A Schneider ve sve knize Science as a Contact sport o filmu The Great Global Warming Swindle

Media mud wrestling continues in the climate change arena. Among the most recent examples are the machinations involved in the production and distribution of the United Kingdom film The Great Global Warming Swindle. Purportedly a balanced documentary that is the antidote to the “distortions” of the IPCC, the film was shown in the United Kingdom by the sensationalist Channel 4 and across Europe—and reportedly had a major effect in weakening public confidence in global warming science. Among its claims is the absurd assertion that since carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere it can hardly be expected to have much effect. This was refuted by Australian climatologist Andy Pittman, who noted that an even more minuscule injection of Ebola virus would kill us, and that it is effect, not amount, of a substance that matters.

Another claim of the movie is that warming up until “now” wasn’t unusual in the past 1,000 years—but what was labeled as “now” was a 20-year-old preliminary graph that did not include the radical warming of the past two decades, which, as noted earlier in the discussion of the “hockey stick,” very likely exceeds all known warming over the past 500 years and likely over the past 1,300 years. To call the end of the graph “now” when it was really the 1980s is, frankly, a scientific lie. Similarly, the film claimed the sun could explain all warming and showed a very highly correlated set of graphs from 1500 to “now” linking global temperatures with sunspot cycles. What the movie’s producers forgot to say was that the graphs left off the past two decades in which solar effects suggested cooling and the planetary warming went to unprecedented record levels—refuting their own theory. Even worse, the producers filled in a section of the graph to show a strong correlation several hundred years ago when in fact there was no data on it—they just made it up to look compelling.

The Public Broadcasting System in the United States refused to air the film, although it was shown in Australia at the insistence of the Conservative Howard government then in power—though handily trashed by an independent program that followed the broadcast, revealing its egregious distortions. Tony Jones, an iconic Australian reporter who anchors Lateline nightly, flew to the United Kingdom, interviewed the filmmaker Martin Durkin, and masterfully took him and the film apart step by step. It was one of the most adept pieces of science journalism I have seen, done by a political reporter who did his homework under the guidance of award-winning science producer, Annamaria Talas.14

A group of respected scientists and advocates filed a grievance against the film company and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. They cited more than a hundred outright errors in the film and the deliberate misleading of some scientists who participated in it, and they claimed that its distorted presentation caused harm and injury to those who viewed it without access to the correct facts. Their suit was perfunctorily acknowledged—and the film company chided for several distortions—but in the end the complaint was denied in July 2008.

Neco k situaci v Rusku

In this paper, we consider climate scepticism in the Russian context. We are interested in whether this has been discussed within the social scientific literature and ask first whether there is a discernible climate sceptical discourse in Russia. We find that there is very little literature directly on this topic in either English or Russian and we seek to synthesise related literature to fill the gap. Secondly, we consider whether Russian climate scepticism has been shaped by the same factors as in the USA, exploring how scientists, the media, public opinion, the government and business shaped climate scepticism in Russia. Climate scepticism in the USA is understood as a ‘conservative countermovement’ that seeks to react against the perceived gains of the progressive environmental movement, but we argue that this is not an appropriate framework for understanding Russian climate scepticism. Articulated within a less agonistic environment and situated within an authoritarian regime, Russian expressions of climate scepticism balance the environmental, political and economic needs of the regime under the constraints of a strong ‘carbon culture’ and closed public debate.

Russian climate scepticism: an understudied case | SpringerLink
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-022-03390-3

TUHO: Jeste k tomu Schneiderovi, tady kratky overview jeho knizky Science as Contact Sport

We know there’s a problem, but spurring the world to action has been a decades-long struggle, and Stephen H. Schneider has been in the front lines of the charge to understand the science, explain the warnings, and mitigate the damage we’ve inflicted upon the environment and ourselves for four decades. One of the world’s leading climatologists, founder of the journal Climatic Change, and senior participant in the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), his work has been instrumental in framing both the internal debates within the scientific community and the very public debate on understanding and dealing with climate change.

Science as a Contact Sport is Stephen Schneider’s first-hand account of a scientific odyssey, navigating in both the turbulent waters of the world’s power structures and the arcane theatre of academic debaters. From the initial stages of understanding the science of human-induced climate change to predicting the consequences of our actions 10, 50 and even 250 years out, Dr. Schneider has been there to experience it all. Few people know more about the struggles and knockdown, drag-out fights that have taken place behind the scenes and the people who try to repair the damage as well as those who will stop at nothing to deny that climate change is happening. In this riveting memoir Schneider shares his unique eye witness perspective on an era of scientific discovery and debate that may well be one of the most important periods of time in our planet’s history.

Schneider’s efforts have helped bring about important measures to safeguard our planet, but there’s still more to be done to get them implemented.

This is a battle, and no one knows that better than Dr. Schneider—he’s fought with and against presidents, prime ministers, legislators, mayors, CEOs, movie and media stars, lobbyists, journalists, and even his fellow scientists to share good science and workable solutions with the world.

Science as a Contact Sport Book Overview
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Books/SAACS/saacs_book.htm

TUHO: So the message, dear reader, is look underneath the hype and spin out there and try to separate out what aspects of the debate are legitimate remaining scientific uncertainties—still plenty of those left to go around—and what fraction is simply an ideological protection of world views in drag as “sound science.” That separating job is a real tax on public understanding of how to first understand, and then deal with, very complex topics that have a high bar of information needed to even enter the debate intelligently. In the last chapter of Contact Sport, I ask a scary question: “Can democracy survive complexity?” My National Geographic Society editors thought that too much of a downer as my final chapter title and substituted “What Keeps Me Awake at Night.” Either way, for a representative democracy to function well, both the public and its representatives have to understand what is at stake: Risk equals what can happen multiplied by the odds it will happen.

trochu kontextu od stephene schneidera, ktery je u klimaticke debaty od jejiho zacatku

What underlay this loss of cordiality and honest information exchange from the earlier decade? The most environmentally oriented presidents of the past century, in my view, were Republicans: Richard Nixon—who created the EPA—and Teddy Roosevelt. After all, what is a more conservative word than “conservation”? But to the Reaganites, the very admission of global warming was an ideological no-no. It represented the collective planetary-scale footprint of personal, corporate, and national decisions to use the atmosphere as a convenient, free sewer to dump our smokestack wastes, tailpipe emissions, and side effects of land-use changes like deforestation. To admit that we were harming the planetary commons was to admit that we needed regulatory solutions, some internationalist—the ultimate no-no to ideologists of American hegemony and economic power. So denial of global warming became de facto government policy, since the ideology of protecting entrepreneurial rights over public amenities was Reaganite doctrine. The Gore hearing was the first public gun battle in the Congress.

The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth by Eric Pooley | Climate Soldiers
https://ssir.org/books/reviews/entry/climate_war_eric_pooley#

TUHO:
TUHO: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/us/politics/oklahoma-attorney-general-letter-written-almost-entirely-by-energy-company.html

TUHO:

TUHO: Several years ago, before I started researching electric utilities’ role in promoting climate denial, I came across a memorable advertisement from 1991. It showed a cartoon chicken running around with the caption: “Who told you the earth was warming… Chicken Little?” The ad was funded by a climate denial campaign called “Informed Citizens for the Environment.” Utilities spearheaded this work, including the private utilities such as Southern Company and Arizona Public Service, as well as the utility association, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI). Even though climate science was well established by the early 1990s, the ad argued there was “no hard evidence” for global warming.