Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (127453)

7/3/2019 10:08:01 AM

From: Wharf Rat

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Ron

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 361406

Why do perfectly intelligent people believe in Climate Change?

They understand physics.

"The operative word in this somewhat leading question is “believe”. Global warming is a belief system with all the characteristics of a religion."
Science requires proof; denial is the faith-based religion.

"Are my arguments rubbish? "
Totally.

"How did we get to this point in our supposedly rational age?"
Thanks for asking.

In July 1988, on page 11 of Sports Illustrated magazine, one story caught the eye of Fred Palmer.

Under the headline “ The Foul, Hot Summer,” the article lamented that year’s scorching heat and drought.

“We have only ourselves to blame for this midsummer's nightmare. Burning fossil fuels has created many of these environmental ills,” the story read.

Palmer was worried. As the boss of Western Fuels Association (WFA), a co-op of coal power generators and haulers, this self-confessed “prairie populist” could see the writing on the wall for his industry.

“There was a nationwide heatwave, and I remember it specifically because it ruined a vacation I was going to have on the eastern shore at Chesapeake Bay. The well waters all went dry,” he said.

If governments started to get serious about acting on climate change, then coal plants would be the first in line at the chopping block.

Just a few weeks earlier, Palmer had watched NASA climate scientist James Hansen deliver what was to become historic testimony before the U.S. Senate.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now,” said Hansen, in a speech that pushed the science of climate change into the public consciousness.

Now, even Sports Illustrated was delivering clear-eyed assessments on the science.

At the same time, America’s iconic Yellowstone National Park was on fire, in what would become the park’s worst recorded episode of wildfires.

“At the time I don’t think people really understood the import of it. But I did understand the import of it. I engaged immediately,” Palmer told DeSmog.

And engage he did, helping to form one of the very first fossil fuel–funded campaigns that would directly target the science of climate change in order to influence the public’s understanding.
Message 30964189
==
In 1991, a US corporate coalition including the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association and Edison Electrical Institute created a public relations organization called the " Information Council on the Environment" (ICE). ICE launched a $500,000 advertising campaign to, in ICE's own words, "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)." Critics of industry groups have charged that the claims about a global warming controversy are part of a deliberate effort to reduce the impact any international treaty, such as the Kyoto Protocol, might have on their business interests. [43]

en.wikipedia.org