And Now They're Confusing Science and Non-Science

And, again, by "they" I mean, of course, Scaife's braintrust on the editorial board at his Tribune-Review.

Take a look at this morning's nonsense (Get it?  Nonsense and Non-science  Get it?):

Surveying genuine science excluded from the one-sided reports with which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports its radical alarmism, the latest report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) shows global warming is no crisis — and even has benefits.

The previous NIPCC report showed that alarmists' climate models are inaccurate, warming (before the current plateau) is within natural variability and humanity's climate impact is negligible. Its new report, “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts,” concludes that warming and rising carbon dioxide levels cause “no net harm” and often result in “net benefits to plants, including important food crops, and to animals and human health.”

The NIPCC says that with CO2 — which isn't a pollutant — rising, there's “a great greening of the Earth” that brings “rising agricultural productivity” with “little or no risk of increasing food insecurity.” Plants and animals on land and in the sea either feel no impact or see “habitats, ranges and populations” expanding. And because warming more than offsets deaths related to cold, it actually saves human lives.

Independently evaluating scientific evidence without taking government or corporate money, the NIPCC confronts climate alarmists with inconvenient truths that expose the IPCC's real mission: slanting genuine science, blaming mankind and forecasting doomsday to justify governments' drastic anti-growth diktats.

The braintrust is looking (again) to counter the scientific IPCC report with the non-scientific NIPCC report, obviously.  What do you think we'll find if dig a little into the NIPCC report?

Actually, we've already done this - this past September.

Let's review, then.  Back then I linked to this piece in The Guardian:

The report is the latest in the Heartland Institute's "Climate Change Reconsidered" series and the cornerstone of its campaign against the IPCC's fifth assessment. Heartland is aggressively pushing the report in op-eds, blogs and in articles in conservative newspapers and news stations. Among others, it has received coverage in the Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Times and the UK's Daily Mail, in an article that had to be "significantly" changed due to errors.

Other groups participating in the report include the Science & Environmental Policy Project, a research and advocacy group founded by climate skeptic Fred Singer—who is also the director of Heartland's Science and Environmental Policy Project—and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, an Arizona-based climate skeptic group partly funded by ExxonMobil.

And then from there I found the money trail from (among other places) The Sarah Scaife Foundation to the Heartland Institute - the organization that puts out the NIPCC report.

Funny that the braintrust never ever seems to mention that.  But I'm not the only one to find the connection.  Here's Rollingstone Magazine (sub req'd) from a coupla years ago:

The Hack Scientist
Fred Singer
Retired physicist, University of Virginia

A former mouthpiece for the tobacco industry, the 85-year-old Singer is the granddaddy of fake "science" designed to debunk global warming. The retired physicist — who also tried to downplay the danger of the hole in the ozone layer — is still wheeled out as an authority by big polluters determined to kill climate legislation. For years, Singer steadfastly denied that the world is heating up: Citing satellite data that has since been discredited, he even made the unhinged claim that "the climate has been cooling just slightly." Last year, Singer served as a lead author of "Climate Change Reconsidered" — an 880-page report by the right-wing Heartland Institute that was laughably presented as a counterweight to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's scientific authority on global warming. Singer concludes that the unchecked growth of climate-cooking pollution is "unequivocally good news." Why? Because "rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests." Small wonder that Heartland's climate work has long been funded by the likes of Exxon and reactionary energy barons like Charles Koch and Richard Mellon Scaife.

Independent?

And the part (in the Trib) about how the rising levels of CO2 have no net negative harm?  Take a look at this from the National Geographic:

Crops grown in the high-CO2 atmosphere of the future could be significantly less nutritious, a new study published today in Nature suggests. Based on hundreds of experiments in the field, the work reveals a new challenge as society reckons with both rising carbon emissions and malnutrition in the future.

Scientists generally predict that crop yields could fall in a warmer world—though higher atmospheric CO2 by itself should raise yields, as plants find it easier to extract CO2 from the air to make carbohydrates.

Here's that paper in Nature.  Do you need to know that Nature is a peer-reviewed journal?  That means it's science and not "non-science."

So how much more do I need to tell you about the NIPCC, Peter Singer, and the scientific illiteracy on Scaife's braintrust for you to accept that they've written complete non-science nonsense today?