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From Forbes:

Sarah Palin Weirdly Attacks Bill Nye: 'As Much A Scientist As I Am'  APRIL 15, 2016, 9:00 AM EDT

The Republican star was promoting a new movie, ‘Climate Hustle.’

With just one week to go before some 130 countries sign a landmark agreement to tackle climate change at the United Nations, a group of roughly 150 naysayers gathered Thursday in Congress’s Rayburn Building. They were there to see and discuss “Climate Hustle,” a documentary that purports to bust the “myths and hype” and expose man-made global warming to be a hoax.

But the bigger draw at the event may have been one of the panelists, Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who remains a star, albeit controversial one, in conservative circles. The overwhelmingly sympathetic crowd—this was invitation only—murmured in agreement and chuckled at her anecdotes about liberal “fearmongering.” Palin wasted no time, attacking “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” (Nye, a science educator, is the host of a popular children’s science show.)

Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am,” Palin said. “He’s a kids’ show actor, he’s not a scientist.”

(She made the remark after a brief clip was shown of Nye, win which he said, good-naturedly, that he hope climate change deniers will be rejected by the American people.)

Palin bemoaned the fact that children are being taught to embrace the premise that humans are causing climate change. She said, adding, this is why “it’s so important for parents to be a greater influence than the schools.”

Palin was joined in the panel discussion by David Legates, described as a “the former Delaware state climatologist,” and Marc Morano, who runs ClimateDepot.com, for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (known as CFACT), co-producer and funder of the film.

Critics contend CFACT is a shill for Big Oil, though Morano claims that 85 percent of CFACTS funding comes from “individual donors.” (Mother Jones has included it among “The Dirty Dozen of Climate Change Denial.”) The screening was held in the meeting room of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, whose chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx), endorses the film.

The moderator, conservative activist Brent Bozell, lobbed softballs at Palin. Palin’s environmental stances have included calls for more drilling in the Arctic Ocean and, she noted at the event, keeping polar bears off the threatened species list.

“I want life to be better for mankind,” Palin explained, “and that takes developing our natural resources.”

The discussion was being filmed to accompany Climate Hustle when it’s screened for one day at some 400 cinemas around the country on May 2.

The movie itself is a long 75 minutes, featuring various scientists who’ve either never believed in manmade global warming, or have gone rogue—disputing what is near consensus among scientists and therefore becoming virtual pariahs in their field. While the vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is largely caused by the estimated 2 billion tons of CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels and other human activities, Climate Hustle, which has an oddly jaunty tone, scoffs at such alarmism.

Climate Hustle was cowritten and narrated by Morano, a former spokesman for the most best-known climate-change denier in the senate, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe.

At a reception after the screening, which Palin didn’t attend, Morano said he felt an urgency to produce this film, now that “President Obama has bypassed Congress” with environmental legislation, and “little rules are slipping in through the EPA.” The film is meant to be “a reality check,” he explained, adding that he’s already working on a sequel.

Update: An earlier version incorrectly stated the number of theaters showing the film. The correct number is 400. This story also was updated to include mention of the clip of Bill Nye.
Surprise surprise..

Quote:Companies like Pepsi, DuPont, and Google might say that they support climate action, but in reality, they are funding lawmakers opposed to President Obama’s climate agendaaccording to a Reuters report released Tuesday morning. 

Over the last year, more than 150 companies have signed on to the “American Business Act on Climate Pledge,” a commitment created by Obama to encourage businesses to adopt sustainable practices and show their support for the Paris climate agreement. But in looking at the 25 largest donations made during the 2016 election cycle by the political action committees of the 30 largest publicly traded companies involved in the pledge, Reuters found a discrepancy between the businesses’ outward support for climate action and their private political spending.
U.S. Companies Publicly Support Climate Action, Privately Fund Deniers
Pay to play? How about this as pay to play..

Quote:Coal and electricity companies paid to meet with Republican state attorneys general just weeks before those top law enforcement officials joined in suing the federal government over the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, new documents show

Coal company Murray Energy and electricity giant Southern Company, which owns several southeastern utilities and a number of natural gas companies, held private meetings with attorneys general at the Republican Attorneys General Association’s annual summit in West Virginia in August 2015. The meetings cost up to $125,000 per company, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which uncovered the documents.
Republican State AGs Met With Coal Companies Before Filing Against The EPA’s Carbon Rule
Hardly surprising, this..

Quote:The Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” noting that it has the potential to exacerbate conflict and threaten national security. And in September, 25 military and national security experts — including former advisers to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — issued a report warning that climate change poses a “significant risk to U.S. national security and international security.” Middle East experts have suggested that the Syrian civil war is a contemporary example of a climate-driven conflict, one where widespread drought and crop failures helped tip the scale.

Trump, on the other hand, does not believe in the scientific consensus on climate change. He has called climate change a “hoax,” and has vowed to roll back nearly every single climate policy enacted under the Obama administration, from the Clean Power Plan to the Paris climate agreement.
So it should be no surprise that, when it comes to climate change, Trump’s first five advisers also reject the scientific consensus, as well as national security community’s warnings, regarding the dangers of global warming.
Donald Trump’s first staff picks all deny the threat of climate change
Quote:The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world.comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain.

As the ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats has widened, so has the partisan divide over climate change. Scientific evidence that human activity is the leading cause of global warming has continued to accumulate in recent years, and the evidence for man-made climate change is now overwhelming.

In spite of that, Republicans are slightly 
less convinced than they were a decade and a half ago that the Earth is getting warmer as a result of human activity. Democrats have moved in the opposite direction and become more likely to say that man-made climate change is real. This year, Gallup found that while 85 percent of Democrats believe human activity has lead to higher temperatures, only 38 percent of Republicans agree.
Donald Trump and the Triumph of Climate Denial - The Atlantic
Speaking about hyperbole..

Quote:The environmental movement is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world”, according to an adviser to the US president Donald Trump’s administration. Myron Ebell, who has denied the dangers of climate change for many years and led Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until the president’s recent inauguration, also said he fully expected Trump to keep his promise to withdraw the US from the global agreement to fight global warming.

Ebell said US voters had rejected what he dubbed the “expertariat” and said there was no doubt that Trump thinks that climate change is not a crisis and does not require urgent action. Trump has already replaced the climate change page on the White House websitewith a fossil-fuel-based energy policy, resurrected two controversial oil pipelinesand attempted to gag the EPA, the Agriculture Department and the National Parks Service.

Ebell, speaking in London, claimed that the motivation for climate action was protecting a special interest: “The climate-industrial complex is a gigantic special interest that involves everyone from the producers of higher priced energy to the academics that benefit from advancement in their careers and larger government grants.” The IMF has calculated that fossil fuels receive
 $10m every minute in subsidies, while the fossil fuel industry spends at least $100m a year on lobbying.

In an echo of Trump’s claim that climate change was a hoax invented by China, Ebell said: “China is making big investments in producing more solar panels and windmills, which they sell to gullible consumers in the western world, so that power and electricity prices will become higher and the Chinese economy will become more competitive.”
Green movement 'greatest threat to freedom', says Trump adviser | Environment | The Guardian

Yes, experts can be dismissed out of hand, arguments, data, substantiation, proof, all of that doesn't matter..

For instance that China installs way more solar panels and windmills in their own home market, or that these alternative source can now compete with fossil fuels in electricity generation:

Quote:Lazard’s LCOE analysis identifies how much each unit of electricity (measured in megawatt-hours) costs to generate over a power plant’s lifetime. LCOE represents every cost component -- capital and financing expenditures to build; operations and maintenance; and fuel costs -- spread out over the total lifetime megawatt-hours generated.
Wind and Solar Are Our Cheapest Electricity Generation Sources. Now What Do We Do? | Greentech Media
Meet the new head of the EPA..

Quote:But now that Pruitt’s all settled in at the EPA, he’s getting a little less shy. In a CNBC interview on Thursday morning, Pruitt explicitly said that carbon dioxide doesn’t cause global warming. “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact,” Pruitt said. “So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”
EPA chief Scott Pruitt just went full climate denier. | New Republic
Quote:BBack in November 2009, as the Obama backlash was just gathering steam, Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his radio program to “Climategate.”

That was the episode in which a climate research institute was hacked and the private emails of scientists were leaked. Conservative media sifted through the emails, stripping individual sentences and phrases out of context and spinning them to look sinister, as though scientists were coordinating and manipulating results. Mainstream media dutifully covered the “controversy.”

No fewer than five separate investigations later cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but by then, for a large class of right-wing media consumers, it was already settled history, part of shared lore..
Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology - Vox

The rest of the article is a must read, about the causes and consequences of the epistemological closing of the rightwing media. 'Çlimategate' is just one example of that.
Quote:Trump’s EPA transition leader just blasted Ivanka and Rex Tillerson over climate policy. Ever since Trump’s election, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell has been leading the charge to permanently hobble the Environmental Protection Agency. He formed a transition team for the agency that included some of the nation’s most prominent climate science deniers, and created a policy document that recommends withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, defunding international climate programs, withdrawing regulations on carbon dioxide and methane emissions, and somehow reversing the Supreme Court’s ruling saying carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

But at a conference for climate science deniers on Friday, Ebell said there have been roadblocks to getting these things accomplished. “We do have a problem,” he said. “Swamp creatures are still there. They are trying to infiltrate the administration. And some of them are succeeding.” Amazingly, Ebell said one of those “swamp creatures” is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil. Ebell blasted Tillerson for suggesting that the U.S. should remain a party to its international agreements to fight climate change, saying Tillerson just wants to “pal around” with diplomats on the subject. “Rex Tillerson may be from Texas, and he may have been CEO of Exxon, but he’s part of the swamp,” Ebell said.

Ebell also called out Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner, who have reportedly been trying to convince the president to not be so awful on climate policy. Perhaps realizing the perils of singling out his former boss’s daughter, Ebell was more restrained with that criticism. “I don’t know that they really want to be identified as swamp creatures, and I’m not willing to do so,” Ebell said. “But at some point it needs to be pointed out that the people who elected Donald J. Trump are not wealthy Manhattanites, including his children.”
Trump’s EPA transition leader just blasted Ivanka and Rex Tillerson over climate policy. | New Republic

Quote:The head of the Environmental Protection Agency says President Donald Trump in the coming days will sign a new executive order that unravels his predecessor's sweeping plan to curb global warming. EPA chief Scott Pruitt says the executive order to be signed Tuesday will undo the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, an environmental regulation that restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The 2015 rule has been on hold since last year while a federal appeals court considers a challenge by coal-friendly Republican-led states and more than 100 companies. Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Pruitt said Trump's intention is to bring back coal-mining jobs and reduce the cost of electricity. Supporters of former President Barack Obama's plan say it would spur thousands of clean-energy jobs.
EPA Chief: Trump To Sign Order Undoing Obama Plan To Curb Global Warming
The climate denier at the helm of the EPA:

Quote:EEPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a climate denier, is launching an initiative at the agency to challenge scientists’ near-universal consensus on climate science by having experts debate scientific studiesE&E News reported Friday.

The initiative will include “red team, blue team” exercises to perform “at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science,” an anonymous administration official told E&E News. The term “red team, blue team” is used by the military to describe exercises aimed at finding vulnerabilities, and it was popularized as a way to debate climate science by Wall Street Journal columnist Steven Koonin..
Pruitt Is Reportedly Starting An EPA Initiative To Challenge Climate Science – Talking Points Memo

Quote:EEPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is undertaking a formal initiative to evaluate climate scienceaccording to reporting from E&E News White House reporter Emily Holden. According to Holden, the program will feature a “red team, blue team” approach meant to provide “back-and-forth critique” of climate science.

But actual climate scientists argue that “back-and-forth critique” already exists in climate science: It’s called the peer-review process.
“The system they describe is precisely what scientific peer-review is,” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told ThinkProgress via email. “The reality is that the only thing these folks don’t like is the conclusion that the scientific community (that is, the world’s scientists, literally) has arrived at — that climate change is real, human-caused, and a threat.””
Scott Pruitt wants to hijack the peer-review process to push bad climate science
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