How Tom Steyer used his billions to stifle climate – Latest News
Billionaire Tom Steyer used his money to assault a lone climate researcher.
Roger Pielke Jr.’s analysis on climate and catastrophe coverage wins awards and is cited by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“My views are entirely mainstream,” mentioned Pielke.
“My work is cited by all three working groups of the IPCC. There’s nothing contrarian.”
Both Steyer and Pielke agree that “greenhouse gases warm the climate,” however Pielke’s sin was saying, “it’s not the apocalypse.”
Because of that, “the Center for American Progress decided to make me a target,” he mentioned.
The middle is a lefty group that pushes climate hysteria, working articles claiming, “Climate change is fueling more deadly and destructive floods,” “Extreme weather is only intensifying” and so forth.
Anyone who disagrees is labeled a “climate denier.”
Steyer, now working for governor of California, gave the middle enough money to run hit piece after hit piece describing Pielke’s work as “fantastical falsehoods,” and calling him a “disinformer” who “ignores the data on climate science.”
Pielke didn’t know who funded the smears till WikiLeaks revealed an e-mail to Steyer from ThinkProgress’ editor: “Thanks for your support of this work . . . it’s fair to say, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change.”
Think about that.
“Progressive” activists are proud to stop a researcher from writing about what he is aware of.
Pielke says his persecution started after the release of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth,” during which Gore claimed that temperature will increase create stronger storms.
Pielke had the nerve to disagree.
“Doesn’t warmer water create bigger storms?” I requested him.
“All else equal, yes, it does,” he mentioned — “however the environment is a difficult place.
“You have things like windshear, which knocks over storms . . . We haven’t observed changes in the frequency or intensity beyond natural variability.”
Pielke’s analysis acknowledged that there have been “increasing impacts of extreme weather, mostly economic costs and loss of life.”
However, he added, the impacts weren’t attributable to larger storms however by “what we build, where we build, how much wealth we have in harm’s way.”
“When the climate advocacy movement shifted to extreme weather, I was on the ‘wrong’ side,” he mentioned.
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“I had a choice to make. Was I going to call things like I see them, or was I going to succumb to pressure to say things that maybe I didn’t believe?”
Pielke known as it as he noticed it, and paid a price.
“There was an enormous effort to try to silence people who had a voice,” he mentioned.
Testifying earlier than Congress, Pielke mentioned it’s “misleading . . . to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or drought have increased.”
That data can be within the findings of the IPCC.
But the Obama White House put out a 3,000-word memo attacking him: “Dr. Pielke’s statements . . . are seriously misleading . . . not representative of mainstream views.”
“It was the sort of thing your crazy uncle might put on Facebook,” laughed Pielke.
“I’m the only academic or researcher that any president, including Donald Trump, has ever singled out.”
The University of Colorado, the place Pielke labored for twenty-four years, caved in to the stress.
Its directors closed Pielke’s analysis middle, canceled his lessons and moved his workplace into a closet.
“What I went through was not what a university is supposed to be for,” Pielke mentioned.
The state-funded faculty, after dumping Pielke’s precise scientific analysis, now calls “climate change and sustainability . . . the central focus of our campus-wide initiatives” and hosts foolish issues like “climate summits” with panels on “youth climate advocacy.”
It’s so dumb.
And so mistaken.
Fortunately, Pielke discovered one other job.
Now he researches climate on the American Enterprise Institute, one of many suppose tanks doing the analysis that universities as soon as did.
And proper now, betting websites have Steyer in second place in California’s governor’s race.
John Stossel is the creator of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
