Background for teachers: smear-tactics against critics of CO2-alarmism

The logical legerdemain of 'appeal to authority' is widely used by scaremongers about CO2 in the air, and is easily spotted (e.g. 'the IPCC says...', as if the IPCC were worthy of trust!, or the appallingly misleading '97% of climate scientists agree...', as if a self-selected tiny-minority response to an obscure questionnaire had inductive merit).  Perhaps less obvious, if more unpleasant, are the smear tactics to discredit 'opponents' (for the alarmist are waging a battle, as they solipsistically see it).  A blogger called Russell Cook has collected examples of this , and has written several essays to draw attention to them:

http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/thread-1939-post-11632.html#pid11632

Examples of his output, these ones all being published on American Thinker:

• "The Lack of Climate Skeptics on PBS's 'NewsHour' " The first piece I wrote when I began looking into this situation, online December 29, 2009
• "Smearing Global Warming Skeptics" July 6, 2010, my first detailing the myriad problems with the Gelbspan / Ozone Action accusation of skeptic scientists
• "The Left and Its Talking Points" July 29, 2010, about the 'JournoList' similarity of the accusation, and a quantification of the bias against skeptic scientists at the PBS NewsHour
• "The iceberg treatment" August 10, 2010, on Rep Ed Markey's "Deniersberg", and the lack of answers from the PBS NewsHour
• "Pelosi funding accusation about mosque the same tactic used against..." August 20, 2010, about how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's call to investigate protesters of the Ground Zero NYC mosque is thought by some to be a good tactic
• "Silencing global warming critics" August 26, 2010, the Union of Concerned Scientists' new efforts to create an intimidation system against certain journalists, contrasted with their 1998 efforts to thwart the petition of skeptic scientists
• "Warmist Slander of Scientific Skeptics" September 15, 2010, where Jane Mayer's New Yorker article about the Koch Brothers isn't a new exposé, but is instead has elements tied to the same single accusation originating with Gelbspan / Ozone Action
• "The Curious History of 'Global Climate Disruption' " October 04, 2010, on John Holdren's and Jane Lubchenco's 1997 ties to Ozone Action
• "Supreme Court to Hear Global Warming Case" December 8, 2010, describing how a lawyer in one of the global warming nuisance cases tie into this entire skeptic smear situations 

And his latest one there :http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/the_case_of_the_curious_climat.html


An extract:

'Untold numbers of well-informed individuals are rolling their eyes about how all the ‘warming planet' warnings abysmally failing to happen, like low lying islands swamped by rising seas, more frequent and intense hurricanes, and the Arctic starting down the path of being ice-free in the summer -- a process less likely to happen since the big ice cube up there keeps getting bigger each winter.

Eyes roll, but tough questions aren't being asked about the origins of faith-based organizations' climate change concerns, so those ideas are allowed to spread, ultimately corrupting a perfectly unsuspecting Advent season.

The question is: what prompts this faith-based concern about an essentially political issue?

The USA Today article says,

Many of the 10,000 congregations involved in Interfaith Power and Light have joined a Carbon Covenant...

Click on the link for "Carbon Covenant" at the article's page and you are taken to the Interfaith Power and Light web page. Click on IP&L's Resources link and continue to their "Building" page, and the #2 link is for a PDF file of "Bottom Line Ministries that Matter: Congregational Stewardship with Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Technologies" by the National Council of Churches' Eco-Justice Program. A handy online version of that PDF file shows it was prepared by Matthew Anderson-Stembridge and Phil D. Radford, with absolutely no reference of who they both are.'

Cook goes on to explain just who they are, and it makes for an interesting read.