Okay, we knew that Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin is one of those anti-scientific idealogues, having said back in August 2008, “A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”  And then in a September 2008 CBS interview, she jumped the shark polar bear entirely, saying, “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.” Seriously.  As this Think Progress repost shows, Palin’s thinking hasn’t really evolved, so to speak….

Yesterday, former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) reminded radio host Rush Limbaugh that she doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Palin, on a nationwide tour to promote her new book, Going Rogue, questioned the “snake oil science involved” and complained about the “shady science right now.” Palin said that she thinks any changes are “in a lot of respects, cyclical“:

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The Superfreaks come up with their biggest aerosol smoke screen yet  to obscure their book’s countless mistakes, as Brad Johnson reports in this Wonk Room repost.  Note also how Dubner, in playing the victim card, trivializes the very serious issue of religious persecution.

In the latest of many fawning interviews promoting SuperFreakonomics, author Stephen J. Dubner claimed the critics of his “global cooling” chapter have issued a “fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.” On Public Radio International’s morning program, “The Takeaway,” Dubner told hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee that he was right to call global warming a “religion.” In fact, he considers the criticism the book has received from economists, climate scientists, and energy experts to be “essentially a fatwa“:

In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.

Listen here:

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What is the best way to talk about those who are devoting their efforts to spread disinformation on climate science and/or climate legislation?  Recent speeches by President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Rudd, who represent the two biggest industrialized countries that have so far refused to take action, offer some suggestions.

Certainly, if you want to hear the best progressive messaging on energy and climate “” if you want to know the best phrases and framing “” listen to the President.  In two recent speeches Obama has gone out of his way to criticize the disinformers and delayers.

In Florida late last month, Obama said “The closer we get to this new energy future, the harder the opposition is going to fight, the more we’re going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in Washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the American people.  Now, there are those who are also going to suggest that moving towards a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs.  And they’re going to argue that we should do nothing, stand pat, do less, or delay action yet again.”

A few days earlier, at M.I.T. he said:

The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy “” when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs. There are going to be those who cynically claim “” make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.

Obama understands that our current economic system is dangerously unsustainable, and that the opposition is driven to a large extent by those who act out of narrow self-interest or ideology.  He doesn’t use the term “denier,” instead accusing those who spread anti-scientific disinformation of cynicism.  He does use the word “delay” in both speeches, focusing on the primary goal of the opposition.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what words the President uses — those who oppose his policies will misquote and misrepresent them.  One of the leading disinformers, Pat Michaels, made this absurd assertion on National Review Online:

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“Earl Haynes, of CGE Solutions, installed a blower door, left, in the front door of the columnist David Leonhardt’s home while conducting an energy audit. A blower door depressurizes a home, allowing a rater to measure air flow through a pressure ring in the fan and determine the amount of air leak.”

Promise in a “Cash for Caulkers” home weatherization program

The one highly visible success of the stimulus program has been the cash-for-clunkers program. It induced a boom in vehicle sales this summer that clearly would not have happened otherwise.

The rest of the stimulus has created a lot of jobs “” 700,000 to 1.5 million, according to economists’ estimates. But it has done so in thousands of little ways: scattered construction projects, plugged-up school budgets and the like. Politically, these measures are not popular enough to create a groundswell for more of them.

And the economy still needs help. So White House officials are looking at creating a new version of cash for clunkers “” this time for home weatherization.

John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and former President Bill Clinton have separately suggested versions of the idea to the White House. Mr. Doerr calls his proposal, which would give households money to pay for weatherization projects, “cash for caulkers.” Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, told me, “It’s one of the top things he’s looking at.”

The idea has a lot to recommend it. The housing bust has idled contractors and construction workers, who could be put to work insulating homes and caulking air leaks. Many households, meanwhile, would save substantial money “” not to mention help the climate “” by weatherizing their homes, research by McKinsey & Company has shown. All in all, a cash-for-caulkers program seems like a promising part of the jobs program for 2010 that Mr. Obama has suggested he is planning.

But I would also mention one point of caution: the details of any caulkers plan will matter enormously. Weatherizing a home, as I recently discovered, turns out to be a lot more complicated than buying a car.

For background, see “Energy Secretary Steven Chu on home weatherization: Saving money by saving energy.”  The story continues:

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In the latest of many fawning interviews promoting SuperFreakonomics, author Stephen J. Dubner claimed the critics of his “global cooling” chapter have issued a “fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.” On Public Radio International’s morning program, “The Takeaway,” Dubner told hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee that he was right to call global warming a “religion.” In fact, he considers the criticism the book has received from economists, climate scientists, and energy experts to be “essentially a fatwa“:

In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.

Listen here:

A fatwa is an Islamic clerical legal ruling. Dubner is evidently alluding to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s twenty-year-old fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by hardline Muslims. Rushdie has suffered assassination attempts and decades in seclusion. Translators of the book were stabbed, shot, and killed, and bookstores were firebombed.

Despite this supposed global warming “fatwa,” however, Dubner is heroically appearing all week on the Takeaway to flack his book, co-written with University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. The SuperFreakonomics authors have now enjoyed softball interviews from Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart, 20/20, the Guardian, the UK Telegraph, and others. The Diane Rehm Show did a much better job, bringing in IPCC lead author Peter Frumhoff to debunk their nonsense.

SuperFreakonomics has been edged out on the bestseller list by Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots.

[updat

I could easily spend all my time just responding to every single piece of silliness that appears in the mainstream media on global warming.  But not only would that be unproductive and unhelpful for my readers (i.e. you), but heck I have great readers capable of doing such responses themselves.

The NY Times has just given some of its precious real estate to one of the lamest and most irrelevant op-eds ever published on climate change:  ”Ben Franklin on Global Warming.”  The gist of it seems to be that since weather changes over small parts of the Earth’s land were noticed by people in the 18th century and that Franklin himself apparently noticed part of what is now well understood and modeled by scientists as the heat island effect — “cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker” — that we should somehow think … well, actually, I can’t even figure out what the author is trying to say.

The piece appears to be a novel take on the “teach the controversy” strategy.  The author, Ben Gelber, meteorologist at WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, sort of acknowledges anthropogenic global warming science but mostly makes irrelevant connections between the past and today to imply that what’s happening now is nothing really new.  If Gelber thinks we should do anything about global warming, he keeps it to himself.

Well, anthropogenic global warming is new, and it would be catastrophic or worse to do nothing about it — see, for instance, “Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks” and “Imagine a World without Fish” and “Intro to global warming impacts” and UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”

But hey, I’ve written too much already.  You respond, and I’ll lift the best comments up into the main post.

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying….

That is the opening of “What They Really Believe,” Tom Friedman’s NYT op-ed today.   Here are some more excerpts:

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Thom Porter, staff chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) talks about the changes he has witnessed in the Californian climate and how it is increasing the risk of forest fires:

A bit strange this comes via a story from the UK’s Telegraph, but an important, science-based message from someone in the front lines nonetheless:

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