Hill Heat

The conservative Canadian newspaper National Post and several of its reporters have been found guilty of defaming a climate scientist in numerous articles that attacked his character. The defendants - the Post, its publisher Gordon Fisher, and its journalists Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, and Kevin Libin - have to retract all their articles about climate scientist Andrew Weaver and pay $50,000 in general damages jointly.

The judge in the case, Justice Emily Burke, did not find the defendants guilty of malice, merely that they “deliberately created a negative impression of Dr. Weaver” because of their climate-change denial and “have been careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts.”

Dr. Andrew Weaver is one of the world’s pre-eminent paleoclimatologists, a professor at the University of Victoria since 1992. He has spent considerable time working to educate the public on climate change, writing Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World in 2008 and acting as a lead author for every IPCC report since 1995. During the

In a series of articles and editorials, the Post claimed Weaver, as “Canada’s warmist spinner-in-chief,” was part of a global scientific conspiracy to concoct fear about fossil-fueled global warming. This “Climategate” smear against varied climate scientists was promoted by conservative media worldwide during the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks. While other scientists were being smeared following the hacking of a set of email correspondence, Weaver was the victim of an office break-in. The Post then falsely claimed Weaver blamed the oil industry for the burglary. The Post also falsely claimed Weaver was trying to dissociate himself from the IPCC and was generally corrupt and deceitful. In 2010, Weaver filed suit against the Post, after years of asking for corrections and retractions.

Justice Burke found the defendants’ claims that their articles did not defame Weaver’s character completely unconvincing. She found, instead, they lied and defamed Dr. Weaver. According to Burke, they “altered the complexion of the facts and omitted facts sufficiently fundamental that they undermine the accuracy of the facts expressed in the commentary to the extent the facts cannot be properly regarded as a true statement of the facts.”

As she wrote in her decision:

Essentially, the allegations of the defamatory character of the words in the four articles can be summarized as the following innuendos or inferences that Dr. Weaver:

(a) attempted to divert public attention from the IPCC and Climategate scandal by fabricating stories about the involvement of the fossil fuel industry with respect to the break-ins at his office, theft of emails from a UK University, and hack attacks at the Centre;

(b) engaged in deceptive misconduct in the news media to do so;

(c) engaged in willful manipulation and distortion of scientific data for the purposes of deceiving the public in order to promote a public agenda;

(d) in doing so, is motivated by a corrupt interest in receiving government funding and financial rewards;

(e) is wilfully concealing scientific climate data;

(f) knows or believes the IPCC reports concerning global warming are unscientific and fraudulent and seeks to avoid personal accountability for the manipulation/distortion of those reports by disassociating himself from that organization;

(g) has deceitfully or incompetently linked current weather and temperature events with global warming;

(h) authored a deceitful and manipulative work of agitation propaganda known as The Copenhagen Diagnosis; and

(i) is untrustworthy, unscientific and incompetent.

As of this writing, the National Post has not yet removed the offending articles from its website.

The full judgment can be found here.

North Dakota Congressman Kevin Cramer believes that anthropogenic global warming is a “fraudulent science,” the result of a scientific conspiracy to promote wind farms and carbon taxes at the expense of cheap coal. In a February 4, 2012 radio interview unearthed by Hill Heat, then-candidate Cramer (R-N.D.) details to KNOX’s Jarrod Thomas his version of the “Climategate” conspiracy theory:

“These mandates and these wind farms are all based on this fraudulent science from the EPA, meaning their claim that CO2 is a pollutant and is causing global warming. I’m sure you’re familiar with one of the leading climate research centers in the world there at East Anglia University in England, the Hadley Research Centre. The director, Phil Jones, his emails, he admitted that he was falsifying temperature data. The reason he had to do is because was the data was showing the global climate is actually declining in temperature, temperatures were going down. He was overlaying higher temperatures on the real data to show that it was actually rising. We know the globe is cooling. Number one, we know that. So the idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”

Listen:

In reality, the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect is a physical fact known since the 1800s. The stolen emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (the Hadley Research Centre is a separate institution) do not provide support for Cramer’s libelous attacks on Dr. Jones. The global climate is continuing to warm, with every decade since the 1970s warmer than the last, and the impacts of global warming are accelerating faster than scientists projected.

Rep. Cramer is a member of the House Committee on Science.

MP3 file. Full interview audio is available here.

Yesterday, the South Dakota legislature passed a resolution telling public schools to teach “balance” about the “prejudiced” science of climate change by a vote of 37-33. Earlier language that ascribed “astrological” influences to global warming was stripped from the final version.

There are at least fifteen state legislatures attempting to prevent limits on greenhouse gas pollution. The states of Alabama and global warming endangerment finding, with legislators in thirteen more states in tow. Several of these resolutions argue that the scientific consensus on the threat of manmade global warming is actually a conspiracy:

KENTUCKY: “WHEREAS, a recent disclosure of communications among scientists associated with the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has cast serious doubt upon the scientific data that have purportedly supported the finding that manmade carbon dioxide has been a material cause of global warming or global climate change . . .”

MARYLAND: “WHEREAS, E–mail and other communications between climate researchers around the globe discovered as part of the recent “climate–gate” controversy indicate that there is a well–organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data and incorporate tricks to substantiate the theory of climate change . . . “

OKLAHOMA: “WHEREAS, intense public scrutiny has revealed how unsettled the science is on climate change and the unwillingness of many of the world’s climatologists to share data or even entertain opposing viewpoints on the subject . . .”

UTAH: “WHEREAS, emails and other communications between climate researchers around the globe, referred to as ‘Climategate,’ indicate a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome . . .”

Every resolution makes the claim that protecting citizens from hazardous climate pollution would hurt the economy, instead of spurring a green recovery. Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Alaska lawmakers talk about being “dependent” on their states’ coal and oil industries. Several of the resolutions, drafted early last year, call on Congress to reject the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), which passed the House of Representatives in June but has languished in the Senate. The Alaska and West Virginia resolutions support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) effort to rewrite the Clean Air Act (S.J.Res. 26), and Alabama’s resolution calls for the passage of Rep. Earl Pomeroy’s (D-ND) similar effort (H.R. 4396).

Bizarrely, Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen’s (R-AZ) resolution argues that the U.S. Congress does not have the Constitutional authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. Allen also believes the Earth is 6000 years old. The other Arizona resolution, along with the Kentucky, Virginia, and Washington resolutions, would attempt to block state enforcement of global warming rules.

These efforts to overturn the Clean Air Act and politicize established science are being supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a national organization that brings conservative state lawmakers together with industry. ALEC promotes a resolution opposing the endangerment finding drafted by its Natural Resources Task Force, which includes over 120 lawmakers from around the nation and a similarly sized group of corporate representatives. Although ALEC does not have an official position on the validity of climate science, the organization is “actively involved in helping people get together and share ideas,” a representative told Hill Heat. For example, the spring ALEC task force meeting will feature noted climate conspiracy theorist Paul Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.