Denier Desperation: To Russia with WUWT Love

Now that Stephen Harper has gone from the scene, and Australia's Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott has been dethroned, science deniers don't have too many leaders left (oops - I mean right, right?) who they can adore. They briefly flirted with China, but deniers didn't know the name of the leaders there. In any case, China is, if not panicking, at least very aware that climate change is not going to be kind to them. Particularly when something like 50,500,000 people in China could be at risk of flooding from sea level rise if CO2 emissions continue on their current trajectory. And President Xi Jinping of China has made a joint pledge with President Obama of the USA on climate change.

Free marketers find cosying up to China uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons. Not only would China still be described as sort of communist, even though it's started to embrace capitalism, China is blamed for taking all the jobs from hard-working Americans. And there's still a lot of resentment against China for bailing out the USA in the global financial crisis.

Deniers can now breathe a sigh of relief. They've found a new hero - it's Vladimir Putin from Russia (archived here). Now Russia feels probably a tad more comfortable than China. It's no longer as communist as it once was. Now it can probably be best described as a totalitarian rough house.  This is not a bad fit for right wing authoritarians. They've got a leader they can follow, while at the same time, they would relish the anarchic side of Russian society.

Eric Worrall is a fan of Vladimir Putin. He wrote in glowing terms how an employee of the Cato Institute (one of the right wing anti-environment lobby groups that abound in the USA) has spoken up on behalf of Mr Putin:

Putin’s scepticism dates from the early 2000s, when his staff “did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate”, said Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s senior economic adviser at the time and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington.

“We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited,” he said. “It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”

Rather than read the Daily Caller's version of things (which is a media of choice for WUWT-ers), you might prefer to read the article from Reuters, which begins with:

Wildfires crackled across Siberia this summer, turning skies ochre and sending up enough smoke from burning pines to blot out satellite views of the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal.

To many climate scientists, the worsening fires are a consequence of Siberia getting hotter, the carbon unleashed from its burning forests and tundra only adding to man-made fossil fuel emissions. Siberia's wildfire season has lengthened in recent years and the 2015 blazes were among the biggest yet, caking the lake, the "Pearl of Siberia", in ash and scorching the surrounding permafrost.

But the Russian public heard little mention of climate change, because media coverage across state-controlled television stations and print media all but ignored it. On national TV, the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out.

From the WUWT comments

Charles Nelson might think he'd prefer to live in Russia under Putin - but would he really?

October 30, 2015 at 3:21 am
I said it in a post several days ago and it gives me not pleasure to repeat it but he USA appears to be morphing into the USSR. (complete with Lysenko style science). And Obama is Gorbachev. As someone who grew up watching America dominate the world with its technology and its culture I can only shake my head and ask…What the hell went wrong?