The American Spectator

AmSpecBlog

What's NASA and Team Alarmism so Afraid of?

By Chris Horner on 11.27.09 @ 10:45AM

The alarmists' reaction to CEI's Notice of Intent to Sue NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for withholding data now for nigh on two years has been particularly shrill as regards my FOIA inquiry into the clearance and other deliberations over the non-official activities for the nasty, deceptive, third-party advocacy blog RealClimate.org by one GISS spokesman Gavin Schmidt on official, taxpayer-funded time.

When considering that apparently unacceptable Request for transparency as to what NASA was thinking in agreeing to spend my money that way, our Notice and the alarmists' reaction in the current "ClimateGate" context, also consider the following relevant excerpt from "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed" (pp. 104-104). That nice red cover would look great under the tree this year, even if what's inside the cover is burning the retinas of the global warming industry right about now:

RealAlarmists

Putting a bow on this package of interwoven relationships and back-scratching in pursuit of the elites' agenda (and largely at taxpayer expense) comes the leading alarmist webblog RealClimate.org. Seemingly established in 2004 to counter, of all things, Michael Crichton's novel, State of Fear, RealClimate serves as the popular science media's main touchstone for alarmist memes second only to Gore and his advisor Hansen - and we see here that this is really a distinction without a difference. This outlet is populated by none other than NASA's resident alarmist mouthpiece - and official spokesman for Hansen's GISS shop - Gavin Schmidt. Although RealClimate touts the unpaid nature of their writers' work, the time-stamps on Schmidt's often highly personal blog posts make quite clear that these actually come on the taxpayer dime, as well. Other RealClimate writers include "Hockey Stick" Mann and Hockey Stick-related Casper Amman.

It turns out that Realclimate.org is owned by an outfit that is in essence a non-profit public relations firm called Environmental Media Services (EMS), "dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues", whose Pittsburgh office houses the RealClimate server.[1] ActivistCash.com describes EMS as "the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications."[2]

EMA's listed registrant, Betsy Ensley, engages in the objective, non-partisan pursuit of "manag[ing] BushGreenwatch.org, a joint EMS-MoveOn.org public awareness website".[3] She also apparently ran WomenAgainstBush.org, and former Harvard string theorist (and still-hilarious climate blogger) Lubos Motl notes that when Ensley was campaigning against John Ashcroft her secretary was Kalee Kreider, now Al Gore's spokesperson.[4] MoveOn is of course in part a George Soros venture, and attentive climate realists recall the kafuffle over Soros supporting Hansen's alarmism.[5]

Motl describes EMS as "primarily an organization to pay for junk science about food and beverages, often hired by food companies to damage their competitors".[6] This is known as "black marketing."[7]

This is not inconsistent with my own experience with Fenton, which I first encountered nearly two decades ago. Then, they were representing a "green" lawn care products company in a legislative effort to craft new federal laws creating a secure place in a market otherwise dominated by those whose products attain prominence through competition. This is a modus operandi that will sound very familiar by the time you finish this book. Fenton has also been associated with every questionable campaign from chasing Alar off the shelves by leveraging weepy celebrities and fear tactics to promoting Mother Sheehan's tour.[8]

As critics note, the idea that RealClimate is just a bunch of unpaid "real scientists" is risible, given their methods of argumentation are often little more than smear, ridicule, cherry- picking science, and pronouncing themselves and their exclusive little climate clique as only the few "qualified' to have an opinion on man-made global warming. RealClimate's members, like Andrew Dessler of Grist and writers for the Soros-backed Climate Progress, perpetrate a unique form of "qualification thuggery" by which anyone skeptical of their agenda are unworthy to comment, typically because they skeptic does not affiliate with the UN IPCC. When the skeptic is an IPCC author or reviewer, well he's still unqualified. And "mere physicists" such as Freeman Dyson, or chemists, or economists, are also unqualified, but only when they disagree. After all, Dessler is a chemist, and the IPCC's "chief scientist" is no such thing at all, as you'll see.

Absent agreement, this unholy alliance of activists, Big Science and other vested interests responds so viciously to even the whiff of dissent that it is impossible to not wonder what it is they are afraid of.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Media_Services

[2] http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110.

[3] http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=326603649

[4] Lobos Motl, "Bonus: Funding of RealClimate.org", The Reference Frame", April 7, 2008, http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/04/green-trolls-edit-wmo-bbc-reports.html.

[5] See, e.g., Noel Sheppard, "NASA's Hansen Claims He's Being ‘Swift-boated' by Critics", NewsBusters, September 28, 2007, http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/28/nasa-s-james-hansen-claims-he-s-being-swift-boated-critics.

[6] Motl, "Bonus: Funding of RealClimate.org."

[7] See discussion also at http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/110.

[8] See Horner, "Politically Incorrect Guide to global Warming and Environmentalism", pp xv-xvi.