Marc Morano | |
|---|---|
 Morano in 2019 | |
| Born | 1968 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | George Mason University (B.A.) |
| Occupation(s) | Former U.S. congressional staffer, founder and executive editor of ClimateDepot.org |
Marc Morano (born 1968) [1] is a former Republican political aide who founded and runs the website ClimateDepot.com. [2] ClimateDepot is a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a US non-profit organisation that promotes climate change denial. [3]
Morano was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in McLean, Virginia. He has a bachelor's degree from George Mason University in political science. [1]
He began his career working for Rush Limbaugh from 1992 to 1996. [4] After 1996, he began working for Cybercast News Service (now CNSNews), where he was the first to publish the subsequently discredited [5] [6] accusations from Swift-Boat veterans that John Kerry had allegedly exaggerated his military service record. [7]
Beginning in June 2006, Morano served as the director of communications for Senator Jim Inhofe. He was also communications director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the George W. Bush administration. In 2007, Morano produced a report listing hundreds of scientists whose work, according to Morano, questions whether global warming is caused by human activity. [7] [8]
In April 2009, despite having no formal education in the field of climate science, [9] Morano founded and became executive editor of ClimateDepot.com, a website sponsored by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). In November 2009, Morano was one of the first to break the Climatic Research Unit email controversy story after being contacted by Anthony Watts. The story was subsequently picked up by James Delingpole. [4] In 2016 Morano co-wrote and presented the CFACT-funded documentary Climate Hustle .
In December 2012, Morano debated Bill Nye on global warming on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight . [10] In January 2013, Morano debated Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, again on Piers Morgan Tonight. [11] Morano was interviewed in the 2015 documentary Merchants of Doubt . [12]
In 2019, Morano's blog described 16-year old climate change activist Greta Thunberg as an "autistic prophet", and he retweeted criticisms of her that center on her autism. [13]
Morano mocks scientists in television debates, which he describes as fun. In one blog post he wrote "We should kick scientists when they're down. They deserve to be publicly flogged", but then said "come on, it was a stupid expression." While some climatologists who felt they had been bullied were reluctant to give their names, Michael E. Mann openly said that Morano "spreads malicious lies about scientists, paints us as enemies of the people, then uses language that makes it sound like we should be subject to death threats, harmed or killed." Morano says he merely posts public contact details, and suggests to his followers that they say what they think to the scientists, who he says "live in a bubble" and don't hear from the public. He says this is refreshing, healthy, and "good for the public debate". [14] At the end of 2012, left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America named Morano the "Climate Change Misinformer of the Year." [15]
Morano has been criticized for publishing the email addresses of climate scientists on ClimateDepot.org. In March 2012, Morano posted an article and the email address of sociology professor Kari Norgaard, who had presented a paper on why it is difficult for societies to take action to respond to climate change. This story was later picked up by Rush Limbaugh, after which Norgaard received threatening emails. [16] Morano repeated this action again in 2013, when he posted the email address of Shaun Marcott in response to Marcott's having published a temperature reconstruction which resembled the hockey stick graph. [16]
Morano says that emails targeting climate scientists can be nasty in tone, but he defends the practice of posting their addresses by noting that he, too, has received hate mail. He says that his goal is to "let the professors hear from the public" and that receiving nasty emails is "part of the process". [16]
In 2010, the conservative group Accuracy in Media awarded Morano their annual Reed Irvine Award alongside Andrew Breitbart. [17] The lobbying group Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, described by The Guardian as a "fringe political group", [18] awarded Morano the 2010 Petr Beckmann Award. [19]
Environmental skepticism is the belief that statements by environmentalists, and the environmental scientists who support them, are false or exaggerated. The term is also applied to those who are critical of environmentalism in general. It can additionally be defined as doubt about the authenticity or severity of environmental degradation. Environmental skepticism is closely linked with anti-environmentalism and climate change denial. Environmental skepticism can also be the result of cultural and lived experiences.
Accuracy in Media (AIM) is an American non-profit conservative news media watchdog founded in 1969 by economist Reed Irvine.
The Information Council for the Environment (ICE) was an American climate change denial organization created by the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association, and Edison Electrical Institute.
Willie Wei-Hock Soon is a Malaysian astrophysicist and aerospace engineer who was long employed as a part-time externally funded researcher at the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Myron Ebell is an American climate change denier who served as the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), an American libertarian advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. He was also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a politically conservative group formed in 1997 focused on "dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis". In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) is a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1985 that advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues. According to its mission statement, CFACT also seeks to protect private property rights, promote economic policies that reduce pollution and protect wildlife, and provide an "alternative voice on issues of environment and development".
The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian 501(c)(3) nonprofit public policy think tank known for denying the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking.
Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Tucson, Arizona. The group is closely affiliated with the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, a politically conservative nonprofit association advocating numerous discredited hypotheses including AIDS denialism. It is run by Arizona physician Jane Orient.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is a 2007 British polemical documentary film directed by Martin Durkin. The film denies the scientific consensus about the reality and causes of climate change, justifying this by suggesting that climatology is influenced by funding and political factors. The program was formally criticised by Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulatory agency, which ruled the film failed to uphold due impartiality and upheld complaints of misrepresentation made by David King, who appeared in the film.
James Mark Court Delingpole is an English writer, journalist, and columnist who has written for a number of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He is a former executive editor for Breitbart London, and has published several novels and four political books. He describes himself as a libertarian conservative. He has frequently published articles promoting climate change denial and expressing opposition to wind power.
Climate change denial is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none. Climate change denial includes unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom whose aims are to challenge what it calls "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. The GWPF, and some of its prominent members individually, have been characterised as practising and promoting climate change denial.
Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006.
Peter Sinclair from Midland, Michigan, is an environmental activist whose focus is on climate change. He is a YouTube blogger, explorer and founder of the ClimateCrocks.com website. Together with climate researchers he's traveled to hot spots of climate change, for instance to Greenland as part of the Dark Snow Project. Sinclair is perhaps best known for producing the Climate Denial Crock of the Week series on his YouTube channel. Videos have received praise from climate scientists such as Gavin Schmidt, Michael E. Mann, and the late Stephen Schneider. In 2012, he launched another YouTube series, entitled This is not Cool, for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
Kari Marie Norgaard is a Professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, a post she has held since 2017. She is known for her research into Indigenous environmental justice, climate change denial and the politics of global warming.
Merchants of Doubt is a 2014 American documentary film directed by Robert Kenner and inspired by the 2010 book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. The film traces the use of public relations tactics that were originally developed by the tobacco industry to protect their business from research indicating health risks from smoking. The most prominent of these tactics is the cultivation of scientists and others who successfully cast doubt on scientific results. Using a professional magician, the film explores the analogy between these tactics and the methods used by magicians to distract their audiences from observing how illusions are performed. For the tobacco industry, the tactics successfully delayed government regulation until long after the establishment of scientific consensus about the health risks from smoking. As its second example, the film describes how manufacturers of flame retardants worked to protect their sales after toxic effects of the retardants were reported in the scientific literature. The central concern of the film is the ongoing use of these tactics to forestall governmental action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in response to the risks of global climate change.
Climate Hustle is a 2016 film rejecting the existence and cause of climate change, narrated by climate change denialist Marc Morano, produced and directed by Christopher Rogers, co-written by Morano and Mick Curran, and funded by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a free market pressure group funded by the fossil fuel lobby.
The history of climate change policy and politics refers to the continuing history of political actions, policies, trends, controversies and activist efforts as they pertain to the issue of climate change. Climate change emerged as a political issue in the 1970s, when activist and formal efforts sought to address environmental crises on a global scale. International policy regarding climate change has focused on cooperation and the establishment of international guidelines to address global warming. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a largely accepted international agreement that has continuously developed to meet new challenges. Domestic policy on climate change has focused on both establishing internal measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and incorporating international guidelines into domestic law.
The latter individual, Marc Morano, exemplifies the deep roots of climate change denial in conservative circles ... provides the denial machine with a highly effective means of spreading its message
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