Clinging to fossil fuel

While deriding the UN’s IPCC reports, Ray Freeman quoted the late Fred Singer as writing, “The IPCC claimed to represent the consensus of scientists. It represents the consensus of politicians... Politicians set the organization’s agenda, name the scientists who can participate, and rewrite the all-important’ summaries for policymakers.’”

What’s probably unknown to Ray Freeman, Vance Kirkpatrick, and other reactionary letter writers is, although he long denied it, Fred Singer was paid by various capitalist interests to disseminate disinformation. In 1993, Singer finally admitted under oath (Singer v Lancaster) that he was paid by Shell, Exxon, and the American Gas Association to distort the science behind climate change.

During the 1980s, Singer worked for a tobacco capitalist-funded PR firm, APCO & Associates, to subvert the science surrounding the dangers of smoking.

Fred Singer was a vulgar, money-grubbing individual who sullied his scientific credentials by selling out to capitalist-class interests. So, of course, the UN doesn’t allow dishonest scientists like Fred Singer to participate.

Freeman: “Natural processes with much more significant effects than CO2, such as solar activity and changing patterns of ocean currents, are essentially unpredictable by existing theory.”

Meaning what that solar activity and ocean currents are responsible for climate change? If so, although the Sun influences Earth’s climate, it didn’t cause the warming trend throughout recent decades.

Moreover, ocean currents are predictable. And it’s climate change that’s altering ocean currents, not the converse.

Freeman: “[C]limate change is a complex and difficult subject requiring the insights of many disciplines.”

Climate change is easily understood at its core: Earth’s atmosphere contains too much human-induced C02.

What’s complex is the Right’s slavish commitment to fossil fuels.

Climate change notwithstanding, it’s bizarre that these people wish to cling to costly, filthy, disease-inducing, centralized fossil fuels. The phrase Stockholm Syndrome might be applicable here. Guy Marsh Lancaster