Friday, October 30, 2015

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?

18 comments:

  1. (OT) Forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Gonu now have Chapala.

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  2. The proper description for the current political system in Russia is that it is a kleptocracy - which is a marginaly less sophisticated version of what the Koch brothers are aiming for in the US.

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    Replies
    1. Now that the US, thanks to Bernie Sanders, is finally coming to terms with a positive understanding of the word "socialism," it's worth pointing out that what Putin's Russia exhibits is negative understanding of the word "capitalism." -- Dennis

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    2. The US became a socialist country when we stopped doing things for the King of England.

      The blame for all the jobs going to China lies right here with our own business model, not China.

      What went wrong is both political parties in the USA got owned by the CIA.

      Delete
    3. This is beginning to look like denialist conspiracism with the signs flipped.

      Delete
    4. @looʞ oɹez. Saunders is a socialist in much the same way that Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is a socialist. It's a metric of how far the US has moved from the centre that Saunders could be considered far left.

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    5. That is true what you say. I'm all in for Sanders, but the bankers & billionaire shills pull has always rewarded the Clinton's who help keep center where they want it ... for multiple hundreds of tons of Contra Cocaine flown into Mena, Arkansas. They will do everything possible to get her a Presidency, same as they did Bubba. That was Bubba's rewards, being a hedge for CIA Poppy Bush against Henry Ross Perot, keep the money & gun$ going south and the white powder flowing north. Absolutely no disruptions and no takeovers allowed...

      Quail Hunting Club founder Sam Walton had already owned Bubba & Hillary since college, so the bankers rewarded Wal~Mart, pumping them up into the earth's biggest retailer. They're trucks are practically painted white with the stuff.

      Sue writes powerful works that do expose WUWT as indeed, part of the twilight zone. I sometimes wonder if right winger Dr Ben Carson's brilliance as a doctor enabled him to surgically implant large quantities of bat crazy into their brains.

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  3. We don’t have a lot to show us that Putin is really a climate denier from those articles. Putin is almost certainly not as bond by ideology, particularly the Western free market belief and religion as Abbot and Harper so he may actually be quite reasonable about the issue of climate change. I can see him listening to his scientific advisers and attending to world opinion (when convenient). His most recent quote seems to be from 2013 and it was a throw-away line.

    Other than a writer, Stanislav Belkovsky, who has apparently described Putin as a repressed homosexual kleptomaniac [a description that that might, of course, cover 40% of the world's heads of government) and a former adviser, Andrey Illarionov, who is now at the Cato Institute (an interesting change of jobs, that) I didn't see anyone really offering any good evidence.

    Neglect of the issue seems very likely. We know how hard it is to get most politicians attention on the issue and Putin has had a busy few years so it may have slipped his mind at bit.

    Of course, we don't know that Putin is not a denier is but I think the New York Times, Reuters, and The Daily Caller (what is that?) may be reading a lot into a few sparse tea leaves.

    If the local climate denialists want to elevate him to the pantheon of Global Warming Truthtellers with such luminaries as Nigel Lawton, Tim Ball and Lord Monckton, so be it.

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    Replies
    1. Putin is a politician and adept at playing geo-politics. The Russians at one point declared Kyoto dead - then ratified it a few months later. They profess scepticism of the science all the while claiming Russia would benefit from 2 to 3 degrees of warming. And just when you think you have them pegged they change course 180 degrees.

      Yesterday global warming was a fraud, tomorrow urgent action on climate change will be demanded. Whichever stance is expedient is the one Putin expounds today.

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    2. A large percentage of Russian exports by value are made up of fossil fuels, so one expects "expedient" Russia to be denial-prone.

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    3. Putin is certainly prone to playing geo-politics but it's too soon to judge how adept he is. If he'd cashed out after the Crimea (not to forget the March Through Georgia) we could call him a winner, but he's still in the game and on two widely-separated and disparate fronts. Not too clever on the face of it.

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  4. Imagine being a right-wing AGW denier that hates Obama so much you're willing to throw your lot in with Putin.
    @AndyOz2
    @JunkScience
    @JWSpry

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    Replies
    1. But isn't it obvious...? Putin isn't a black closet Muslim socialist who hates America and is working to bring it down. He's a good ol' boy who just had the misfortune to have been born in the wrong St. Petersburg... otherwise he could have gone from the Florida governor's office to the White House.

      Delete
  5. Strange how none of Anthony's fanboys have the courage to point out that it was not so long ago they were reading on WUWT that an evil warmist Pope was the product of a plot hatched by the KGB/FSB.

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    Replies
    1. Most deniers could give lessons to the White Queen.

      Of course, the Pope is a fascist-communistic, atheistic, socialist from Central America.
      (Some deniers are not all that sound on geography either)

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    2. Someone describing the pope as an atheist ha ha ha. Talk about loony-tunes trolling from some of the deniers, they are a laugh a minute.

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    3. I think it goes : atheism is a religion, the Pope is religious, ergo the Pope is an atheist. Communists are atheists, the Pope is an atheist, ergo ...

      Delete

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