More Flagrant Alteration Of The Past: Patrick Moore As Founder Of Greenpeace
By far the most-read posts on this site are the ones in my now twenty-two part series The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time. The specific subject of that series is the alteration by government bureaucrats of historical temperature data in the ongoing campaign to convince the public that there is dangerous global warming going on. At this point, the showing that earlier-year temperatures have been materially altered downward (to create a fake enhanced warming trend) is completely definitive, demonstrated by simple comparison of currently-published official data to previously-published official data that can still be found online. Yet the bureaucrats at NOAA and NASA continue to disseminate the altered data, and even to make further ongoing “adjustments” to make the past appear to have been even cooler. And every time a NOAA or a NASA puts out a new breathless press release about the current year or month being the “hottest ever,” you can count on a dozen or more mainstream media sources to parrot the announcement without ever mentioning that the result derives entirely from fraudulently altered data.
The past has been changed. It’s official! Comparisons to the alteration of history by Stalin are completely appropriate.
In the last week, we have seen an even more ridiculous effort to change history in the enforcement of climate change orthodoxy. You may already have seen several references to it, but let me take you through the timeline of the story.
A week ago today (March 12) a guy named Patrick Moore appeared on the Fox morning news program “Fox and Friends.” I didn’t see the show, but apparently during his segment Moore was identified as a “co-founder” of the Greenpeace environmental group. Moore also took the occasion to call the so-called climate crisis “fake science.”
It seems that President Trump was watching the show. Within minutes, he issued the following tweet:
Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!
The guys at Greenpeace were not about to take that lying down. Also within minutes, they had put out a reply:
Now there is a rather stark factual dispute: President Trump (apparently quoting Moore himself) says that Moore was a “co-founder of Greenpeace.” Greenpeace says that Moore “was not a co-founder of Greenpeace.” Only one can be right. Which is it?
Within a few hours, CNN had weighed in, in a piece with the subtitle “Don't believe these climate change lies.” What are the lies?
President Donald Trump escalated his denial of global warming Tuesday, when he took to Twitter to quote a noted climate skeptic who claims that climate change is "fake science." Trump cited the comments of Patrick Moore on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program, which identified him as the co-founder of the activist group Greenpeace. . . . According to Greenpeace, however, Moore is not a co-founder but rather "a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years."
OK then, CNN, if Greenpeace says Moore is not a co-founder, then I guess that must be true. Even more over the top, as usual, was MSNBC, in a piece the same afternoon titled “Trump’s approach to the climate crisis gets even more embarrassing.”
And who [sic], pray tell, does the president believe [on the subject of the “climate crisis”]? Some guy he saw on Fox News this morning. Trump published this tweet a few hours ago:
“Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: ‘The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.’ @foxandfriends Wow!”
As is too often the case, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. As Greenpeace USA explained soon after, “Patrick Moore was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. He does not represent Greenpeace. He is a paid lobbyist, not an independent source.”
So for MSNBC, it’s not enough that Trump is just “wrong”; he also has to be “embarrassing” and to have “no idea what he’s talking about.”
So let’s bring in fact checkers Snopes to get to the bottom of this. On the afternoon of March 12, Snopes put what it called a “fact check” of the following proposition:
Claim: Patrick Moore, who once described anthropogenic climate change as “fake science” on the morning opinion program "Fox and Friends," co-founded the environmental action group Greenpeace.
And the result? Snopes rated the claim as partly true and partly false. Here’s the part they rated as “false”:
What's False: Greenpeace does not consider Moore a co-founder of the organization, and the entity that became Greenpeace existed prior to Moore being affiliated with that group.
Thus for the supposed “fact checkers” at Snopes, it is sufficient to declare President Trump’s statement “false” that they have received a response from Greenpeace stating that they do not “consider” Moore to be among their co-founders. But, whatever they may now say about what they “consider,” what are the facts? Do CNN, MSNBC, Snopes (and plenty of others) have any idea what they are talking about? Did they make any effort to check the easily-available public information? In the age of the internet, a credible fact check cannot really consist of just asking one side of a dispute and taking that side’s word. In this case, the easily-publicly-available information includes a since deleted page from Greenpeace’s own website. For some reason I am unable to get the screenshot to import here, but here is the key quote:
The Founders of Greenpeace. . . . In 1970 the Don’t Make a Wave Committee was established. Its sole objective was to stop a second nuclear weapons test at Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. The committee’s founders and first members included: . . . Patrick Moore, ecology student at the University of British Columbia.
For a full screenshot of Greenpeace’s old web page, go to Joanne Nova’s website at this link. The page existed on Greenpeace’s website as recently as 2007, even though Moore had left the organization as early as 1986. On the other hand, his deviance from official orthodoxy has more recently become too much to bear. Apparently, he must be erased from history.
Over at CNN and MSNBC, they go out anew every day to earn the label of “fake news.” It is richly deserved.
Meanwhile, it’s not really so important whether Patrick Moore was or was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. What’s important is to recognize that enforcement of climate orthodoxy has become so seemingly important to the environmental blob that they are willing to seek to change any and all inconvenient facts in the effort to achieve their ends. It’s not enough just to say, “Sure Moore was one of our co-founders, but he came to disagree with us, and we no longer endorse what he says.” He must be thoroughly cast out as an apostate.