Why Earth and Atmospheric Scientists Are Swearing Up a Storm and Getting Arrested.
By Jonathan Mingle, Slate, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012
NASA scientist and climatologist James Hansen takes part in a mock funeral parade during Climate Change Campaign Action Day in 2009 in Coventry, England
Many of us have wondered at some point in almost precisely these terms: “Is Earth Fucked?” But it’s not the sort of frank query you expect an expert in geomorphology to pose to his colleagues as the title of a formal presentation at one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings.
Hansen gets an inordinate amount of press, especially compared to scientists that write these sorts of studies: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.jp/2013/01/paper-finds-sun-controls-climate-gives.html
I’d never heard of “O. Karner” before, so I googled him (or her…) and found:
Peer-reviewed skeptic papers by Olavi Karner
This page lists any peer-reviewed papers by Olavi Karner that take a negative or explicitly doubtful position on human-caused global warming.
There are no peer-reviewed climate papers by Olavi Karner that meet this definition.
I also discovered he works or is part of a right wing think tank in Vancouver Canada called The Fraser Institute whose motto is “A free and prosperous world through choice, markets and responsibility” and is anti tax. Being Canadian, I used its website’s own search engine for “tar sands” and got this:
“The European Commission was wrongheaded when, in October, it singled out oil extracted from Canada’s ‘tar sands’ by proposing a higher carbon-emissions value for it than for other sources of fossil fuel. Given that very little Canadian oil currently makes its way to Europe, labelling it as ‘dirty’ would be largely symbolic. But such a designation would matter: it would muddy the issues that now surround extraction of Canadian oil and inflame trade tensions…. ”
I think neither Karner nor the Fraser Institute have any other interests than short term profits at the expense of future generations….
God I love the internet! How amazing is this?
If you look in the paper, his contact info is listed as
O. Ka¨rner, Tartu Observatory, To˜ravere 61602, Estonia. (olavi@aai.ee)
I’ve just sent him an email asking if he’s associated with the Fraser Institute.
If you look at that site, you can see he’s listed [1] as a “Research associate”. So we’re asserting that a research institution is funded or corrupted by the Fraser Institute. Not implausible, of course, but at least his main affiliation is with a real research group.
I also see the “Zoominfo” page [2] you found that says Olavi Karner is associated with the Fraser Institute. The link it has for where it got that info is a mess of unformatted text so I think the link is tenuous at best.
I also rang the Fraser Institute [3] and used their automated system to look up “Olavi Karner” and it did not return any results. I rang the operator to double-check but I was outside business hours.
So, looks like a different guy.
[1] http://www.aai.ee/?page=staff&lang=eng
[2] http://www.zoominfo.com/#!search/profile/company?companyId=54840403&targetid=profile
[3] The Fraser Institue (604) 688-0221
“A free and prosperous world through choice, markets and responsibility”
That’s free to pollute as much as they like but where’s the responsibility when it comes to taking any responsibility for that pollution.