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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Science journalists are no better at describing chemistry, paleontology, or condensed matter physics. The climate is controversial because there are people who want it to be controversial.

There are plenty of articles that are perfectly clear, and have been for decades. Having this article be blinding clear and unambiguous would not change the underlying induced distrust. No amount of editing will fix climate denialism until the denialists cease making it a culture war, or readers decide they'd rather take an interest in reality.

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All true.

It's also an unequal fight, per the asymmetry of bullshit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

The merchants of doubt dominate media. And spend billions of dollars shaping discourse.

Whereas intellectually honest explainers are fighting on hostile territory.

The meager amount of constructive debate we do have happens despite the system.

Who is spending "billions of dollars shaping discourse" exactly, unless you mean governments and their academics? The idea that people don't trust climatologists because they get paid not to is simply an absurd lie. It's the other way around: the budgets are all on the side of the academics.

Take it from climatologists themselves, talking about who are these skeptics who cause them so much trouble?

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/01/email-4986-augsept-200...

    They are mostly people who correspond on the Climate Audit blog site. They all seem to have infinite time as they are all retired.

ExxonMobil reports record first-quarter profits of $11.4bn: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65427372

probably the most criminally underreported stroke of evil genius in the past 30 years, is how the Koch brothers managed to subvert the climate message of this country's most renowned national museum, the Smithsonian, by funding it. Specifically, the floor-filling installation on human evolution. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions among the curators about how to handle this conflict of interest, because the resulting exhibit doesn't reveal an obvious bias. But there certainly is one.

It only develops indirectly and cumulatively if you read the posters accompanying the various displays, many of which are skewed toward a particular emphasis on "adaptability." Which is to say, in blunt terms, "it's okay if the earth's climate is damaged by human activity, humans have adapted to so much worse, and will adapt again, because we are an adaptable species. Aren't we."

There is a climate change exhibit immediately outside of the new human evolution exhibit. It's clearly not an accident. I think the Smithsonian scientists were grumpy about taking Koch money, even for a good exhibit. (Which is actually only ok.)

That's a non-sequitur.

I know you believe that.

We've learned that Shell, at the very least, knew about the effects of climate change since the 60s. It's not suspicious at all that whether or not climate change is even real has been debated for decades. Shell definitely wouldn't use the billions of dollars at their disposal to protect their industry from existential threat by shaping discourse.

That's a lot of smears and hypotheticals, isn't it? You have to rely on those because the claim isn't true.

If Shell are really spending billions then it should be trivial to find armies of thousands, or tens of thousands, all of whom are directly receiving grant money from Shell to talk about climate full time (negatively). But no such people exist. As the climatologists say, the only people who have the time to double check their work are retirees.

Now go look at how much money governments, BMG Foundation etc spend on climate related stuff. It's huge.

If Shell is spending billions on people to talk about climate full time negatively, it seems a rather obvious oversight that they wouldn't include instructions to not advertise that fact. But I wasn't talking about an army of paid human shills. The majority of the "discourse" around COVID misinformation came from 12 sources - not everyone who repeated their talking points was paid to do so, yet shaped the discourse was.

Governments spending billions on "climate change related stuff", an existential threat to their continued existence, is not the conspiracy you think it is.

(...And by the same token, Shell spending billions protecting its continued existence/economic model would also not be some conspiracy...)

What exactly are you talking about then? What does this imaginary money get spent on, if not people?

This whole idea is a classic conspiracy theory. Do you realize that? Obviously the only way to shape discourse is with people, because discourse is something done by people. How do you think it's possible to spend literally billions of dollars - call it $3B and that's enough to pay for 30,000 people on great salaries making reports and blog posts all day, that this could last for years - and not have anyone notice this? Nobody ever asks where the money is coming from? Not one of these tens of thousands of people have ever gone to the press and said, I was paid by Shell to say repeat things that aren't true?

There are of course massive ecosystems of NGOs and the like that do exactly that, but they're all pushing doomerism. They're also pretty open about where the money comes from. They have to be, you can't hide movements of those sorts of sums. The Gates Foundation alone spends $1.4B on climate change "shills" as you'd put it, and it's only one of many.

BTW, no governments existence is threatened by climate change, not even in the discredited IPCC worst case scenario. Not even in fiction - Waterworld has a government in it!

I would love a job getting paid to write pro-climate blog posts all day. Can you link me to a job posting?

https://careers.bbc.co.uk/

What measure of proof do you require?

The recent book Merchants of Doubt is just one of dozens of such investigations.

In fact, the covert reactionary movement has begat its own little cottage industry working to expose the fraud.

Big Oil funded 100s of astroturf groups to oppose every single offshore wind project. Here's the receipts:

https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-man-trying-to-kill-america...

Just one example of 1,000s. Every single facet of every single effort faces this kind of manufactured opposition. Throw a rock in any direction and you'll hit one.

Did you check that receipt?

It talks about one organization, the "Caeser Rodney Institute", which received a $10k grant from an organization that disperses tiny grants to all kinds of random groups, like diabetes research and the "National Foundation for Women Legislators". The CRI does many things.

These guys are such oil company shills that if you check their website you will find them directly attacking the oil industry:

https://www.caesarrodney.org/energy-updates2/Cancel-Culture-...

"The big picture is that the oil industry is investing billions in offshore wind, and the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) opposes their projects."

"CRI receives donations from donors who agree with our policy recommendations, including about 1% of our total donations from the oil industry."

Your article says that "400 of those residents sent a combined $50,000 in donations to support the opposition effort", so this one man writing letters was able to raise 5x the amount of money from random locals as from (lol) Big Oil.

The guy claimed Big Oil is spending billions and this is the best example anyone can find? This is proving the point, isn't it? It's at the scale where maybe one guy who happens to work for an oil company decides he doesn't like wind turbines in his view of the sea, and this is supposed evidence of a global conspiracy.

Now compare that to the BMGF spending over a billion dollars on climate related topics. These things are in different leagues. All the financial power here lies with the net zero lobby.

Troll claims he's not a troll. I guess we have no choice but to believe him.

Seriously?

You are the living embodiment of Brandolini's Law.

Dave's CV shows he's deeply embedded in the climate denial (now climate slow rollers) strategy. Former DuPont exec. Henchman in Trump Admin's efforts to dismantle the EPA. Member of f!@king Heartland Institute, ground zero for the loons.

Oh yea, definitely a champion for our renewable energy future.

> The CRI does many things.

Yup, grifters gonna grift.

PS- ExxonMobil's wind energy bonafides are that they'll sell industrial lubricants for windmills. Separately, they're part of a group effort to stop new offshore wind in Texas.

You're talking about the CV that lists "promoting CO2 capture" and "co-founding Delaware's Green Building Council" as evidence that he's deeply embedded in climate denial. That's as convincing as "Big Oil spends billions of dollars ok maybe $10k on a guy who thinks offshore wind is has a bad cost/benefit ratio for CO2 reduction".

Your post is exactly the type of response that wakes people up to how extreme and dishonest the green movement has become. This guy thinks offshore wind projects are a bad idea and other green projects are a better investment. All you got in response is an endless procession of thought-terminating memes: he's a "troll", a "loon", a "grifter", in the pay of "Big Oil" and so on. It's a recipe for unproductive conversation. Even climatologists knew that wasn't true when they talked amongst themselves.

I'll ask again - where are these billions being spent by Shell or ExxonMobil or whoever? This thread proves my point that you can't hide money like that, you can't even hide a $10k grant from one trade group.

What measure of proof do you require?

Exxon Mobile, for example, is known to have had incredibly accurate warming models built by its own scientists going back as far as the 70s, and then lied to the public about the dangers. They also lied when the existence of these models became public knowledge saying the scientists told them they should "make up their own minds" about the science, but fortunately a bit of investigation into their internal communications revealed the differences in what they said internally and the lies they told the public.

1. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

> The merchants of doubt dominate media.

Wrong. Literally, the merchants of oil dominate the media.

They're the same picture

> The merchants of doubt dominate media. And spend billions of dollars shaping discourse.

Then let them sow doubt. If the case is "we're not sure but it's very possible that continued CO2 emissions will cook the Earth", what should we do? Continue emitting CO2, or stop until we're sure that it won't cook the Earth?

It's the precautionary principle - if the science isn't settled, given the catastrophic risks, we should limit CO2 as much as possible until it is settled that emitting it is safe.

We’re sure and we won’t stop

But what if we make a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable world for nothing?

To be the devil's advocate, the deniers will say "We've been emitting CO2 since the beginning of the world, and it's been fine, why are you worrying now?" - yeah sure that's ignoring the fact that there are now more cars, more planes, more factories, more cows, etc, but that's to be expected of these unscientific people.

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