Guardian Smears Morano, GOP as 'Extinction Deniers'

May 28th, 2019 4:24 PM

Not content solely to use the offensive “climate denier” term against dissenting views on climate change, a Guardian writer adopted the term “extinction deniers” in a tirade against skeptics on May 23.

Contributing writer Jim Tobias claimed Republicans instigated a “campaign of climate deception,” and smeared them as “extinction deniers” for listening to critics of an upcoming United Nations report during a May 22, House committee hearing.

Those critics included Climate Depot editor Marc Morano, who describes himself as a voice of climate realism. He previously worked for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and the MRC’s CNS News. 

Another critical perspective before the committee came from Dr. Patrick Moore, an ecologist and the director of the CO2 Coalition. Tobias labeled Moore’s group “a Koch-brother-backed non-profit that ‘educates’ the public about the importance of fossil fuels.” Note the use of sarcastic quotation marks. Tobias omitted the fact that Moore is an actual scientist and was a co-founder and leader of Greenpeace for many years. 

Tobias was apoplectic that people would ignore or challenge the summary from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES claimed “around one million species already face extinction” if action is not taken.

In his view, IPBES’s findings were scarier than “any of the fictional demons or dragons that our TV writers conjure.”

He accused Republicans of “ignoring the report’s chilling conclusions” and claimed there has been a conspiracy for decades on the part of fossil fuel companies using “think-tanks, front groups and public relations operatives to promote faulty science” on climate change.

Tobias also lashed out at Morano, who disputed the report summary and castigated its reputation as an “independent” body of the United Nations (UN) before the committee.

According to Morano, the report was essentially propaganda and served to advance the UN’s goal of “more money, more power, more scientific authority, more money and more regulatory control of the economy and people’s lives.” He also suggested that the IPBES chair, Sir Robert Watson (who was also speaking before the committee), was politicizing the agency at the cost of actual science.

Morano’s testimony clearly aggravated Tobias. It had already aggravated committee chairman Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who accused Morano of making “a career out of trolling scientists or monetizing contrarian ideology.”

Apparently, any disagreement with left-wing doctrine of global warming is considered “contrarian.”

Tobias lamented what he claimed were “bullying tactics” of Republicans and Big Oil to “distract from the growing biodiversity crisis.” He also accused the fossil fuel industry for pursuing profits while establishing themselves on business models “built on degrading wildlife habitat.”

In addition to writing left-wing climate screeds for The Guardian, Tobias is a contributor to the far-left magazine The Nation.