WorldNetDaily has a long history of promoting petitions advocating certain fringe-right beliefs that it claims are signed by experts in the subject but are, in fact, signed almost exclusively by activists and non-experts. That happened again in an anonymously written Aug. 29 “news” article:
One of Joe Biden’s ideologies is that there is a climate “emergency.”
That’s why he’s tried to destroy America’s fossil fuels industry by banning drilling and pipelines, demanded Americans buy electric cars and imposed all sorts of new requirements for “efficient” appliances.
Now, however, the idea that that “emergency” exists has been debunked.
By more than 1,600 scientists including two Nobel winners.
Just the News has documented a declaration from 1,609 scientists from around the globe stating “there is no climate emergency.”
They also state they “strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy” that climate emergency activists are now claiming is needed.
The statement from the scientists does not deny that greenhouse gases can be harmful, but challenges the related “hysteria.”
The statement comes from CLINTEL, the Global Climate Intelligence Group, which urges that “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” Just the News reported.
As with the other petitions WND has promoted, it has been signed mostly by people with no expertise in the subject. Inside Climate News reported:
“Looking at the list of signatories, there are a lot of engineers, medical doctors, and petroleum geologists and almost no actual climate scientists,” said Zeke Hausfather, a longtime research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-partisan nonprofit that specializes in analyzing climate data, and the former director of climate and energy programs at the Breakthrough Institute, another independent environmental research firm.
[…] [Brendan] DeMelle, who has been investigating CLINTEL since it was founded in 2019 by retired professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and journalist Marcel Crok, said the group has circulated identical petitions almost every year. What he’s uncovered so far is that CLINTEL, and its co-founder Berkhout, have strong political, professional and financial connections to the fossil fuel industry and influential right-wing and libertarian think tanks, many of which are known for working tirelessly over the years to thwart climate action. Those include organizations like the Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute, both of which are funded by Koch Industry money and promote unobstructed free market ideals, including unfettered fossil fuel development.
Euronews similarly reported:
When looking closer at the list of signatories, there are precisely 1,107, including six people who are dead. Less than 1% of the names listed describe themselves as climatologists or climate scientists.
Eight of the signatories are former or current employees of the oil giant Shell, while many other names have links to mining companies.
One of the signatories is Ivar Giaever, a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for work on superconductors. However, he has never published any work on climate science.
According to an independent 2019 count of the declaration’s signatories, 21% were engineers, many linked to the fossil fuel industry. Others were lobbyists, and some even worked as fishermen or airline pilots.
WND is not going to tell you any of this, of course, or that CLINTEL appears to be largely funded by fossil-fuel interests, which means trying to pretend climate change isn’t a thing is an agenda item that’s a condition of its funding.