Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore rips USA Today for claiming skeptics are ‘polarizing’ climate debate

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/01/21/climate-change-misinformation-facebook-youtube-twitter/6594691001/

Climate change denial on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok is ‘as bad as ever’

Excerpt:

The climate is changing, but misinformation about it on the major social media platforms is not. Climate change falsehoods, hoaxes and conspiracy theories are still prevalent on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube despite pledges to crack down, a new report says. Social media posts and videos denying climate change, disputing its causes, or underplaying its effects not only can still be found on these platforms, they are often missing warning labels or links to credible information, according to Advance Democracy, a research organization that studies misinformation.

… 

John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who advises Facebook, says the proliferation of climate misinformation on social media reflects the torrent of misinformation coming from a combination of science denial and skepticism about climate policy and renewable fuels and technologies. “One element of climate misinformation that seems to be particularly prominent on social media is culture war type posts that attempt to paint people concerned about climate change as belonging to some separate social group intent on impinging on people’s freedoms,” Cook said. “This is a particularly damaging form of misinformation as it exacerbates public polarization on climate change, making progress more difficult.”

End USA Today article excerpt. 

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Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore responds to John Cook: 

That’s a good one! We skeptics are responsible for the “public polarization” about the climate? Who is using the word “denier” as if we skeptics want to send the true believers to the gas chambers? They are the ones foaming at the mouth with doomsday language. We are basing our opinions and facts on historical data and sound science. They refuse to accept 4 fundamental truths (among many others):

1. The global climate is colder now, during this Pleistocene Ice Age, than it has been since the previous ice age, the Karoo, that lasted for 100 million years from 350 million to 250 million years ago. We are at the tail end of a 50 million-year global cooling period that began with the Eocene Thermal Maximum. Our ape ancestors lived through that.

2. During this Holocene Interglacial Period, one of about 40 interglacial periods during the Pleistocene, CO2 fell to the lowest known level in the history of Planet Earth 20,000 years ago, 180 ppm, at the peak of the most recent glacial maximum. As the oceans warmed between then and pre-industrial times they gave off CO2 which brought it back up to 280 ppm, still lower than all of history except for the Pleistocene during which many of the recent glacial maximums it fell below 200 ppm. Plants begin to die at 150 ppm.

3. Humans, Homo sapiens, are a tropical species, not a sub-tropical, temperate, or polar species. We evolved in Africa, at the equator, where even during the glacial maximums of the Pleistocene the temperature was similar to what it is today. The only reasons we were able to come out of Africa were the innovations of controlled fire, shelter, and clothing (animal skins). Humans would have been fine even during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, long before polar bears evolved from the Eurasian Brown Bear due to global cooling into the Pleistocene. Ironically there would be no polar bears if it were not for climate change, the onset of the Pleistocene 2.6 million years ago and the polar ice cap where bears can eat seals.

4. Since we began using fossil fuels and making cement, the long decline of CO2 over the millennia has miraculously been halted. There is no reason to believe that if we had not unintentionally reversed the downward trend in CO2 that all life on Earth would have been threatened with eventual extinction when CO2 fell below 150 ppm. We have returned a balance to the global carbon cycle. There is no reason to prevent this from continuing up to 800 ppm and beyond. The graph below of the longest continuous temperature record with a thermometer from Central England clearly shows that the advent of our CO2 emissions did not trigger an exponential rise in temperature . It simply carried on rising very slowly in fits and starts as it has since about 1700, the nadir of the Little Ice Age, 150 years before significant emissions began. Note the period between 1694 and about 1730. This is the largest and longest period of warming in the entire record and it occurred before we began emitting large amounts of CO2.

I would like to think this is pretty much worthy of a QED in science.