Lawrence Solomon, Anti-Vaxxer: Part Bazillion

Enter Lawrence Solomon. You remember Lawrence Solomon, don’t you? He’s what I referred to last summer as a rising star in the antivaccine movement. A conservative columnist for the Financial Post, when first we met him he was complaining about a “conservative failure of skepticism” on vaccines because, apparently, conservatives haven’t been antivaccine enough for his liking. (Maybe he’s happier with more recent developments.) Indeed, Solomon used some seriously brain dead arguments about herd immunity indistinguishable from the nonsense they regularly spew over at the antivaccine crank blog.

I've said it before; The Star published one piece suggesting that Gardisil might have some hidden dangers and the whole media shit.  Quite properly, too, and The Star issued a grovelling apology. Because The Star is a class act where people worry  about accuracy and journalistic standards.  What kind of crap newspaper must The National/Financial Post be to offer this guy an ongoing platform for spouting dangerous gibberish.  Do these people have absolutely no shame?

The National Post Should Fire That Anti-Vaxxer Prick

National Post columnist Lawrence Solomen is now running an anti-vaxxer website.  You can see it here.  This is from the "About us" section:

VaccineFactCheck, headed by Lawrence Solomon, is a project of Consumer Policy Institute.

The "Consumer Policy Institute" is also just more Solomon, another part of his "Energy Probe" network of  astro-turf groups pushing various corporate causes.

Now, Solomon probably wouldn't call it an anti-vaxxer site; he'd probably just claim he was trying to "teach the controversy".  But that is, of course, bullshit.  And after that whole thing with The Star's Gardisil article I thought the whole nation had come to the conclusion that this kind of ant-vaccine  fear mongering was beyond the pale.  But not the National Post, apparently.

So here's a call out to Andrew Coyne, who is apparently some kind of editorial big-wig over there at the NP these days:  fire Lawrence Solomen.  Ditch the kook.  Show some class.

Globe vs. Geller?

From Media Culpa:

It’s a sad day when Atlas Shrugs looks like better journalism than the Globe and Mail.

Indeed.  Interesting too is that this article appears to mark climate-change denier and all round corporate shill Lawrence Solomon's return to the Globe after many years of writing for the National Post.  It would be interesting to know the back-story behind that move.  In any case, its sad news that anyone in the MSM would see fit to publish the man.  As MC demonstrates, he's already starting to drag the G&M down.

Whoops!  Looks like Solomen is writing for both papers!  I didn't know that was allowed.  In any case, he is back at the Globe after a long absence.

Dirty Business: Who Funds Wind Concerns Ontario?

Dunno, really.  There have been rumours that the PWU (Power Workers Union) is behind them, but nothing really solid, and its clear that however it raises funds, WCO's core membership are local NIMBY's.

However,  their new book, Dirty Business, shows multiple links to Energy Probe, Lawrence Solomon's faux enviro group.  From the EP website:

(September 9, 2011) Dirty Business, a new book that focuses on wind power’s impacts on Ontario’s power systems and rural communities, features three Energy Probe directors (retired banker Parker Gallant, economist Michael Trebilcock and Globe columnist Margaret Wente), and a past executive director (Tom Adams).

Given the obsessions of Wente and Co., it isn't surprising that they might have allowed some of their columns to be reproduced for the volume.  More intriguing is Parker's Gallant's role as the book's "Contributing Editor", which suggests some kind of consultative role in its creation.  He is also, as it turns out, on WCO's BOD.

As background, Energy Probe seems to have begun life as a kind of quirky, right-wing group devoted to promoting free market solutions to environmental problems.  As you can see from the Star article at the bottom of the link, back in the 1990s Solomon managed to convince the right-wing Donner Foundation Canada to kick in several $100,000s (perhaps as much as $1.6 million) for various projects, and their name still appears on the Energy Probe Research Foundation's donors page.  So these guys are pretty well-heeled

In any case, whatever EP might have started out as, it has in recent years degenerated into your standard-issue AGW denialist group, or at least serves as an outlet for Mr. Solomon's curious notions on the topic.

I'm not sure this gets us much closer to answering who funds Wind Concerns.  But perhaps it will cause a few people--journos, maybe who are in a position to get answers--to at least ask a few questions.

PS.  As of this mornin, WCO had not filed for third-party status here, which limits the manner in which they can spend money to promote their cause.. 

Wind: What Lawrence Solomon Emits

He blithers as follows:

The role of wind farms in the soaring power bills is not yet widely understood, just as the role of nuclear reactors in the rising power bills of two decades ago wasn't initially understood. As this understanding takes hold, and as wind's environmental costs become better known, the pushback will grow and wind will come to symbolize out-of-scale technology and arrogance-- the new nuclear.

Well, a year is a long time in politics, but as of last April the rebellion hadn't materialized:

Seventy-nine per cent (79%) of Scarborough residents support Toronto Hydro's plan to put a wind measuring device off the Scarborough shore, while 84 per cent of Essex County residents support plans to build wind farms there.

"What we're seeing in Essex County and Scarborough is not only strong support for the Green Energy Act, but strong support for local wind energy initiatives," said Dan Arnold of Pollara.

And since then the only real resistance I see to government efforts at making Ontario a green energy manufacturing center are from a bunch of NIMBYs with highly alleged health concerns.

Of course, Tim Hudak is looking to ride any angry populist wave he can find; so what's he going to do to stem the tide of turbines? Pretty much nothing, as it turns out. I'd bet it's because he doesn't see a wave coming from that direction.

Lawrence Solomon: From Credible To Refuted In Under Fifteen Minutes!

As per usual in his series on AGW Deniers, Lawrence Solomon is able to find a retired old fart to talk about an area of science he has no special expertise in. In this case, soil scientist Cliff Ollier attempts to demonstrate that the rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is impossible.

Here's Mr. Ollier describing what's impossible:

The scenarios [of rapid melting]...stem from models divorced from the real world. They rely on imaginary glaciers and ice sheets -- not on the actual formations that exist in Greenland and Antarctica -- and demonstrate no understanding of how glaciers flow.
[...]
Ice sheets do not melt from the surface down -- only at the edges,' Prof. Ollier explains. The modellers' mechanism that has 'meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers.'"

And here's an account by real glaciologists of the impossible happening just this April:

A report in today's Science describes how researchers recorded the drainage of one such lake in Greenland. The lake was roughly 5.6 km2, but drained completely in less than an hour and a half. The lake's contents rapidly made their way down to the bottom of the ice sheet, 980 m below the surface. During this period, the average drainage rate was 8700 m3/s. For reference, the average flow rate for Niagara Falls is only 5700 m3/s.

As Jerry Fodor is fond of saying: Ptonk! (meaning: Argument over!)

Usually with one of Solomon's pieces it takes a bit of research to discover that its all bullshit. Luckily, in this case, I've been wanting to write about these glacial lakes for awhile now, and already had a few links/quotes in the bag.

National Post Caught In Global Warming Lie

In the course of Lawrence Solomon's series on Global Warming skeptics, "The Deniers", no less than three scientists were incorrectly referred to as global warming "deniers", including Nigel Weiss, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Of the three, Mr. Weiss was offended enough that he issued a press release clarifying his position, and wrote a letter to the Natty Post claiming that Solomon had slandered him. At first Solomon slithered about in print for a bit, claiming that he was using the term "denier" in its most heroic sense. I guess, however, that the threat of imminent legal action held sway at last, because this morning the Post assumed its best grovelling position:

Nigel Weiss, professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, believes that the warming trend in Earth's climate is caused by greenhouse gases produced by human activity, and that the effect of a potential future reduction in solar activity would not reverse or cancel out that trend, but might have a small effect in mitigating it. He has held these views for several years. Incorrect information appeared in a column in the Financial Post on Feb. 2. The National Post withdraws any allegation that Dr. Weiss is a global warming "denier" and regrets the embarrassment caused him by the Feb. 2 column and a further column on Feb. 9.

On behalf of Mr. Weiss and the planet in general, let me just respond to this by saying that the editorial staff and columnists at the Natty Post are all a bunch of wiggly worms, the lowest form of life that crawls, and I look forward with joy and anticipation to the day when your next rotten filthy lie is waved before your faces and you are, once again, forced to eat the dirt that lies beneath our feet.