A2A:
Now working for both the Heartland Institute and PragerU, Patrick Moore went from being a defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters
We'll get to that, but let's get the facts first:
Patrick Moore Did Not Found Greenpeace
In October 2008, Greenpeace issued a statement distancing itself from Moore, saying he “exploits long gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking positions that Greenpeace opposes.”
Patrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. Phil Cotes, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970. Patrick Moore applied for a berth on the Phyllis Cormack in March, 1971 after the organization had already been in existence for a year.
“While Moore was a leading figure with Greenpeace Canada, and worked with Greenpeace International between 1981 and 1986, he was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. Moore broke away from Greenpeace after he concluded that “[…] the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.” Greenpeace contends that “what Moore really saw was an opportunity for financial gain. Since then he has gone from defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters”.
Greenpeace even kept a copy of the letter Patrick Moore sent to them asking for a berth on a boat to engage in a nuclear protest dated to long after the founding of Greenpeace. Here it is:
MOORES APPLICATION FORM:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120413021852/
Did Patrick Moore, a Doubter of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Co-Found Greenpeace?
Who Founded Greenpeace? Not Patrick Moore.
Introduction:
It is noteworthy that Patrick Moore and Prager U each have similarly false origin myths about themselves. Moore falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace and Prager University falsely claims itself to be a university.
PragerU “University” is a conservative think tank poorly drag queened as a university. Its sole purpose is to spread paranoid fear mongering political propaganda and anti science nonsense on YouTube.
PragerU is so EXTREME RIGHT biased they crush the Bias - O -meters:
“Overall, we rate PragerU Questionable based on extreme right wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks and the publication of misleading information regarding immigration and climate change.”
PragerU - Media Bias/Fact Check
PragerU videos are so controversial YouTube wont have them;
“A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Google filed by the conservative educational site PragerU that alleged the internet giant was censoring its YouTube videos.”
Judge dismisses lawsuit alleging Google censorship of conservative YouTube videos
One can only wonder how batshit crazy it takes to be rejected by YouTube. I look at this as an important step on the road to “fight fake news and conspiracy theorists by linking to reputable articles”.
YouTube will fight fake news and conspiracy theorists by linking to reputable articles
Moore works for the same think tank which says this on tobacco smoking:
Sound familiar?
Heartland Institute 2021:
"The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science".
"The anti-smoking movement is hardly a grassroots phenomenon: It is largely funded by taxpayers and a few major foundations with left-liberal agendas."
“The association between tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”
"There are many reasons to be skeptical about what professional anti-smoking advocates say. They personally profit by exaggerating the health threats of smoking and winning passage of higher taxes and bans on smoking in public places."
Smoker's Lounge | Heartland Institute
BUT LET'S DEBUNK PATRICK MOORE'S TWO MAIN ARGUMENTS
- PATRICK MOORE'S FAVORITE GRAPH:
What Moore thinks it shows:
There is no correlation between temperatures and CO2, and CO2 levels were higher in the past, like hundreds of millions of years ago thus arguing that todays CO2 level is nothing to worry about.
____________________________________
But why is there no correlation between CO2 and temperature on the graph? Is there another influence on the temperature other than CO2?
This is so ironic; Deniers favorite mantra is "It's the sun," but what do they do?
LOL……..
They use a graph which do not include the sun.
The assertion that only CO2 drives temperature is as much a logical fallacy as the sun being the only driver of temperature, though science considers both. It's amusing that deniers, who say it's the sun which drives the climate, do not consider the sun when they try to demonstrate there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature.
YES, THERE IS A CORRELATION BETWEEN CO2, THE SUN AND TEMPERATURES:
https://stephenschneider.stanfor...
Today’s CO2 or temperature levels are not unique, but the speed of these changes have never been seen before. Changes that typically take millions of years are now happening in a century. Get it?
When was the last time the planet had nearly 8 billion people burning fossil fuels warming the planet out of its natural cycles?
Comparing old Earth to modern Earth is just not relevant.
Some 500 million years ago, when the number of living things in the oceans exploded and creatures first stepped onto land, the ancient atmosphere happened to be rich with about 7,000 ppm of carbon dioxide.
Earth was very different back then: the Sun was cooler, our planet was in a different phase of its orbital cycles, and the continents were lumped together differently forming a huge land mass over the south pole called Gondwana. Thus ocean currents were different to today. This also made it possible for much larger amounts of ice on land. Sea levels were also higher. And the temperature 10 °C warmer than today.
Here is the thing the scientists know that deniers just cant understand:
The fact that CO2 levels and temperatures were higher millions of years ago is irrelevant to whether people living today will be negatively impacted by recent high levels.
because,
The effects of today's RAPID global warming are felt by societies and existing ecosystems adapted to the Holocene climate in OUR TIME - NOT the climate and CO2 levels that existed hundreds of thousand or millions of years ago which gave ecosystems time to adapt.
But anyway, can you see the name in the bottom left corner?
It says CO2 after R. A Berner 2001. Hmm...OK..it refers to a study.
Let's check this study and see what it says about CO2 and temperatures:
GEOCARB III: A REVISED MODEL OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 OVER PHANEROZOIC TIME - ROBERT A. BERNER and ZAVARETH KOTHAVALA 2001
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/vie...
On page 201:
"Thus, exact values of CO2, as shown by the standard curve, should not be taken literally and are always susceptible to modification. Nevertheless, the overall trend remains. This means that over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the atmospheric greenhouse effect"
WOW. The man behind the CO2 graph says there IS a correlation between temps and CO2, which is the opposite of what Patrick Moore claims and what deniers thinks of the graph. Berner also confirms the greenhouse effect, which is basic physics many deniers refuse to believe in.
Full debunk of the graph:
Can we make better graphs of global temperature history?
2. THE ”CO2 IS PLANT FOOD AND GOOD FOR US” MYTH.
Fossil fuel and polluters propaganda will tell you “CO2 is plant food”, not because they care for plant life, but because they want to keep on burning fossil fuels, take the profit and dump the bill on public health and the environment. Because thats what predatory capitalism does.
CO2 is many things.
Essential for life, a greenhouse gas, a polluter.
Pollution is not a measure of somethings make-up, or if something is toxic or not, it is about how much of it you have and where. Water is great in the sea. Not great when flooding your house. The US supreme court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant in a landmark 2007 case.
“CO2 Is Plant Food.” Conservative climate skeptics call this a sound argument. Climate change communicators should call it what it is: a clever sound-bite that depends on cherry-picked facts and on a major premise that is demonstrably false.”
Uprooting the carbon dioxide is plant food argument » Yale Climate Connections
The brutal truth, august 2019;
The world is gradually becoming less green, scientists have found. Plant growth is declining all over the planet, and new research links the phenomenon to decreasing moisture in the air—a consequence of climate change.
The study published yesterday in Science Advances points to satellite observations that revealed expanding vegetation worldwide during much of the 1980s and 1990s. But then, about 20 years ago, the trend stopped.
Since then, more than half of the world’s vegetated landscapes have been experiencing a “browning” trend, or decrease in plant growth, according to the authors.
Climate records suggest the declines are associated with a metric known as vapor pressure deficit—that’s the difference between the amount of moisture the air actually holds versus the maximum amount of moisture it could be holding. A high deficit is sometimes referred to as an atmospheric drought.
- Chelsea Harvey, E&E News/Scientific American, Aug 15, 2019
Earth Stopped Getting Greener 20 Years Ago
Plant growth has declined drastically around the world due to dry air
Abstract
Atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a critical variable in determining plant photosynthesis. Synthesis of four global climate datasets reveals a sharp increase of VPD after the late 1990s. In response, the vegetation greening trend indicated by a satellite-derived vegetation index (GIMMS3g), which was evident before the late 1990s, was subsequently stalled or reversed. Terrestrial gross primary production derived from two satellite-based models (revised EC-LUE and MODIS) exhibits persistent and widespread decreases after the late 1990s due to increased VPD, which offset the positive CO2 fertilization effect. Six Earth system models have consistently projected continuous increases of VPD throughout the current century. Our results highlight that the impacts of VPD on vegetation growth should be adequately considered to assess ecosystem responses to future climate conditions.
Increased atmospheric vapor pressure deficit reduces global vegetation growth
The NASA “Greening Earth” study predicted it would happen.
“Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.”
More CO2 also bad for humans;
"Growing evidence suggests that environmentally relevant elevations in CO2 (<5,000 ppm) may pose direct risks for human health”
[…] This early evidence indicates potential health risks at CO2 exposures as low as 1,000 ppm—a threshold that is already exceeded in many indoor environments with increased room occupancy and reduced building ventilation rates, and equivalent to some estimates for urban outdoor air concentrations before 2100.
“Continuous exposure to increased atmospheric CO2 could be an overlooked stressor of the modern and/or future environment”
Direct human health risks of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide
Reality:
After brutal spring floods, US farmers face big losses
India is running out of water, fast
Someone please tell the farmers of the world more CO2 is "plant food" and “greening the Earth” when they cant even plant their corn or they have their harvest hit by droughts or flooded by billions of tons of water because of AGW.
My own “CO2 is good for us” myth debunked:
Moore debunked by peer reviewed science:
PragerU fake university debunked:
SUMMARY:
"It’s time to ignore dangerously ignorant corporate mouth-pieces like Patrick Moore -- people paid to fuel climate-change denial so as to protect greed and profit while diminishing the health of the planet that sustains us. It’s time to listen to the overwhelming majority of knowledgeable, informed scientists throughout the world who have reached near-unanimous consensus in regards to human-caused climate change. The science is in. It’s time we collectively move past denial towards acceptance and action. "
Skeptics and Deniers are Dangerously Wrong (The Science Is In)
BONUS: