prove that there is an argument going on," he said. "They're just trying to create noise."
What Dessler says about ‘corrupt climate scientists' - the people involved in ClimateGate - is a false premise out of the gate, as I discovered when doing a Google search for my January 3rd blog piece on why reporting on ClimateGate had so little effect on public opinion. Regarding the rest of his quote, it very much resembles a narrative apparently created by anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan 15 years ago. A regurgitation of that narrative from another anti-skeptic 2009 book, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is here:
Why, I wondered, were people so confused? Who had started this public debate? The great U.S. journalist Ross Gelbspan had the answer. In two early books, the Heat is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004), Ross had uncovered the first hard evidence of an organized campaign, largely financed by the coal and oil industries, to make us think that climate science was somehow still controversial, climate change still unproven.
SolveClimateNews.com inaccurately called Gelbspan a Pulitzer winner back in 2008, an error they could have found for themselves by doing a simple Google search. With more extensive searching, they could have seen that Gelbspan is also not the discoverer of the ‘evidence' that is the basis of his skeptic scientist accusation, and that there is a sea of red flags associated with his accusation, now extending all the way to an upcoming Supreme Court hearing, as I detailed in my December 8, 2010 article.
A quote from Andrew Dessler's October 2007 blog at Grist showcases the same "don't go see it" advice about spectacularly controversial movies that always backfires and drives up attendance. (Boldface emphasis mine):
[Senator Inhofe staffer Marc Morano] implored listeners to go to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works web page to get information on climate change. Don't. Unlike the IPCC reports, this web page has not been produced by a rigorous IPCC-like process.
This is basically all we hear from global warming believers about their critics: "don't read EPW pages, don't listen to skeptic scientists since they are corrupt, don't ask Al Gore tough questions, don't ask us to debate the issue, read Gelbspan's book but don't question anything in it, ignore the ClimateGate stuff, there's nothing to see there, move along".
Why is Google and its hand-picked ‘experts' seeking to re-educate us on global warming? Because we used Google to discover the mainstream media and far-left politicians and enviro-activist groups have orchestrated their narratives to exclude half the story. This is entirely the reason why I write these pieces, I read Ross Gelbspan's accusation against skeptic scientists for the upteenth time in 2009, but I didn't just move along, I stopped to Google search it.
The error these people make is telling us not to look at what we can see for ourselves. When they can't defend assertions about an ignorant public or corrupt skeptic scientists, what will their fallback defense be? Perhaps their last-ditch effort will be what the ClimateGate scientists tried; deleting the inconvenient truth. But, to borrow a marvelous warning seen across the web, "What has been seen on the internet cannot be unseen."
Russell Cook's collection of writings on this issue -- a result of extensive Google searches -- can be seen at "The ‘96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists -- or at least what I've dredged up
