Skiff Of Fools: The Remaining Hacks, Cranks And The Handful Of Actual Scientists Denying Warming
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At 68, Christy is well established: He has taught and researched at the University of Alabama in Huntsville for 32 years. He is Alabama’s state climatologist, the interim dean of the university’s science college, and the director of a lab with some 60 researchers. The database he and Spencer created for their 1990 Science magazine paper spurred more research into satellite temperature monitoring, which found errors in his monitoring. (Christy told me he believes the errors found in his work have been minor.) I told him I’d emailed with Trenberth, who said he distanced himself from Christy around 2001, worried that every time a decision was called for in processing data, Christy was choosing values that gave little or no trend. Christy grimaced. “He doesn’t want to admit that my work stands on its own.” Christy, ethically in some ways, stands on his own, too. He’s not quoted as frequently or fervently in newspapers as the other eight holdouts. He refuses to take money from oil, mining, or automotive companies. Notably, he avoids the semi-annual international conferences led by the Heartland Institute, today the hub of doubt. “There is a sense that some of those in the skeptical camp are…” he said, pausing to search the beige walls of his office for the right words, “not scientifically grounded. Appearing in those venues, you get tainted.”
But Christy does have mud on his boots. In a deposition, he recalled that CEI paid him some $1,500 for writing a chapter in the 2002 book Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death, just one of several indications that he’s part of a larger whole. (When pressed later by an attorney in the deposition, he admitted under oath that global warming wasn’t an “eco-myth.”) He says he has testified in congressional hearings on climate change about 20 times. His testimony in 2009, 2011, and 2016 appears to have given cover to bills crafted to suppress federal climate science or kneecap greenhouse gas regulations, though none became law. (Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Chevron, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, Peabody Energy, Edison Electric Institute, and other fossil fuel giants lobbied for the 2011 bill.) For his connections on Capitol Hill, at least in part, Christy must thank the financiers of the vast network designed to broadcast his views—financiers who cared more about money than the earth.
Though Christy may keep some distance from the network, Larry Bell, the University of Houston space architecture professor, does not. Bell made himself a kind of skeptic celebrity, writing the 2011 book, Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, which, he said, landed him a regular column for Forbes.com until 2014. He is an adviser for CFACT and a member of the CO2 Coalition. He also advises the Heartland Institute, which has had a number of other affiliates at Forbes who’ve broadcasted doubt. Bell, now 81, established his career during the space race of the 1960s. He designed equipment that was used the first time an astronaut walked in space and founded the only graduate-degree program in space architecture. He has, in his own words, “a shitload of credibility in space,” and in his writing on climate change he claims this credibility also extends to the atmosphere of this planet. In his Forbes column he advocated for carbon fuels and shot down green energy and environmental regulation, and a central theme was climate science cast as a conspiracy. When he left the site in early 2014—Bell said Forbes “got squishy”—he moved his column to the far-right website NewsMax.
Bell believes climate change is a cover for communism. The refrain is common among contrarians. They denigrate environmentalists as “communist, un-American fanatics and diametrically opposed to prosperity, jobs, and profit,” according to a 2013 study of climate doubters, “Wise Contrarians,” published in the journal Celebrity Studies. For Bell in particular, who was shaped by the Cold War, the “climate thing” has always been about communism. After the Berlin Wall fell, three decades ago, Bell flew to Russia to visit its space program and recalls being shocked at what communism had done to the Russians. He believes that climate regulations, like communism, are fundamentally about redistribution, and that without competition a nation cannot prosper. “I don’t give a shit about climate,” he said, “other than how it’s being weaponized to frighten people.”
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwawq/the-last-of-the-climate-deniers-hold-on-despite-your-protests-v26n4
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