Obama's War on Coal = War on America

Introducing CFCPACC.org -- Committee for Confusing People About Climate Change

CFACT + Lovelock = Climate Confusion

The Denialsphere has a new meme:

And as usual, it would be charitable to call it a half-truth.

It took me less than five minutes to find that out.

Yes, the irrepressibly outspoken originator of the Gaia theory of our planet, James Lovelock, did say what CFACT (the “Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow,” as Stephen Colbert might have named it) triumphantly says he did. Without even fact-checking, I'm willing to believe another climate change obfuscation outfit on that one, because at least the Global Warming Policy Foundation is responsible enough to publish the 94-year-old scientist cum natural philosopher's words in partial context – a context that includes other tidbits you won't see in any disinfographic from CFACT.

Lovelock's quote is loosely taken from a BBC Newsnight interview broadcast on April 2, just a few days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its massive Working Group II report on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.

Early in the interview, Lovelock opted to illustrate his point that we're not as smart as we think we are, and that we're cruising for a bruising with extinction, by opining:

Take this climate matter everybody is thinking about. They all talk, they pass laws, they do things, as if they knew what was happening. I don’t think any of them really know what’s happening. They're just guessing it. And a whole group of them meet together and encourage each other’s guesses. 

(I'm using my own transcript now that I've watched the interview myself. It corrects some errors in the transcript by the GWPF and adds a few more lines of context.)

So there it is. The get, the ripe cherry to be picked, the quote to be mined, tweaked and decontextualized by CFACT, Friends of Science, Watts Up With That? and all the other climate confusionists dedicated to pulling the wool over the people's eyes in the guise of enlightening them, ensuring the fossil fuel companies will live to profit another day and keeping the bogeymen of “Big Government” and global governance away.

And here's the context.

Tiger not-so-direct: Adventures in comical customer service

It began with a message from me to tigerdirect.ca, submitted via their website. I had been checking out the Lenovo Yoga 10.1 tablet – including on tigerdirect.ca. 

For days afterward, ads from tigerdirect.ca for the Lenovo tablet (among others) followed me around the web. These two-frame GIFs flickered between the implied regular price with a slash through it and the implied sale price. 

But the regular price the ads gave for the tablet was inflated by 20% above Lenovo's list price. And the implied sale price was ... the list price. 

Even Lenovo was discounting it below list at the time (the 2013 Christmas holiday season). 

I wanted Tiger Direct to know. 

Instead I would become an unwitting straight man in a comedy routine that would involve some 11 emails. 

(NOTE: I've removed redundant text from the email transcript below in order to minimize discomfort and maximize amusement.)

Punishing Syria – and the Responsibility to Protect

Much of the determination by the Obama administration and other Western leaders to punish the Assad regime for gassing its own people is probably informed by a controversial doctrine that evolved in the aftermath of the international community's collective shame following its failure to intervene in Rwanda. As the world stood by, as many as a million civilians were brutally slain during the three-month bloodbath in 1994. 

Eight years ago, when this doctrine – known as The Responsibility to Protect, or “R2P” – was on the brink of gaining international acceptance, I wrote the following column in The Aquarian explaining what it is and why I believe it's an important step forward for global justice and security. 

But while R2P might be a motivating factor for those who would intervene militarily in Syria, it's very unclear if America's non UN-sanctioned action would meet the cautious R2P criteria. More to the point, of course, will it help or will it hurt? 

Child abusers, carbon polluters and the Conservative Party of Canada

Over the years I've dropped hint after unsubtle hint to the Conservative Party of Canada – which during its seven-year (and counting) reign in Parliament has gutted my country's record of political progressivism – that I don't like them. 

— that their candidates cannot “count on my support”;

— that they are practically the polar opposite of all my political values.

Yet, somehow I've wound up on the email list for their core supporters – the one where they propagandize their base and show the side of their face they usually try to cover with heavy makeup when communicating to the general Canadian public.

It's kind of breathtaking to be candidly chatted up by the party in power like you're a flag-waving supporter of Stephen Harper (the party's leader and Canada's Prime Minister), a hater both of liberals and the Liberal Party – and the kind of person who would cheer the Conservative government's latest initiative to crack down harder than ever on child abusers while it continues to indirectly cheer on the massive child abuse perpetrated by carbon polluters.

So here is the latest of these emails which – this time – has prompted me to blow my cover with a most unsubtly derisive reply:

CFACT's new meme: "UN bureaucrat admits global warming is really about wealth redistribution"

CFACT – the right-wing libertarian disinformation tank – has a new meme, another billboard and Internet graphic calculated to pull the wool over people's eyes while claiming to enlighten them.

Here's how it looks:

It's having the desired effect. Just look at the “I told you so” vitriol it's unleashed on CFACT's Facebook page where the oil-funded outfit describes it like this:

In a moment of unusual candor, a UN bureaucrat admitted that global warming is really about wealth redistribution.
CFACT shared his statement on our new billboard, right outside the Rockies' 50,000+ seat ball park in Denver, Colorado.
Share this post and expose the co-chair of UN IPCC working group III's true thoughts about global warming.

So what's the real story?