“Climate change, for many conservatives, is associated with fringe environmentalism and a political nemesis, [Al] Gore.”

“Climategate showed us what was behind the curtain,” said Robert Bradley…. There’s a whole lot of alarmism and a whole lot of scientific intolerance toward other views.”

– Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle, January 24, 2010.

Think back ten years ago, when a federal cap-and-trade bill passed the House and was before the Senate. And Climategate was just a few months old.

Today? Cap-and-trade remains dead as federal policy, and proposals for a carbon tax are not being pushed by Biden/Harris (Harris/Biden?) in the current debate. Climagate? Its ten-year anniversary last year brought forth numerous retrospectives, apologetic, critical, and harshly critical.

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All this brings me to a January 2010 piece by Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle, Climate Change Activists Work to Regain Momentum.…

“[Facebook is] a powerful way to misinform people, since these groups can’t win in the actual scientific arena, so they only can win in these media environments where they can pay to promote stuff.” (Andrew Dessler, 2020).

“All of the noise right now from the climate change denial machine, the bots & trolls, the calls for fake ‘debates’, etc. Ignore it all….Report, block. Don’t engage.” (Michael Mann, 2019)

Andrew Dessler and Michael Mann are two very emotional climate alarmists in today’s vigorous, unsettled debate. “Hide the Decline” Mann, the leading culprit of the Climategate scandal, triggered “a public-relations disaster for science” by manipulating data and techniques to reach a preordained (alarmist) result. Andy Dessler, who admits to a “very low threshold for outrage,” is the alarmist’s alarmist–a true catastrophist.…

The idea of presenting both sides of the debate in the name of scholarship is a non-starter with Andrew Dessler because the science is ‘settled,’ climate models have the correct physics, and he knows all he needs to in regard to climate economics, political economy, and public policy.

The Houston Chronicle‘s favorite climate scientist, Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, fancies himself as an energy and public policy expert. And so the Chronicle takes Dessler at face value well, even when he is outside his area of expertise.

Part II tomorrow dissects Dessler’s latest opinion piece for the Chronicle, A Just Transition from Fracking to Renewable Energy is Possible (February 28, 2020); this post looks more broadly at a climate alarmist swimming deep in the political soup.…

“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”

—Dr. Michael Mann, Climategate email, May 30, 2008.

“The film [Planet of the Humans] presents a distorted and outdated depiction of the renewable energy industry in an effort to malign renewable energy, thus ironically promoting the agenda of the fossil fuel industry.”

– Dr. Michael Mann. Quoted in E&E News (May 5, 2020).

If Big Environmentalism loses wind, the supply-side ruse is over, and people will reconsider climate science given that the “cure” is not there. Hence Michael Mann versus Michael Moore.

“The cause” of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation has been pushed backward by a very long overdue hard look at renewable energy as a mass substitute for mineral energies.…