I can remember when I was a supporter of global warming thinking: “you have to cut some slack for those putting the case for global warming … because they don’t have the resources of the other side”.
Of course I was being stupid. I knew from my own involvement in the UK wind industry that most of the Oil Companies were heavily into wind. And even a cursory examination of the effect of rising oil prices is going to show that oil companies make just as much and probably more from rising prices as they cream of the same percentage.
But still I thought there were these stoic few climate scientists and this massive fossil fuel financed … and then I came across one Billy Con-artist. A full time green employee who spent all his time fabricating material on the internet. And then I began noticing this spider’s web of eco-fascists that seemed to have almost unlimited resources – every hallmark of a professionally well-financed campaign and a few stoic individuals who were totally disorganised, usually very passionate, but quite ineffective … all the hallmarks of hobby contributors.
And every time the hobbyists tried to make their case, out would come the PR machine of full-time Green spin merchants with the message: “you’re just in the pay of BIG OIL”.
How do you combat that? How does a group of disorganised individuals who already spend far too much of their spare time, combat a full time extremely well financed campaign?
The effects were catastrophic:
- Any sceptic making a case was assumed to have almost unlimited resources and so what they said had to be suspect … some sort of spin. The truth was that sceptics lacked any substantial resources.
- Even if people agreed with the sceptics … it was assumed that they must be rolling in money and therefore no one needed to donate money to a cause that had the biggest donors in the world (not).
- The “poor” ecos …. oh the darlings had to be tolerated. They were just “hobbyists” desperately trying to put their case. What if they told the odd lie, when you’ve only got several hundred million to put your case … with such a small amount of money how could they be expected not to make the odd mistake.
In other words. Even if the likes of the BBC and other media had treated the sceptics fairly and had not assumed we were oil-lackeys, it would have been a totally uneven fight as a few brave individuals struggled to make their case against £300million for research, hundreds of millions for NGOs, the full weight of public paid hysteria machines like NASA and the IPCC.
Even if we were treated fairly, we didn’t have the resources to make our case. But the fact was that we were not treated fairly, we were treated like pariahs. We were the ones who were assumed to have the hundreds of millions in research funding, hundreds of millions in PR, hundreds of millions to bribe the media.
Then of course, came the morality. WE WERE EVIL!!! Of course the sceptics were evil. We were big-oil lackeys. We were in it for the money. The poor hobbyist environmentalists in their full time jobs paid for by the oil industry were the good guys. The wind companies digging up the peatland’s putting up the bird-mincers, subverting democracy by running parliamentary committees … they were the good guys.
So, not only were the financial odds stacked against us, not only were we the Goliath against the poor eco-David … but we were evil masterminds as well.
Heartland
It is a bit ironic that a lobbyist for tobacco (… I think it’s something to do with the lack of evidence for 2nd hand smoking … which … I digress) It’s ironic that this whole charade of goliath vs. David; of evil sceptic empire vs. hobbyist environmentalists; of massive billion dollar funded sceptics against puny environmentalist struggling to get any money …. has been brought down by some environmentalist.
Fuck … fuck … fuck … fuck
That is what the eco-capitalists-corporate spin doctors will be saying today. The last thing they wanted was some DIY eco exposing the real nature of the Heartland Institute.
Every fairy story needs its baddy. The fairy tale exists as a narrative of good versus evil. The good is good, because it is fighting the evil. The persona of the “Cinderella” eco movement needed the persona of the evil monster and that evil monster was the Heartland institute … all the more sinister because it was known what was hidden.
Even if the Heartland Institute had been HQ for BIG-OIL central sceptics, the very exposure of their activities would have reassured people … because we fear what we cannot see far more than what we can.
But for the Heartland Institute to have been exposed as a rather normal think-tank/lobby group, doing the kinds of things that everyone knows they do. For them to have been exposed as struggling to get money, to have struggled to support little more than two well respected individuals on projects that were already in the public domain.
AND LITTLE IF ANY BIG-OIL money!
This is so disastrous for the warmists, that I seriously have to consider the possibility that it was intentional.
…. but then I realise, that even now the idea of this BIG-OIL highly manipulative machine behind the sceptic camp is attractive even to me. Conspiracy is almost always a cock-up, I won’t rule out completely that it was intentional, but it seems very unlikely.
WHO ARE THE SCEPTICS.
- I am a small fish. I do it as a hobby to let off steam. It sometimes doesn’t work … because the more I find out about the rubbish printed about global warming, the more I need to let off steam.
- The other couple of dozen”activists” in Scotland are mostly professionals, more than the normal number of engineers (I mean professional engineers with degrees) . Mostly employed and everyone part time except….
- Andrew Montford. Who seems to scrape a living by doing reports and writing books.
- The anti-wind brigade. Again, all amateurs. Look like village hall committee, as likely to be fighting the new houses in the village as the new windmills.
- Lord Monckton … seems to be self-funded, and makes a reasonable living as a speaker on the subject. Not impossible that he has the odd big donation … but as he isn’t active in Scotland – indeed doesn’t do much except speaking tours and the odd contribution to WUWT.
- GWPF. One(ish) scientists, around three staff and Lord Lawson tags along to give it colour. (compare that to the ~30 staff at the British Wind Energy Association alone!)
- Heartland … the figures are online, but it must be a couple dozen staff at most.
- A few US politicians seem to have full time efforts – one or two individuals.
- Watts up with that. Anthony is full time. I suspect he gets quite a bit of money through his weather products business which gets a lot of free publicity from the blog. In addition there are perhaps a dozen people who must spend most of their time (apparently for free) preparing articles.
- A few scientists like Roy Spencer, Judith Curry … not so much “sceptic” as people with their own views which sometimes align with scepticism.
WHO ARE THE PROMOTERS OF THE NON-SCIENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING?
- BWEA 30 people,
- Scots Renewables, perhaps 3.
- Scot Greenparty – 3-6people,
- English Green 3-6.
- 30 Scots councils assume 1-2 staff = ~50
- Scottish government a couple of dozen
- English councils 500?
- Westminster 250?
- EU 1000+
- IPCC
- Greenpeace
- WWF
- NASA
- £300 million research funding in the UK is say 30,000 people. Assume 10% actively promote = 3,000. Just the UEA must have dozens of people and a budget of £15million was it?
- etc. etc.
In other words, worldwide I would estimate that there are no more than 40 full time paid sceptics. In the UK alone just in government/councils there must be 10x that number. Add in all the NGOS, the eco-activists who get jobs in research … or should I say researchers who are turned into eco-activists by their work trying to prove the dire consequences of a little bit of warming. Worldwide the ratio of sceptics to alarmists, must be around 100x (4000), it is not inconceivable that it could even be 1000x, but when it comes to that scale of difference it is just so massive that the actual figure matters not at all.
The real question is how on earth did this fraud of the Goliath sceptic movement against the David ecos ever hold water?
What most people do not seem to realise is this is a game changer.
Sceptics have always known the truth … Heartland it not a surprise to us. So, it is very difficult for the sceptics to see how knowing the truth about Heartland will change much if anything … because for us nothing has changed.
But for those who accepted the word of the warmists … who accepted this as a struggle of good against evil … the poor underdog ecos against the Goliath BIG-OIL … it changes everything.
BIG-OIL funds wind. That is a fact. It does not fund the sceptics. That is a fact. That is a fact that completely undermines the moral authority of the warmists to treat every sceptic and everything a sceptic says as the evil lies of BIG oil.
So who’s really been lying? If you have supported the eco-warmists in their struggle against the evil sceptics, and we turn out to be a nice bunch of well meaning amateurs … where is the real lie? Where is the professional lying cheating PR machine that has been abusing the public and taking them for a ride?
Scots Renewables is one independent and unpaid person. Flattering to be listed no.2 in your list of the evil dead, but somewhat unjustified I feel.
I expect you mean Scottish Renewables. They have a team of 16 people and are a lobby organisation for the renewables industy.
I hope the rest of your article is more accurate.
But does the gist of the article stand? Yes. Scepticsm isn’t well funded but AGW support is. The monster in the cupboard is only scary while you can’t see the cupboard is empty. For specific sceptic missions Heartland only plans to spend about half a million dollars. As Donna Laframboise puts it “resources amount to bellybutton lint”.
There is no AGW lobby, just scientific research – which is expensive. Words and fake science -which is what we get from the anti-AGW lobby – are cheap.