Follow-up details on the media and economic leaders mentioned in "Conservatives Finally Accepting Global Warming is Happening?"

William Teach of the blog "Pirate's Cove" (which I hope is just accidentally using the same name as the miniature golf courses located up and down the East coast) wrote a post on my most recent Ecopolitology article, "Conservatives Finally Accepting Global Warming is Happening?," after seeing it on Reuters.

Mr. Teach, apparently, has a little difficulty doing basic internet searches (as well as identifying plural pronouns). Teach quoted this part of my article:

"To start with, we’ve had a conservative columnist and a leading conservative economist (former advisor to George H.W. Bush), in the past month or so, telling their colleagues that it’s time to wake up to global warming and our need for action (see: “Bad science: Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause” and “The power of cap-and-trade”).

Then, he asked: "Who is this mystery man? Obviously, he is not so important that he needs to be named. So, I searched for the articles at Ecopolitology, and, much to my surprise, neither exists. If anyone knows who this man is, please, let us know."

He seems to have missed the "their" in the middle of that sentence and made the assumption that I was referencing one person. In fact, I was referencing two people (hence, "their colleagues," not "his colleagues") and two major articles that they authored. Unfortunately, for Mr. Teach and his readers, the links to those two articles mentioned were not in the Reuters copy (they are in the original post published here on Ecopolitology), and though Mr. Teach went through the effort of searching Ecopolitology for links to those articles, he was unable to find them. I'm not sure where he was looking because if he searched for the original article I wrote OR either of the articles mentioned, he would have found the original article with the links.

Anyway, enough on Mr. Teach's reading and researching abilities. Let me answer his questions about who these people are.

More Details on 4 Media and Economic Leaders

The author of the first piece, "Bad science: Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause," published in Canada's conservative and influential National Post is Jonathan Kay. He is "comment pages editor of the National Post,... a columnist for the National Post op-ed page, and a regular contributor to Commentary magazine and the New York Post. His freelance articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and various other publications."

The second article, "The power of cap and trade," was published in the Boston Globe and was co-authored by Dick Schmalensee. As I mentioned before, Schmalensee served as an advisor to President George H.W. Bush, serving on his Council of Economic Advisers from 1989-1991.

Next up, Mr. Teach said he had never heard of Michael Hanlon, Science Editor of the Daily Mail. As I quoted before, Hanlon "could previously be seen as the UK’s most influential ‘sceptic’." Perhaps Mr.Teach does not read publications outside of the U.S., but even if he doesn't read them, he should know that the Daily Mail is a major media publication in the UK. It has also been a major source and reproducer of climate misinformation.

Lastly, Mr. Teach had issue with CNN meteorologist Chad Myers being mentioned because CNN is not as conservative as, say..., Fox News. Being a long-time denier of man-made global warming on CNN doesn't make his long denial of the science or his recent statement that it is caused by humans any less important, though.

These may not be the most die-hard deniers who would book a flight to an underwater Maldives island to "prove" that global warming is not happening. But paradigm change doesn't start in the middle, it starts on the edges. And these are some very influential people on the edges.

Photo Credit: Some rights reserved by Mikael Miettinen