Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

I am happy to report that, thanks to your retweets, the Sydney Morning Herald has agreed to a recorded interview, and The Guardian has been forced to publish an embarrassingly lame hit piece

Please retweet this to expose their bullying, cowardly behavior

THREAD

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1278852163377061888

Here you can see that, after I called out @npomalley and his supervising editors on Twitter, he sent me an email agreeing to record an interview.

I have repeatedly offered him a copy of Apocalypse Never to read in advance, and did so again, in my reply, which is attached.

Even though he said he would email me a few hours after sending his email, I have not heard back from him, over 24 hours later. However, it is Saturday in Australia, so perhaps he is just taking the weekend off.

In contrast to the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian rejected my request that I record an interview with @readfearn before he publish his baseless allegations, and has published their hit piece

Despite being full of outright lies and falsehoods, it's mostly just weak tea.

@readfearn The biggest outright lie is, perhaps unsurprisingly, that I did not respond to The Guardian's request for a comment

Obviously I responded — not only did I email @readfearn
& his supervisors, I tweeted out the letter!

theguardian.com/environment/20…

I'm sure that @readfearn & his boss @lenoretaylor will correct that false sentence ASAP, given how committed they are to fair and accurate reporting.

I'm kidding, of course!

Religious sectarians aren't committed to either fairness or accuracy.

The main attack on me by @readfearn has to do with his insinuation that I have financial conflicts of interest.

But he presents zero evidence of any conflicts of interest because there is none.

He can't refute the science, and so he makes personal character attacks.

Readfearn then suggests that climate scientists disagree with my statements about the science of climate change, but that's false: we have no disagreement about the science, and the two climate scientists he interviewed have praised Apocalypse Never!

Readfearn quotes Tom Wigley, one of the fathers of modern climate science.

Here's what Wigley said about Apocalypse Never:

"This May be the most important book on the environment ever written."

Readfearn apparently needed to check that quote and so he asked Wigley what he thought of Apocalypse Never:

"He told Guardian Australia he thought the book “may well be the most important book on the environment ever written”.

Got that? Nothing has changed. There is no news.

Readfearn says that Tom expressed concern that the "words [in my article, not book] may be misrepresented by people who don’t believe in human-caused global warming"

Well, sure! I have that concern, too!

Which is why the first words of my article were, "Climate change is real."

Readfearn then quotes MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, who is a friend and science advisor to my nonprofit research organization, Environmental Progress.

Like Tom, Kerry praised Apocalypse Never, calling it "engaging and well researched."

environmentalprogress.org/praise-for-apo…

Readfearn strains himself attempting to invent some disagreement between Kerry and me, but there isn't one.

The supposed disagreement is over this line:

"Climate change is not making natural disasters worse"

But there's no disagreement, just different definitions.

IPCC defines disaster as "Severe alterations in the normal functioning of community or society due to hazardous physical events interacting w/ vulnerable social conditions leading to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environment effects..."

archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-re…

The two main measures of the impact of disasters are deaths & costs

- Deaths from disasters declined 90% in the last 100 years

- There is no trend in rising costs of nat disasters (eg hurricanes) after costs are normalized, meaning after rising wealth is accounted for

When scientists like Kerry & @KHayhoe say "climate change IS making what used to be entirely natural disasters worse" what they are calling disasters are things like hurricane intensity and fire season length, not the impact of those things on deaths and costs.

In other words, there is no disagreement over the science. I'm simply defining disasters, as IPCC does, as "Severe alterations in the normal functioning of community or society," not hurricane strength of fire season length

Recall that I claimed, "The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California"

Readfearn claims what I wrote "is at odds with many studies showing higher temperatures driven by rising levels of greenhouse have already increased the risks of bushfires in Australia and will continue to do so in the future."

But it's not, actually.

In fact, in Apocalypse Never I note that higher temps increases risks of fires in Australia and California — but that those risks are outweighed by the build-up of wood fuel & new development

As far as substantive issues goes, that's it

Readfearn, despite his best efforts, was unable to find any conflicts of interest, because there aren't any, nor any inaccuracies in what I wrote, because there weren't any.

The best Readfearn can do is quote Tom, Kerry, & Ben Heard, a fellow pro-nuclear climate activist, raising concerns about my article

And you know what? That's fine! I don't agree with many of the articles *they* write

And yet we're all still friends & colleagues. Crazy, I know

More to the point, both Tom and Kerry gave very positive reviews to Apocalypse Never, which is the elephant in the room Readfearn is desperate to avoid — and for good reason: it utterly debunks his — and The Guardian's — environmental alarmism.

Let's face it: The Guardian isn't a legitimate newspaper. It is a renewable energy industry-funded religious organization.

The Guardian provides public relations services to the renewables industry in exchange for money for its apocalyptic, heliocentric sect

Just look:

The Guardian may have once been a legitimate newspaper; it no longer is

In their pseudoscientific coverage of climate change, sycophantic coverage of renewables, & hit piece on me, The Guardian has made clear that its staff view ethics as an obstacle to their religious mission.

The reason that activist reporters like @readfearn & @npomalley must engage in character assassination is because they know, at some level, that their religion is threatened by actual science.

It is also threatened by social media.

@readfearn @npomalley Before social media, when activist-journalists smeared people, their victims had little recourse.

But with social media, the tables have turned

Just look at your incredible response yesterday!

I try to have compassion

At the end of Apocalypse Never, I ask the question of how to respond to people like Readfearn & his comrades, who are not only in the grip of an apocalyptic religion, they don't realize it's a religion!

How do you deal with people who hate modern capitalist democratic civilization with such a vengeance that they conjure fantasies of it being somehow destroyed by natural disasters?

The only healthy response to such hatred is the response of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other great leaders across history, which is to love our enemies

For me, nothing is more difficult — especially when they are grossly misrepresenting science and publicly smearing me.

I end Apocalypse Never by noting, "Negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today’s apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction."

If we want to overcome apocalyptic environmentalism we must ground our pro-human environmentalism not just in science but also in love & courage. We will need all three if we are to be the change we want to see in the world.

Thank you & bless you all for your support

❤️✊🏼

/END