Newsweek ties global warming "denial" to Nazis

an article in the August 13, 2007 issue of Newsweek magazine, "The Truth About Denial", decides to take on "the machine" of the cabal of "scientific" interest groups funded by the oil companies, other industrial interests, and their useful idiots in the US congress and other areas of the US government.

Pres. Clinton, who NEVER got 100% behind the effort of "stopping" global warming, despite having the guy who WROTE THE BOOK on it, ALGORE ("Earth in the Balance"), not to mention the propaganda flick "An Inconvenient Truth", and the "LiveEarth" concerts to raise awareness--wasn't able to muster a SINGLE vote in the US Senate to ratify the Kyoto Treaty...a Senate who's members at the time included John Kerry (quoted quite a bit in the article) and Teddy Kennedy. Clinton is given a pass in the article:

Although Clinton did not even try to get the Senate to ratify the Kyoto treaty (he knew a hopeless cause when he saw one)...

remember, the vote was like 95-0 or something, WELL after the "global warming hysteria was in full gear, and a good 5-6 years after the "Earth Summit" in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro supposedly galvanized the majority of the scientific community and the rest of the world on the "threat" and accuracy of the science.

anyway, "The Truth About Denial" makes undocumented claims based upon the premise that the "deniers" of global warming are all financed by industrial interests intendiing to "muddy the waters":

Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on.

interesting, no? who are these scientists? no answer in the argument, but since this statement was in the long first paragraph of a LONG article, why back it up?

but, we do get to learn these tidbits:

In what would become a key tactic of the denial machine—think tanks linking up with like-minded, contrarian researchers—the report was endorsed in a letter to President George H.W. Bush by MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. Lindzen, whose parents had fled Hitler's Germany, is described by old friends as the kind of man who, if you're in the minority, opts to be with you.

and, then:

Now naysayers tried a new tactic: lists and petitions meant to portray science as hopelessly divided. Just before Kyoto, S. Fred Singer released the "Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change." Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy, had run the U.S. weather-satellite program in the early 1960s. In the Leipzig petition, just over 100 scientists and others, including TV weathermen, said they "cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes."

i would agree that a person's biographical information IS important when debating political topics, but a casual reading of this could influence someone to a negative opinion of their (Singer & Lindzen's) opinions.

a CHEAP SHOT, imho...

basically, this article states that the arguments "against" global warming/climate change are bought and paid for by oil/industrial interests, without naming names, and when it DOES name names they link it to Nazis/Hitler.