Shame on the New York Times Magazine for publishing an extended, largely favorable profile of Freeman Dyson, a true climate confusionist.

Shame on them for printing his scientifically unjustifiable slanders of the country’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, even while conceding Hansen “could turn out to be right” — which is the same thing as Dyson admitting that if anybody actually listens to him, we might end up destroying a livable climate for a thousand years.

UPDATE: And shame on the NYT‘s top climate science reporter, Andy Revkin, for promoting this piece on his blog (here) with not a single criticism of Dyson’s numerous anti-scientific statements and smears (see below). I call on Revkin to retract his absurdly indefensible assertion that “On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right….” (see full quote at end).

Freeman Dyson is a theoretical physicist who has always been kind of loopy. He was, after all, one of the “geniuses” pushing Project Orion — the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs — I kid you not!

More recently he joined the famous confusionist camp with Bill Gray (and, formerly, Michael Crichton). He started asserting stuff directly at odds with the actual scientific evidence, like “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.”

And Dyson started proposing outlandish “solutions” (see Freeman Dyson and his amazing, incredible ‘genetically engineered carbon-eating trees’):

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A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists makes a clear, convincing case for a strong nationwide renewable electricity standard (RES). Any renewable standard, of course, should be accompanied by an Energy Efficiency Resource Standard.

The UCS analyzed the economic benefits of a national standard requiring utilities to obtain 25 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025, in addition to assessing the environmental benefits. Their study finds that such a standard would create:

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RealClimate has an excellent post (here) on the Cato Institute’s efforts to get signatories for its new global warming denial ad. But they missed one especially ironic point — a key study Cato uses to argue we may see much less warming than the models predict comes to exactly the opposite conclusion.

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank that has long been a bastion of anti-scientific denial (see “The intellectual bankruptcy of the Cato Institute“). The new ad (here) attacks President Obama directly. First, it quotes his November 19, 2008 statement:

“Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.”

Then in big bold letters it says:

With all due respect
Mr. President,that is not true.

Then it launches into its diatribe of disinformation:

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In a polluter-funded piece masquerading as an academic study, three conservative economists and a librarian attack “green job myths.” Led by economist Andrew Morriss in a piece funded by the Institute for Energy Research, they argue:

Our review of the claims of green jobs proponents, however, leaves us skeptical because the green jobs literature is rife with internal contradictions, vague terminology, dubious science, and ignorance of basic economic principles. Indeed, the green jobs literature claims resemble the promises of long-term financial prosperity offered by Ponzi schemes. New taxes, increased public borrowing, and government subsidies will be needed to support green jobs programs. We find no evidence that these “investments” in green jobs can support the promised results. Investing taxpayers’ money in developing green jobs as an economic and environmental panacea, are likely, like a Ponzi scheme, to result in empty bank accounts.

As Joe Romm explains at Climate Progress, the Institute for Energy Research’s supposed “facts” are in fact illogical and internally inconsistent arguments.

Furthermore, the only “Ponzi scheme” when it comes to energy policy is continuing a debt-and-depletion fossil fuel economy. A global economy dependent on non-renewable resources, by definition, cannot be sustained indefinitely — even if pollution were not a concern. At some point easily recoverable oil, coal, and other fuels that took millions of years to form will run out — and some experts believe that time is at hand. Furthermore, because of global warming, continuing our use of fossil fuels without limit, scientists warn, will lead to catastrophe within decades. Nowhere in this 97-page piece is the economic reality of climate change addressed.

Andrew Morriss, the lead author, is a fossil-funded conservative ideologue. Morriss believes that the United States “made a wrong turn” when the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency was created, despite a four-decade record of economic growth and environmental protection that even the coal industry trumpets. Morriss is impressively employed by three different fossil-fueled right-wing think tanks: the Mercatus Center — founded and funded by the Koch fossil energy fortune, the Institute for Energy Research — founded and funded by the fossil energy industry, and the Property and Environment Research Center — founded and funded by Scaife and Koch fossil energy fortunes.

In fairness to the authors — Morriss, PERC fellow Roger E. Meiners, York College economist William Bogart, and law librarian Andrew Dorchak — admit in a footnote to their full paper that “readers should be just as skeptical of us as we are of the authors of the various green jobs reports”:

Readers should be just as skeptical of us as we are of the authors of the various green jobs reports. Three of us are traditional economists (i.e. not “ecological economists” or some other variety) trained at mainstream economics Ph.D. programs and inclined to be skeptical of claims that governments or international NGOs such as UNEP can effectively induce significant improvements in the U.S. economy without causing significant costs. This Article was produced with support from the Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit organization that favors market solutions to energy issues where one of us (Morriss) is a Senior Fellow. While we think it likely that IER asked us to undertake this project with a pretty good guess where our professional skepticism would likely lead us, neither IER nor anyone else had advance approval rights over our results or interfered in any way with our analysis. We suspect the same is true of the authors of the reports discussed herein – that the people who commissioned the reports had reasonable ideas about how the results might come out given the authors they selected. Healthy skepticism is our recommendation for all analyses of green job claims, including ours.

It’s a pity their piece — which warns of “utopian experiments” in “autarky,” “scientific mumbo-jumbo,” “a society based on centrally-directed, politically-determined choices,” and “planners, politicians, patricians, or plutocrats who want others to live lives they think other people should be forced to lead” — was not written with the same moderate, self-effacing tone of the footnote.

I will post the correction “It’s Getting Hot In Here” published:

It saddens me to post a correction here — the AP stories and hundreds of news stories were overstating the victory against mountaintop removal yesterday. And they still are this morning, actually. What really happened is the EPA took action to put on hold two valley fill permits and indicated that hundreds of other pending applications would come under much more strict review.

That’s right, “review” not “moratorium.”

The confusion is so big the EPA put out this grumpy little press release–here’s a depressing clip for you:

EPA will take a close look at other permits that have been held back because of the 4th Circuit litigation. We fully anticipate that the bulk of these pending permit applications will not raise environmental concerns.

You can still call the White House and leave a message thanking President Obama for taking this important first step and then ask for a real moratorium on these permits. 202-456-1111

Even worse, Greenwire reports today:

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[Please write an email to themail@newyorker.com about this outrageous piece and Submit a question to author David Owen.]

The New Yorker magazine has just published a lead story on climate, “Economy vs. Environment,” by David Owen, that is so bad, so filled with long-debunked right-wing talking points, it would barely qualify for the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

The piece could be the poster child for award-winning journalist Eric Pooley’s searing critique of the media’s coverage of climate economics (see How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics — “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress”).

What makes this all the more stunning is that The New Yorker is one of the few magazines in the country that has had consistently top-notch reporting on global warming, led by Elizabeth Kolbert. Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

But Owen’s piece, which leads off the March 30 issue and is heavily featured on their website, undoes all of Kolbert’s good work.

What is especially shocking about the piece is that after all of the magazine’s coverage of the catastrophic climate impacts we face on our current emissions path, Owen has managed to write an entire piece on climate economics that mentions that not a single one of them. And this in spite of his opening paragraph:

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I am as big a fan of the Pulitzer-prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles as anyone (just put “Toles” into the search engine for this blog). And I think I have a pretty good sense of humor. But I can’t make heads or tails out of this one:

He would appear to be saying that U.S. climate policy is rejecting the obvious life preserver of the EPA and waiting for something bigger — a cap-and-trade bill?

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