"CO2 is the building block of all life."
That, too, but there was a lot of life-building when I was young, and CO2 was below 320.
Experts Debunk Viral Post Claiming 1,100 Scientists Say ‘There’s No Climate Emergency’ - Inside Climate News
But despite its measured tone and its list of supporters with impressive-sounding titles like professor or doctor, the declaration isn’t what it appears to be, several career climatologists and disinformation experts told Inside Climate News.
Rather, they said, the post seems to be the latest iteration of a broader disinformation campaign that for decades has peddled a series of arguments long discredited by the scientific community at large. Furthermore, the experts told me, the vast majority of the declaration’s signatories have no experience in climate science at all, and the group behind the message—the Climate Intelligence Foundation, or CLINTEL—has well-documented ties to oil money and fossil fuel interest groups.
“Looking at the list of signatories, there are a lot of engineers, medical doctors, and petroleum geologists and almost no actual climate scientists,” said Zeke Hausfather, a longtime research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-partisan nonprofit that specializes in analyzing climate data, and the former director of climate and energy programs at the Breakthrough Institute, another independent environmental research firm.
In fact, Ivar Giaever, who has been promoted as a kind of poster child for the declaration in what some believe is meant to give it credibility, won his Nobel with another scientist in 1973 for their discovery of electron tunneling in superconductors, not for anything remotely related to the study of global warming. Other signatories of the petition, as noted by climate journalist Dave Vetter, included at least eight current or former employees of oil giant Shell. |
