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 |
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.
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“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.”
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Robert Watson: IPCC is fundamentally sound; don’t let “skeptics” distract or derail action
Posted on Sunday, March 07, 2010
“Does the IPCC process need to be significantly revised? I would argue that it does not,” says Robert Watson, former IPCC chairman and currently chief science adviser to the UK environment department. “The Principles and Procedures for the selection of authors and review editors, and the peer-review process and approval of reports are all sound. What is needed is to tighten up the implementation of these procedures.” The IPCC “is one of the most rigorous scientific review bodies in existence,” says Watson, and “in many cases is very conservative in its statements.”
In his March 2 guest post on a World Bank site (“Is the scientific evidence of human-induced climate change unequivocal?”), Watson says: “To suggest that the hacked e-mails or the identified inaccuracies in the IPCC Working Group II report undermine the broad evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing due to human activities, or that any talk of carbon emissions cuts should be suspended, is simply untenable. …The challenges of the skeptics must be fully addressed, …[but] We must not allow them to use the incident at [the University of East Anglia] or the mistakes in the IPCC report to distract us or derail the political will to safeguard the planet.”
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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.
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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.
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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’.”
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Al Gore New York Times op-ed a lesson for Obama in how to talk about climate change with candor
Posted on Saturday, February 27, 2010
In the Sunday February 28 New York Times former Vice-President Al Gore weighs in with a strong, 1,900-word op-ed column that includes a spirited defense of climate science and the besieged climate science community (something it would be nice to see Obama start doing). Gore also takes aim at the political paralysis that has been allowed to develop in Washington, notwithstanding the large Democratic majority. He argues for not abandoning cap-and-trade legislation—even as it now appears that it may be on the verge of being jettisoned by Senate climate bill negotiators. Will Senate leaders try to sell us a watered-down compromise that is inadequate to the problem supposedly being addressed? And he delivers a richly-deserved thrashing of the hubristic triumphalism of free-market fundamentalists, who have served the interests of corporate power and wealth, promoted fake-populist demagogues, and undermined the country’s ability to govern itself intelligently. “From the standpoint of governance,” Gore says, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.”
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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.
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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.
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Anyone Can Whistle: The Essential Role of the Whistleblower in American Society
Posted on Saturday, February 20, 2010
On February 17 the Government Accountability Project teamed up with Participant Media and the Paley Center for Media in New York City for a televised, long-format special featuring legendary whistleblowers. The program detailed and analyzed what whistleblowers are, the six stages of whistleblowing they typically experience, and their lack of legal protections. Noted guests for the event included Daniel Ellsberg, former FDA commissioner David Kessler, former NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, and others. See Details for more information and link to video of the event.
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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.
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World Wildlife Fund statement on the IPCC and WWF’s scientific work
Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010
The World Wildlife Fund has issued a statement on the results of the organization’s inquiry into statements about Himalayan glaciers and the climate change threat in the Amazon attributed to WWF in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change impacts assessment report. The statement indicates steps WWF will take to ensure that the scientific community and the public can more easily distinguish between WWF’s voluminous peer-reviewed scientific reports and their general communications products, and to ensure their scientific publications continue to meet the highest standards for accuracy, and notes the broader context of the strong scientific basis for understanding climate change.
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Why snowstorms freak out Washington, D.C.: How snow-plowing policy is made in the nation’s capital
Posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
“Obama announces that he wants to get the snow plowed, but that he wants bipartisan consensus and compromise instead of unilateral action, and that instead of him pushing a particular snow-plowing policy, he wants Congress to work out the details. The Republicans, seeing that Obama is for cleaning up the snow, decide that they must be against it. They negotiate the plan down to clearing half the snow and doing it very slowly. Then they still refuse to support it. Joe Lieberman expresses his intention to join Republicans in filibustering the plan if it comes to that. Eventually, the Republicans and Senate Democrats have whittled it down to a non-binding resolution expressing support for the idea of ‘somebody’ plowing the snow at some point in the future, and the Democrats have thrown in some tax cuts to get 60 votes. It finally passes, still getting zero Republican votes (other than Olympia Snowe, since it reminds her of her name). Republicans attribute this to Democrats’ hyper-partisanship and unwillingness to negotiate. At this point, it is July.” (h/t to Layne Longfellow and a poster on a social networking site)
Commerce Department proposes NOAA Climate Service
Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010
On February 8, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled a major new proposal for the establishment of a NOAA Climate Service, a new office tasked with serving the nation’s increasing climate information needs. We support this initiative as a significant step in the right direction, while noting that it appears to leave aside, for now, the question of how the Climate Service office will ultimately coordinate with the full suite of federal activities relevant to climate change adaptation and preparedness planning.
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A new low: 44% approve Obama’s job performance, 47% disapprove; 29% approval among independents
Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010
The Marist Poll of U.S. public opinion conducted February 1-3 finds fewer registered voters nationwide—44%—currently approve of President Obama’s perfromance as president than disapprove—47%. For the first time since he took office, a majority of Independents—57%—disapproves of how he is doing in the role. 54% of Americans nationwide say, in general, the country is headed in the wrong direction. Unless Obama and his Congressional majority begin soon to demonstrate some urgency in hammering out a coherent agenda with a coherent narrative, and show the public they can rise above endless processing and political impasse to execute effective policymaking, we can kiss the prospect of meaningful climate legislation (and much else) goodbye.
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