The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: "the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain". The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy". Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the "Manufactured Doubt" industry.
The Manufactured Doubt industry grows up
As the success of Hill and Knowlton's brilliant Manufactured Doubt campaign became apparent, other industries manufacturing dangerous products hired the firm to design similar PR campaigns. In 1967, Hill and Knowlton helped asbestos industry giant Johns-Manville set up the Asbestos Information Association (AIA). The official-sounding AIA produced "sound science" that questioned the link between asbestos and lung diseases (asbestos currently kills 90,000 people per year, according to the World Health Organization). Manufacturers of lead, vinyl chloride, beryllium, and dioxin products also hired Hill and Knowlton to devise product defense strategies to combat the numerous scientific studies showing that their products were harmful to human health.
By the 1980s, the Manufactured Doubt industry gradually began to be dominated by more specialized "product defense" firms and free enterprise "think tanks". Michaels wrote in Doubt is Their Product about the specialized "product defense" firms: "Having cut their teeth manufacturing uncertainty for Big Tobacco, scientists at ChemRisk, the Weinberg Group, Exponent, Inc., and other consulting firms now battle the regulatory agencies on behalf of the manufacturers of benzene, beryllium, chromium, MTBE, perchlorates, phthalates, and virtually every other toxic chemical in the news today....Public health interests are beside the point. This is science for hire, period, and it is extremely lucrative".
Joining the specialized "product defense" firms were the so-called "think tanks". These front groups received funding from manufacturers of dangerous products and produced "sound science" in support of their funders' products, in the name of free enterprise and free markets. Think tanks such as the George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer's SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been active for decades in the Manufactured Doubt business, generating misleading science and false controversy to protect the profits of their clients who manufacture dangerous products.
The ozone hole battle
In 1975, the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) industry realized it had a serious problem. The previous year, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, chemists at the University of California, Irvine, had published a scientific paper warning that human-generated CFCs could cause serious harm to Earth's protective ozone layer. They warned that the loss of ozone would significantly increase the amount of skin-damaging ultraviolet UV-B light reaching the surface, greatly increasing skin cancer and cataracts. The loss of stratospheric ozone could also significantly cool the stratosphere, potentially causing destructive climate change. Although no stratospheric ozone loss had been observed yet, CFCs should be banned, they said. The CFC industry hired Hill and Knowlton to fight back. As is essential in any Manufactured Doubt campaign, Hill and Knowlton found a respected scientist to lead the effort--noted British scientist Richard Scorer, a former editor of the International Journal of Air Pollution and author of several books on pollution. In 1975, Scorer went on a month-long PR tour, blasting Molina and Rowland, calling them "doomsayers", and remarking, "The only thing that has been accumulated so far is a number of theories." To complement Scorer's efforts, Hill and Knowlton unleashed their standard package of tricks learned from decades of serving the tobacco industry:
- Launch a public relations campaign disputing the evidence.
- Predict dire economic consequences, and ignore the cost benefits.
- Use non-peer reviewed scientific publications or industry-funded scientists who don't publish original peer-reviewed scientific work to support your point of view.
- Trumpet discredited scientific studies and myths supporting your point of view as scientific fact.
- Point to the substantial scientific uncertainty, and the certainty of economic loss if immediate action is taken.
- Use data from a local area to support your views, and ignore the global evidence.
- Disparage scientists, saying they are playing up uncertain predictions of doom in order to get research funding.
- Disparage environmentalists, claiming they are hyping environmental problems in order to further their ideological goals.
- Complain that it is unfair to require regulatory action in the U.S., as it would put the nation at an economic disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.
- Claim that more research is needed before action should be taken.
- Argue that it is less expensive to live with the effects.
The campaign worked, and CFC regulations were delayed many years, as Hill and Knowlton boasted in internal documents. The PR firm also took credit for keeping public opinion against buying CFC aerosols to a minimum, and helping change the editorial positions of many newspapers.
In the end, Hill and Knowlton's PR campaign casting doubt on the science of ozone depletion by CFCs turned out to have no merit. Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995. The citation from the Nobel committee credited them with helping to deliver the Earth from a potential environmental disaster.
The battle over global warming
In 1988, the fossil fuel industry realized it had a serious problem. The summer of 1988 had shattered century-old records for heat and drought in the U.S., and NASA's Dr. James Hansen, one of the foremost climate scientists in the world, testified before Congress that human-caused global warming was partially to blame. A swelling number of scientific studies were warning of the threat posed by human-cause climate change, and that consumption of fossil fuels needed to slow down. Naturally, the fossil fuel industry fought back. They launched a massive PR campaign that continues to this day, led by the same think tanks that worked to discredit the ozone depletion theory. The George C. Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer's SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been key players in both fights, and there are numerous other think tanks involved. Many of the same experts who had worked hard to discredit the science of the well-established link between cigarette smoke and cancer, the danger the CFCs posed to the ozone layer, and the dangers to health posed by a whole host of toxic chemicals, were now hard at work to discredit the peer-reviewed science supporting human-caused climate change.
As is the case with any Manufactured Doubt campaign, a respected scientist was needed to lead the battle. One such scientist was Dr. Frederick Seitz, a physicist who in the 1960s chaired the organization many feel to be the most prestigious science organization in the world--the National Academy of Sciences. Seitz took a position as a paid consultant for R.J. Reynolds tobacco company beginning in 1978, so was well-versed in the art of Manufactured Doubt. According to the excellent new book, Climate Cover-up, written by desmogblog.com co-founder James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, over a 10-year period Seitz was responsible for handing out $45 million in tobacco company money to researchers who overwhelmingly failed to link tobacco to anything the least bit negative. Seitz received over $900,000 in compensation for his efforts. He later became a founder of the George C. Marshall Institute, and used his old National Academy of Sciences affiliation to lend credibility to his attacks on global warming science until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. It was Seitz who launched the "Oregon Petition", which contains the signatures of more than 34,000 scientists saying global warming is probably natural and not a crisis. The petition is a regular feature of the Manufactured Doubt campaign against human-caused global warming. The petition lists the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" as its parent organization. According to Climate Cover-up, the Institute is a farm shed situated a couple of miles outside of Cave Junction, OR (population 17,000). The Institute lists seven faculty members, two of whom are dead, and has no ongoing research and no students. It publishes creationist-friendly homeschooler curriculums books on surviving nuclear war. The petition was sent to scientists and was accompanied by a 12-page review printed in exactly the same style used for the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A letter from Seitz, who is prominently identified as a former National Academy of Sciences president, accompanied the petition and review. Naturally, many recipients took this to be an official National Academy of Sciences communication, and signed the petition as a result. The National Academy issued a statement in April 2008, clarifying that it had not issued the petition, and that its position on global warming was the opposite. The petition contains no contact information for the signers, making it impossible to verify. In its August 2006 issue, Scientific American presented its attempt to verify the petition. They found that the scientists were almost all people with undergraduate degrees, with no record of research and no expertise in climatology. Scientific American contacted a random sample of 26 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to have a Ph.D. in a climate related science. Eleven said they agreed with the petition, six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember the petition, one had died, and five did not respond.
I could say much more about the Manufactured Doubt campaign being waged against the science of climate change and global warming, but it would fill an entire book. In fact, it has, and I recommend reading Climate Cover-up to learn more. The main author, James Hoggan, owns a Canadian public relations firm, and is intimately familiar with how public relations campaigns work. Suffice to say, the Manufactured Doubt campaign against global warming--funded by the richest corporations in world history--is probably the most extensive and expensive such effort ever. We don't really know how much money the fossil fuel industry has pumped into its Manufactured Doubt campaign, since they don't have to tell us. The website exxonsecrets.org estimates that ExxonMobil alone spent $20 million between 1998 - 2007 on the effort. An analysis done by Desmogblog's Kevin Grandia done in January 2009 found that skeptical global warming content on the web had doubled over the past year. Someone is paying for all that content.
Lobbyists, not skeptical scientists
The history of the Manufactured Doubt industry provides clear lessons in evaluating the validity of their attacks on the published peer-reviewed climate change science. One should trust that the think tanks and allied "skeptic" bloggers such as Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That will give information designed to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there are respected scientists with impressive credentials that these think tanks use to voice their views, but these scientists have given up their objectivity and are now working as lobbyists. I don't like to call them skeptics, because all good scientists should be skeptics. Rather, the think tanks scientists are contrarians, bent on discrediting an accepted body of published scientific research for the benefit of the richest and most powerful corporations in history. Virtually none of the "sound science" they are pushing would ever get published in a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal, and indeed the contrarians are not scientific researchers. They are lobbyists. Many of them seem to believe their tactics are justified, since they are fighting a righteous war against eco-freaks determined to trash the economy.
I will give a small amount of credit to some of their work, however. I have at times picked up some useful information from the contrarians, and have used it to temper my blogs to make them more balanced. For example, I no longer rely just on the National Climatic Data Center for my monthly climate summaries, but instead look at data from NASA and the UK HADCRU source as well. When the Hurricane Season of 2005 brought unfounded claims that global warming was to blame for Hurricane Katrina, and a rather flawed paper by researchers at Georgia Tech showing a large increase in global Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, I found myself agreeing with the contrarians' analysis of the matter, and my blogs at the time reflected this.
The contrarians and the hacked CRU emails
A hacker broke into an email server at the Climate Research Unit of the UK's University of East Anglia last week and posted ten years worth of private email exchanges between leading scientists who've published research linking humans to climate change. Naturally, the contrarians have seized upon this golden opportunity, and are working hard to discredit several of these scientists. You'll hear claims by some contrarians that the emails discovered invalidate the whole theory of human-caused global warming. Well, all I can say is, consider the source. We can trust the contrarians to say whatever is in the best interests of the fossil fuel industry. What I see when I read the various stolen emails and explanations posted at Realclimate.org is scientists acting as scientists--pursuing the truth. I can see no clear evidence that calls into question the scientific validity of the research done by the scientists victimized by the stolen emails. There is no sign of a conspiracy to alter data to fit a pre-conceived ideological view. Rather, I see dedicated scientists attempting to make the truth known in face of what is probably the world's most pervasive and best-funded disinformation campaign against science in history. Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change--which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines--is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists being subject to the fiercest attacks.
Exaggerated claims by environmentalists
Climate change contrarians regularly complain about false and misleading claims made by ideologically-driven environmental groups regarding climate change, and the heavy lobbying these groups do to influence public opinion. Such efforts confuse the real science and make climate change seem more dangerous than it really is, the contrarians argue. To some extent, these concerns are valid. In particular, environmentalists are too quick to blame any perceived increase in hurricane activity on climate change, when such a link has yet to be proven. While Al Gore's movie mostly had good science, I thought he botched the treatment of hurricanes as well, and the movie looked too much like a campaign ad. In general, environmental groups present better science than the think tanks do, but you're still better off getting your climate information directly from the scientists doing the research, via the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Another good source is Bob Henson's Rough Guide to Climate Change, aimed at people with high-school level science backgrounds.
Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):
Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
Williams Companies $920,000
Flint Hills Resources $820,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000
National Mining Association $770,000
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000
Devon Energy $695,000
Sunoco $585,000
Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000
Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000
Peabody Energy $420,000
Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000
America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000
Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000
El Paso Corporation $261,000
Spectra Energy $279,000
National Propane Gas Association $242,000
National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000
Nexen, Inc $230,000
Denbury Resources $200,000
Nisource, Inc $180,000
Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000
Valero Energy Corporation $160,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000
Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000
Tesoro Companies $119,000
Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000:
Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500
Nature Conservancy $650,000
Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000
National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000
Sierra Club $120,000
Defenders of Wildlife $120,000
Environmental Defense Fund $100,000
If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.
Corporate profits vs. corporate social responsibility
I'm sure I've left the impression that I disapprove of what the Manufactured Doubt industry is doing. On the contrary, I believe that for the most part, the corporations involved have little choice under the law but to protect their profits by pursuing Manufactured Doubt campaigns, as long as they are legal. The law in all 50 U.S. states has a provision similar to Maine's section 716, "The directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interest of the corporation and of the shareholders". There is no clause at the end that adds, "...but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates, or the dignity of employees". The law makes a company's board of directors legally liable for "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. Shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible, and not paying enough attention to the bottom line. We can reward corporations that are managed in a socially responsible way with our business and give them incentives to act thusly, but there are limits to how far Corporate Socially Responsibility (CSR) can go. For example, car manufacturer Henry Ford was successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day. The courts declared that, while Ford's humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders.
So, what is needed is a fundamental change to the laws regarding the purpose of a corporation, or new regulations forcing corporations to limit Manufactured Doubt campaigns. Legislation has been introduced in Minnesota to create a new section of law for an alternative kind of corporation, the SR (Socially Responsible) corporation, but it would be a long uphill battle to get such legislation passed in all 50 states. Increased regulation limiting Manufactured Doubt campaigns is possible to do for drugs and hazardous chemicals--Doubt is Their Product has some excellent suggestions on that, with the first principle being, "use the best science available; do not demand certainty where it does not and cannot exist". However, I think such legislation would be difficult to implement for environmental crises such as global warming. In the end, we're stuck with the current system, forced to make critical decisions affecting all of humanity in the face of the Frankenstein monster our corporate system of law has created--the most vigorous and well-funded disinformation campaign against science ever conducted.
Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone, and I'll be back Monday--the last day of hurricane season--with a review of the hurricane season of 2009.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Glad you came out of "Lurkville"!
Have to hit the road to do the last minute stuff. Hope to see you again.
Safe and sober holiday to all.....well, safe anyway! :)
yikes Ike it's cooool by you and Aqua Too!!
Mornings are BEST!
yeah, booooo on the Chilly..... looks like I have to be on colic alert (horses) and pull the horse blankets out of the bins....wish it would stay in the 70"s year round
And the 3 month precip outlook compared to normal...
Hey surfmom and Happy Thanksgiving to you.
AQUA - SNOW is a 4 letter word!!!!!
Or aged HorseGoldNuggets or a few buckets of ChickenGold.
If you have free-range chicks they do a lovely job shredding and turning leaves into to mulch, plus you get fresh eggs...... I penned my hens in the veggie garden area and put those feet to work - they turned over the soil beautifully. Every suburban yard should have a flock - no bad bugs, healthier and happier fruit trees.... of course you need neighbors that won't rat you out! Must say the hens egg production is cranking since we got cooler temps......
POTTERYX - NICELY STATED
Glad to hear it. You needed some rain.
Thanks IKE!!! same to YOU : ) --BUT, what's this you wishing for snow & cold temps? LOL -- you know how it puts us Florida Girls in a "Flurry" when we have to give up flipflops and consider wearing socks!!!
arvvvy!!!!!
and cold water temps...... takes the wave riding pleasure and twists it into a session of Pain & Torture in order to get a rush..... ohhhhh please....I want to continue the myth I live in a tropical paradise : )
AMEN!!!!! or
raising baby chicks by hand and then losing half (12-which were to be sold to cover the start up costs) devoured by Ricky Raccoon when he broke into the coop
or
counting on your Mango Tree to supply the bumper crop it produced the year b/4 --only to experience ElNorte freezing the blossoms & baby bud fruit and yielding only 20 survivors verses the 60 plus from the year b/4.
Now, I'm not going to starve --cause I have the market down the road..... but if I had to depend on my garden, my fruit trees, my hens to sruvive....it would be quite a different story.
Humble in a HeartBEAT...... MotherNature is in charge...we merely fool and distract ourselves into thinking otherwise. Because we are sooo removed from some of the above experiences --most of society is out of touch as to how integrated we are with her. ......and that we can not harness her... and should we try --there will always be a back lash.....
Many of us here have a keener sense because we're weather geeks .....but a hungry belly would make it all the more clearer.
LOL...I'm several hundred miles to your NNW. I'll take a 3-6 inch snow and you can keep the tropical weather down there.
so my first course of the day will be serving carrots and molasses cookies after the track work out.
Surfers had hoped this cold front/rain would have brought some wave action... but it's way flat on the Gulf now...water Temp is 74 degrees and dropping. Might see a bump up late in the afternoon....but doubtful I'll make it out..
Hoping when I return the spouse will have carefully (lol) clean out the fireplace... got the feeling it's that time of the season whether I like it or not.
your going to burn leaves... your going to add your bit into the global warming thing i keep hearing about. hehe
Perfect weather for the day in ECFL.
Cool, brisk.
Time to make the pies! :)
Yeah...I know. I'll probably get hammered by some in here.
Maybe you should take a few minutes to read about it, too...hehe ;)
I no all about it... i also no there are 30,000 scientist, of which 10,000 have PHD's. and they no its all hogwash. Read about the Oregon Petition.
Know Aus... not no
Squall line not as potent as in earlier runs, but still there for the Florida Peninsula next week.
AOI
AOI
AOI
AOI
Humor in Comments
its internet speak
Those leaves were going to release their carbon as they rot anyway...a net change of 0 by burning, just a shorter time frame.
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
AGW AKA Anthropogenic Global Wishcasting is a construct whose sole goal is financial gain.
That being said, conservation of resources is the only way to go.
Case in point.
Those curly light bulbs.
One curly light bulb consuming 13 watts per hour generates the equivalent light of a 75 watt incandescent bulb.
One curly bulb left on for 24/7 for a year consumes 114,000 watts and costs $12.54 @ 0.11 per kilowatt hour.
That 75 watt incandescent over the same period consumes 657,000 watts and costs $72.27 @ 0.11 per kilowatt hour.
Conservation at work...You own a home in an area that security is an issue. You place one curly at the front door, one curly at the back door and one more at each corner of your home for a total of six curlys. The energy consumption is 342,000 watts and the cost is $37.62 .... for the entire year. BTW...your lights are controlled by a device that turns them off at daybreak, for an average 'on' time equal to 12 hours per day.
Conservation not at work...same home...substitute 75 watt incandescents instead. The energy consumption is 1,974,000 watts and the cost is $217.14 ... again for the entire year. Same device at work turning them off at daybreak.
Savings per year? $179.52 and the curlys have a life of 8000 hours which translates to over two years of service as compared with the 800 hours for the average incandescent.
Go to SamsClub or Costco and you can buy 8 of them for somewhere near $10 per package.
Now that is carbon control at work in the real world.
The choice is yours.
Be part of the AGW crowd...
fly all over the world for meetings, pumping ungodly amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Drive HumVees with the horrendous gas mileage and then lecture the rest of us calling us contrarians and denialists. Cap and Trade is the sneaky trick the AGW crowd uses to get around conservation by allowing them to purchase carbon credits and get their money by perpetrating the fraud of AGW and the Cap and Trade rip off.
Or
Be a sheepdog...
who sees through the smokescreen and, instead, chooses to conserve with energy efficient appliances and automobiles as well as choosing alternate ways of conducting business that helps save the planet.
Sheepdogs who are careful to recycle properly and who simply challenge the AGW crowd to please give us the raw data so that we can do the math too.
If they, the AGW crowd, have nothing to hide, why are they hiding that information?
Why can't we all be like Jerry McGuire and, in one loud voice demand...
"SHOW US THE DATA!!!....ALL OF IT!!!"
3:05 PM GMT on November 26, 2009
Happy Thanksgiving!
Jeff Masters
Happy Thanksgiving Dr. J.
Emergency crews are dealing with hundreds of calls after wild weather caused flooding and damage across Victoria.
A teenage girl is in a stable condition in the Monash Medical Centre after she was struck by lightning at Rowville, in Melbourne's east this afternoon.
A house at Lalor, in Melbourne's north, caught fire after it was struck by lightning, and a train driver required medical treatment after a train was struck by lightning at Sunshine.
A football clubhouse at Mont Albert and a shopping plaza at Greensborough were damaged when part of their roofs collapsed.
Rainfalls of up to 40 millimetres have been recorded at Mount Buffalo and Warrandyte, and the weather bureau is predicting more falls tonight.
Tim Wiebusch from the State Emergency Service (SES) says crews are working around the clock.
"SES volunteers will be working right through the night tonight, we are expecting another rain band to come through later in the evening, the bureau's indicating it could be up to 50 millimetres of rain again tonight," he said.
"The SES crews are increasing in numbers as we speak, starting to address that backlog of nearly 600 requests for assistance."
Connex says the storms have disrupted all services causing lengthy delays and cancellations.
Spokeswoman Lanie Harris says the network has been hit hard.
"Flooding at Blackburn, we have had trees down on powerlines, we have had lightning strikes that have cut power," she said.
"So there have been massive delays right through the afternoon and [there is] possibly another storm on the way, so we are preparing ourselves."
Around 9,000 customers are without power in eastern Victoria, while hundreds of homes have also lost their supplies in Melbourne's west.
Natasha Whalley from SP Ausnet says it could take several hours before electricity is restored.
"In some cases lightning can cause quite a lot of damage to the network, and our crews have to patrol the powerline to make sure it is safe to turn the power back on," she said.
- ABC
I no what those people that were struck are going through
I wanted to take this moment to express my best wishes to everyone to have a great Thansksgiving today with your families.
Eat plentiful of course, but more importantly, please be safe out there as well!
Happy Thanksgiving!
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! YOU ANSWERED THE REQUEST TO POST OFF-TOPIC!!
WHOO HOO C'MON IN NRAAMY! ALL-EEE ALL-EEE IN FREE! Not sure about purple-pooping-hippo, though...but I think Captain Underpants is welome!
HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!
(Just shouting for the joy of the day!)
Thank you all so much for letting me join in the conversation this year, for putting up with me and my newbie-ness.
(Kind of long, but I felt it was worthy of more than just a link -- pls. let me know if you think I was correct or wrong in my thinking...and thanks again to those who serve, in any capacity!)
Gazette.net (Maryland)
Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009
Former Green Beret takes command of Garden of Lights
Gruff exterior hides heart of a gardener
by Amber Parcher | Staff Writer
Staff Sgt. Larry McMillan has jumped out of planes, trudged through swampy wetlands in enemy territory and counted himself among America's elite military men for 20 years.
But the Germantown resident has traded all of that for a new mission: stringing colored lights in the shapes of bears, geese and sunflowers over the flora at Brookside Gardens.
McMillan, a 60-year-old retired member of the army Special Forces, is the man behind the Garden of Lights, one of the Wheaton garden's most popular holiday attractions.
The regimented Green Beret joined the gardens four years ago as a seasonal helper after he was laid off from a 17-year stint at Kmart.
"I saw an ad for a light show—whatever the heck that was—and applied," he said while standing outside the garden's Visitor's Center on Friday hours before the show's premier, a plug for a lighted purple hyacinth in one leathered hand and a switch-blade in the other.
At first, the hardened man in the camouflage cap didn't quite fit the profile for an Earth-loving Brookside gardener.
McMillan is right out of a war scene on "Forrest Gump," said McMillan's boss, landscape supervisor Jeff Patterson: He doesn't eat breakfast or lunch, he drinks two cups of coffee before bed, his arms are covered in tattoos and a pack of Marlboro Lights is never far from his hands.
"He started out as this rough-and-tough-nobody-wants-to-mess-with-him ex-marine," Patterson said.
Maybe it was a result of his years of globetrotting, from the jungles in Southeast Asia to the tropics in Central America, but McMillan quickly slipped right into daily life at the garden. In his short tenure at Brookside, he steadily climbed the ranks from light-show wrapper to turf-maintenance guy to supervisor of both.
And the staff warmed.
"He has a really hard exterior, but he's a big softie," said Katie Hillesland, the designer for much of the displays at the Garden of Lights.
A year later, McMillan's horticulture-enthusiast wife, Cathy Tait, was hired on as a gardener's assistant. Her presence shone a new light on McMillan, said Leslie McDermott, the communications director at Brookside.
"It was funny to see this tough, military guy being called sweetie by his wife on the radio," she said.
McMillan takes all of the tough-guy-gone-gardener jokes in stride. Example one: A tall cherry tree near the reflection terrace that's fondly referred to as "Larry's tree."
It was April, and McMillan was finishing tearing down last year's show, stretched out on an orchard ladder about 10 feet in the air to unwrap the tree. But spring's warmth had not yet unfrosted the frozen ground, and McMillan leaned an inch too far.
"The ladder kicked out from under me, and I landed on my back," he said. He pulled every muscle in his body and almost fractured four vertebrae. But there was no lamenting the month he was forced to stay home—instead the accident became a joke among staff, something to kid him about.
When he came back, was he hesitant to climb a ladder again?
"No," he scoffed. "I used to jump out of airplanes."
It's McMillan's lore that keeps his staff in line, some say. He demands a lot from his staff, and procrastinators beware — his patience for milling about is non-existent.
But the hard-workers always get something in return for following his curt orders.
"Larry will respect the hell out of you if you work," Patterson said.
McMillan admits his style is a bit "gruff."
"I think I get along with people good—even though I can be a bit of a hard-nose," he said with a rare smile twisting across his face.
Of course, he sets the example himself.
"There ain't a whole lot here anybody can ask of me that I won't do," he said.
But McMillan retains some aura of mystery. He can't talk too specifically about where he's been or what he's done in the army. When asked if he served in the Vietnam War, McMillan pulls out a Marlboro Light cigarette from under his faded sweatshirt, lights it and takes a puff.
"I don't talk about that," he said. "Back then, it was either join or get drafted."
He will open up about his moonlight job as a state-certified wildlife-control operator. Wearing that hat at the garden, he traps squirrels, rabbits and raccoons — all enemies of the fertile soil plants need to grow.
He relocates the healthy animals, but any rabid raccoon caught by McMillan is doomed.
"I can put a 22-caliber bullet in their head," McMillan said. The state mandates the disease-ridden animals be destroyed, he explained. He added that he makes sure he kills the poor beast humanely.
McMillan is no stranger to weapons in wildlife or on the battlefield: He's also a hunter-safety, bow-hunter and trapping instructor.
And while he's happy at Brookside, he finds the Washington, D.C., region "too busy."
Perhaps that's why he's found some solace and a home in Montgomery County's refuge.
A lot of powerful people have a lot of politcal capital and money riding on this. Notice the convienent change of moniker from "global warming" to "climate change". Their PR machine is working overtime, far outreaching the money that Dr. Masters claims is influencing the argument from the energy industry.
30 years ago when I was in my graduate program in Environmental the rage was the "ice age" was upon us. In my opinion we are really no further in our understanding of the forces impacting the climate as then.
Now a upcoming new breed of discredited chicken littles have alarmed the gullible populus. Al Gore states the argument is over. I say far from it.
Good thing the Vikings had SUV's so they could colonize Greenland. Face facts, recorded climate history is very small, and external factors (i.e solar activity / sun spots) has a lot more impact than the CO2 levels that are supposedly dooming our future.
And last, as far as manipulation of data. You can put as much spin on it as you want. Believe me, I beleive the surface has only been scratched on this scandal. I hope Soros' and Gore's fingerprints are all over it.
And finally, trying to tie cigarette studies to this AGW debate is pretty lame. I like to quote John Coleman (Weather Channel Founder) who likens this AGW debacle to the biggest scam in human history.
No disrespect to you Dr. Masters, just my 2 cents.
Only the extremists on either side of the argument are driving the arguments here; the sky is falling or it isn't; I for one beleive somewhere in the middle, but what harm does it do to be better stewards of our planet?
Catfish, whose koolaid have you been drinking?
For everyone here, my friends and otherwise, a very HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
To those of you who helped me and my family through the sirgery I just had, many thanks, and blessings for you all, and last but not least, for all of you helping with Portlight in any way, god bless you!
I'm out folks...going to rest for a while, have some turkey dinner and pain killers and in general have a greatr day among my loverd ones
Okay Flood.... Just what are the so called denialist lying about? Pretty funny comment since it is the other side that is throwing out and or falsifying data. At my company you get fired for that.
However, Dr. Masters has conveniently forgotton to list the biggest of financial contributors to the AGW cause...
General Electric (GE) to the tune of $19,661,000 in 2009 alone!!!
$19.3 million in 2008, and on and on for the last decade!
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