War on Science

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James Enstrom: How Big Tobacco’s favorite researcher weaseled his work in to the EPA

There are only a handful of credentialed deniers still alive and generating nominally peer-reviewed papers to support their fundamentally anti-regulatory agenda. Over at InsideClimateNews, Marianne Lavelle recently dove into the long, downward slide of the scientific career of James Enstrom, once a respectable up-and-coming physicist before diving into the world of tobacco-funded anti-regulatory pseudoscience. By Climate Denier Roundup His story […]

May 30th

Climate change deniers hate experts – like the healthcare pros who say climate change is now a cause of death.

Last week, researchers from Harvard and the American Cancer Society published a commentary piece in the ACS’s journal about the ways in which cancer and climate change interact. By making extreme weather more intense and frequent, climate change is exposing more people to industrial pollution through floods and wildfires that release otherwise buried or contained carcinogens. Those […]

May 27th

Facebook (finally) takes action against propaganda after polar bear climate change denial video

Two recurring issues here: deniers’ debunked insistence that polar bears are thriving, and social media companies’ generally too-little-too-late attempts to follow years-old advice to make it harder for propagandists to flood their websites with disinformation, have finally converged in Facebook’s recent “reduced distribution” of PragerU content for its “repeated sharing of false news.” By Climate Denier Roundup The straw that broke the camel’s […]

May 23rd

Climate change deniers love to be (selectively) outraged (Greta vs Seibt)

Recently, deniers absolutely lost their shit when CNN put Greta Thunberg on a panel about coronavirus, hope and fear, to talk about the importance of listening to experts. They also attacked her for the recent news that she’s started her own foundation to give away the monetary prizes she’s won for her activism, including some coronavirus relief efforts specifically targeting at-risk youth. But you probably […]

May 21st

For climate change deniers, a single dead bald eagle is a tragedy (but billions are just a statistic)

As the Trump administration figures out sneaky ways to funnel coronavirus relief funding to the oil and gas industry, it’s also found a sneaky way to take money from wind and solar: a retroactive $50 million bill for rent for energy generated on public lands. By Climate Denier Roundup While that’s certainly their biggest problem at the moment, the […]

May 20th

Trump wants “Transparency” at EPA (While firing Inspector Generals at State, Defense and Intelligence for doing their jobs)

  As first reported by Meridith McGraw and Hahal Toosi at Politico, Donald Trump has purged yet another inspector general, State Department IG Steve Linick. Like those forced out before him, Linick is being dumped for performing his watchdog job, which was causing discomfort in the White House where loyalty is only surpassed by flattery for anyone who […]

May 18th

War on Science: Every unhappy conspiracy theorist is unhappy in their own way

The latest issue of the Atlantic magazine, Shadowland, focuses on a topic near and dear to us: conspiracy theories. Though not specific to climate, the parallels are clear and the fact that deniers are basically just motivated conspiracy theorists is, well, undeniable. By Climate Denier Roundup Jeffrey Goldberg’s essay looks at the difference between famous kooks like […]

May 16th

War on Science: Trump admin’s Orwellian “Transparency in Science” (That BLOCKS most science)

Nothing’s ever really final, but next Monday is the last chance you’ll have to register your opposition to two and a half decades worth of tobacco and fossil fuel industry planning that has culminated in the Trump administration’s Orwellian-named Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science rule. By Climate Denier Roundup We’ve touched on this long-running campaign recently, describing how it […]

May 13th

War on Science: Confronting Trump’s lies

Monday, before leaving his outdoor press conference at the White House in a huff because of a couple of  “nasty” women reporters doing their jobs, Donald J. Trump—flanked on both sides of the podium by signs claiming “America Leads the World in Testing”—said that “we have met the moment, and we have prevailed” on testing for the coronavirus. […]

May 12th

War on Science: Even more debunkings of the lousy science of “Planet of the Humans”

It’s been a few weeks since Michael Moore’s deceptive re-release of Planet of the Humans, a documentary so loaded with errors it’s spawned at least 30 rebuttals and even more critical reviews. Scientists, journalists, activists, energy experts and even another documentary filmmaker have published debunkings, while the fossil-fuel funded climate denial network has praised it.   By Climate Denier Roundup “My friends and I […]

May 12th

War on Science: Small town conservative newspaper pushes coronavirus, climate change denial

The Salem News is small town newspaper based in Salem Ohio. It appears to have far right-of-center editorial policies. Over the past few days, even as the county it represents recorded its 30th COVID19 death, it has published multiple letters and commentaries dismissing the seriousness of the crisis and attacking the social-distancing policies that public health officials have insisted are necessary.  During […]

May 7th

War on Science: WSJ attacks coronavirus pollution link health study for failing to use time travel (really!)

On Monday morning, the Guardian ran a great interview with climate journalist Emily Atkin. It opens with Atkin rather unapologetically declaring, “I’m sorry, but if you still refuse to see parallels between climate change and coronavirus then honestly you’re just stupid.” Always eager to prove its critics right, by Monday evening the Wall Street Journal published an […]

May 7th

Climate idiot Bjorn Lomborg also believes human lives don’t count – only money.

Bjorn Lomborg, not exactly known for being good at science, has a new study out making the same boring old argument he’s always made: the only thing we should do about climate change is invest in research and development so that someday in the future clean energy will be cheap, and until then we should all just enjoy getting rich off of fossil fuels. […]

May 2nd