Saturday, June 11, 2016

Now the Cornwall Alliance is scared of RICO

Dear Attorneys General,

You’re not stupid. Stupid people don’t graduate from law school.

Neither are you generally ignorant. You know lots of law.
Those are the first words of an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and members of Attorneys General United for Clean Power. Since they are Attorneys General I suppose, um, they would know "lots of law". I'd say they can write more eloquently than the "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists who wrote that letter, too.

The open letter began woefully and went downhill, telling the Attorneys General to read a lot of non-science hogwash (a scientific term meaning pseudo-science crap). The letter was published at WUWT (archived here) and purported to be from the Cornwall Alliance. That's the cult that doesn't "believe in" biology or climate science on pseudo-religious grounds. Despite the inelegant schoolboy opening, the signatories included professors and PhDs. They weren't all from the Cornwall Alliance either. Signatories included disreputables like the "One World Government" conspiracy theorist Timothy Ball, and a nonentity I've never heard of, Madhav Khandekar, who it turns out is another greenhouse effect denier on the payroll of the Heartland Institute.



The Cornwall Alliance managed to round up nineteen people to sign the letter. They were pushing it, listing denier meteorologists as climate scientists. They even claimed Anthony Watts, ex-tv weather announcer, as a "climate scientist". Anthony isn't a climate scientist, he runs a "climate hoax" conspiracy blog. He doesn't understand temperature anomalies, thinks it's Russian steampipes that are causing global warming, and recently falsely accused thousands of COOP volunteers of faking their weather reports. His good friend Willis Eschenbach says he couldn't tell a good article from bad if he had a year to do it.

What the letter does show is that science denying organisations are feeling nervous about being drawn into investigations into whether fossil fuel companies paid them to have climate science denial propaganda done on their behalf.

That's a good thing.

9 comments:

  1. Has Anthony explained why he supports investigating genuine climate scientists while he is against investigating anyone responsible for creating and disseminating misinformation about climate change? Oh wait, I think the answer is obvious.

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    1. I see that Roy Spencer, chief climate hoax investigator and promoter (with John "the Baptist" Christy) of the dubious UAH "satellite temperature" analysis is on the list. Maybe the Cornwall Alliance think Spencer's disinformation graphs, the ones with model results vs satellite and balloon data, are all they need to prove their case. It worked for Ted Cruz, why not for those other smart lawyers? They gotta be careful, those lawyers might notice that there are three other groups which produce "temperature" results from the same satellite data and these exhibit trends which show greater warmer than S&C's latest TMT v6beta5.

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  2. "Those are the first words of an open letter to..."

    One of the peculiar features of "open letters" from climate change deniers is that their intended readership are not the people they are addressed to.

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    Replies
    1. Millicent, it's a shame there is no "like" button here. You have a gift for pithy incisiveness.

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    2. Very astute observation indeed.

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  3. You know they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for credibility when they put Watts on as a climate scientist. The poor man gets high school math wrong on a regular basis, and his reading comprehension skills aren't doing so well either.

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  4. "You know they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for credibility when they put Watts on as a climate scientist. The poor man gets high school math wrong"

    But willard could go back to college for another six years and scrape up a degree, so technically he is a scientist...in the wingnut alternate reality.

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    Replies
    1. Don't think another six years eould help. He originally spent 7 - 8 years at Uni without graduating in anything.

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