Hooray for the Kiwis part 2


Greenpeace tries to discredit the Climate Science Coalition

Then the CSC dismantles their arguments piece by piece.


Some highlights: (Greenpeace in italics)

1. “The newly formed group of 'climate scientists' is about politics and big business, not science.”

As explained on our website*, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) is committed to providing New Zealanders with balanced scientific opinions that reflect the truth about climate change and expose the exaggerated claims that have been made about human-caused global warming.

The Coalition is led by scientists, and makes its appraisals using evidence-based science.

From its published comments on many issues, not just climate change, it is clear that Greenpeace does not base its views on science, but rather strives to achieve its environmental agenda through political ends.

4. "It is a well known strategy by vested interests to cast doubt on the climate science. But the debate is over. The scientific majority agrees - climate change is happening and it is caused by human activities. What we are seeing in the formation of the Climate Science Coalition is the death throes of the climate change sceptic."

The first sentence is irrelevant innuendo, and also contains a false assertion: unlike Greenpeace, the NZSCS always aims to highlight the scientific facts and their sensible interpretation.

The second sentence is manifestly false. Greenpeace illustrates Orwellian 'double think' when it makes this statement and then disparages 'skeptics'. It can't have it both ways.

The third sentence is vacuous in that the climate has always changed and always will; it is also false in that not even the IPCC claims that climate change is solely caused by human activity.
Finally, the fourth sentence is political rhetoric divorced from reality.

7. "Exxon-Mobil, the biggest oil company in the world, has spent more than NZD$18.8 million funding groups and climate sceptics to challenge the science of climate change."

Greenpeace seems here, and in other places, to be obsessed with big business. What Exxon-Mobil may or may not have spent encouraging scientific investigation is known only to Exxon-Mobil, and is anyway a matter of which they would rightly be proud, not ashamed.

NZCSC numbers amongst its members persons who are alleged (by Greenpeace members, amongst others) to have received funding from Exxon-Mobil. The allegations are utterly without foundation.

If Greenpeace wants to contribute sensibly to the public discussion on climate science, it needs to reorient itself away from politics and innuendo, and start acknowledging the primacy of the science of the issue.

9. "Why would anyone cast doubt on the largest body of scientific effort ever assembled on planet - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a collaboration of over 1,500 climate experts from around the world that 17 national academies of science have endorsed as the pre-emininent authority on climate science on the planet?"

Science is about observation, experiment and theory, not consensus. This statement is rhetoric, and weak rhetoric at that.
NZCSC stands for less rhetoric and more science. (IT'S ABOUT TIME! -CC)

10. "Why would anyone argue against 11 national science academies who issued a joint statement to the G8 Summit that acknowledged G8 nations have been responsible for much of the past greenhouse gas emissions? Or recent participants at Wellington's Climate Change and Governance conference who all agree climate change is real and happening."

No-one disputes that climate change is real and happening, that burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere, nor that G8 nations have contributed their share of emissions. In contrast, there is no agreement at all as to the portion of climate change that is human-caused, the likely magnitude of any temperature change that may follow from continuing human emissions, nor whether it is necessary to take remedial action.

Neither science academies, nor the IPCC, nor the recent Wellington conference has a monopoly on science wisdom about climate change. Indeed, some of the utterances of persons associated with these bodies conflict so dramatically with science reality, and with the views of independent expert scientists, that one is forced to conclude that these bodies are now operating to a significant degree in the political realm. Like Greenpeace.

You really should read the whole thing.