ClimateScienceWatch

Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government

Climate Science Watch is a nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the integrity and effectiveness with which they use climate science and related research in government policymaking, toward the goal of enabling society to respond effectively to the challenges posed by global warming and climate change. See Details

Global Warming Denial Machine

Michael Mann interview: Denialists are waging “asymmetric warfare” against climate science

Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The climate science community is beginning to push back in the face of concerted attacks on the integrity of climate science. In a recent interview with science writer Chris Mooney, one of the most frequently attacked researchers—Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann—defended the fundamental scientific evidence on human-caused climate change and addressed issues of the ‘Climategate’ e-mail controversy. He pulled no punches in characterizing the problem of the global warming disinformation campaign and the dilemma with which it confronts the science community. See Details for partial transcript and links.

“Cyber bullying” and Congressional inquisition aim to chill the work of climate scientists

Posted on Monday, March 08, 2010

An article in The Daily Climate (“Cyber bullying rises as climate data are questioned”) reports on how some of the leading climate scientists are being subjected to a barrage of vitriolic, abusive, and threatening communications. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has a 19-page document of “extremely foul, nasty, abusive” e-mails he’s received just since November. Worst of all, says Gavin Schmidt of NASA, are “intimidating letters” from congressional members threatening dire consequences to scientists working on climate change. “That is chilling the work of science in the agencies.” That’s all fine with notorious denialist propagandist Marc Morano: “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down,” he says of the scientists. “They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

Naomi Oreskes: How a handful of scientists obscure the truth on global warming

Posted on Friday, March 05, 2010

Here’s a heads-up on a forthcoming book about the denial machine: In a videotaped lecture, University of California professor Naomi Oreskes discusses Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik Conway. From the publisher’s pre-publication announcement: “Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is ‘not settled’ denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These ‘experts’ supplied it.” See Details for the video of Prof. Oreskes’s talk.

E-mails show climate scientists struggling with push-back on anti-science political assault

Posted on Friday, March 05, 2010

Greenwire and the New York Times on-line reported today on leaked e-mails among leading U.S. scientists who are exchanging views on the question of how the climate science community can best counter the global warming denial machine, which is currently engaged in an all-out attack on multiple fronts seeking to delegitimize leading scientists, scientific organizations, and the scientific evidence on climate change.

UK Guardian: “US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’”

Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010

The Guardian covered the story of Senator Inhofe’s new prosecutorial approach to climate science. “A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt,” the British national daily newspaper reported. “But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 ‘key players’.”

Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlines this classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.

Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

Posted on Tuesday, February 23, 2010

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel of eminent scientists agreed they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news about a few errors in the 2007 IPCC climate change assessment report and to allegations about hacked researcher e-mails—but they characterized the public impact of these controversies as far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate, with profound implications.

“The situation is completely out of hand,” ScienceNOW reported Texas A&M climate scientist Gerald North saying at the event. “One guy e-mailed me to say I’m a ‘whore for the global warming crowd.’ Scientists cannot use the same tone and rhetorical style as commentators and bloggers,” he said. For example, how can scientists be expected to respond to this kind of incitement from the bizarre extremist talk show host Glenn Beck on Fox News: “If the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred.” This is not a science education problem—it’s much worse than that.

Deep Climate investigation of denialist and “skeptic” attack on Hockey Stick temperature record

Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010

The investigative blogger Deep Climate has been working to set the record straight on how an orchestrated campaign by members of Congress, industry-funded global warming denialist groups and PR operatives, and professional “skeptics” has spread misleading information about the paleoclimate temperature record while launching attacks on the integrity of leading members of the science community. Two recent posts at Deep Climate – “Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 1: In the beginning,” and “Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 2: The story behind the Barton-Whitfield investigation and the Wegman Panel,” should be read in their entirety, along with Richard Littlemore’s post at DeSmogBlog – “Wegman’s Report Highly Politicized – and Fatally Flawed: ‘Independent’ Hockey Stick analysis revealed as Republican set-up,” and Joe Romm’s post of additional supporting material, links, and references at Climate Progress.

Richard Somerville: A Response to Climate Change Denialism

Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010

Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, issued a statement in response to a recent request to address claims recently made by climate change denialists. “Science…does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet,“ he says. “The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.” See Details for full text and related links.

Stephen Schneider: Climate Denier Gate a case of Science as a Contact Sport

Posted on Wednesday, December 30, 2009

In Climate Denier Gate (Stephen Schneider’s term for what the deniers call “Climategate”), “the private frustrations of a few climate scientists was turned into an ostensible plot by the entire climate science community in dozens of countries, hundreds of institutions, and hammered out over 40 years of peer reviewed assessment studies—as some kind of fraud.” Schneider says, “The big untold story here is how broken the 2009 media is for investigating the wrong folks and giving credibility to a non-event that changes nothing in climate science.” One more episode in the decades-long tension between climate science and public debate, the subject of Schneider’s memoir, Science as a Contact Sport.

Reps. Joe Barton and James Sensenbrenner carried global warming denier message to Copenhagen

Posted on Wednesday, December 23, 2009

“We don’t have an icecap in Texas,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said at a December 18 press briefing in Copenhagen. The “theory [of anthropogenic climate change] has never been independently analyzed by any scientific group.” Mr. Barton and some of his colleagues, including Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), showed the media in Copenhagen that the Congressional global warming denial machine may be scientifically clueless, but is still capable of waging a nasty political battle.

Sensenbrenner IPCC witch-hunt: Attempt to blacklist climate scientists must be rejected

Posted on Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for scientists whose names appear in the e-mails stolen from the U.K. Climatic Research Unit to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Sensenbrenner is engaged in an outrageous McCarthyist jihad against the climate science community, making it abundantly clear that this controversy is not really about stolen e-mails, which have been misused and misinterpreted. Rather it is part of an aggressive campaign by the global warming denial machine to bully and intimidate the science community. Sensenbrenner shows no real interest in meaningful dialogue, nor in an honest examination of climate science findings. Denialists are throwing up a smokescreen of propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their refusal to come to grips with scientific evidence on global climatic disruption and its implications. This is a power play. Climate Science Watch calls on the IPCC to rebuff this attack. We call on the Obama Administration and in particular the President’s science adviser John Holdren to fully support the U.S. climate science community in this matter. We call on Sensenbrenner’s colleagues in Congress to chastise him for this censorious anti-scientist behavior. And we call on members of the science community to understand what the denial machine is up to and not allow themselves to be divided by innuendo about and attacks on scientists who have been singled out as immediate targets of a larger predatory attack on the community as a whole. Seeking an IPCC purge is just the next step. This attack, using guilt-by-association and demagogy, will go as far as it can to delegitimize the entire climate science and assessment enterprise if it is not exposed and thwarted. (See Details for the Sensenbrenner letter and press release.)

Lou Dobbs and global warming: Two stories

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009

On the occasion of Lou Dobbs abruptly quitting his anchor-commentator program on CNN, we recall two occasions on which he ran a climate change story. In one, he didn’t appear able to distinguish the relative merit of the views of a distinguished climate scientist and IPCC author and someone who views global warming as “the greatest scam in history.” In the other, covering a story on Bush White House political editing of climate science program reports, he did manage to note that “putting an oil industry lobbyist at the head of a council on the environment, that is curious, to say the least.”

Climate Cover-Up: New book by the DeSmogBlog team is a take-down of the denial machine

Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009

In their excellent new book, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore take on the deceptive public relations tactics behind the global warming denial machine. Featuring an oily cast of characters that may be familiar to our regular readers, their work reveals the techniques of mass confusion employed by major players in the energy industry to stall action on climate change.

Limbaugh to Revkin: Die

Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Likening “environmental wackos” to jihadi terrorists, Rush Limbaugh bent some recent comments on population and climate change by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin out of shape and threw down this challenge: “This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet…Mr Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?” Revkin has a good reply, which includes this: “This might be funny, in a sad way, if it weren’t for the fact that my mailbox is already heaped with hate mail.”

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