As Bring Me the News reports in GOP leader: Minnesotans won't complain if climate change causes state to get 2 degrees hotter and City Pages in Senate GOP leader: Minnesotans won't 'complain' about global warming, Paul Gazelka thinks Minnesotans won't mind a little climate change.
The idea isn't a new one in Minnesota's political discourse; indeed, the notion was the meme (in this case, a viral idea) behind the now moribund group, Minnesotans for Global Warming. The last post on the group's website--after a pitch for a coffee mug--appears to be from early 2018.
According to records on file with the Minnesota Secretary of State's office, Minnesotans for Global Warming, Incorporated was registered as a domestic corporation on April 6, 2010, with Elroy Balgaard as its registered agent. The group was active as far back as 2007, so we're assuming this was a move to monetize the meme.
We believe Balgaard, a west metro Republican activist, wrote for Minnesotans for Global Warming, wrote for his corporation under the pen name Elmer Beaugard.
Balgaard ran for the Minnetrista City Council last year; according to a candidate profile published by the Laker Pioneer, he's a graphic designer who is "also a musician in a band called The Balgaard Brothers." He came in third in a field of three candidates, according to election results online at the Minnesota Secretary of State's office.
He serves as the Communications Director for Senate District 33, according to the party unit's website. Republicans serving in the district are Senator David Osmek (chairman of the Senate’s Energy and Utilities Finance and Policy Committee) and Representative Jerry Hertaus. Once upon a time, Cindy Pugh served in the B side, but lost in the 2018 election to Kelly Morrison. Another highlight for anti-science? Anti-vaxxer leader Jennifer Larson is listed as Finance Chair. We're not sure when the site was last updated, since Hertaus' biography has him serving as vice-chair of a committee, duties which ended when the DFL regained control of the chamber in 2018.
Minnesotans for Global Warming in the News
A Google new search reveals that the group was active in 2009, when the conservative media criticism site Newsbusters reported Update from Minnesotans for Global Warming: 'Two Below Honey' in February, followed by Van Morrison Asks YouTube to Remove 'Two Below Honey' Satire. Aren't property rights a bitch?
The two most recent hits are from 2014. One is from the Heartland Institute, profiled here by ) If We Had Some Global Warming … (Song Parody), highlighting a 2007 video by the group. published in 2014. The other? The Guardian mentioned the group in Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap:
. . .Yesterday, Roy Spencer took to his blog, writing a post entitled "Time to push back against the global warming Nazis". The ensuing Godwinian rant was apparently triggered by somebody calling contrarians like Spencer "deniers." Personally I tend to avoid use of the term, simply because it inevitably causes the ensuing discussion to degenerate into an argument about whether "denier" refers to Holocaust denial. Obviously that misinterpretation of the term is exactly what "pushed [Spencer's] button," as he put it.
However, this misinterpretation has no basis in reality. The term "denier" merely refers to "a person who denies" something, and originated some 600 years ago, long before the Holocaust occurred. Moreover, as the National Center for Science Education and Peter Gleick at Forbes have documented, many climate contrarians (including the aforementioned Richard Lindzen) prefer to be called "deniers."
"I actually like 'denier.' That's closer than skeptic," says MIT's Richard Lindzen, one of the most prominent deniers. Steve Milloy, the operator of the climate change denial website JunkScience.com, told Popular Science, "Me, I just stick with denier ... I'm happy to be a denier." Minnesotans for Global Warming and other major denier groups go so far as to sing, "I'm a Denier!". sur
That should work with the kids. We're curious whether Gazelka truly thinks Minnesota's walleye fishery will survive in reality and they'll be taking out alligators, as per the video.
Climate scientist Michael Mann and these local folks
Minnesotans for Global Warming's shining moment was a public spat with Pennsylvania State climate science Michael Mann, reported here on conservative Fox News: Climate Scientist, Heated Up Over Satirical Video, Threatens Lawsuit. There's more at Michael Mann v No Cap and Trade, Minnesotans for Global Warming at the Digital Media Law Project. Your mileage may vary.
Mann discussed the episode in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. At the Atlantic Monthly in 2013, Chris Mooney looked at the larger controversy in The Hockey Stick: The Most Controversial Chart in Science, Explained:
Climate deniers threw all their might at disproving the famous climate change graph. Here's why they failed.
Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers--thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade").
The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD--and then, in 2001, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeprominently featured the hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report. Based on this evidence, the IPCC proclaimed that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years."="#fig220">
And then all hell broke loose.
Mann tells the full story of the hockey stick--and the myriad unsuccessful attacks on it--in his 2012 book TheHockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines; . . . But to summarize a very complex history of scientific and political skirmishes in a few paragraphs...
Read the discussion at the Atlantic. Mooney concludes:
. . .So what does it all mean? Well, here's the millennial scale irony: Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick. They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles Heel of global warming research--and even then, they couldn't hobble it. (Though they certainly sowed plenty of doubt in the mind of the public.)
What's more, even if they'd succeeded, in a scientific sense it wouldn't have even mattered.
"Climate deniers like to make it seem like the entire weight of evidence for climate change rests on the hockey stick," explains Mann. "And that's not the case. We could get rid of all these reconstructions, and we could still know that climate change is a threat, and that we're causing it." The basic case for global warming caused by humans rests on basic physics--and, basic thermometer readings from around the globe. The hockey stick, in contrast, is the result of a field of research called paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) that, while fascinating, only provides one thread of evidence among many for what we're doing to the planet.
. . .Meanwhile, the hockey stick's blade doesn't just stop rising of its own accord. It's just going to go up, and up, and up, as the image above, combining the Marcott hockey stick with projections of where temperatures are headed by 2100, plainly shows.
When he shows that graph to audiences, says Mann, "I often hear an audible gasp." In this sense, the hockey stick does indeed matter--for it dramatizes just how much human irresponsibility, in a relatively short period of time, can devastate the only home we have.
We wonder why Gazelka--praised so often for his reasonable manner--embraces an old joke when it comes to describing how Minnesotans think about climate action. But then, he sent his child to "conversion therapy," Bring Me The News noted in Child of Sen. Paul Gazelka condemns dad's 'gay conversion' vote, which also reported:
Conversion therapy is a deeply contentious issue and has come under severe criticism in the science community; according to The Trevor Project, "no credible scientific study has ever supported the claims of conversion therapists to actually change a person’s sexual orientation."
And then there's that defending Duluth against witchcraft moment.
Screengrab: From a YouTube by Minnesotans for Global Warming, a group led by a Minnesota Republican Senate District party officer.
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