Co-founder of Greenpeace: Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic

a reply to: mc_squared

Global warming believers will never see the truth because they don't have brains or eyes or testicles or spleens! They're so brainwashed there is no hope for them blah blah blah (insert continued hypocritical ad hominem attacks).
/facetiousness

See how effective that is at persuasion? You people claim to have facts on your side and to hold the moral high ground, and this is how you communicate your ideology.

EDIT: Aaaaand you're still being a contentious hypocrite with the response to this post. With that skull you don't need a helmet.

a reply to: OpenMindedRealist

^ like I said: too cowardly to face up to any of the evidence presented in this thread. That's 4 meaningless posts now trying to derail the conversation, and counting.

originally posted by: OpenMindedRealist
a reply to: Grimpachi

Nothing like a tantrum to set the mood...

You can stop throwing one whenever you feel like it.

Would you like to comment on the article or sources in the OP?

a reply to: Grimpachi

Nah, you guys put a stop to that pages ago.

originally posted by: mc_squared
This is such a disingenuous response, and very typical of the mental gymnastics climate deniers start to perform on these threads when faced with real evidence. You're comparing money for research and development of technological solutions versus how much it costs to get some shill to lie in a newspaper article.

Your apples-to-oranges logic does nothing to take away from the fact Heartland are a bunch of proven liars who took money from tobacco companies to question the science on smoking, and now take money from oil companies to make up BS about climate scientists:

No, I'm comparing who makes the most most out of their beliefs... those pushing for regulations and policies dependent on buying into the AGW fabricated theory, or those pushing back against the new regulations by questioning the alleged "science." If a group's board members stand to make millions of dollars off of that government spending (which goes much deeper than simply research) and they are also conveniently the ones defining the "problem" which the government is spending to "solve," then that is a conflict of interest. It is the modern equivalent of the window repair business owner paying little kids to run around the neighborhood slinging rocks at people's windows.

This: "take money from oil companies to make up BS about climate scientists" is rich and fattening!
www.petro-online.com...

While neither report denies the reality of climate change, nor do they suggest taking immediate, aggressive action. Instead, ExM argues for adaption and mitigation, suggesting we’ll all have to become less reliant on fossil fuels in future. In addition to this, as fossil fuel deposits diminish, prices are set to rise. In response to this, ExM acknowledges the need to set a price on carbon.

"Big Oil" is playing you, my friend. They are starting to jump onto the bandwagon with oil prices cratering. Anything that can create an artificial (excuse for) shortages, driving up demand and price, they will stand behind.

It's the old Fortune Teller fraud. "You're cursed, pay me and I will lift the curse for you." Problem is, there's no curse and, since there's no curse, there's no "lifting of the curse" procedure that will do anything.... except separate the gullible from their money.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

I posted explicit evidence of Exxon funding Heartland’s climate denial as far back as 15 years ago, so you dismiss that by pointing to an article from within the past year that states:

the papers appeared to suggest that ExM was ready to admit that burning fossil fuels contributed to climate change.

If they’re “ready to admit” this now, how does that absolve them of all their actions for the last 15+ years – when a drug addict finally goes to rehab, does that mean they never had a problem in the first place?

The fact is Exxon have been talking out of both sides of their mouth on climate change for a long time, but that is to be expected. It’s exactly why they use front groups to do their dirty work for them - because it doesn't inspire much credibility for an oil company to just come out and say “climate change is a hoax you whiney Liberal fools!”.

Do you understand how a Front Group or Third Party Technique works?

With the public's perception of corporate credibility waning, hiring corporate spokespeople is of limited use. "For the media and the public, the corporation will be one of the least credible sources of information, on its own product, environmental and safety risks. Both these audiences will turn to other experts ... to get an objective viewpoint", Amanda Little from the Sydney office of PR firm Burson-Marsteller told an advertising conference in 1995.

"Developing third party support and validation for the basic risk messages of the corporation is essential. This support should ideally come from medical authorities, political leaders, union officials, relevant academics, fire and police officials, environmentalists, regulators"

^This is like Conspiracy Theory Reality 101 here, and it's exactly why phony “environmentalists” like Patrick Moore publish at The Heartland Institute. I hope most people are at least realistic enough to read between the very obvious lines, but you go ahead and keep calling everyone else gullible while relying on these exact shills to support your claims.

...
So now apparently oil companies are just part of this scam too – so fossil fuels become artificially scarce and they can raise the price on them later? That makes loads of sense, especially considering (as we've all seen recently) competition from alternative resources like “big green” has actually forced the oil cartels to drop their prices - which were artificially inflated in the first place, since they could do whatever they wanted beforehand.

Your version of this conspiracy is getting more and more elaborate and ridiculous the further you try to justify it, while ours has just become reinforced with every step. Industry shills are the ones playing you my friend - they did the exact same thing in the 80s & 90s on smoking, and before that with lead additives in gasoline. This isn't rocket science - stop making it so complicated and maybe you'll figure it out.

a reply to: mc_squared

Hostility clouds vision. Coming from a guy who often learns things the hard way.

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: Metallicus

Sometimes a blind squirrel can find a nut. Thinkprogress is more credible than the Heartland Institute. The thinkprogress link has list is of known corporate donations to the group.

Follow the money....

Follow the money huh?... Any idea who donates to "thinkprogress"? Let's see...

Thinkprogress is an oulet blog for Center for American Progress.

CAP staff includes...

...
The president and chief executive officer of CAP is Neera Tanden, who worked for the Obama and Clinton administrations and for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns.[5] The first president and CEO was John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to then U.S. President Bill Clinton. Podesta remained with the organization as chairman of the board until he joined the Obama White House staff in December 2013. Tom Daschle is the current chairman.

The Center for American Progress runs a campus outreach group, Generation Progress, and a sister advocacy organization, the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Citing Podesta's influence in the formation of the Obama Administration, a November 2008 article in Time stated that "not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway"
...

en.wikipedia.org...

High profile senior fellows of CAP include...

...
Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan; Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Ruy Teixeira, political scientist and author of The Emerging Democratic Majority; and, most recently, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Elizabeth Edwards, late wife of former presidential candidate and former U.S. Senator from North Carolina John Edwards. Sarah Rosen Wartell, a co-founder and executive vice-president of the center, has been named President of the Urban Institute
...

en.wikipedia.org...

Among the people who donate and/ or helped create "Thinkprogress" and Center for American Progress(CAP) it includes:

...
Investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the March 1, 2004 edition of The Nation: "The idea for the Center [CAP] began with discussions in 2002 between (Morton) Halperin and George Soros, the billionaire investor.… Halperin, who heads the office of Soros' Open Society Institute, brought (former Clinton chief of staff) John Podesta into the discussion, and beginning in late 2002 Halperin and Podesta circulated a series of papers to funders." The Capital Research Center reports that Podesta eagerly “took on the project of creating a new laboratory for liberalism.”

Soon thereafter, Soros and Halperin (who would become CAP's senior vice president) recruited Harold Ickes—chief fundraiser and former deputy chief of staff for the Clinton White House—to help organize the new think tank, which was launched on July 7, 2003 as the American Majority Institute. The name was changed to Center for American Progress on September 1, 2003.

Hillary Clinton, too, was intimately involved in the formation of CAP. She told reporter Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine on October 12, 2003, "We need some new intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build the 21st-century policies that reflect the Democrat Party's values." She later told The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss: "We've had the challenge of filling a void on our side of the ledger for a long time, while the other side created an infrastructure that has come to dominate political discourse. The Center [CAP] is a welcome effort to fill that void."

Persistent press leaks during CAP's early years confirmed that Mrs. Clinton, and not its nominal leader, John Podesta, was ultimately in charge of the organization at that time. "It's the official Hillary Clinton think tank," an inside source confided to Christian Bourge of United Press International. Robert Dreyfuss noted in The Nation: "In looking at Podesta's center, there's no escaping the imprint of the Clintons. It's not completely wrong to see it as a shadow government, a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile—or a White House staff in readiness for President Hillary Clinton." Dreyfuss noted the abundance of Clintonites on the Center's staff, among them Robert Boorstin, Bill Clinton's national security speechwriter; Gene Sperling, Democratic Leadership Council staffer and the former head of President Clinton's National Economic Council; Matt Miller, former senior advisor to President Clinton's Office of Management and Budget; Debbie Berger, daughter of Clinton national security chief Sandy Berger; and others. In 2007 Mrs. Clinton said, at the YearlyKos convention of left-wing bloggers, that she herself had "helped to start and support" CAP.
...

www.discoverthenetworks.org...

Major donors include George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Stephen M. Silberstein, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing, Herb andMarion Sandler and the Tides Foundation which funds money to "political liberal causes".

...
Wealthy donors contributed many millions of dollars to help the CAP establish itself during the first few years of its existence. These donations included $22,274,000 from the Sandler Foundation, created by Herbert and Marion Sandler; $3 million over a three-year period from George Soros; $3 million from the Marisla Foundation; $2,192,450 from the New York Community Trust; $1.9 million from the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation; $1,849,991 from George Soros’s Open Society Institute; $797,983 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and $765,000 from the Tides Foundation.
...

www.discoverthenetworks.org...

Were you saying something about "following the money"?...

And "Thinkprogress" more credible?... Really?...

a reply to: jrod

I would counsel you to show that the facts sited by the founder of Greenpeace who has a PhD in a relevant field are somehow flawed before engaging in an ad hominem attack. Or at a minimum, introduce your credentials in the field. Otherwise, people that already agree with you will agree with you and people that disagree will immediately disagree. And the people that disagree with you will be more justified in doing so. That is the definition of a throwaway statement.

Whatever your current feelings are about Greenpeace, the organization has clearly done more to advance the interests of the environment than you or I will ever do. So it debases your credibility to attack its rep.

Finally, organizations like Heartland Institute routinely hijack messages that benefit their agenda. This does nothing to prove or disprove the author's argument. Goes back to the ad hominem concept.

a reply to: Dawgishly

You must have missed the posts proving the guy was never a co-founder of Green Peace.

The guy lied about being a co-founder so what else is he lying about? Seems there has been a lot.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The second law of thermodynamics disproves the man made global warming theory.

a reply to: 00018GE

No, it doesn't.

The earth is not a closed system.

Yes it does.

originally posted by: rickymouse
Well, I think that the unnatural chemistry we are dumping into our environment is definitely causing problems. Remember, unnatural is even when excessive amounts of a natural chemical or element is released in an area. The same is true with smoke coming out of a smokestack, like in China. Those smokes are unnatural and change the environment over a large area. We waste so much fuel it is ridiculous, get rid of the waste, not complain about the heat to heat a person's home then tax them for it on top of the cost of the fuels causing them hardship.

A bunch of small local factories or farms running small efficient operations ecologically friendly is better than big factories or farms. The small farms and businesses also make a living for more people.

China is pushing the smog button presently, yet we buy their products and ship them half the way across the world. If that makes sense ecologically, you must be as nuts as our government is to believe a consumer based economy can be secure.

Well this is the thing, as has been said before even if climate change wasn't real the solutions of increased energy efficiency, increased renewable energy, increased sustainability of production and consumption, and cleaner industry are all positives.

The "doing business as usual" method is quite simply not working, and beyond climate change the pollution and ecological destruction is incontrovertible.

Eh, false argument regarding CO2 being necessary for plants and therefore cannot be negative in certain amounts.

Many things are factually good in balanced or trace amounts but bad in large amounts. For example, if we increased the nitrogen too much in our atmosphere it would kill most life.

Even too much water can kill you...

So the argument that because something serves a purpose in the right range and proportions, therefore it cannot possibly be negative if there is too much is obviously fallacious.

Argument retired.

a reply to: xuenchen

Its mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years.

I love it when corporations that ravage the planets resources and pollution blame "humans" for their activities.
If it wasn't for the Mega industrial complexes we'd be a world of small states each populated by subsistence farming and environmentally sound practices.

Instead we have this toxic effluent runoff from our high order "civilization".

originally posted by: fernalley


"At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth’s history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!).

Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago. The last period of glaciation, which is often informally called the “Ice Age,” peaked about 20,000 years ago. At that time, the world was on average probably about 10°F (5°C) colder than today, and locally as much as 40°F (22°C) colder."

geology.utah.gov...

As it seems no one denies there have been prior ice ages and global temperature changes , what exactly are we trying to accomplish? I think the elephant in the room is the reality the earth will go through her cycles with or without us. Keeping our environment cleaner is certainly a benefit ,however, even if I take every precaution to live a healthy lifestyle I still will never beat the inevitable outcome! Not possible.

When people cite "natural cycles," especially those of the sun, they prove that they haven't really read the publications of many of the top climate scientists and publications explaining the data supporting anthropogenic climate change.

They very specifically NOTE NATURAL CYCLES and then explain how current data, first accounting for natural cycles, is doing something more and there are large portions of the data unaccounted for by natural cycles.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

First, I admitted it was a mistake to posting a link to thinkprogress, however it is a great case study considering how many who were quick to support the heartland article, were also quick to denounce the thinkprogess study. Pot meet kettle.

Unlike some, I can admit from I am wrong and my beliefs are malleable based on new information. I feel like you regurgitated a bunch of good information that I would like to know how you found, if only you were able to do the same with The Heartland Institute.


a reply to: Dawgishly

False.

The person in question in NOT a founder, just someone who claims to be one. Believe it or not activist groups like Greenpeace or notorious for being infiltrated by alternative interest, but that is a completely different discussion.

Just because the man has a PHD, does not mean he is right, in fact he can be completely off. The Monty Hall problem is living proof of how the 'experts' can get it wrong.

originally posted by: ThecakeisalieIt is only plant food if there are trees to absorb it, and the rate of deferstation vastly outweighs the rate of reforestation. The less trees, the less Co2 is absorbed. Eventually all that excess Co2 has to go somewhere.

Apparently you are unaware that the vast majority (70-80%) of the worlds oxygen supply (and CO2 conversion into oxygen) occurs in the ocean, by none other than the lowly algae (in this case, specifically, phytoplankton).

Without the oceans phytoplankton, we all die. Period.

Also, you have to take into account that, especially in large (think 'rainforests') mature forested environments, it is far from a simple 'CO2 > O2' formula. The reality is, it is actually a neutral cycle - meaning, they - mature forests - have no impact on the net atmospheric CO2 levels.

Surprise!

"A study was made of a 150 year old mature forest in Manitoba, Canada. The aim was to measure the amount of CO2 being absorbed or produced by the complete forest. They concluded that over a long-term the forest was neutral with respect to carbon sinking (ie absorbing CO2). In summer when new leaves were active, it tended to absorb more CO2 than it produced, but in fall the reverse happened.

In conclusion, destroying our forests adds to the CO2 problem since the removed wood eventually decays. Converting bare land back to forests will reduce CO2 in the atmosphere for a relatively short time while the forest matures – it is not a long-term solution. Mature forests have little effect on the amount of CO2 in the air and as such they can’t help us with our global warming problem."

Link to article

Link to referenced Study

originally posted by: Grimpachi
a reply to: 00018GE



The earth is not a closed system.

Are you admitting that the earths climate is influenced from outside the earth? Just how many people live outside the earth?