Dr. Genevieve Guenther Profile picture
Aug 1, 2018 17 tweets 7 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
I really wanted to like @NathanielRich's @NYTmag piece about 70's & 80's climate politics. It does put AGW front-and-center for once. But I'm crushed to say that Rich suppresses important facts, covering up how organized climate denial created our current predicament.

[Thread]
For just one example: let's look at how Rich narrates the role of the scientist William Nierenberg in writing and disseminating “Changing Climate,” the @theNASciences report released in 1983.

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This is how Rich credentials Nierenberg (N)👇🏽. He doesn't report that N was a physicist, not a climate scientist. Nor does he say that N worked on the Manhattan Project. He hides the parts that undermine N's expertise on climate & that suggest N used science politically.

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Rich goes on to narrate that although N stated in “Changing Climate” that “action had to be taken immediately,” he lied about that fact “in the press interviews that followed” (although, of course, Rich doesn't' use the word “lied”).

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But Rich attributes N's misrepresentation of the report to the public as stemming merely from a commitment to what we now call Ecomodernism: according to Rich, N felt it was “better to bet on American Ingenuity to save the day.”

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And then, disingenuously attributing his own hagiography to unnamed “officials,” Rich doubles down on his characterization of N as a brilliant and transformative Regan-era optimist, “one of the elite class of scientists how had helped the nation win a global war.”

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And in case we didn't hear the silent implication of all this praise, Rich spells out the message: “Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections.”

Nobody believed this? Really – nobody?

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What Rich actively SUPRESSES is that Nierenberg subsequently founded The George C Marshall Institute, a “conservative think tank” which “disputed” climate science.

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The GMI put out, for example, one report, authored by N himself, arguing that global warming was caused by the sun, and another that CFCs weren't bad for ozone, and yet another claiming that secondhand smoke was fine to breathe.

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This is all public record—I just found these screen shots on Wikipedia, for god's sake.

And @NaomiOreskes has written extensively about Nierenberg in *Merchants of Doubt*. Her article about him is here: jstor.org/stable/10.1525…

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It is unconscionable that Rich suppresses all this historical context.

And tragically this is just one moment out of an entire article that obscures the full truth about United States climate politics over the last forty years.

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The claim that “everybody knew,” & understood the stakes, but all collectively decided not to transition to clean energy due to “human nature” is outrageous.

It's absurd to suggest that these elite white men who denied climate change epitomize “human nature.”

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It seems to me that Rich, and by extension the @nytimes and @nytmag, failed to report the story accurately, instead pinning the cause for our current emergency on a discredited concept that ideologically obscures the political actions of conservative elites.

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This legerdemain is DANGEROUS. The actions of the Trump administration & the @GOP clearly demonstrate that elite conservatives are continuing to attempt to prevent the US from transitioning to safe energy. They are threatening our lives. People are already dying.

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Guess what, Mr. Rich and @NYTmag? It's NOT “us.”

It's not me, and it's not the vast majority of American voters desperate for governments to do something about climate change.

climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/p…

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And, most importantly, IT'S NOT TOO LATE.

We can still save billions of lives if we act to decarbonize NOW.

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@nytimes, you must #EndClimateSilence & tell the truth about politicians who serve the interests of climate-denier donors over the interests of the people.

Without that truth, your journalism carries water for those same climate deniers in the service of profit & death.

/fin

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More from @DoctorVive

Oct 8, 2018
Can we talk about the global "we"?

"We" is a big word in climate discourse. Just today I've seen a number of responses to #SR15 that use it, as in "we're fucking this up."

I'm here to say that this "we" is a fictional construct: ideological, obfuscatory, and dangerous.

1/n
Who is this "we"? Does it include the nearly one billion people who live on less than 2 dollars a day?

worldbank.org/en/topic/pover…

2/n
Does it include the +/- 5.5 billion people who live on between 2-10 dollars a day?

oxfam.org/en/even-it/5-s…

3/n
Read 17 tweets
Sep 26, 2018
Yesterday, at an interesting #ClimateWeekNYC panel on fighting denial (organized by @ColumbiaClimate, @Sallan_Found, @earthinstitute, & @ClimSciDefense) @jeffnesbit made some excellent points I want to circulate.

[Thread]
First point: Nesbit reported that his research shows that trying to inoculate teenagers against tobacco advertising by telling them that smoking will make them die before their time doesn't work. But....

2/n
Telling teenagers that they're being targeted and manipulated by tobacco companies who are shamelessly trying to addict them actually *does* make them much less likely to take up smoking.

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Read 20 tweets
Jul 8, 2018
1. I happened to listen to @NPR for a few hours this morning, and I heard three stories that are very much connected to #climatechange without anyone on the radio mentioning climate change even once.

It was surreal and disturbing.

[thread]
2. The first story was about the current drought in Oregon. It focused on a rancher who is currently paying to have 18,000 gallons of water a day trucked in to water his livestock. (Yes, you read that right.)
3. The story discussed how much this water and its transport was costing the rancher; how long this drought has affected ranching in the West; and what the ranchers might do if the weather doesn't eventually return to normal (as if it would one day return to normal).
Read 13 tweets
May 11, 2018
When I first saw this image a few weeks ago, I noted in passing that Morano's book was filled with lies.

Some guy in Norway (since blocked) challenged me to identify 4 or 5 lies in the text. And because I'm a woman of my word ---> thread👇🏽
From page 45. Note the lack of citation.

Where are the peer-reviewed papers by “renowned climatologists” arguing that a tripling of CO2 concentrations would have only minor impacts on temperatures? They don’t exist. Because this claim is a lie.

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From page 47. This claim is also a lie. Current warming is over 100% attributable to human activity.

The citation leads not to a scientific study, but to congressional testimony by Dr Will Happer, a Emeritus Prof of Physics, who specializes in optics, and who...

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Read 10 tweets

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