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No. And I tell you why. They may have been a real scientist one time, before they degenerated into a fake expert for corporate interests.In this answer I will debunk all the fake experts of the Heartland Family. Dont be surprised to see all of them are fueled by fossil fuel money and or have been caught butt naked cheating.What do you do if all the world's experts disagree with you?A decades old technique perfected by the tobacco industry is to manufacture the appearance of a continued debate through fake experts. Climate change is a complicated, multi-disciplinary science and yet many of the leading voices who purport to know better than the experts have never published a single piece of climate research.The professional climate deniers are using the same playbook as the tobacco industry used to play down the hazards of tobacco smoking. A playbook which was created by the lead polluters. Some of the climate denial think tanks are in fact still denying the hazards of tobacco smoking.Its called denial for profit.There is a red line from lead, asbestos, DDT, mercury, nicotine denials and climate denial.All these industries kept portraying their product as harmless even after they knew it was not. And they used and still uses billions of dollars on disinformation campaigns telling the public there is nothing to worry about."As early as the 1950s, the groups shared scientists and publicists to downplay dangers of smoking and climate change".Tobacco and Oil Industries Used Same Researchers to Sway PublicRoger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to How similar to past tobacco-cancer denial is human contributed CO2- global warming denial?There are very few people still alive in our world with actually background from climate-related sciences, who still to some degree, deny AGW or who plays down the role and impact of C02 as a driver for climate change. Most of the denier "experts" are experts in a different field of science or a blown up authority paid to present the usual sewer stream of propaganda lies and myths on behalf of the oil industry funded think tank who puts money on them. Many of them stopped being scientists and degenerated into talking heads for polluters industries. Now they are bloggers who feeds the amateur deniers with junk science and fossil fuel propaganda.Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to What are the 5 telltale techniques of climate change denial?The true climate scientists are out there in the field right now, working to increase the knowledge base on climate science matters. This database is added to on a daily basis. But climate deniers are instead relying on the now stigmatized and outdated hypothesises from these long time retired retirees.The most referred ones by deniers, with actual background from climate related matters, are ALL directly linked to the fossil fuel industry front groups and think tanks -and creationists. Wherever there are climate denial, creationists are never far away. They flock to anti science nonsense like flies to horse shit.Most notably, most of the fake experts, are directly linked to “Denial for profit” think tank The Heartland Institute. A think tank also known for their tobacco and asbestos denial.Heartland is an libertarian think which pushes corporatism and free marked libertarian ideology.Heartland Institute - Media Bias/Fact CheckTheir dream world is a world where mighty corporations runs and controls everything. A world where corporate self interests, wealth and power rules everything at the expense of public enlightenment and freedom and can pummel the public into submission and where governments are divested of the ability to control policy, economy, and ultimately the fate of the nationAnd they will attack anything which comes in their way. Thats why they attack democracy, governments, freedom, science, the scientists and the education system etc. Its a predatory anarcho capitalist system which has imploded into fascism.How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake newsLeak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate scienceHeartland Institute: A Manifestation of the Kochtopus EmpireKoch Foundations Funding to Climate Science Denial Front Groups, 1986-2017But surely, The Heartland Institute are not talking down the hazards of tobacco smoking in 2020, right?Im afraid they do:Heartlands tobacco and asbestos denial is using the same arguments as their climate denial:Heartland Institute 2020:"The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science"."The anti-smoking movement is hardly a grassroots phenomenon: It is largely funded by taxpayers and a few major foundations with left-liberal agendas."“The association between tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”"There are many reasons to be skeptical about what professional anti-smoking advocates say. They personally profit by exaggerating the health threats of smoking and winning passage of higher taxes and bans on smoking in public places."https://www.heartland.org/Alcoho...Asbestos denial:"As is often the case with environmental scares, the asbestos “cure” was pushed well ahead of a complete diagnosis. Research has confirmed that asbestos workers who do not use protective breathing apparatus suffer increased health risks. For the remaining 99+ percent of the U.S. population, however, asbestos health risks are virtually nil."https://www.heartland.org/news-o...Nature describes Heartland like this:"Despite criticizing climate scientists for being overconfident about their data, models and theories, the Heartland Institute proclaims a conspicuous confidence in single studies and grand interpretations....makes many bold assertions that are often questionable or misleading.... Many climate sceptics seem to review scientific data and studies not as scientists but as attorneys, magnifying doubts and treating incomplete explanations as falsehoods rather than signs of progress towards the truth. ... The Heartland Institute and its ilk are not trying to build a theory of anything. They have set the bar much lower, and are happy muddying the waters."http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/475423b.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110728Heartland even has it written down, black on white, in their board papers, their agenda is to undermine climate science.WOW!!Is the Heartland "Strategy Memo" a Fake? Let's try using science! - Greg Laden's Blog“Documents uncovered by journalists and activists over the past decade lay out a clear strategy: First, target media outlets to get them to report more on the “uncertainties” in climate science, and position industry-backed contrarian scientists as expert sources for media. Second, target conservatives with the message that climate change is a liberal hoax, and paint anyone who takes the issue seriously as “out of touch with reality.” In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade groups and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer and David Legates as experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and opposite to that of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, which hosts an annual International Conference on Climate Change known as the leading climate skeptics conference, for example, routinely calls out media outlets (including The Washington Post) for showing “bias” in covering climate change when they either decline to quote a skeptic or question a skeptic’s credibility.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/10/how-fossil-fuel-industry-got-media-think-climate-change-was-debatable/?fbclid=IwAR0sF0YjTSpyrOjt_O08SLZQSR8xtx-jIhs-rnhPFmioL4IykzzWTul1yi4&utm_term=.c4ab0fc45257Latest march 2020:Heartland now uses german neo nazis to spread their gospel:The Heartland LobbyHeartland Launches Website of Contrarian Climate Science Amid Struggles With Funding and ControversyThe good news is:Deniers Deflated as Climate Reality Hits HomeDeniers Deflated as Climate Reality Hits Home“In other words, the arguments were mostly easily debunked, contradictory nonsense in service of the most profitable and polluting industry in human history.”Heartlands fan club are now limited to a few very old white men with links to creationists.BUT FIRST,THE SPIDERS IN THE DENIAL FOR PROFIT HEARTLAND WEB:Executive director of Climate Depot and communications director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an anti-science think tank that has received funding from ExxonMobil, Chevron, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars from foundations associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. Morano previously worked for Sen. James Inhofe and began his career with Rush Limbaugh.Morano is a marionette for Big oil:Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc MoranoMarc Morano and his CFACT/Climate Depot blog is the heart of the Heartland Denial for profit movement.Most smear campaigns and attacks on scientists and the science has been planned by Morano. Im pretty sure he was involved in planning the (manufactured) Climategate smear attack on scientists.Interviewed in the 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt, he described his involvement with the climate change controversy and how he started Climate Depot.“We went after James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer and had a lot of fun with it. ... We mocked and ridiculed James Hansen. I was authorized - I couldn't believe they let me do this - I did a two-part probably 10,000 words unbelievably scathing critique on James Hansen. ...Actually his scientific work isn't even in question, it's more of his public claims and publicity and interviews. I still felt restrained, so I started doing what I call the underground newsletters which went much further than anything else, had a lot more fun, a lot more humor, wit, sarcasm and sometimes nastiness. That went out and that became the basis for Climate Depot.”Climate Change Misinformer Of The Year: Marc MoranoMarc Morano - RationalWikiMarc MoranoTop 10 Climate DeniersHEARTLAND INSTITUTES AND THE WORLDS NR.1 DENIER BLOG WHATSUPPWITHTHAT.Again, in their board papers we can see they are funding WUWT blog and Anthony Watts:Here are the climate denier darling crooks A-ZTim BallChristopher BookerJohn ColemanJohn ChristySusan CrockfordJudith CurryFreeman DysonDon EasterbrookPeter FerraraDonna LaframboiseIvar GjæverWilliam HapperSteve Goddard/Tony HellerOle HumlumCraig IdsoRichard LintzenBjørn LomborgRyan MauePatrick MichaelsChristopher MoncktonPatrick MooreMarc MoranoNils Axel MørnerJoanne "Jo" NovaJordan PetersonMurry SalbyNir ShavivFred SingerWillie SoonRoy SpencerJames TaylorAnthony WattsGregory WrightstoneIncluding:Blogger and creationist Roy Spencer, creationist Timothy Ball, blogger and lobbyist Richard Lindzen, the former evangelical pastor John Christy, notorious lier and oil shill Patrick Michaels, the former tobacco lobbyist Ivar Gjæver, the fraudulent Willie Soon and lobbyist blogger Judith Curry.I’m also debunking many of the most used OPed writers used by the Denial movement.Lets debunk them one by one:Roy SpencerFunded by George C. Marshall Institute and Heartland Institute? Check!Directly linked to the fossil-fuel-industry? Check!Crank-expert? Check!Creationist? Check!Roy Spencer is just a very sad example as to how a scientist can degenerate into a fake expert. Spencer betrayed science, his profession and his colleagues to become a misinformer for corporate polluters. Now he runs a blog where he cherry picks data and twist the science so that it always turns out convenient for the polluters.ROY SPENCERS BIG LIE AND CHEAT:Have predictions historically been bad? The evidence they (deniers) cite is from Dr. Roy Spencer, who showed in 2013 that 95% of climate models over predict the temperature rises due to greenhouse gases.Unfortunately, that chart itself is based on falsely calibrated data.In 2014, the truth came out: Spencer’s UAH team had made a huge mistake in the calibration of their data. Instead of negligible upper-atmosphere warming, they found that the upper atmosphere had been warming at +0.14 degrees per decade, double the 1880-2014 rate of 0.07 degrees per decade. The other major satellite data set, RSS, also found a calibration error, meaning the Earth warmed 140% faster since 1998 than previous conclusions indicated. At the same time, the ground-based data from NOAA, NASA, the Hadley center and BEST all displayed agreement with one another. Once the 2014, 2015 and 2016 data are also included, the graph shows the scientific truth: the models are very much in line with what we observe.HOW THE FAKE GRAPH WAS CREATED:More:John Christy, Richard McNider and Roy Spencer trying to overturn mainstream science by rewriting history and re-baselining graphsThe correctly adjusted chart:The RSS data as misrepresented by deniers:Researchers from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), based in California, have released a substantially revised version of their lower tropospheric temperature record.After correcting for problems caused by the decaying orbit of satellites, as well as other factors, they have produced a new record showing 36% faster warming since 1979 and nearly 140% faster (i.e. 2.4 times larger) warming since 1998. This is in comparison to the previous version 3 of the lower tropospheric temperature (TLT) data published in 2009.Climate sceptics have long claimed that satellite data shows global warming to be less pronounced than observational data collected on the Earth’s surface. This new correction to the RSS data substantially undermines that argument. The new data actually shows more warming than has been observed on the surface, though still slightly less than projected in most climate models.Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998THE UAH SATELLITE DATA DENIERS THINKS DISPROVES GLOBAL WARMING DEBUNKED:Can you see the trendline?Here, let me help you:Sorry deniers, even satellites confirm record global warmingWhat trend do the UAH data show now? Lets go to the UAH home page:The University of Alabama in Huntsvillehttps://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climat...Their trend is 0.13 C per decade. Very much in tune with all the other data.BONUS:If you’re wondering why Spencer plots a 13-month running average when 13 months do not actually correspond to anything relevant to homo sapiens, well, you’ll have to ask him. It is slightly easier to do the math. In any case, here is the more meaningful 12-month running average.Spencer being paid to write junk science on behalf of fossil fuel funded think tanks:Roy Spencer augments $190k U of Alabama salary by doing a climate denial paper for oil funded think tank https://t.co/NRGMODHMZv— Peter Dykstra (@pdykstra) July 20, 2016But what would you expect from a guy who contributed the chapter “The Global Warming Fiasco” to a 2002 book called Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, published by Competitive Enterprise Institute, a leading provider of disinformation on global warming that was funded by ExxonMobil?SPENCER THE CREATIONISTSpencer is also a Creationist, which confirms he is anti-science. Roy Spencer has signed the The Cornwall Alliance creationist petition - declaring that "God" would never allow global warming / climate change to happen because its “sustained by His faithful providence”."We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history."Prominent Signers of "An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming"An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming (An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming)Dr. Roy Spencer, Please Keep Your Religion Out Of Science - Real SkepticThe Cornwall Alliance seems to me to be more of an astroturf organisation, a fossil fuels front group dressed up as a creationist org where they can pander to conservative christians and sneak in fossil fuel propaganda.In the book The Evolution Crisis, creationist Spencer denies evolution:"I was finally convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, because the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexities of the world. [...] Science has scared us with its many discoveries and advances, but it has hit a brick wall in its attempt to get rid of the need for a creator and designer.”http://theevolutioncrisis.org.uk/testimony2.phpRoy Spencer’s Great Blunder, Part 3Climate Scientists Debunk Latest Bunk by Denier Roy Spencer and more lies? Climate misinformation by source: Roy SpencerThese are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really. | Dana Nuccitelli).Even more lies debunked.More errors identified in contrarian climate scientists' temperature estimatesCreationist Spencer debunked “Again & Again”.Roy Spencer's Great Blunder Roy Spencer’s Great Blunder, Part 1, part 1A debunkingThese are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really. | Dana Nuccitelli of creationist Spencers 13 big lies.Still,ROY SPENCER CONFIRMING THE GHE AND OUR C02 CAUSES WARMING:Roy Spencer on the greenhouse effect:"I have not yet seen any compelling evidence that there exists a major flaw in the theory explaining the basic operation of the Earth’s natural Greenhouse Effect."Roy Spencer 5 August 2010http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010..."Greenhouse components in the atmosphere (mostly water vapor, clouds, carbon dioxide, and methane) exert strong controls over how fast the Earth loses IR energy to outer space. Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels creates more atmospheric carbon dioxide. As we add more CO2, more infrared energy is trapped, strengtening the Earth’s greenhouse effect. This causes a warming tendency in the lower atmosphere and at the surfacehttps://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/He even calls out for deniers to stop questioning the GHE because it makes them look like idiots....hilarious:"Please stop the “no greenhouse effect” stuff. It’s making us skeptics look bad. "http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014...BONUS 2.Roy Spencers CALIFORNIA wildfire denial debunked:California Wildfire DenialJohn ChristyLinked to oil funded think tanks? Check!Crank? Check!“Dr. Christy is listed as a "Roundtable Speaker" for the George C. Marshall Institute, a right-wing conservative think tank on scientific issues and public policy. He is also listed as an expert for the Heartland Institute.”The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a "non-profit" organization funded by the profits from oil and gas interests and right-wing funders (listed later). It has received substantial funding from Exxon's Exxon Education FoundationCHRISTY HAS BEEN WRONG FOR DECADES“It surprises no one that Christy is wrong here. Christy, and University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) colleague Roy Spencer, famously screwed up the satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.John Christy and Spencer were wrong — dead wrong — for a very long time, which created one of the most enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did. As RealClimate explained a few years ago:We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming, and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.Amazingly (or not), the “serial errors in the data analysis” all pushed the (mis)analysis in the same, wrong direction. Coincidence? You decide.The old and tired misleading non peer reviewed Christy-graph debunked again:No, you cant expect to find a correlation if you dont use the same elements. 3 apples + 2 cucumbers is not 5 bananas.https://skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=243Graph shows a comparison between the average of an ensemble of 102 model calculations and observations (average of 3 satellite measurements and 4 balloon measurements). They have clearly not understood that they compare different sizes, so that they can not dismiss model calculations based on such.The model calculations shown by Christy are derived from the Dutch data portal ClimateExplorer. However, model calculations of temperatures at different heights above the ground in this web portal can not be found, only the temperature near the ground. The satellite measurements and balloons, on the other hand, represent the average temperature in a volume that stretches from the ground to a height of about 15 km.In addition to various statistical sizes, Christy uses different physical measures in comparison when comparing temperatures at the surface with the temperature of 15 km of the atmosphere. Increased greenhouse effect causes the lower part of the atmosphere (troposphere, which goes up to about 10km) to get warmer while the above layers of the stratosphere become colder. Does anyone see the problem with this comparison?Not only that. The satellite measurements are also model calculations,. In fact, they base on similar models that show that CO2 provides global warming. Ironically, neither Spencer nor Christy have realized this fact. In addition, the satellite curve is sewn together by different satellites with short lifespan, and the measurements from the different satellites are scattered. It is not so easy to put them together to a reliable temperature curve. They have been corrected several times.In other words, the figure of Christy and Spencer reveals basic deficiencies in understanding both statistics and physics.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/may/11/more-errors-identified-in-contrarian-climate-scientists-temperature-estimatesDifferent types of numbersThe upper left panel in Fig. 1 shows that Christy compared the average of 102 climate model simulations with temperature from satellite measurements (average of three different analyses) and weather balloons (average of two analyses). This is a flawed comparison because it compares a statistical parameter with a variable.A parameter, such as the mean (also referred to as the ‘average’) and the standard deviation, describe the statistical distribution of a given variable. However, such parameters are not equivalent to the variable they describe.The comparison between the average of model runs and observations is surprising, because it is clearly incorrect from elementary statistics (This is similar statistics-confusion as the flaw found in the Douglass et al. (2007)).http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/comparing-models-to-the-satellite-datasets/http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/03/the-true-meaning-of-numbers/#more-20158Climate scientists, using current science, are successful in predicting temperatures. Another Christy debunkThe Guardian:“Christy and Spencer have also been affiliated with various conservative fossil fuel-funded think tanks. And Spencer is on the Board of Advisors of the Cornwall Alliance – a religious group that essentially believes God wouldn’t let damaging climate change happen.Spencer and Christy made a valuable scientific contribution by creating their atmospheric temperature data set. However, given how few climate scientists dispute the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, it’s useful to examine their research and comments with a critical eye. When we do, it becomes clear that they have less in common with Galileo than with the scientists who disputed the links between smoking and cancer.”The role of satellite remote sensing in climate change studieshttps://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1908A Comparative Analysis of Data Derived from Orbiting MSU/AMSU Instrumenthttp://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0121.1WoW really? Richard Lindzen a Heartland hired crank? Check.Directly linked to fossil fuel industries? Check!Working for creationists? Check!Linked to tobacco inustry? Check!Lindzen is a contrarian who angered climate scientists by writing to President Trump, urging him to withdraw from the UN Climate Convention.Since 2013, Lindzen has received $25,000 a year from the Cato Institute, founded in part by the billionaire Koch brothers, and $30,000 from Peabody Coal for testimony in legal proceedings.“He's been wrong about nearly every major climate argument he's made over the past two decades. Lindzen is arguably the climate scientist who's been the wrongest, longest.”Richard Lindzen's views are rejected by his MIT colleagues. All of them."Lindzen clings to his agenda of denial, advancing spurious hypotheses that have been thoroughly refuted in the peer-reviewed literature, even by climate scientists otherwise inclined toward a conservative view of the issue."MIT professors denounce their colleague in letter to Trump for denying evidence of climate change - The Boston GlobeLindzens Iris-theory is debunked a long time ago:https://www.skepticalscience.com/infrared-iris-effect-negative-feedback.htmLindzens sensitivity nonsense debunked:https://www.skepticalscience.com/Lindzen-Choi-2009-low-climate-sensitivity.htmTim BallLatest:Michael E. MannTimothy BallLinked to oil industry? Check!Creationist? Check!Crank and fake expert? Check!Ball is even lying about his credentials:He is often seen titled as a “former Professor of Climatology at the Univerrsity of Winnipeg.”But the problem is:The University of Winnipeg never had an office of Climatology.His degree was in historical geography and not climatology:"Ball was a former professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1988 to 1996.”But surely, he is not a creationist right? RIGHT?Ball admitting he is a creationist:"Even though it is still just a theory and not a law 148 years after it was first proposed, Darwinian evolution is the only view allowed in schools. Why? Such censorship suggests fear of other ideas, a measure of indefensibility."Try and see this video and without laughing:I cant stop laughing.And Tim Ball is apparently too LUDICROUS to be taken seriously:Judge finds written attack on climate scientist too ludicrous to be libel.The Hotwhopper blog saw it coming a long way:Climate science denial dismissed - Judge finds Tim Ball too wacky to be believed“By the way - I did predict that Tim Ball was trying for the insanity defense, back in April last year. He must be very pleased his efforts have come to this!”B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald Skolrood criticized Ball (a long-retired geography professor from the University of Winnipeg) at length. Justice Skolrood wrote:“… despite Dr. Ball’s history as an academic and a scientist, the Article is rife with errors and inaccuracies, which suggests a lack of attention to detail on Dr. Ball’s part, if not an indifference to the truth.”Later in the judgment, Justice Skolrood wrote,“the Article is poorly written and does not advance credible arguments in favour of Dr. Ball’s theory about the corruption of climate science. Simply put, a reasonably thoughtful and informed person who reads the Article is unlikely to place any stock in Dr. Ball’s views, including his views of Dr. Weaver as a supporter of conventional climate science.”https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/14/judge-dismisses-libel-claim-sceptic-tim-ball-not-credible-enough-take-seriously“Climate science denier and Trump transition team advisor Dr. Tim Ball, who a Canadian court earlier derided as incompetent, ill-intended, and apparently indifferent to the truth, has been further rebuffed in the British Columbia Court of Appeal and must now stand libel for a 9-year-old attack against prominent Canadian climate scientist (and outgoing BC Green Party leader) Dr. Andrew Weaver.”Canadian Court Slams Trump Climate Advisor in Successful Libel CaseWilliam Happer, born 1939 (age 78–79), is a climate change denier and Professor of Physics at Princeton University, specialising in MRI imaging. He has no training in climate science. He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the George C. Marshall Institute and is on the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a denier think tank.William Happer - SourceWatchHapper is not a climate scientist, but is very often used as the “C02 is good for us” alibi. He is a typical fake expert and an “appeal to authority” fallacy in persona.And let me warn you…this one is ugly!! This is after the same playbook tobacco industry used to play down the dangers of tobacco smoking.Greenpeace exposes sceptics hired to cast doubt on climate science“Sting operation uncovers two prominent climate sceptics available for hire by the hour to write reports on the benefits of rising CO2 levels and coal.”“Happer wrote in an email that his fee was $250 an hour and that it would require four days of work – a total of $8,000. “Depending on how extensive a document you have in mind, the time required or cost could be more or less, but I hope this gives you some idea of what I would expect if we were to proceed on some mutually agreeable course,” he wrote.”“Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change and that this sponsorship will then be kept secret,” said John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace UK. “Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it.”Greenpeace exposes sceptics hired to cast doubt on climate sciencehttps://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/fossil-fuel-industry-academics-08122015/Happer is simply a talking head for the polluters industry paid to talk down the dangers of climate change and to portrait C02 as a “gift from God”. The tobacco industry had similar fake experts to talk down the dangers of tobacco smoking.MY DEBUNK of HAPPERS CLAIMS:Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to If William Happer thinks CO2 it a good thing, should he lead a presidential committee on climate change?Why Happer is wrong about climate models:Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to How many past long term predictions about global warming/climate change are true versus false?Why Happer is wrong about “C02 is good for us”.Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to Why does the increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have ill effects on life?Is C02 a pollutant? C02 is many things, but also a pollutant. Think of it as the oceans. When the waters are in the oceans, its all good. But if the waters in the oceans floods your home, its a bad thing .The US supreme court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant in a landmark 2007 case.FREEMAN DYSONDyson has succumbed to old age crank syndrome as well, becoming a global warming denier. However, he hasn't done any actual criticizing of climate science besides dismissing the models as flawed and saying that if it is a real problem, we can easily cook up some super-tree to suck the carbon dioxide out of the air.Freeman Dyson - RationalWikiFreeman Dyson, RIP | National ReviewLOBBYIST BLOGGER JUDITH “ I do receive some funding from the fossil fuel industry” CURRYJudith A. Curry is chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She runs a climate blog and has been invited by Republicans on several occasions to testify at climate hearings about uncertainties in climate understanding and predictions. Climate scientists criticize her uncertainty-focused climate outreach communication for containing elementary mistakes and inflammatory assertions unsupported by evidence. Curry is a regular at Anthony Watts' denier blog, as well as Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit, another denier site. She has further embarrassed herself (and her university) by using refuted denier talking points and defending the Wegman Report, eventually admitting she hadn't even read it in the first place.http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/04/judy-currys-attribution-non-argument/#comment-677575https://skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_blog.htmhttps://www.desmogblog.com/judith-curryPatrick J. Michaelsalso known as Pat Michaels, is a largely oil-funded global warming skeptic who argues that global warming models are fatally flawed and, in any event, we should take no action because new technologies will soon replace those that emit greenhouse gases.Latest: They are shutting down Michaels:Cato closes its climate shop; Pat Michaels is out“The Cato Institute quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.”POLITICS: Cato closes its climate shop; Pat Michaels is outPatrick Michaels debunked:Linked to oil/koch-brothers funded think tank? Check!The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank founded by Charles G. Koch and funded by the Koch brothers.On Fox News, Patrick Michaels falsely claims humans are only responsible for half of global warmingWatch Potholer54s brilliant takedown of Michaels:https://climateinvestigations.or...https://www.desmogblog.com/patri...https://www.desmogblog.com/cato-...https://sourcewatch.org/index.ph...https://skepticalscience.com/pat...https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pa...https://www.sourcewatch.org/inde...https://exxonsecrets.org/html/pe...PATRICK MICHAELS BIG LIE:In 1988, James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate on the danger of anthropogenic global warming. During that testimony he presented a graph — part of a paper published soon after. This graph had three lines on it, representing three scenarios based on three projections of future emissions and volcanism. Hansen was right on the money, and the models he used proved successful. Unfortunately, when Patrick Michaels made his testimony before Congress in 1998, ten years later, he saw fit to erase the two lower lines, B and C, and show the Senators only Line A. He did so to make his testimony that Hansen’s predictions had been off by 300% believable. He lied by omission. This lie was picked up by Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear (one of many omissions, confusions, and falsehood in that book — see here).In this video Michaels is admitting he is funded (40%) by the oil industry:WILLIE SOONhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html"At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work,” the New York Times reported in February 2015"Smithsonian Gives Nod to More 'Dark Money' Funding for Willie SoonExcept for two grants from the Mount Wilson Observatory, all of Soon's research since 2002 has been funded by fossil fuel interests, according to Harvard-Smithsonian records. The 11 Soon papers range from denial of human-caused global warming to articles that downplay the role of climate change in ecological impacts.He not only took a lot of money, he hid that he took it. He keeps taking it. He knew what he was doing, regardless of his public statements since. Between the duplicity about funding and his inability to get the science right, he has no credibility. Others should be believed long before Soon or his ‘friends’.THE FAKE EXPERTS:IVAR GJÆVER.Who We Are - Ivar GiaeverGjæver is not a climate scientist and thus has written zero peer reviewed papers, nothing, on climate matters. He is a fake expert for the fossil fuel industry think tanks. And he did the same dirty job for tobacco industry.Here are Ivars own words on his climate credentials:"I am not really terribly interested in global warming. Like most physicists I don't think much about it. But in 2008 I was in a panel here about global warming and I had to learn something about it. And I spent a day or so - half a day maybe on Google”. (Ivar Gjæver)Ivar Giaever (2012)Giaever has used his position of scientific authority as a Nobel Laureate to misinform people about a subject on which he has not even done the most basic research. That is not how a good scientist should behave, and that is why Giaever has rightfully and deservedly been criticized.Listening to Giaever's opinions on climate science is equivalent to giving your dentist a pamphlet on heart surgery and asking him to crack your chest open. While climate science has a basis in physics (and many other scientific fields of study), it is an entirely different subject, whose basics Giaever could undoubtedly grasp if he were willing to put the time in to do his homework.___________________________________________________But individual scientists (even Nobel Laureates) suffer from cognitive biases like anyone else. That's why we don't rely on indvidual scientists or individual papers to draw conclusions about climate change. The only way to get an accurate picture is through the work of many scientists, peer reviewed and scrutinized over decades and tested against multiple lines of evidence. Giaever demonstrates how far cognitive bias - reinforced by a few hours of Googling - can lead anyone to the wrong conclusions, and also proves that no individual's opinion, regardless of his credentials, can replace the full body of climate science evidence.The only people who uses Ivar at this moment are fossil fuel funded think tanks like the Heartland Institute or creationists. Here we see Ivar speaking at the Cornwall Alliance creationist convention:Nobel physicist Ivar Giaever's classic lecture on global warmingAnd I almost forgot to mention that Ivar used to do the same fake expert thing for tobacco giant Philip Morris.Ivar Giaever: Nobel Icon For Climate Deniers, and Philip MorrisNobel Laureate Ivar Giaever: Obama Is 'Dead Wrong' on Climate ChangeClimate change conspiracy buffs focused solely on Dr. Giaever while ignoring others who also addressed the issue of global warming at the 65th Nobel Laureate Meeting. On the final day of the meeting, 36 Nobel laureates signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change, an emphatic appeal for climate protection, stating that “that the nations of the world must take the opportunity at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015 to take decisive action to limit future global emissions” In the months thereafter, 35 additional laureates joined the group of supporters of the declaration. As of February 2016, a total of 76 Nobel laureates endorse the Mainau Declaration 2015 (supporting AGW).Members of the National Academy of Sciences Publish Open Letter On Climate ChangeProfessor Granger Morgan joined 375 other members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel laureates, to publish an open letter meant to draw attention to the serious risks of climate change.Read it and decide for your self: https://www.cmu.edu/.../2016/nas-climate-change-letter.htmlIf we add this report,Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume I peer reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, the world’s most prestigious academy, founded by Abraham Lincoln, with over 200 Nobel Price winners among their members.“Based on extensive evidence … it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,”We end up with AGW Nobel Laureates 276 - Ivar Gjæver 1Ivar Giæver en skam for vitenskapen.Gjæver er ikke klimaforsker og har således skrevet null, ingenting, zip, nada, om klima i den fagfellevurderte litteraturen. Han er en falsk ekspert for fossil brensel. Og han gjorde den samme skitne jobben for tobakksindustrien.På The Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting for noen år siden holdt han et innlegg om et tema han ikke har satt seg inn i; global oppvarming. Forelesningen var så til de grader infantil og mangelfull, at de øvrige 36 deltagende nobelprisvinnerne (herav 16 fysikere og 2 astronomer) skjønte at kunnskapsfornektelsen nå hadde nådd deres egne rekker, og reagerte med å forfatte det som nå omtales som The 2015 Mainau Declaration, adressert til verdens politikere for å be dem om å lytte til vitenskapen (altså ikke Giæver).Senere er det kommet til flere nobelprisvinnere og det er nå >70 signaturer.Nobelprisvinner og klimaguruKronikk: Forunderlige klimamyterNobel Laureates Issue A Call To Action On Climate ChangeENTER THE SEA LEVEL CRANKNILS-AXEL MØLNER.As you can see from the picture (above), Mølner is a regular at Heartland conventions.Mörner claims to be an expert in “dowsing,” the practice of finding water, metals, gemstones etc. through the use of a Y-shaped twig.And no surprise, his climate denial and sea level crankery is at the same level as his dowsing nonsense:“Nils-Axel Mörner's claims regarding sea level rise are the very definition of denial, involving nothing more than conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated accusations of data falsification which are easily proven untrue. The mainstream media needs to realize that Mörner is simply not a credible source of information about sea level rise or climate science in general. One individual's unsupported conspiracy theories do not trump empirical observational data.”INQUA has been trying to dissociate itself from Mörner's views.“Current president of the INQUA commission on Coastal and Marine Processes, Professor Roland Gehrels of the University of Plymouth, says his view do not represent 99% of its members, and the organisation has previously stated that it is "distressed" that Mörner continues to falsely "represent himself in his former capacity."Nils-Axel Mörner is Wrong About Sea Level RiseNils-Axel MornerOle Humlum.THE MAD PROFESSOR BEHIND THE climate4You denier blog.Ole Humlum has become the deniers expert for – CO2 increases are natural, and increased temperatures are just natural variations. Deniers may also cite that the last inter-glacial period was warmer, and that we are following a similar trend [which will ultimately lead to another ice age]. The message is don’t worry, it’s natural, the increased CO2 comes from the oceans, and humanity can carry on burning fossil fuels.The paper by Humlum et al. (2013) suggests that much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1980 results from changes in ocean temperatures, rather than from the burning of fossil fuels. We show that these conclusions stem from methodological errors and from not recognizing the impact of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on inter-annual variations in atmospheric CO2.Humlum et al paper debunks here and here.De fagfellevurderte papirer Humlum har vært med på blir grundig avvist her:Looking at irrelevant aspectsHumlum et al. (2013; HSS13) argued that changes in CO2 follow changesin the temperature, and that this implies that the increases seen in the Keeling curve are not man-made. Their claims implicitly support the CO2-curve 21 presented by Beck (2008), and the thesis that the increase in the CO2 concentrations seen in the Keeling curve is not due to the burning of fossil fuels, has long been an aspect of agnotology surrounding the global warmingissue. The analysis on which HSS13 based their conclusions filtered out the long-term signal through a correlation between the annual time differences in CO2 and temperature. This procedure removes the long time scales, and emphasises the short-term variations. Hence, HSS13 found the well-known link between El Niño Southern Oscillation and CO2. They then incorrectly assumed that this link excludes the effect of anthropogenic emissions.HSS13 chose to analyse a short series from 1980 describing the global analysis of the CO2 concentrations rather than the almost identical series from Mauna Loa going back to 1958. They also applied a differencing operator (DIFF12) to the data followed by a lagged correlation, and in effect removed all trends and long time scales.A comparison between the shorter global and longer Mauna Loa series had some effect on the lagged correlation, however, the main problem was the use of DIFF12 followed by the correlation, as this strategy is designed to neglect trends. It is easy to demonstrate that the method Humlum et al. used is unable to pick up the longer time scales, as shown in replication Demos. In other words, the analysis emphasised the short time scales, and the analytical set-up was pre-disposed to ignore the anthropogenic component to the CO2 concentrations. Hence, the analysis contained a logical flaw since conclusions based on short-term fluctuations were drawn for the long-term time scales.Another problem was that their study did not account for the carbon budget such as sources and sinks. It is not clear whether the increased CO2 was assumed to originate from the ocean surface or the deep ocean, and their discussion ignored the literature concerning diffusion of trace gases in the oceans. They also neglected the work documented in the fourth assessment report of the IPCC (Solomon et al., 2007) regarding changes in the O2/N2 ratios, the acidification of the world oceans, and isotope ratios (Kern and 22 Leuenberger, 2013). Further criticism of HSS13 have been published in comments to the article (Masters and Benestad, 2013; Richardson, 2013). The way HSS13 fails logically suggests it can be attributed to category C: addressing a different question. Another point was missing relevant contextual information, such as facts about the carbon cycle and ocean dynamics.Selective use of data Humlum et al. (2011a; HSS11a) suggested that natural cycles, e.g. the moon and solar variability, play a role a role in climate change on Earth, and that their influence is more important than changes in the greenhouse gases (GHGs). A replication of their analysis can provide a means for turning these contrarian claims into an educational exercise. The core of the analysis carried out by HSS11a involved wavelet-based curve-fitting, with a vague idea that the moon and solar cycles somehow can affect the Earth’s climate. The most severe problem with the paper, however, was that it had discarded a large fraction of data for the Holocene which did not fit their claims.A new paper (Richardson, 2013) in the journal Global and Planetary Change that calculates the man-made and natural contributions to changing atmospheric carbon dioxide(CO2) since 1980. It comments on a study by Humlum and others (2013) and uses the same data and part of the same approach as them, but gets a completely different answer. I do this because I follow the maths to calculate the size of each effect and I find that the entire rise in atmospheric CO2 is man-made.https://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=337NIR SHAVIV“Shaviv is a climate change skeptic and was a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) hosted by the conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute. While he does believe the earth is warming, he contends that the sun's rays, rather than human produced CO2, are the cause.But a 2009 analysis of data "on the sun's output in the last 25 years of the 20th century has firmly put the notion to rest.The data shows that even though the sun's activity has been decreasing since 1985, global temperatures have continued to rise at an accelerating rate."Shaviv's arguments and research conclusions have been undermined by subsequent research and his analyses critiqued as "based on unreliable and poorly replicated estimates, selective adjustments of the data (shifting the data, in one case by 40 million years) and [drawing] untenable conclusions, particularly with regard to the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations on recent warming.". Shaviv argues that cosmic rays influence cloud cover, but this link is still under question.”Nir Shaviv - SourceWatchJORDAN PETERSON.Jordan Peterson has degenerated into and eerie conservatism and pseudo intellectualism and is thus a perfect propaganda tone troll for cultural Marxism , alt right white supremacists and the whole War on science movement.Him posing with fans wearing hate speech t-shirts just after the New Zealand terror, really says it all.His recycling of creepy crawly PragerU propaganda and denier think tank nonsense really says it all.Experts on climate change about Peterson.https://www.thestranger.com/slog...A Field Guide to Jordan Peterson’s Political ArgumentsJordan Peterson - RationalWikiBJØRN LOMBORG“With respect to climate change mitigation, Lomborg presents the same false dichotomy in much of his output: there are limited resources, so we must choose between dealing with global warming or what Lomborg has decided are "more important problems". He considers AIDS and other diseases, starvation, malnutrition, and poverty to be more important problems than global warming, yet his framing of the issue treats global warming as a discrete issue, ignoring the fact that it will actually exacerbate the other problems he considers to be more important. Strangely, Lomborg spends most of his time and effort debunking these "unimportant" environmental concerns, writing tendentious books and setting up bullshit forums titled in such a way as to confuse the ignorant — he has done little to nothing to encourage greater spending on what he considers the really great problems.”Bjørn Lomborg - RationalWikiSome look at these data in an attempt to find something, anything, they can cherry-pick to claim that either global warming’s effect on sea level isn’t happening, or that we should look at it as “no problem.” A classic example happened nearly 10 years ago, when Danish climate “skeptic” Bjorn Lomborg wrote this in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian:THEIR NEW CATO INSTITUTE DENIER DARLING RYAN MAUEAnd , you can't make this shit up;Even other climate deniers think tanks admits Maues graphs are fake:Global Warming Policy Foundation concedes that the Tory peer's supposedly official figures were wrong and produced by a right-wing think tankHowever the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has now revealed the source of these supposedly “official” figures was a meteorologist who works for a libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, founded by US billionaire and leading climate sceptic, Charles Koch.“It has been brought to our attention that a temperature chart prepared by US meteorologist Ryan Maue and published by Joe Bastardi, and which was referred to in the Today programme appearance of Lord Lawson, was erroneous.UK’s leading climate sceptics admit claim that global temperature has fallen was falseIt’s important to note that Maue is part of a think tank that’s co-founded by wealthy climate denial funders, the Koch brothers, and that Bastardi is a well-known climate denier. It’s likely that the GWPF already knew about their backgrounds – they just hoped no one would do a little digging and find out.Although this admittance is weirdly satisfying, it’s also worth pointing out that the GWPF tweeted immediately afterwards that the rest of Lawson’s claims to the BBC were true – despite the fact that they were demonstrably false.Since the ruckus, the GWPF has gone back to telling the world that man-made climate change is a massive hoax. At the same time, most of the world has continued working on combating climate change.Climate Science Denial Group GWPF Admits It Used False Temperature Graph | DeSmog UKTONY HELLER / STEVEN GODDARDHellers batshit crazy conspiracy theories are so bad even fellow deniers are having none of it. Hilarious:Anthony Watts, a popular skeptic of most climate change data, posted his objection to Goddard’s claim.“Goddard” is wrong is his assertions of fabrication". [...] "I took Goddard to task over this as well in a private email, saying he was very wrong and needed to do better,"Full debunk from Politifact.Fox's Doocy: NASA fudged data to make the case for global warmingPolitifact judge Hellers claims as :POTHOLER54 BRUTALLY DEBUNKS HELLER.Steve Goddard/Tony HellerGoddard in his own words:“First, you should know that I’m pretty much a nobody in the climate debate. I’m laughed at by all climatologists. I’m not even taken seriously by true climate skeptics. I don’t have a degree in climatology. I haven’t written a single academic paper about climate change and I don’t have a job related to climatology or the weather. What I do have is a blog and a Twitter account. And as it turns out, that’s pretty much all you need to be a somebody in the climate debate.Like a shit stain, my blog is ugly, embarrassing and, as much as you hate to, it’s something you have to deal with. One fellow climate denier described my blog as “the crack house of skepticism.” But enough uneducated morons and right-wing ideologues link to my blog to grant me substantial ranking on Google search results. As a result, any layperson on the Internet who has researched global warming with Google to a fair degree has likely read the bullshit posted on my website […]”“And so although a complete nobody in the climate debate, I have a fair amount of influence over thousands, perhaps millions, of impressionable individuals who don’t have a basic grasp of the facts on global warming…My next big break was my speaking gig at Heartland Institute’s climate denier conference held in Las Vegas just a couple of weeks later in July. You can watch my rambling, bumbling presentation at the conference here. Despite my rather underwhelming talk, the event was still a fantastic opportunity to network with other climate deniers and start connecting with others who could help me get paid for spewing my bullshit to my denier lemmings and clouding the climate change debate for my unsuspecting readers.Since that time, the hundreds of embarrassingly bad blogs posts that would torpedo any real scientist’s career hasn’t put a dent in my career as a professional denier. For example, there was the time I confused sea ice with a glacier on my blog and had to erase all evidence of my post when I got called out on it. Despite my buffoonery, things have actually been going swimmingly. Because fake news has become indistinguishable from real news in the minds of many and because scientific knowledge has been overwhelmed with nonsense, it makes it possible for someone like me to have real influence. My bogus charts have been cited by the likes of United States Senator Ted Cruz and I even appeared and spoke alongside Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts at his press conference in 2016. I’m also now frequently quoted as a climate authority by right wing propaganda outlets like Climate Depot and Breitbart.I’m looking forward to continuing my work and building upon my reputation as an unapologetic sociopath and fighting the climate jihadists with juvenile insults. I am a rabid partisan and my work is an extension of my extreme right-wing ideology. Do I feel shame deceiving readers with unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, half truths, and ceaseless cherry picking? Nope! In fact, I view all progressives as the enemy and I will gladly say next to anything if I think it will undermine them. And I certainly have no issue with doing all this work for money so please donate today!”Who Is Tony HellerDid NASA/NOAA Dramatically Alter U.S. Temperatures After 2000?http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014/how-not-to-calculate-temperature/#comment-130003Fox News Flash! NASA Fakes Temp Data! Obama Born in Kenya! Batboy Found in Cave!NOAA and temperature data - it must be a conspiracy.Debunks:Steven GoddardHow Steve Goddard a.k.a. Tony Heller does bad science - Greg Laden's BlogWas Global Warming Data 'Faked' to 'Fit Climate Change Fictions'?The NASA data conspiracy theory and the cold sunIt’s Time to Boot Climate Deniers Off Social MediaPATRICK MOOREMoore went from being a defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters”Patrick Moore - SourceWatchBut lets get the facts first:Patrick Moore Did Not Found GreenpeacePatrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. Phil Cotes, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970. Patrick Moore applied for a berth on the Phyllis Cormack in March, 1971 after the organization had already been in existence for a year.Full debunk:Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to Why would the founder of Greenpeace suggest there is no evidence of man-made global warming?FRED SINGER:SINGER HAS DONE IT ALL:Talked down the dangers of tobacco smoking, denied the ozone hole threats and now AGW.S. Fred Singer is well known for taking a stand contrary to medical evidence that second hand smoke from cigarettes is not bad for you. Funding for his work has been linked to special interests both in the tobacco industry and more recently the fossil fuel industry. Dennis Avery, is an economist.[Singer] has testified before Congress numerous times, and is probably the most widely quoted skeptic on the ozone hole and global warming issues. Unfortunately, Dr. Singer cannot be considered an active scientist publishing in the peer-reviewed literature, or even an objective informed critic. Dr. Singer touts himself as having "published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers over the course of his career". However, Dr. Singer's contributions to atmospheric science have been essentially zero since 1971.S. Fred Singer - RationalWikiS. Fred SingerLeaked documents obtained by DeSmog revealed that Fred Singer has also been receiving $5,000 a month from the Heartland Institute. With the help of Craig Idso, Singer helped develop the Heartland Institute's “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),CRAIG IDSOCraig IdsoThe Idso Heartland junk:We Fact-Checked a Bogus “Study” on Global Temperature That’s Misleading ReadersWe Fact-Checked a Bogus "Study" on Global Temperature That's Misleading ReadersMURRY SALBY.is a crank.Thus you will only find links to him from the usual echo chamber of denier blogs.In fact, his hypothesis are so bad even denier blogs are not having it:“Salby’s natural carbon dioxide theory cannot be true. It is falsified. Even before detailing his definitional, mathematical, and factual errors.”Is Murry Salby Right?Salby is really a rotten egg:“John Mashey and The Guardian's Graham Readfearn decided to research Salby's legal history and came up with some stunning findings. Salby had previously been banned for three years from accessing US taxpayer-funded science research money after the National Science Foundation (NSF) found that Salby's "actions over a period of years displays a pattern of deception, a lack of integrity, and a persistent and intentional disregard of NSF and University rules and policies."The NSF report found that Salby had funneled himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in government grant money through a for-profit company he created, of which he was the sole employee. To justify his salary payments to the NSF, Salby claimed to be working for this company for an average of 14 hours per day for 98 consecutive days, which aside from being entirely implausible, would also have left him no time to fulfill his university obligations. The NSF concluded that Salby's behavior was likely fraudulent, but by the time the report was completed, Salby had resigned from the University of Colorado and moved to his job at Australia's Macquarie University.Potentially fraudulent and unethical behavior aside, what about the scientific credibility of Salby's arguments? They too are entirely lacking in quality. We know that humans emissions are responsible for 100 percent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide increase from simple basic accounting. Humans are emitting approximately 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, and the amount in the atmosphere is increasing by approximately 15 billion tons per year (the other half is absorbed by the oceans, which in turn is causing ocean acidification, known as "global warming's evil twin"). Quite simply, human greenhouse gas emissions cannot magically vanish.Salby's argument is based on a mathematical error detailed in papers published by two of my colleagues, Gavin Cawley and Mark Richardson. In short, Salby and others who make this same mistake confuse the natural contribution to the short-term wobbles in atmospheric carbon dioxide with the contribution to the long-term trend, which is unquestionably due to human emissions. This is as settled as science gets, as noted above, proven based on simple accounting. Those who wish to be considered climate "skeptics" should think twice about unskeptically accepting the claims of someone with Salby's history and with his obviously fundamentally wrong climate arguments.”Wretched week for a typical trio of climate contrarians | Dana NuccitelliMore debunks:The lines of evidence that humans are raising CO2 levelsPETER RIDDClimate Science Deniers Have a New Hero and His Name Is Peter Ridd“Dr Ridd was not sacked because of his scientific views. Dr Ridd was never gagged or silenced about his scientific views, a matter which was admitted during the court hearing.”James Cook University professor Peter Ridd's sacking ruled unlawfulGreat Barrier Reef expert panel says Peter Ridd misrepresenting scienceExclusive: Panel head Ian Chubb compares ‘roadshow of Dr Ridd’ to tobacco industry strategy defending smokingGreat Barrier Reef expert panel says Peter Ridd misrepresenting scienceState government-funded managers urge cane farmers to question reef scienceExclusive: Speaking tour by controversial academic Peter Ridd is being supported by sugarcane managers paid for with Queensland government fundsState government-funded managers urge cane farmers to question reef scienceClimate Science Deniers Have a New Hero and His Name Is Peter RiddAre climate sceptic Peter Ridd's controversial reef views validated by his unfair dismissal win?Could Salvatore Vasta be Australia's worst judge?Real science tells us the Great Barrier Reefs are not in a good condition.Scientists mobilise as bleaching resumes on Great Barrier ReefDuring 2015–2016, record temperatures triggered a pan-tropical episode of coral bleaching, the third global-scale event since mass bleaching was first documented in the 1980s. Here we examine how and why the severity of recurrent major bleaching events has varied at multiple scales, using aerial and underwater surveys of Australian reefs combined with satellite-derived sea surface temperatures. The distinctive geographic footprints of recurrent bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002 and 2016 were determined by the spatial pattern of sea temperatures in each year. Water quality and fishing pressure had minimal effect on the unprecedented bleaching in 2016, suggesting that local protection of reefs affords little or no resistance to extreme heat. Similarly, past exposure to bleaching in 1998 and 2002 did not lessen the severity of bleaching in 2016. Consequently, immediate global action to curb future warming is essential to secure a future for coral reefs.Scientists mobilise as bleaching resumes on Great Barrier ReefGlobal warming and recurrent mass bleaching of coralsKey points from the study:2015-2016 saw record temperatures that triggered a massive episode of coral bleaching across the tropicsCoral bleaching events should no longer be thought of as individual disturbances to reefs, but as recurring events that threaten the viability of coral reefs globallyThe Great Barrier Reef has had three major bleaching episodes, in 1998, 2002 and 2016, with the latest being the most severe and with catastrophic levels of bleaching occurring in the northern third of the Reef (a region approximately 800 km or 500 miles in length)The amount of bleaching on individual reefs in 2016 was tightly linked to local heat exposureThe cumulative, superimposed footprint of the three mass bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef has now encompassed virtually all of the Great Barrier ReefPast exposure to bleaching in 1998 and 2002 did not lessen the severity of the bleaching in 2016Evidence for ocean acidification in the Great Barrier Reef of AustraliaJOHN COLEMAN (r.i.p)Coleman was not even a scientist. He was a tv weather man. The Heartland Institute hijacked him towards the end and made him go on TV and spew the usual long time debunked fossil fuel propaganda talking points.Deniers are still using Coleman to attack climate science even after he is no longer with us. Maybe they dont even know he is dead??Just to make it clear, and please dont laugh now, but his own Weather Channel is rebuking Coleman:The Weather Channel has released an official position statement on global warming, just two days after the channel’s co-founder told Fox News’ Megyn Kellythat climate change is based on “bad science” and does not exist.In the statement, The Weather Channel said the planet is “indeed warming,” with temperatures increasing 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. The statement acknowledged that humans are helping make the planet warmer due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.Weather Channel Rebukes Its Co-Founder On Climate ChangeColeman doesn’t even have a degree in meteorology, as he himself has admitted.To begin, Coleman hasn’t published a single peer-reviewed paper pertaining to climate change science. His career, a successful and distinguished one, was in TV weather for over half a century, prior to his retirement in San Diego last April.But a climate scientist, he is not.Coleman is simply an awful choice to discuss this issue. He lacks credentials, many of his statements about climate change completely lack substance or mislead, and I’m not even sure he knows what he actually believes.FAKE “LORD” CHRISTOPHER MONCKTONHeartland Institute? Check!Fossil fuel crank? CheckBlown up fake authority? Check!Long history of lies and disinformation? Check!No peer reviewed papers? Check!In 2015, scientists looked at one of his very few scientific papers to make it into the peer-reviewed literature in a junk journal and found it was “riddled with errors” — and published a response in the same journal.'Chemical nonsense': Leading scientists refute Lord Monckton's attack on climate sciencePotholer54s brilliant series of debunks on Monckton:Another debunking from Peter Sinclair:Climate Denial Crock of the WeekDON EASTERBROOK:Very old conservative white man?? Check!Linked to Heartland Institute? Check!Connections to Big Oil?? CheckCrank-expert? Check!Decades of misinformation? Check! and Check!https://www.skepticalscience.com/don-easterbrook-heartland-distortion-of-reality.htmlEasterbrooks prediction models are very very bad:BONUS - HEARTLAND AND OTHER OPINION WRITERS AND WOLF PACK ATTACKERS SPEWING ANTI SCIENCE NONSENSE AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES FASTER THAN YOU CAN SAY BREITBART.Who We Are - Peter FerraraPeter Ferrara, a "senior policy adviser" at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, admitted that he "took money" from Jack Abramoff "to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist's clients. 'I do that all the time,' Ferrara [said]. 'I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future',"Peter J. FerraraTaylor has criticized climate change science through both his own publications and op/eds, and the Heartland Institute, which has consistently received funding from ExxonMobil.James M. Taylor - SourceWatchPinch your arm, you wont believe this:SOME “CUTE” ASBESTOS DENIAL FROM JAMES TAYLOR:"As is often the case with environmental scares, the asbestos “cure” was pushed well ahead of a complete diagnosis. Research has confirmed that asbestos workers who do not use protective breathing apparatus suffer increased health risks. For the remaining 99+ percent of the U.S. population, however, asbestos health risks are virtually nil."https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/testimony-on-asbestos-litigation-1Gregory WrightstoneWhile Heartland Institute have their own fake experts to channel their desinformation through, they sometimes hire some “regular” dude to promote their denial propaganda. Gregory Wrightstone is another puppet who has seemingly “written” a book, but its really just a front for Heartland propaganda. The same old tird lies.The book is thorn apart here:It’s Easy to be Tricked by a Climate DenierAnd , here is their mandatory Corona denial too:Donna Laframboise“Donna Laframboise is a journalist, photographer, and founder of Global warming info you deserve to hear, a website critical of the IPCC and skeptical of climate change. In late 2013, Laframboise became a senior fellow for the Frontier Center for Public Policy, a freemarket think tank based in the US and Canada.”“The content at Global warming info you deserve to hear. makes clear that we are dealing with a writer who does propaganda, not any investigative journalism driving by an honest desire to learn and understand.””Her “Heartland”-book debunked:Donna Laframboise recycles old attacks on IPCCDonna LaframboiseJoanne "Jo" Nova(real name Joanne Codling) is an Australian writer, speaker, former TV host, anti-science presenter and a professional wingnut. She maintains a blog which regularly regurgitates debunked climate denial myths, making her the poor Aussie's Ian Plimer or Andrew Bolt.Joanne Nova - RationalWikiChristopher Bookeris a creationist columnist for the Sunday Telegraph in the UK, where he writes anti science nonsense faster than you can say quackery quack.He is known for being a crankery crank who talks down the hazards of tobacco smoking and asbestos as well as spewing the mandatory climate denial propaganda junk.Booker’s false claims (42 articles and counting) downplaying the risks of white asbestosChristopher BookerSUSAN CROCKFORD.Heartland Payments to University of Victoria Professor Susan Crockford Probed“University of Victoria adjunct professor Susan Crockford doesn't seem interested in discussing the monthly payments she appears to receive from the climate denying Heartland Spinstitute.The Heartland Institute's Denialgate documents indicate that the spinstitute gives Crockford $750 per month. She is one of three Canadian university professors on the denier dole at Heartland, along with Madhav Knandekar and Mitch Taylor.”According to a description of her work by The Martlet, Crockford is“a sessional adjunct professor in Archaeozoology in the Pacific Rim with research focuses on the domestication and breed development, evolutionary theory and the evolution and history of the domestic dog.”Heartland Payments to University of Victoria Professor Susan Crockford ProbedDENIERS FAVORITE BLOGGER ON POLAR BEARS IS LYING THROUGH HER TEETH ON BEHALF OF FOSSIL FUEL FUNDED THINK TANKS:How climate denial blogs misinform so many people with such poor scientific arguments.New study uncovers the 'keystone domino' strategy of climate denial | Dana NuccitelliSusan Crockford writes a lot about polar bears, but does so mostly on her own website and for anti-mitigation thinktanks such as the Heartland Institute and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF); not in the scientific literature.Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing BackThe researchers also singled out Polar Bear Science, a blog run by Susan J. Crockford, a Canadian zoologist, as a primary source of dubious information about the status of polar bears.About 80 percent of the contrarian websites that the researchers studied referred to Dr. Crockford’s blog as a primary source, they said.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/...Analysis of "Polar bears keep thriving even as global warming alarmists keep pretending they’re dying"Published in Financial Post, by Susan Crockford on 27 Feb 2018Three scientists analyzed the article and estimate its overall scientific credibility to be 'very low'.A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Biased, Cherry-picking, Misleading. Financial Post publishes misleading opinion that misrepresents science of polar bears’ plightInternet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy | BioScience | Oxford Academichttps://academic.oup.com/bioscie...Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back.Hun ble ikke sparket.. Hun hadde kun vikar jobb på korte perioder, og fikk ikke jobb videre , etter kontrakt var gått ut. Hun leverte vel heller ikke noe fagfelle vurdert forskning, så da måtte hun gå. Dem fleste påstandene hennes er uten hold. Og hun er blitt hauset opp av skeptikere som en helt.https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/16/deniers-club-meet-the-people-clouding-the-climate-change-debate/?utm_term=.d4e1d99457c1https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/a-list-of-climate-misinformers-like-roy-spencer-and-murray-salby.329735/Roger Fjellstad Olsen's answer to Why is opposition to climate science more common in the United States than other countries?

Q. What was the caliber of the generals who were lost to Stalin's purges? How would the war have fared differently if they weren't lost?A. TL;DR: The disaster of 1941 was the result of a combination of factors:shortage of officers due to the purge as well as the rapid expansion of the armed forceshasty and abbreviated training of junior officers after 1937brief time in command positions before promotion or transfer or bothlack of talent among many of the senior officers.Harder to quantify is the effect of the politicization of the officer corps and Stalin’s interference in personnel policy regarding the promotion, assignment, arrest, and release of top generals.The effect of the purge was not only to remove many competent officers but to create an air of distrust among the officers and their men, who, influenced by state-controlled media propaganda, became predisposed to believe that their commander could be a traitor or a spy.Overall, Stalin’s interference in military affairs was unhelpful and destabilizing, but it was the rapidity of the war itself that dealt the greatest blow to the Red Army.Rethinking Stalin’s Purge of the Red Army, 1937-38Posted on June 13, 2016 by Suzanne GalleOn 11 June 1937, a Soviet military court sentenced a group of some of the most senior officers in the Red Army to execution. Accused of working for Nazi Germany and coordinating a so-called ‘military-fascist plot’, the group were charged with sabotage, espionage, and planning to overthrow the Stalinist regime. The sentences – carried out just hours later – marked the point when Stalin’s military purge burst into the open and sparked nothing short of international scandal. Iosif Stalin was decapitating his military at the very moment that Europe was bracing itself for total war. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, the Red Army’s most creative thinker and strategist, was the most prominent victim of the military purge in 1937, but the net was cast much wider. Over the next two years over 30,000 army leaders were discharged from the ranks; thousands were arrested and executions were widespread. The violence began to subside in late 1938 and reinstatements to the ranks became more common in 1939, but the military purge remained a highly destabilizing and damaging attack on the Red Army. It was a central moment in the broader Great Terror that gripped the Soviet Union in the mid-to-late 1930s. Moreover, the purge was a key moment in the years leading up the outbreak of the Second World War. Stalin’s attack on his army in 1937 made him seem unpredictable and unreliable; an alliance with the British and French governments against Nazi Germany was now increasingly unlikely.There was of course no truth in the charges against the Tukhachevskii group: there was no ‘military-fascist plot’ or genuine conspiracy in the Red Army. Confessions were coerced from the arrested men, often using violence. However, why Stalin lashed out at his army at the same time that the Soviet Union was gearing up for war, as military spending was rising at break-neck pace, has long been without an adequate explanation. The most common argument (dominant from the Cold War) points to Stalin’s desire for total power. In short, ambitious and popular officers like Tukhachevskii had to be killed for Stalin to rest easy about the security of his dictatorship. But this does not explain why the military purge spread so quickly beyond Tukhachevskii and the group of officers put on trial in June. Why were tens of thousands of army leaders subsequently drawn into a mass purge? If Stalin was primarily concerned about preserving his position as dictator, smashing the Red Army in such a dramatic (and ultimately uncontrollable) fashion was a very risky way of consolidating power, especially when world war was on the horizon. Launching the military purge was a big risk and one that put the security of the Soviet Union under threat. If anything, the purge put Stalin’s own position in danger.A second – and related – explanation for the military purge points to Stalin’s paranoia: Stalin saw ‘enemies’ everywhere and the Red Army was no exception. In this way, the military purge was not a targeted removal of potential challengers to Stalin’s power, but instead a manifestation of the dictator’s worldview and his tendency to lash out at imaginary ‘enemies’. However, it is impossible to know if Stalin did genuinely suffer from paranoia, and even so, this is too much of a blanket explanation for Stalinist political violence. It leaves unanswered why the Stalinist regime deployed violence when it did; why this violence took on different forms (targeted arrests or collective punishment); it says nothing about the thousands of other perpetrators, collaborators and other unwilling participants working for the Stalinist regime. And even if we accept that Stalin was paranoid – or at the very least highly suspicious – we need to understand where his suspicions about the Red Army stemmed from specifically. How and why did Stalin come to believe that dangerous ‘enemies’ were at the heart of the Red Army establishment in 1937?Mikhail TukhachevskiiThe key to understanding the military purge is to look back to the longer history of civil-military relations from very formation of the Soviet state. Importantly, from the early days of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Red Army was continually the subject of deep security anxieties and believed to be under a near-constant threat of subversion. The most serious perceived threats to the Red Army identified by the Bolsheviks before the military purge include:Former imperial officers from the disbanded Tsarist army. Such officers enlisted in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and 1920s and brought with them valuable expertise. They were, however, viewed as the enemy within.Former White officers who had fought against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War similarly enlisted in the Red Army and were regarded with even more suspicion.‘Foreign agents’ were a constant security anxiety for the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Whether British, Polish, Japanese or German, the Bolsheviks saw their army as a prime target for hostile foreign governments.Leon Trotsky’s opposition platform was quickly identified as a dangerous internal threat to Red Army stability in the mid-1920s and beyond.Peasant soldiers formed the bulk of the Red Army, but their reliability was always in doubt. During the collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the loyalty of peasant soldiers seriously wavered as the regime dispossessed peasant families of their belongings and forced farmers into collective units. Stalin’s ‘Revolution from above’ threw the fragility of the Red Army into sharp relief.Rumors of betrayal and conspiracy constantly surrounded the Soviet high command, inside and outside the Soviet Union throughout the entire interwar period. Tukhachevskii in particular was regularly portrayed as a potential ‘Soviet Bonaparte’ and challenger to Stalin. These rumors never dissipated.In all, over the twenty-year period before the military purge of 1937, there was never a moment that the Bolsheviks believed their army was reliable or secure. When the Great Terror erupted in 1936, the growing wave of political violence and intense pressures placed on state and society brought long-standing security anxieties surrounding the Red Army to a head. The ‘military-fascist plot’ seemed entirely credible to the Stalinist regime in 1937. The military purge was the result of long-standing security anxieties about the Red Army that stretched back to 1917; when these became intertwined with the explosion of political violence during the Great Terror, the Soviet high command was left fatally exposed.–Written by Peter Whitewood, author of The Red Army and the Great TerrorStalin Attacks the Red Army3/28/2017 • MHQ MAGAZINEStalin had been purging his enemies—real and chimerical—for years, including military officers. Then the 1941 German invasion exposed the Red Army’s real problems.In late June, 1941, without a declaration of war, the Axis armies of Germany, Hungary, and Romania invaded the Soviet Union along a broad front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Much of the Red air force was destroyed on the ground in the first week of the war, leaving the army at the mercy of the German Luftwaffe. The Red Army leadership reacted clumsily and ineffectively to the German blitzkrieg style of war, and by the end of September, the Axis had conquered large swaths of territory in the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, and had killed, captured, and wounded millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians. Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin reacted to the German advance by blaming his generals and had several of them executed on baseless charges of cowardice, as examples to the rest.BY HISTORY NETIn October the Germans launched their drive on Moscow and made it to within 12 miles of the Kremlin. Weather, sheer exhaustion, massive casualties (750,000), and lack of supplies were among the factors that halted their advance, but mostly it was the Red Army’s refusal to quit fighting. After the war, while Stalin lived, discussions of who was responsible for the disaster of 1941 were forbidden. But once he was gone, the army was quick to blame him, citing the ongoing purge of 1937–1939.In the popular imagination, and even in the world of scholars, Joseph Stalin’s terror purge in those years is associated with midnight arrests, lengthy torture sessions resulting in false confessions, and firing squads. Certainly, the terror purge—often referred to as the Ezhovshchina after Nikolai Ezhov, the chief of the police (the NKVD) at the time—was a terrible tragedy for Soviet society at large and the officer corps of the Red Army in particular.Yet its ultimate effect on the Soviet military was initially greatly overstated by Red Army apologists, in part to deflect blame for the 1941 disaster from the army onto Stalin. Even as the purge was taking shape, the armed forces were exaggerating and misrepresenting their losses, perhaps in order to persuade Stalin to end the Ezhovshchina. Until recently, historians had estimated that the purge claimed as many as 50,000 out of an estimated 100,000 officers. Now, thanks to greater access to Russian archives, we know that far less than 50 percent were lost, and even as officers were purged, new officers were added—almost 14,000 in 1937 and 57,000 in 1938. At its worst, then, no more than 12.5 percent of the officer corps was repressed. We can legitimately question whether the purge had as dramatic an impact on the leadership and the army’s unpreparedness for war as long assumed.Without a doubt, Stalin wanted to eliminate specific top officers and commissars whom he unjustifiably suspected of outright disloyalty to him, failing to support his policies, or being unreliable in a crisis. Among those purged were some of his best officers, notably Robert Eideman, Iona Iakir, Innokentii Khalepskii, August Kork, Aleksandr Sediakin, Aleksandr Svechin, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, and Ieronim Uborevich, while Stalin’s incompetent cronies—Marshals Semen Budenny, Grigori Kulik, and Kliment Voroshilov survived.As commissar of defense, Voroshilov submitted to Stalin a list of some 300 officers to be repressed. Voroshilov wanted to put an end to the struggle over modernizing the Red Army that his cohorts were waging against Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii’s group of rising professional officers, who wanted to emphasize armor and aviation at the expense of cavalry. Also, Stalin and Voroshilov held personal grudges against certain officers. Yet none of that explains the scale of the repression that extended not just to the military but to all sectors of Soviet society and government. Nor do any of the many theories suggested for the terror adequately explain all of its variations. The best we can do is accept that Stalin promoted the Ezhovshchina purge because he was afraid of losing his own political power. We may never know how he decided who was a threat to him or why he allowed his murderous measures to extend to people who could not possibly have been a threat.The progression of the Ezhovshchina within the military shows that the army itself was at least partly culpable: Stalin initiated the purge by ordering some of the truly professional officers of the Tukhachevskii group to be arrested on false charges, emanating from the security services, that they were traitors in the pay of Nazi Germany. Voroshilov subsequently called on all servicemen to vigilantly report suspicious activity and denounce enemies of the people hidden in their ranks. Officers and men enthusiastically heeded these instructions, especially those in Communist Party organizations. As a result, a wave of denunciations spread throughout the armed forces. From June through December 1937, 2,238 officers were arrested and 15,426 discharged. By the time the Ezhovshchina was over, two thirds of the more than 9,500 arrests had been orchestrated by special sections of Ezhov’s NKVD assigned to the army; the People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO), playing Stalin’s game, had ordered the arrest of the remaining third.Military district staffs in particular played an important role in the scale of the Ezhovshchina, because the NKO gave them wide latitude. In October 1937 the NKO authorized military districts to expel Communists under suspicion from the party without consulting the central authorities in Moscow and to relieve expelled officers of their military duties on the spot. What constituted grounds for discharge or arrest was not always clear. A man could be denounced for any type of military inefficiency or political unreliability, from criticizing some aspect of party policy to holding favorable views of the policies of Stalin’s former rivals to having even the slightest connection with a foreign country. Six months earlier, in March 1937, the Politburo had ordered that all senior officers expelled from the party were to be discharged from active duty. Many men found themselves in trouble simply for not being Russian: In 1938 orders went out to the military districts to discharge all officers with German, Polish, Latvian, Estonian, Korean, Finnish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, or Bulgarian backgrounds. Accordingly, NKO leadership initiated the discharge of 4,030 army and political officers and the military districts discharged another 7,148 men.By September 1938, however, Voroshilov was attempting to end the Ezhovshchina by publishing an order that forbade military districts to submit any more lists of personnel to the NKVD for ethnic background checks. Yet the submissions continued. It took a joint NKO/NKVD order in August 1939 to finally put the brakes on the practice.Conventional wisdom has it that the army—and the Soviet people in general—felt terrorized by the Ezhovshchina. Some people did live in terror, and the suicides of prominent officers attest to that, but there is evidence that some, and perhaps many, Soviets believed the Ezhovshchina was just and necessary. The state bombarded the population with the idea that traitors and spies were threatening the security of the Soviet Union and had to be eliminated. Consequently, people denounced one another in good conscience, thinking they were doing patriotic deeds. Boris Starinov, a captain in 1938, remembered thinking that Tukhachevskii and his “gang of wreckers” were guilty. One budding pilot, Valentina Ivanova, said of the times and Stalin: “He rid us of traitors.” To this day, there are Russians who still believe that Stalin made the Soviet Union safer through his purge.Many people, civilian and military, believed that the Ezhovshchina was conducted legally and fairly, because, in the months and years that followed, thousands were released from custody and tens of thousands reinstated. By mid-1940 nearly one-third of all officers who had been expelled from the party and discharged from the army had successfully appealed both their expulsions and discharges and had been reinstated in the party and in their jobs. Party members first appealed through the established party mechanism, which gave all members a right to appeal an adverse ruling regarding membership. If that appeal was successful, they then appealed to the NKO personnel office for reinstatement, using their rehabilitation to the party as proof of their innocence. Nonparty officers made their cases directly to the NKO. At the end of 1941, more than one-third of the arrested had been released, some based on individual appeals to the Commissariat of Justice, others on orders from the NKVD based on requests from the NKO. Most officers were then given back their rank and assigned to duty. Time and again one reads in officers’ memoirs of “mistakes” made in the arrests of friends and family that were recognized and rectified after an effective appeal. Such was the case of Sigismund Torgovskii, a lieutenant arrested in May 1938 for having been born in formerly Russian Poland and accused of being a Polish spy. He wrote a letter of appeal denouncing Ezhov and his minions for the mistake. (By this time Ezhov himself had been arrested and replaced as head of the NKVD by Lavrenti Beria.) In less than a year, the lieutenant was reinstated in the army by administrative orders from Beria.The terror purge of 1937–1939 can be seen as an extension of earlier Trotskyite purges taken to extremes. Stalin’s war with Leon Trotsky lasted from the 1920s until Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940. In those years, anyone suspected of having been a Trotsky supporter on any issue was doomed, whether he worked on a collective farm or on the army’s General Staff. In the mid-1920s, 26,000 Trotskyite officers were purged— dismissed—from the service during high-level party battles. That marked the beginning of politically based repression of army officers, but it was only the beginning. In March 1937 Voroshilov proudly announced to a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that from the onset of the fight against Trotsky in the mid-1920s to that point, the NKO had discharged 47,000 officers. The commissar of defense noted that 5,000 of those men, “clearly oppositionists,” had been arrested. In a secret meeting with members of the Military Soviet of the Commissariat of Defense on June 2, 1937, Stalin explained the need to arrest Marshal Tukhachevskii and his group in the context of the ongoing struggle against Trotsky and Fascist spies. Gullible members of the Military Soviet, including career officers such as Marshals Georgii Egorov and Kirill Meretskov, believed the charges and gave their approval for the arrest of senior officers. Marshal Egorov, in his capacity as a Communist Party Central Committee member, continued to authorize the arrest of high-ranking party members in the months preceding his own arrest.At least some level of army purge continued from the mid- 1920 Trotskyite purges right up to Stalin’s death in 1953, with thousands of officers dismissed from service every year on suspicion of being politically unreliable. In 1930, for example, the NKVD launched Operation Vesna, a major effort to eliminate officers who had begun their careers in the tsarist army and were then suspected of being anti-Soviet. Roughly 3,000 officers were discharged and many of them arrested on bogus charges of conspiring with the Orthodox Church to overthrow the Soviet regime. Strictly on political grounds, the NKO discharged 6,198 officers from the army in 1935 and another 5,677 in 1936.Considering that the number of officers repressed has proven to be far lower than previously believed, we have to look to the quality of the officers lost to help explain the disasters during the German offensive of 1941–1942. In absolute numbers lieutenants and captains suffered the most; however, on a percentage basis, the purge hit hardest senior officers with the rank of colonel and higher. For example, between January 1937 through to the end of 1938, 52 corps commanders, 123 division commanders, 264 brigade commanders, and 897 colonels were discharged. In all, the army discharged 1,336 colonels and generals and 1,385 of their commissar equivalents. The NKVD subsequently arrested 800 of these officers and 465 commissars.After Stalin’s death, Soviet historians declared that those purged were the Red Army’s best and brightest as a way to blame Stalin for the army’s failure to stop Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg. The insinuation is that the more militarily proficient an officer was, the more likely he was to be repressed. But this thinking must be viewed skeptically: After all, why focus a purge on your best officers? Further, the competent performance during the war of such generals as Vasilii Chuikov, Ivan Konev, Boris Shaposhnikov, Aleksandr Vasilevskii, and Georgy Zhukov, to name but a few who were not purged—and of the many lieutenant colonels and colonels who rose to successfully command divisions and armies—challenges the idea that only incompetents survived. All of this suggests that the Ezhovshchina was just one of several factors that contributed to the debacle in 1941–1942.The Red Army had never been in good shape; it continuously struggled with indiscipline, rampant alcoholism, equipment and weapon shortages, and inattentiveness to training. Social strife between workers and peasants in the ranks was also a problem: The peasantry had suffered when agriculture had been collectivized in the 1930s and a famine early in that decade only worsened matters, as did the party’s idealization of workers.In general, it is fair to say that the quality of senior officers— colonels and above—was very uneven in the prewar years. Most senior officers had little to no formal military education and had risen to high command at young ages during the Russian civil war. Their credentials were based on their performance in an extremely low-tech war and on their party loyalty rather than on professional training and demonstrated competence. The purge of Trotskyites in 1926 only made matters worse, leaving the army with serious officer shortages, lack of effective officer training, and a pattern of intrusive politicization. The subsequent Ezhovshchina was not the reason for the preponderance of poorly trained officers in the Red Army but it did exacerbate the problem.Another contributing factor was the exponential growth of the armed forces in anticipation of eventual wars with Germany and Japan. The Red Army more than tripled in size in only four years, from 1.3 million in 1937 to 4.5 million in 1941. The plan to counter the growing threat called for the army to field a fully mobilized armed force of 8.6 million men by spring 1942, dividing them between the Soviet Far East and Eastern Europe. To achieve these numbers, the scale of the expansion in 1939 alone was breathtaking: 4 new army groups, 2 fortified regions, 8 armies, and 19 corps—all requiring administrative structures and support staffs. Along with this were 111 new infantry divisions comprising 333 infantry regiments, 222 artillery regiments, and 555 separate artillery battalions; 16 tank brigades; 12 reserve infantry brigades; 85 reserve regiments; 137 artillery battalions independent of corps and divisions; 42 military schools; 52 reserve officer refresher courses; and 345 evacuation hospitals. New units were still being formed in the spring of 1941 when the Germans invaded. The Red air forces establishment was similarly expanded to enable it to support ground forces with air cover and tactical air support.The manning requirements created by the formation of these new units, combined with the need to replace the losses from the purge, further degraded the leadership capacity of the officer corps: Officers spent very little time in their positions before being promoted to higher responsibilities, often in new units. In their new positions, they were responsible not only for leading and overseeing the training of hundreds or thousands of soldiers but also for training subordinate officers, despite their own minimal training and experience. Lateral transfers between units only increased with the pace of expansion and undermined cohesion within the leadership.Although the defense industry began to produce matériel at a frantic pace, it could not keep up with the army’s rapid mobilization of manpower. Soldiers would arrive at newly established regiments with barracks still under construction. They often had to sit idle, waiting for artillery pieces or the rifles and ammunition necessary for their training. Some units had to wait weeks to be issued such simple things as boots so they could go into the field.Stalin and his generals knew that expanding the armed forces would be difficult, not just because of the ambitious material goals they had set but also because there was already a deficit of leadership cadres. Even before the start of the Ezhovshchina in May 1937, the army was short some 10,000 officers. By the following January, at the height of the Ezhovshchina, that number was 39,100. As 1938 progressed, newly created infantry divisions required 33,000 additional officers, but even with the bulk of discharges and arrests over and reinstatements beginning, the army was still short 73,000 officers at the end of the year. The Red Army projected that 198,000 officers would need to be added in 1939 to meet that year’s expansion plans, and it subsequently set a goal of procuring 203,000 men to fill newly created and vacant officer posts.From 1938 to 1939 the army had commissioned only 158,147 officers. These new officers, who would lead platoons and companies into battle in 1939 in Poland, Finland, and Mongolia, were woefully underprepared. The majority—77,971 of them— were junior lieutenants who had trained for six months or less, while some 62,800 went through shortened courses of one or at most two years at military schools; the remaining 17,376 officers were reservists called up for temporary service and given only abbreviated refresher training. In contrast, young officers who had been recruited after the civil war and before the rapid expansion of the army (1922 through 1937) had typically spent four years in a military school preparing for their commission.General Efim A. Shchadenko, head of the personnel office for the Commissariat of Defense, estimated that the officer corps would need to grow by 50 percent between January 1, 1939, and March 1940—that is, from 240,000 to approximately 357,000. Despite their best efforts, the army and the Communist Party failed to recruit enough officers, and with 9,093 officer casualties in combat in 1939–1940 (in the invasion of Poland, the Battle of Khalkin-Gol with Japan, and the Winter War with Finland), the army was, in March 1940, undermanned by 125,000 officers. Shchadenko then reported that in order to have the officer corps fully manned by 1942, at the completion of the projected expansion, a total of 438,000 additional officers would be needed. A mind-boggling 980,000 sergeants would also be required over the same two years to lead the soldiers at the squad level; privates, however, abounded. By May 1940 the army numbered almost 4 million soldiers, an increase of 2.2 million over 1937.One week before the Nazi invasion, on June 15, 1941, the Red Army had 439,143 officers, half of whom had been in the military for two years or less. This number was 15 percent (67,000 men) fewer than it needed. The hundreds of thousands of officers added to the rolls since 1937 were simply not prepared to lead their semitrained and underequipped men, and many companies and even battalions were commanded by recently minted lieutenants as young as 19. The catastrophe to come, then, had roots that went far deeper than the Ezhovshchina. The purge and the expansion together crippled the leadership capacity of the Red Army officer corps at the most critical time in Soviet history.In sum, the disaster of 1941 was the result of a combination of factors: a shortage of officers due to the purge as well as the rapid expansion of the armed forces; hasty and abbreviated training of junior officers after 1937; the brief time in command positions before promotion or transfer or both; and lack of talent among many of the senior officers. Harder to quantify is the effect of the politicization of the officer corps and Stalin’s interference in personnel policy regarding the promotion, assignment, arrest, and release of top generals. The effect of the purge was not only to remove many competent officers but to create an air of distrust among the officers and their men, who, influenced by state-controlled media propaganda, became predisposed to believe that their commander could be a traitor or a spy. Overall, Stalin’s interference in military affairs was unhelpful and destabilizing, but it was the rapidity of the war itself that dealt the greatest blow to the Red Army.Roger Reese is a professor of history at Texas A&M University and a leading expert on the Soviet military under Stalin. The most recent of his four books on the subject is Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought (2011).

I answered this question on Quora, and expanded it more into my Twitch story. My username on Twitch was "AnarchyAo". I was known for being the first rank 50 in Tribes: Ascend. My story is long, but if you're interested in livestreaming and growing your brand, then the details of my story might be interesting to you. Enjoy!I was earning $3,500 per month (after taxes) while streaming on Twitch before I was banned for non-gaming content and hate speech (offensive sarcasm). I was subsequently hired by a competing company (UStream) and relocated to San Francisco from my rural hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia.I was a former Partner of Twitch and had a certain rate that I was paid per advertisement that I played. I also live-streamed for Hi-Rez Studios on their official Twitch channel to help promote Tribes: Ascend prior to it’s launch and (later) helping to promote their other triple-A title, SMITE.I began broadcasting in February 2012 (several months before Tribes: Ascend was released in April 2012) and spent most of my time playing Tribes: Ascend with no camera and my music playing loud. Due to the lack of streams, people began to watch because the game was in the beta at the time.I didn’t realize it at the time, but Hi-Rez Studios began negotiating promotional pushes for Tribes: Ascend on Twitch’s front page. I would frequently have my stream put on the front page of Twitch and I was also given the privilege of applying for Partnership and being accepted into the partner program without having the required amount of concurrent viewers.For a solid 9 months I was streaming Tribes: Ascend and was the first person to hit rank 50 (max rank in the game). I became a well known person in the Tribes community and Hi-Rez Studios noticed. They invited me to help set up their booth at PAX Prime (Seattle, WA) in Fall 2012.By this point I was earning a few hundred dollars per month streaming and living in my own apartment (with my parent’s supporting me, buying my groceries, paying my rent and constantly being on my case about getting a ‘real’ job). I think at this time in my life I was quite depressed and was using the livestreaming as a device to get my social fix. I also felt that I deserved to have a job that I enjoyed doing… hindsight, I don’t think I deserved anything because my expectations were unreasonable.At PAX Prime in Seattle, Hi-Rez paid for everything. My hotel, flight, etc and I was able to meet a lot of cool people that worked for the company. Before meeting me, they just knew me as the guy playing their game 16 hours a day and live-streaming it.I went back home to Virginia after the event, and was given an offer to be a contracted streamed for Hi-Rez Studios, streaming their game on their channel on a (scheduled) weekly basis (approximately 4 hours per day) and being paid an hourly rate ($18 / hour).I did this streaming for Hi-Rez and promoted their game during major patch releases. I wanted more hours but Hi-Rez was investing in a new game, a MOBA called SMITE. I was afraid that the future of my Tribes streaming would have its hours cut down, or eliminated altogether.I asked to be added to Hi-Rez's SMITE game live streaming schedule. Their Chief Operating Officer, Nabil asked me how I would provide them with value playing SMITE, when I have no experience playing MOBAs.There was well-known friction between the Tribes and SMITE community (Tribes players claimed Hi-Rez neglected Tribes because SMITE was hogging their developer resources).I told Hi-Rez I would bridge the gap between the two fan bases of their top two games. I explained that, being the first rank 50 Tribes: Ascend player, simply giving SMITE a chance on stream would open up the Tribes fans to playing SMITE with me. And the SMITE fans that would watch me and start to like me would understand that I'm a Tribes player, and I'm playing their favorite game SMITE, so maybe they should try playing Tribes. After hearing my perspective, Nabil was happy to add me to the SMITE game channel, effectively increasing the hours that I was paid each week to live stream their games.While not streaming for Hi-Rez ion their official channel, I wasn't earning money. I had little to no income being derived from my personal channel because the hype of Tribes: Ascend and it's launch had worn off (it had been a year and a half since it's release, and less people were playing the game).For a year and half I had been streaming Tribes: Ascend on my personal channel and would consistently have 50 concurrent viewers. I streamed every day to 50 people but I was getting bored. Several viewers suggested I play League of Legends. I had never played a MOBA until SMITE, but SMITE was very different and I had no idea how to play League. I was afraid to start playing LoL on my personal channel because Tribes players hate other games, especially MOBAs and I didn't want to lose my original fanbase that had been dedicated to me for so long.I decided to give it a shot any way, because I wanted to see if I could garner more viewers. I was successfully streaming to thousands of people for Hi-Rez on SMITE's channel and my concurrent viewers were competitive with their pro SMITE players streaming for them (cadburry and sooner).So I began streaming League of Legends on my personal channel in June 2013. I only streamed ranked matches.I was very, very bad at league and never played it until I began streaming it. Several times while streaming League in my first two weeks, my concurrent view count skyrocketed. The most concurrent viewers I reached was around 3,800 viewers watching.After reaching this level of popularity, I applied for a subscribe button ($5 per month, split 50% with Twitch… so I earned $2.50 per month per subscribed user). Within a few weeks of getting a subscribe button, I had an additional revenue stream of $500 per month.Meanwhile I was running ads against 2k to 3k concurrent viewers and earning a steady income, this supplemented by my pay on Hi-Rez Studios channel schedule was providing me a reasonable income. I would stream 9 to 12 hours a day and was earning around $3,500 per month (on average).Soon after my popularity taking off in League of Legends, I was invited in Summer 2013 to join a professional NA LCS team (Team Vulcun). The owner at the time, Ali told me that he liked my stream and felt I would connect well with their pro eSports team’s fanbase because they currently needed a solid, personable connection to their fans as the pro players weren’t as relatable (in skillset) to the casual viewers / fans of their team, and they were focused more on playing well and less on viewer entertainment.I joined Team Vulcun and 10% of my earnings would go to them, but they would promote me and provide me with marketing across all of their social media outlets and allow me access to joining them at in-person events at no cost to me.This steady stream of income and streaming only lasted several months. I was banned from Twitch in September 2013 after being warned several times. I was streaming non-gaming content between matches (walking down street to buy a donut, using skype to stream an apartment tour) and I was very sarcastic / edgy (my opinions and what I said to people could be construed as offensive, but I felt this was vital to my success as a unique personality that people respected because of my candidness).After being banned and appealing, the CEO of Twitch (Emmett Shear) said that the ban would stick and I could re-apply for appeal in a year. As a result of my ban, Hi-Rez Studios had to cut ties with me, as they didn’t want to disrespect Twitch’s decision and allow me on their channel (the ban was limited to my channel, but they didn’t want to appear disrespectful to Twitch’s decision).As a result of my ban, I couldn’t stream again on Twitch. I reached out to Ustream and asked about encoding options (different resolutions) and other Partner program perks. They replied that their not in the business of partnering with streamers like Twitch does.Ustream was intrigued by my connection to the Gaming industry and eSports scene. I spoke with several of their sales people on gchat for a few months and got to know them that way. I spoke with one sales executive at Ustream every day during this time.When joining Team Vulcun, I was told by Ali to contact their primary sponsor, TechBargains (a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, a media company that owns IGN and PC Magazine) point of contact, a guy by the name of Marshall. I spoke with Marshall on Skype and he gave me the background images and other assets required to put on my channel to advertise TechBargains (Vulcun received money contributions from TechBargains to name their selves Vulcun TechBargains and to advertise on each of their team members Twitch pages).Marshall worked for Ziff Davis, and owned the relationship between TechBargains and Team Vulcun. I kept in touch with Marshall on a daily basis as well, and spoke with him and Ustream each day. At this time, I was still out of work (I couldn't live stream) and was occasionally streaming on Ustream but only had 20 concurrent viewers with no ad revenue or sponsorship.Marshall went on to purchase the Team Vulcun organization from the former owner, Ali (the guy who invited me to join the team as a live streamer). Marshall was now the owner of Team Vulcun, and he changed it’s name to XDG Gaming.I told my friend (now owner of Team Vulcun) about about my interactions with Ustream and their interest in eSports. He found this interesting and offered me several floor seats to the League of Legends NA LCS tournament at the Staples center in Los Angeles, CA.I invited two of the sales executives over at Ustream to join me at the tournament and that I would introduce them to various key people in Gaming / eSports (by way of my friend who owned XDG Gaming organization, he offered to provide introductions for me).My friend who owned XDG Gaming also paid for my flight (I told him I’d pay him back, and I later did) because I couldn’t afford to pay for it with me not having a job and rent being due.I flew out for 2 days and spent time with UStream and my friend. I then came back home and spent another 6 months not streaming, with no income and having my parents pay my bills (buy my groceries, pay my rent, etc).I was a college dropout with $20k in debt and no college degree. It was 2013 and I was 26 years old. I had graduated High School in 2005. Failed through community college for 4 years. I had even spent tuition money given to me in 2012 by my parents to attend James Madison University but instead I gave the check to my school, and dropped my classes then spent all the money on a new live streaming set up.I put everything into this and lost it all. But I got lucky. My friends at Ustream wanted me to work for them in their sales department to help sell their live video platform into the Gaming and eSports markets.After returning from the League NA LCS Worlds tournament in Fall 2013, I received an offer for a sales job at Ustream in March 2014. I relocated from Harrisonburg, VA to San Francisco, CA and I’ve been here ever since.It’s been several years since all of this happened, and I was eventually laid off at Ustream due to performance issues. I went on to work in sales for a big data company in San Jose, CA called Hortonworks.I’ve been at my current company, Fastly, a tech startup that sells a Content Delivery Network platform (optimized delivery of digital assets of websites and mobile apps).Some advice I can provide up and coming streamers… it’s all about the viewer experience and this can be satisfied in more than one way (high interaction, high skill). No one way is right or better, they’re just different.I enjoyed streaming. I loved the people. They were rude and mean but I’m very negative and sarcastic, and I thrived in the harsh environment of live streaming on the Internet.Here's some advice based on my experience:1) Go outside. Maintain a social network in real-life. Use your internet connections to your advantage in the real-life world.2) Stay humble. People will always want YOUR attention. Don’t let this go to your head. You aren’t special because people are watching you. They’re watching you because you’re streaming and they aren’t and the viewers consider you their friend.3) Effectively market yourself. Be consistent with the times you’re live streaming and the username you're using across all social media outlets. The more you stream, the better. But there’s also a delicate balance. You don’t want to stream when you’re tired because people will remember you as being the guy who doesn’t talk while playing games. Make sure you’re always ready to be the best at what you do, every time you’re streaming. New people come and go. You want them to come more than they go.4) Don't hate. Befriend other streamers, and the people you work for. This was a hard lesson learned by me. Even if you think you're right, don't hate on the people who employ you (Twitch) and don't hate on anyone in your industry (other streamers, game publishers, developers or the games they passionately create for you and others).You create opportunities by connecting with people and networking. Be everyone's friend, and they'll be yours.