The Koch-funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) verified three things we already knew:

1. Recent global warming has been “on the high end.”
   
2. It’s accelerating.
3. The data won’t stop the deniers and their media allies from spreading disinformation, including the myth that it has stopped warming.

Figure 1: BEST land-only surface temperature data (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, 1998 to 2005, 2002 to 2010 (blue), and 1973 to 2010 (red).

Dana of Skeptical Science has a good post on the denier’s latest spin, “Going Down the Up Escalator,” reposted below.

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ThinkProgress filed this report from the Defending The American Dream Summit in Washington DC

The Koch brothers and the foundation they fund, Americans for Prosperity, are among the biggest backers of the right’s anti-environment movement, pushing for the repeal of environmental laws and regulations on both the state and federal level. Those efforts continued at AFP’s annual Defending the American Dream Summit this weekend, as attacks on the EPA came from seemingly every prominent speaker and in multiple panels.

Former pizza magnate Herman Cain (R) drew some of his largest cheers when he declared that the EPA “needs an attitude adjustment,” while former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) decried the burden of federal regulations on job creation. But while Romney has insisted in the past that Republicans aren’t “anti-regulation” and other conservatives have insisted that the party doesn’t want to defund the EPA, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) — the Congressman from Koch — made it clear during an environmental panel that that was exactly his goal:

POMPEO: We’re trying. Indeed, I personally tried. … We’ve got a Senate that has a deeply different worldview, and there my bill sits. We won’t be able to slow down the growth of the EPA dramatically until we change the view of folks in Congress, and I speak mostly of the Senate here, and we get a new leader in the White House.

Watch it:

Pompeo is hardly the only Republican to state plainly that defunding the EPA is one of the GOP’s primary goals. In July, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) said the EPA “would be discontinued” if the GOP gained control of the Senate and the White House.

Pompeo, however, seems perplexed that President Obama and House and Senate Democrats aren’t willing to do the Kochs’ bidding by joining him in his anti-environmental campaign. Perhaps that’s because they have no desire to aid the efforts of what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) called the “most anti-environmental House of Representatives in American history.”

A senior ALP [Australian Labor Party] faction leader branded Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited “a threat to democracy” today as the feud between the newspaper group and the Government intensified.

Two months ago I reposted a warning  by Australian scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”

Clearly one reason the 1%  have been able to assert such a disproportionate influence on national and global policy — beyond their control of nearly half of the wealth — is that the most powerful media empire in the world supports their disinformation campaign unquestioningly.

Murdoch’s News Corp is the leading purveyor of anti-science, anti-clean-energy disinformation around the world and especially in this country — see “Foxgate: Leaked email reveals Fox News boss Bill Sammon ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science” and “93% of WSJ‘s Climate Op-Eds Misrepresent Science” and links below.

Murdoch’s stranglehold in Australia is even tighter, since he has a near monopolistic control of the media in many major cities:

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Last week I wrote a strongly worded and widely read piece: “The New York Times Abandons the Story of the Century and Joins the Energy and Climate Ignorati.”

I received a great deal of support for the analysis from of number of people, even someone who works at the Times.  But there was some blowback for my call to cancel your subscription to the paper.

Of course, Big Media seems impervious to outside criticism — indeed, often wears it as a badge of honor (“if  everybody’s criticizing us we must be doing something right”).  Maybe nothing can be done.

In the case of my post, the blowback came from Charlie Petit at MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Petit is someone I respect — he “has been on the science and technology beat since 1970.”

We exchanged e-mails and then had a phone conversation.  He retracted his most strongly worded comment, and I decided to modify what I had written.  We both agreed that blogging without an editor has many benefits, but it does have costs.

He gave me some very positive words of encouragement for Climate Progress — and some advice, too, which hopefully will improve my blogging in the months to come.

One thing I realized in rereading my earlier post is that I didn’t put what I was suggesting into the full context of what has happened in the past five years.  So I added this at the end:

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A cyber-penny for your thoughts.

Toles has the cartoon that sums up the week’s biggest news:

Notice how he sneaks in climate change along with the food insecurity message.

Related Post:

• Nature:  “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”