The Daily Signal - Why Progressive Activists Want to Silence the Truth About Climate Change

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

Climate activists continue to sound the alarm over carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Caleb Rossiter, the executive director of CO2 Coalition, an organization of climate scientists and experts who research and report the facts of climate change, joins the show to explain just how worried we really should or should not be about the planet's warming.  Rossiter also explains “a long campaign to … cancel climate voices in the mainstream media,” including his own.  To learn more about CO2 Coalition, visit the website or Facebook page. We also cover these stories:  The New York City health commissioner has left her job, reportedly over New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s handling of the coronavirus.  The Trump administration announced Tuesday that the Justice Department is giving $35 million in grant money to help survivors of human trafficking.  Ariana Pekary resigned from her position as a producer at MSNBC and has released an open letter describing mainstream cable news networks as a "cancer.” Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And I'm Virginia Allen. Climate activists continue to raise the alarm over CO2 emissions. Caleb Rossiter, the executive director of CO2 Coalition, an organization of climate scientists and experts who research and report the facts of climate change, joins the show to explain why climate activists have attacked his organization and just how worried we really should. or shouldn't be about the planet's warming. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

Now onto our top news. The New York City Health Commissioner has left her job reportedly over New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's handling of the coronavirus. New York City Health Commissioner Arachis Barbat said in an email announcing her resignation that she left her job with deep disappointment that during the most critical public health crisis in our lifetime that the health department's incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been. Our experts are world-renowned in their epidemiology, surveillance and response work. The city would be well served by having them at the strategic center of the response and not in the background. Barbott wrote in an email, first reported by the New York Times. Barbert has experienced tension with de Blasio from the beginning

of COVID-19, especially due to the fact that de Blasio and May took away the department's ability for a large contact tracing program per the Hill. Almost a quarter million New Yorkers have tested positive for COVID-19, the Hill reported. The Trump administration announced Tuesday that the Department of Justice is giving $35 million in grant money to help survivors of human trafficking. The grants will be divided between 73 different organizations, across 33 states and specifically go towards housing, counseling, job training, and other resources for survivors of human trafficking. Ivanka Trump said in a statement that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, combating human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad is critical work.

DOJ's grant recipients are on the front lines of this fight, ensuring that survivors across our country are afforded safe and stable housing. and empowered with the support and resources they need to rebuild their lives. I am incredibly honored to join Attorney General Barr to highlight these organizations in their tireless and vital work. On Monday, President Trump said the results of the presidential election could take two months to find out if mail-in voting is used. In an interview with Axios journalist Jonathan Swan, Trump said, We went through World War I, you went to the polls, you voted.

We went through World War II. You went to the polls. You voted. And now because of the China virus, we're supposed to stay home, send millions of ballots all over the country, millions and millions, Trump told Swan. You know you could have a case where this election won't be decided on the evening of November 3rd. This election could be decided two months later. Ariana Picari resigned from her position as a producer at MSNBC on July 24th. On Monday, she released an open letter explaining why. Pachari said she quit because the problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.

She went on to describe the problems of MSNBC and other large cable news networks as a cancer, saying that decisions on what news to cover and how it is covered all come down to ratings. Bacari wrote in the letter on her personal website, Occasionally the producers will choose to do a topic or story without regard for how they think it will rate, but that is the exception, not the rule. Due to the simple structure of the industry, the desire to charge more money for commercials, as well as the ratings bonuses that top-tier decision-makers earn,

they always relapse into their old profitable programming habits. She described in detail the so-called cancer eating away at mainstream journalism. As it is, this cancer stokes national division, even in the middle of a civil rights crisis. The model blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices, and events, all at the expense of others, all because it pumps up the ratings. And she continued saying, this cancer risk human lives, even in the middle of a pandemic.

The primary focus quickly became what Donald Trump was doing poorly to address the crisis, rather than the science itself. As new details have become available about antibodies, a vaccine, or how COVID actually spreads, producers still want to focus on the politics. Important facts or studies get buried. It's a critical time in our nation's history. Now more than ever at the Daily Signal, we're committed to equipping you

with the best information and insight we possibly can. And for that, we need your help. By sharing your thoughts and suggestions through our five-minute online survey, you can help the Daily Signal improve our reporting and reach more Americans with a message. message of freedom. Find the five-minute survey at daily signal.com slash survey. Again, that's

daily signal.com slash survey. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Caleb Rossiter, the executive director of CO2 Coalition, as we discuss the facts of climate change. I am joined by Caleb Rossiter, the executive director of CO2 Coalition. Caleb, thanks so much for being on the show. Virginia, it's a real pleasure to be talking you from lovely upstate New York where I'm on a bit of a vacation. Oh, that's good. Good for you. Well, I'm sorry to make you work on your vacation, but I'm glad that you're allowing us to pull you in and speak with you today. I want to start by just hearing a little bit about your organization. You all have come under some fire recently from the left, and we're going to get into that in just a moment. But first, can you just tell us a little bit about what CO2 Coalition does? Sure. The CO2 Coalition was founded in 2015 by Dr. Will Happer, Princeton University, a physicist,

a very noteworthy American physicist, who recently served as President Trump's science advisor on the National Security Council, which explains how I ended up being the director for a couple years. There are 55 climate scientists and energy economists, experts in their field, who over the years noticed with alarm that climate science and energy economics had become very politicized. And there were claims that it was all settled and because of terrible changes in atmospheric warmth leading to hurricanes and sea level rise and glaciers melting, we had to get rid of the fossil fuels that power over 80s. percent of the world economy. These climate scientists and energy economists felt that was incorrect based on the data and their understanding of physics and economics and came together. So they've been a prominent source in Congress of sort of scientific and economic expertise. We publish reports, we comment on other people's reports, and we do a lot of public speaking and congressional education.

So, you know, we hear so much about climate change, and like you say, it has become so politicized. How did we get to that point where, for one, it seems like often the facts are overlooked for the sake of just kind of pushing an agenda? And then to what extent is climate change something that we actually need to be concerned about? Well, one of the first things we always ask people, particularly members of Congress, who say, is climate change real? And we ask them to tell us, what do you mean by climate change? As academics, we want to know what it is we're supposed to be looking at. The climate of the world, meaning the temperature and the weather that it experiences, changes

dramatically over the course of a fairly regular course, let's just take a short-term period in sort of geological history. hundred thousand years, there's a terribly powerful cycle that drives temperature up and down about eight degrees Celsius, so about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, over the entire world on average. That's when you get, for example, where I'm sitting right today in Ithaca, New York, 18,000 years ago or so was under a mile of ice. That's the last glacial maximum. occurs every 100,000 years in some very powerful cycle going up and going down, those 15

degrees, based on the, you might call it the geometry of the Earth's movement around the sun, the ellipse we travel in, it changes its shape slightly and regularly, and that brings more sunlight to bear. So there are these powerful climate changes over long periods. In short periods, temperature goes up and down a degree or two all the time. So at the moment, we're going because of that powerful elliptical 100,000-year cycle, we happen to be at this stage of humanity at the top of the temperature range. And that temperature wobbles up there a bit every few hundred years in very some chaotic, some regular ways, and is about to, I'm sorry to say, go down for the next glacial maximum,

but don't worry, it'll take 80,000 years to get us cool. And so in that period that we are in now, there has been a slight, natural warming since about the year 1800 as the world came out of something called a little ice age. Now none of this is controversial or outside any sort of scientific consensus. It's just the way that the temperatures work when they wopped around a little bit. At about 1950 when about half of the warming from 1900 to today of about one degree average around the world, in 1950 there was enough carbon dioxide pumped out by industrialization.

after World War II to finally make a difference to temperature, because carbon dioxide is a warming gas. And the UN claims that at least half of that, which is a reasonable estimate, has come because of the addition of carbon dioxide, a very minor trace warming gas to the big warming gases like water vapor that is naturally causing about 97% of our greenhouse effect. So the worry is that either this one-degree rise, that's at least a quarter natural in the last 100 years, or 50% natural, if all the warming since 1950 is natural, is going to cause rapid increases in the rate of sea level rise, the melting of glaciers, and droughts, hurricanes, floods, things that harm people, that is climate change.

Now the data to date that the UN has put out and analyzed do not support that. The rates of all those variables, you know, per decade, the rate of sea level rise that was always coming up from the little life age, is the same as it was 1920 to 1950, droughts, floods, and all that. So the climate change debate has strangely morphed into a debate over my topic. I used to teach mathematical modeling and climate statistics at American University. The debate today really is driven by, do you believe the computer models, mathematical models, that project, If we keep producing carbon dioxide, temperature will rise dramatically and will cause increased floods, storms, and hurricanes.

That's where this whole debate that you and I are talking about comes in because our coalition has experts in these matters who write on these matters, and Facebook has started to censor them on these matters. Let's touch on that a little bit. You mentioned Facebook. What role is Facebook playing in actually censor? information about CO2 emissions and climate change and specifically your organization. Because the mainstream media from about USA Today and Washington Post, CNN on over to the left,

have been sort of cancel cultured over the last 15 years with tremendous pressure from advertisers and groups to eliminate critical voices about the wildest climate change claims from their airwaves and from their newspapers. We have relied not only on direct publication and meeting with members of Congress and holding briefings, but also social media. It's our samisdat, as dissidents in the Soviet Union called their underground

method of transmitting information during the communist era where people can pass information. Social media is fantastic. We use Facebook and Twitter to broadcast and publicize and advertise. to reach people directly with our arguments and our studies that we can't get written about in anything to the left of, you know, the Fox News and the Washington Times.

I want to touch on this letter that was written. You all recently came under some attack from the left. And a couple weeks ago, a group of 19 left-wing leaders and climate activists, including Stacey Abrams sent a letter to Fox asking that they remove the CO2 Coalition Facebook page because, and I quote from their letter, Facebook is allowing the spread of climate misinformation to flourish unchecked across the globe. Instead of heating the advice of independent scientist and approved fact checkers from climate Facebook, Facebook sided with fossil fuel lobbyists by allowing the CO2 coalition to take advantage of a giant loophole for opinion content. Were you surprised by this

letter? Well, there's virtually not one word in that sentence that's accurate, but I'm not going to have time to explain that. But I'll tell you what happened. There's a long campaign to, as I said, cancel climate voices in the mainstream media. A leader of that campaign was named Eric Michaelman. He's a tech millionaire, billionaire, whatever he would be, who helped invent. the mouse. And he has been on this tear for at least 15 years of funding organizations that try to silence dissent on climate. And Mr. Michaelman founded something in 2015 or 16 called Climate Feedback, which Facebook accepted as an independent fact-checker through a sort of left-leaning international fact-checking network run by the group that runs Politifact. And somehow put them in charge of

deciding what was false and misleading or this issue. Last September, the former president of the American Association of State Climatologists, Patrick Michaels and I, a climate statistician, wrote an article in the Washington Examiner just describing what climate models are and how they work. They're really just tools, not oracles, as we know from the COVID modeling escapades. And people have elevated climate models far over what mathematicians. would tell you is worth listening to in terms of policy. So we make those points.

We were censored on Facebook by the science feedback group that Facebook had given the power to, labeled false, which means you can't repost it, send it around, advertise it and boost it, all the ways that we reach our audiences. Dr. Michaels and I immediately responded with a detailed scientific letter citing all sorts of peer-reviewed research to indicate that the models were running high. hot and are quite poor guides for policy. And Facebook removed it. I think they were a little scared of Senator Cruz, who

had been jumping on them the day before, because climate feedback is part of a passel called science feedback that includes health feedback, and they'd been going after abortion activists on Facebook for making claims about the medical aspects of abortion, and Senator Cruz had intervened. So we fortunately were left alone for a while. And then Dr. Michaels had a very

successful video appearance on Life, Liberty, and Levin, maybe three years ago that had three million views. Well, about a month ago, climate feedback went back and unearthed that and decided to censor that. So again, we complained, we cited the science, and it's been written about, and I think because we're successful in challenging the underpinnings of climate alarm, which are the models that are quite weak, climate feedback came after us. Now, and so, so did this group led by Stacey Abrams and Tom Steyer. And all the environmental groups, frankly, who have always refused to debate us and just spread alarm

on their web pages, like the Union of Concerned Scientists or the Sierra Club. These are huge organizations, and they're picking on us, and we're very proud of that. But I would add one thing. Recently, Michael Schellenberger, a noted environmentalist, and Roger Pielke Jr., a very prominent climate statistician who are not part of our co-o-ocean at all have published

articles that have been equally critical of the climate consensus of alarm and Michael Moore's new film although he believes in climate catastrophe he said the new renewables aren't ready for prime time and will not make any difference in carbon emissions all of these have been censored on Facebook by climate feedback so maybe we were the warm-up act for them to learn how to do it and they come after anything that is popular and makes people say huh maybe we don't have such a climate emergency going on that would justify getting rid of our affordable, reliable energy. I mean, to me, this just so underscores truly how political this issue is,

that at CO2 coalition, you have all of these well-well-educated experts in this field. And then you have this Facebook group that is essentially saying, no, we know better than, you know, these experts that, you know, this is your world, this is where you study, you know the facts, you know the science, it's really, you know, I would like to say it's shocking, I guess, unfortunately, though, we've seen this trend so frequently that maybe now it really isn't that surprising. Well, it is politicized. You have to remember, I mean, I'm a Democrat.

I was a Democratic candidate for Congress, a Democratic staffer for many years on Capitol Hill. I come to this completely from the mathematics and the statistics of having a Democrat. a professor in this area and learned by my, the work I had to do to teach it, that of course it's a very complex area. And the so-called science is not settled in these thousands of areas that relate to climate, let alone as the economics settled. You have a long time effort to suppress that point of view. Many of our members, Professor Dick Linson, for example, Roy Spencer, the atmospheric physicist

who keeps the satellite record for the United States government. government. These folks were on the IPCC, the UN body, and around 2001 began to see that it was, you know, they'd been appointed by the United States, began to see that it was being politically exaggerated from its very fine peer-reviewed studies up through its report language, up to its press release. By the time the Secretary General talks about something that says we see the same rate of sea level rise since before the carbon era, it's become climate change caused by carbon dioxide is wiping out our cities. So there's just been systematic exaggeration of the science.

We point that out, and that is very threatening to people who are trying to create the consensus to pass the Green New Deal, which, as someone who's worked in African energy, I can tell you, is the Green New Death, because Africa needs cheap, reliable energy to raise its life expectancy, and that's not going to get there with wind farms and solar panels. I want to circle back and ask you, one of the issues that we are hearing a lot of policy debate around is a carbon tax. And you kind of hear both sides of the debate on this in the news. And essentially, this would be a tax on companies that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. Can you explain what a carbon tax would accomplish and whether or not it actually makes sense?

The purpose of a carbon tax is to raise the price of using their resources for your heating in your house from a natural gas-powered electrical generating plant or in your automobile with gasoline. Raise it so high that you will be willing to pay a higher price and buy the renewable, so-called energy coming out of a solar-powered electrical plant or a wind-powered grid that you can plug your vehicle into. The reason is those so-called renewables, which are not at all, they have to be much. in Africa, transformed, shipped, set up, and then recycled when they fall apart every 10 years, the wind turbines and the solar panels.

And all of that uses fossil fuel, of course. They're very expensive because they're intermittent. You can't really get rid of your fossil-fueled plant if you have wind-powered electricity because when the wind dies down or the sun goes down for solar, you've got to have the fossil fuel grid there to keep it going. It's very expensive. It doesn't work yet. They don't have the batteries to save the energy for when the power is,

intermittent, which would be wonderful. So you have to raise the price of carbon dioxide fueled and sense fossil-fueled power very high to get people to change their behavior and instead buy the renewable. That's essentially what the purpose of the tax is, is to make it as expensive as the renewable, so you stop using it. And right now, for you all at CO2 coalition, where are you all really focused and zeroed it on right now as it relates to within the climate change debate and research and discussions around this issue? We focus on two things.

Our climate scientists write about the reasons to revisit the 2009 endangerment finding that found that the greenhouse gases were endangering our society's health by creating storms, floods, droughts, things of that nature. You know, nothing could be further than the truth. The carbon dioxide by chance happens to be a strong plant food that is boosted in the carbon dioxide era. Fossil fuels plant productivity about 30 percent around the world and with more to come. And we'd like to see that finding, which is the basis of all these federal laws to consider carbon dioxide dangerous and raise prices on energy fourfold.

We'd like to see that reverse scientifically, meaning have the EPA look at it again. On the economic side, we write about the cost of renewable energy. We published something last year showing called the social cost of carbon that shows that it's four times expensive to use so-called renewables when you have the true cost with the mandates that all cities and states buy a certain amount of this expensive energy. And we're about to publish something on the so-called fossil fuel subsidies, which proponents of renewables say are so big

that it reduces the price of fossil fuel unfair. And it turns out, of course, with all the taxes we put on fossil fuels, there's a net negative subsidy to fossil fuels. If renewables are having trouble for prime time, it's not because fossil fuels are unfairly subsidized. You know, natural gas, because of horizontal fracturing, starting about 2010, is pouring out of the ground, essentially free to utilities that want to provide electricity and heat from it. It's saving up to 11,000 lives a year, according to the National Institutes of Health, by key. keeping the price of heating down in places like Ohio and Wisconsin and New England. The natural gas fracking miracle for our economy is having tremendously positive health effects, and yet it's considered an endangering gas as if it were sulfur dioxide out of a coal plant

and carbon monoxide out of your pipe, all of which are being treated in modern science with catalytic converters that virtually eliminate the pollution. So as real pollution has gone down, Virginia, ironically, concerned about so-called carbon pollution, which is not a pollutant, it doesn't hurt you to breathe in and out carbon dioxide, concern about carbon pollution, which is a propaganda term, has gone up. So interesting. Where can our listeners find these pieces as they come out and follow your work? We have a website called CO2 Coalition.org.

And on it, you will see articles of the day, interesting sort of scientifically-based, but readable articles we find. And right below them, you'll see all our publications. So all the publications I mentioned, both short and long, will be listed there. They can always contact me at the CO2 Coalition. I love to talk. I miss being a professor. I love to talk with people about the complex and interesting science and economics

of what I'd call the great carbon dioxide experiment, which is the massive increase in use of fossil fuels since about 1950. It's increased the percentage of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from three one-hundredths of one percent to four-one-hundredths of one percent. And it's having effects on the oceans, the land in the air. And we were happy to provide the latest research and talk about it in a manner that the average citizen can understand. That's wonderful. Well, and of course, we also encourage everyone to follow you on Facebook. Facebook page is still there.

That is for sure. I think Facebook's in a very tough spot. It's a private company that can do whatever it wants, but when it turns this censoring function over, that's supposed to be used just to stop hate speech and incitement of violence and horrible things like that, which I support. Now it's being used as a tool to go after climate scientists and energy economists who publish studies and have comments on other people's studies. It's really a mania to cancel a debate on what is probably the most important. public policy issue of the coming election. Are you in favor of raising energy prices or reducing them because of your fears or lack of fears about carbon dioxide?

Absolutely. Well, we will be sure to put those links both for the website and the Facebook page so we can continue to support you and show that support in today's show net. So, Caleb, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. But you know, you could have saved time by going over and interviewing Kevin Dyeratna of your wonderful organization. He too has labored in these fields, particularly the carbon tax and economic issues, and I've found him open and brilliant, and you ought to interview him next time. Yeah, no, we are very, very grateful, very thankful to have him at Heritage, but also very much so appreciate your perspective. Okay, thank you.

And that will do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. And don't forget, we need your help to continually improve your podcast experience. So please be sure to head to dailysignal.com slash survey or click the link in today's show notes to take the five-minute survey. Your thoughts and suggestions are critical to our work for America. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinie, and John Pop.

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