Georgene Rice of KPDQ-FM interviewed Christopher C. Horner who is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and is the author of *Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. Below are some of the highlights:
Georgene: [Global warming] is an issue that we were supposed to have reached consensus on. The decisions were supposed to have been made based on science, and yet there are questions—legitimate questions—being raised about what many of our decision-makers are saying about global warming and our need to respond to it.
Christopher: Yes, well one of them is “it’s been cooling for a decade” and that’s at odds with all of the climate computer models which is what the entirety of this movement is premised in. They are not premised in observations. We did warm one degree Fahrenheit after the end of the little ice age but that’s what happens at the end of cooling periods, of course, and then we had a three-decade-long cooling from the forties to the seventies that resulted in a panic and then it warmed for two decades and that ended 1998.
So, oddly, during this period during which all of the hysteria, all of the ratcheting up of the rhetoric and the threats has occurred, it has actually plateaued and then started coming back down. So if you look at observations, if you look out the window, you’ll see that the climate models are all wrong. We’re being told that we must spend trillions of dollars, beginning with 150 billion more dollars very soon as part of the stimulus package for so-called ‘green jobs’. Meanwhile, scientists are speaking up saying this is not science at all, politics has hijacked what should be an issue of open debate and discussion to the point where that’s not even permitted anymore.
Georgene: Science is supposed to be based on dispassionate observation and yet, respected scientists have been victims of threats and vandalism, their careers trashed or at least attempts made to silence them. Talk a little bit about the drama that’s playing out in the scientific community among those who have the potential to have a great deal of power based on global warming and those who say, “wait a minute, the evidence just isn’t there”?.
Christopher: Well, David Deming, who you cited, is a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He lost his classes and his office for speaking out in an amazing way… Deming lost his job because a wealthy contributor to the University of Oklahoma said, “this is inconsistent with my vision for the [College of Atmospheric & Geographic Sciences].” It resulted in litigation, thank goodness, and he got his classes back—he had to move colleges within the university—but that’s terrible…
Christopher: What the media has done is they have gone from swaying with the weather, always promoting panic—even when the Titanic hit an iceberg, the media found it academic…to say that that was proof of the new ice age coming…and the media seems to have changed…Now it’s individuals who want to participate in the media to change the world to make it different under the guise of objective journalism, and they are activists…They’ve gone from just trying to sell copies with catastrophe to actually becoming activist enablers. For example, Editor and Publisher says “balanced is biased”—that’s their trade bible. The editor of TIME magazine says the same thing, “we know what we’re doing, it’s our job to move the public.” That’s activism.. . .
Christopher: To bring you close to home, I should mention that the Oregon state climatologist, George Taylor, was chased out of his job for the sin of refusing to conform his science to what a politician told him. He is one of four state climatologists I cite in the book…The Washington state assistant state climatologist also lost his job for challenging a politician who said something that was demonstrably false, and we should expect more of this.
### This is only a sample of George Rice’s interview, there is much more highly engaging material to hear. To catch Georgene live listen in at KPDQ 93.9 FM, 4-6pm, or listen to her archive of shows at her podcast website here.
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