They seem to think that scientists are paragons of virtue who always tell the truth and do wonderful work - except for the ones they disagree with.
Still the Kochs must be really good business men. Their relatively small contribution to the climate debate has caused the whole movement to falter despite much more money being spent on the opposite point of view.
http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...
See page 5 for some of the funds available to the warmies.
We have the Grantham Institute in the UK. It is like the Heartland Institute except that it only deals in climate issues. It is funded by a billionaire hedge fund manager, Jeremy Grantham. It employs a terrier called Bob Ward who manages to get himself on the TV and in the papers at every opportunity. The BBC does not like giving non-experts air time. That is why they don't like Nigel Lawson an ex-Chancellor of the Excequor (i.e. chief finance minister in government). Bob's OK though, he is on-message. Although he knows little about the science and nothing about finances or policy. Anyone spot the bias?
It matters very much. Read this quote then with that in mind I will give you the formula.
Joseph Goebbels,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
In order to repress dissent you have to put in $1000 of lies (Buying off politicians, the press and crooked scientists. So if Koch pays Heartland $1,000,000 to research the truth. Soros and friends have to cough up $1B to suppress the truth. They would much rather use that money to buy off politicians on other schemes. They didn't get rich by throwing away money.
Your argument suggests that it you have millions of gallons of pure water and you put a drop of poison into it then there should be no effect. Unfortunately this is like much of the Koch brothers arguments, only a common assumption and not based upon a careful empirical examination.
We also have to know the nature and eventual concentration of the poison. Some poisons are potent in very small dosages. We have to know the nature of the social contamination to see its likely effect.
Media properly placed is also more like a biological poison that actually multiplies. The right placement and the right lies can be quite effective. You only have to witness Hitlers propaganda prior to WWII to see how lies can sweep a nation. When viewed this way it is surprising that the Koch propaganda machine has not been more effective considering the billions spent.
But what is effective is a matter of perspective as well. Denier propaganda from energy suppliers does not have to be 100% effective. Fossil fuel suppliers have product in the ground. Alternatives of renewable energy will reduce the profits of those resources in the short term. Therefore if the goal is to delay widespread adoption of renewable energy the propaganda machine is very effective. The US is now 30 years behind Europe in Offshore Wind energy generation. Any offshore wind generation in the US will now be using European Technology and those profits will be going to European Companies and they want to use trained European workers to do the jobs. (There is enough offshore wind energy to power the US electric grid 4 times over. The build out could supply millions of jobs and this industry is in direct competition to the Koch coal operations.)
It is your denialist pals who go on and on here about funding. For instance:
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index...
Yet this is just fine and dandy with you. No complaints at all.
The "little doubt" you profess here is based on bias and slipshod misinformation, as usual.
How do you suppose the assets of the fossil fuel industry compare to government funded research on science? Do you have a clue?
And you want us to believe that tens of thousands of scientists in thousands of universities and institutes around the world all act together in lockstep, while the Koch Brothers, their astroturf front group hacks, and their hired politicians, are just a bunch of Honest Jones each doing his/her own little innocuous thing?
Surely you can come up with a better deception than that.
Interesting to JimZ foam out of his abiotic oil mouth. Soros is leach (not like the rightwing Zionist Jews who are JimZ's best friends of course). And what is an industry based on not building anything but simply on extracting the earth's natural capital (abiotic or otherwise) and dumping costs of using (Mideast military expenditures, highway deaths, respiratory diseases for pollution and a millennium of irreversible and economically damaging climate change) onto taxpayers. They rape the planet, they pillage the taxpayers, they use their dirty money to fund lies about science, but they aren't leaches like Soros and non-extremist non-right wing Jewish financiers). Soros is a Marxist devil and Sheldon Adelson is just hardworking dude in Vegas. The world according to our abiotic oil "geologist." What fun.
Because like the Tobacco industry, they're selling a position that benefits them, rather than the public as a whole?
And no, how much you spend doesn't make what you are doing any less evil. Not that your contentions regarding spending amounts are actually meaningful.
Yes, you can prove anything if you throw enough statistical evidence at it. It's about how frequently you can publish contradicting claims that is important, not how much money you use to do it. The intellectuals are the real drivers of climate denial though. They latch onto the ambiguity for psychological reasons (to distinguish themselves by separating themselves from the masses).
Koch Brothers and Heartland pay for things that better our country unlike Soros and other green billionaires. Soros made his money on currency. He didn't earn it by producing something useful. He is a leach and a parasite on society and he funds leaches and parasites. And that doesn't count the billions you and I (well not you and I personally, not me anyway) fund it in taxes. You're right. If AGW is sound, they should have no worries.
If they want to fund scientific research with their money, like they did with the BEST project, that's fine.
If they want to use their billions to spread lies, that's a completely different matter.
The funny thing is, the people whom the Koch Brothers funded to find evidence disproving climate change, now accept that climate change is happening.
It reveals that the denial is purchased science.
Unlike the the science supporting climate change, which does not pay by the result.
These are private funds. They are not your tax dollars, they are private funds. There is little doubt that the amount paid on "climate change" from both private and gov't funding FAARRRRR outweighs the amount spent by "deniers". Is your message so fragile that private citizens spending 1% of the amount the warmers do, is going to destroy your message?
