Anti-science Republican candidate Rick Santorum said at a campaign event, “The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant.” But back in reality, carbon pollution poses very real dangers to the climate and public health, including inducing more asthma cases than ever. Last week, the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council also rolled out a seven-figure ad showing who suffers from the work of polluters and their lobbysts — asthmatic children:

“The icon of climate change, is more than the image of a polar bear on a melting ice floe trying to survive,” National Resources Defense Council senior scientist Kim Knowlton said. “It’s really the face of a child with asthma, using an inhaler to breathe.”

The EPA is about to release a nationwide carbon pollution rule limiting emissions from power plants, standards that ultimately protect children. The American Lung Association will have billboards in two states, on display in Columbus, OH and Pittsburgh, PA. View it:

One of the country’s best climate reporters proves once again that false balance is alive and well at even the best papers.

The article in question is “Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.” by Justin Gillis. It’s on the new Climate Central report whose news release we reposted earlier today. As Gillis explains:

About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.

If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.

This isn’t terribly controversial among climatologists I talk to, though this report appears to be the first to add storm surges to warming-driven sea rise, spell out the danger in every U.S. coastal region and ”estimate the proportion of the national population at risk from the rising sea.”

Gillis quotes the author, of course:

“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, an author, with other scientists, of two new papers outlining the research. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”

But Strauss is the only scientist quoted in the article. To ‘balance’ Strauss, the Times quotes one of the top anti-scientist disinformers in the country, Myron Ebell, of the could-not-be-more debunked Competitive Enterprise Institute (see, for instance, “Santer, Jones, and Schneider respond to CEI’s phony attack on the temperature record“).

I’m assuming it’s the New York Times editors who are the ones who are still demanding this nonsensical balance — see Science Times stunner: “… a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity”).

Even so, that’s no excuse for this misleading paragraph:

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Last night, Stephen Colbert mocked the Republican presidential candidates for their derision of climate science and clean energy. Colbert took on Rick Santorum’s pithy argument against the threat of carbon dioxide pollution (“Tell that to a plant“), Mitt Romney’s attack on renewable energy and electric vehicles (“You can’t drive a car with a windmill on it“) and Newt Gingrich’s mockery of biofuels research (“Algae!“):

Watch it:

Colbert imagined what the past would have been like if the GOP’s present-day anti-science obsession held sway then.

“Hold on there sport, you want to cure my syphilis with the mold on a hunk of bread? I’d rather remain blind and insane,” Colbert said. “And I’m pretty sure these gentlemen [the GOP candidates] feel the same way.”