The right-wing swiftboating campaign against climate scientists dubbed “Climategate” by its perpetrators is becoming frighteningly unhinged, accusing climate researchers of Hitlerian fascism for fighting against corruption of science by oil-funded ideologues. Yesterday, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the top Republican on the House global warming committee, claimed these scientists were engaging in “scientific fascism.” After Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) denounced his egregious attack, Sensenbrenner defined “scientific fascism” of “intimidation in the scientific community of people who wish to be contrary what the convention wisdom is”:

I’ll define what I mean by scientific fascism. These emails trash the scientific conclusions by those who have disputed Michael Mann’s hockey stick theory. There are information in the emails that the scientific publication Climate Research in which they were published ought to be boycotted because they weren’t doing the politically correct thing. And I understand that the editor of Climate Research ended up getting fired as a result. There is intimidation in the scientific community of people who wish to be contrary what the convention wisdom is.

Watch a compilation of the exchange:

The incident to which Sensenbrenner is alluding in fact involves an admirable event in scientific history, when the scientific community successfully resisted attempts by Exxon-Mobil and Republicans to politicize and corrupt climate research.

In 2003, the journal Climate Research published a paper by astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon which argued that “the current global warming trend is not unique and that an even more dramatic episode occurred centuries ago, before widespread combustion of oil and coal.”

As illegally hacked emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit indeed reveal, the publication of this paper shocked climate researchers, who discussed an array of responses in March, 2003, from a joint response explaining the paper’s flaws to asking colleagues to shun the journal or encouraging the journal to “get rid of the offending editor,” contrarian Chris de Freitas.

What Sensenbrenner and the other smear merchants fail to mention is that the researchers were correct in their concerns that the journal had been taken over by biased ideologues. Despite Sensenbrenner’s claim, no editors were fired because of the climate realists. Rather, the editor of Climate Research, Hans Von Storch, quit in July 2003 because he was suppressed by the journal’s publisher when he attempted to disown the paper’s “severe methodological flaws“:

A science journal editor who recently published an article questioning whether industrial emissions are driving up the earth’s temperature has resigned, saying he was not allowed to publish an editorial repudiating the article.

Five editors — half the editorial board of the journal — soon joined Von Storch in a mass resignation — while Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) held a hearing to promote the blatantly flawed paper during the debate on the McCain-Lieberman climate bill.

The Soon-Baliunas paper turned out to be crass Big Oil propaganda, “underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute and promoted by nonprofit organizations that receive support from energy interests, primarily ExxonMobil Corp.” Journal publisher Otto Kinne eventually admitted in August, 2003, that the Soon-Baliunas claims “cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper” — but only after the paper had served its political purpose.

We return to the present day, where mainstream environmental reporters have abetted this new, disgusting character assassination campaign. Reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press — among many others — have wrung their hands about the ethics of the scientific community while the Fox Business Network compares scientists to Hitler and Stalin and Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com compares them to Nazi eugenicists.

One wishes these reporters would at least read their own, earlier reporting on the Soon-Baliunas affair.

Transcript: Read more

“To deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand”

Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry. West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. One thing is clear. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose.

Anyone who thought that the senior Senator from West Virginia was a guaranteed “no” vote on the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill needs to rethink that position.  For instance, Nate Silver’s “Probability of Yes” vote for Byrd is 19.4%.

Byrd’s must-read op-ed, “Coal Must Embrace The Future,” published today in WV’s MetroNews (and reprinted below) makes clear that he is at the negotiating table.  And for those who find it hard to believe that change could be embraced by the 92-year-old long-time coal supporter who has served in Congress longer than anyone else ever has –  over 50 years in the Senate alone — you can listen to Byrd speaking most of the piece here.

Aaron Weiner of the Washington Independent writes of Byrd’s piece, which “even attacks the environmentally detrimental practice of mountaintop mining”:

Political insiders have portrayed Byrd as a difficult get for Democrats trying to pass cap-and-trade legislation. But as Byrd nears the end of his career and reflects on his legacy, I’ve speculated that he’s more likely to come around to climate legislation “” which will be the most important environmental bill in our country’s history, if Congress manages to pass it “” than a lot of pundits might think. His piece today suggests a step in that direction.

Byrd’s vote isn’t a certainty, but I now think it likely he’ll vote to end a conservative filibuster.   This op-ed is more evidence that the Senate is probably going to pass a climate bill next year (see Sen. Baucus (D-MT): “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation” and Washington Times: “Obama digs in on global warming”).

Here’s the full must-read op-ed:

Read more

The West Virginia coal industry has become a virulent opponent of President Barack Obama’s reform agenda, while the state’s political leaders cheered. In June, West Virginia declared coal the state rock. In September, the coal industry sponsored a rock concert and rally to demonize “environmental extremists.” In October, coal companies organized mobs to attack the Environmental Protection Agency’s halting steps to enforce Clean Water Act limits on mountaintop removal mining. In November, the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce told Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to hold health care reform hostage until climate legislation is killed.

Today, Sen. Byrd had enough. In a stunning rebuke, Byrd told his state to admit that change is coming, and that the coal industry has to clean up its act:

On Coal Jobs And Mountaintop Removal Permits: Let’s speak the truth. The most important factor in maintaining coal-related jobs is demand for coal. Scapegoating and stoking fear among workers over the permitting process is counter-productive.

On Mountaintop Removal And Coal Mobs: “Most members of Congress, like most Americans, oppose the practice, and we may not yet fully understand the effects of mountaintop removal mining on the health of our citizens. West Virginians may demonstrate anger toward the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over mountaintop removal mining, but we risk the very probable consequence of shouting ourselves out of any productive dialogue with EPA and our adversaries in the Congress.”

On Representing West Virginia: “We have our work cut out for us in finding a prudent and profitable middle ground – but we will not reach it by using fear mongering, grandstanding and outrage as a strategy. As your United States Senator, I must represent the opinions and the best interests of the entire Mountain State, not just those of coal operators and southern coalfield residents who may be strident supporters of mountaintop removal mining.”

On Holding Health Care Hostage For The Coal Industry: “Some have even suggested that coal state representatives in Washington should block any advancement of national health care reform legislation until the coal industry’s demands are met by the EPA. I believe that the notion of holding the health care of over 300 million Americans hostage in exchange for a handful of coal permits is beyond foolish; it is morally indefensible.”

Byrd concludes that mindless resistance to change is probably not a wise choice:

Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry. West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. One thing is clear. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose.

Byrd has long been one of the coal industry’s most vociferous defenders in the U.S. Senate. But the reality is that the industry has destroyed West Virginia jobs through mechanization, has destroyed West Virginia health through pollution, and destroyed West Virginia’s natural beauty through wanton mountaintop removal. It is also a reality that West Virginia coal is destroying our climate. Proving again that he is a true leader, Sen. Byrd has stood up and recognized reality. Hopefully, West Virginians will choose Byrd’s prescription for change, and not the path of inaction offered by the state’s corrupt coal oligarchs.

Superfreakonomics coauthor officially joins the anti-science crowd

Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, takes questions from reporters during a news conference in London on December 1, 2009. Stern, in reponse to questions about hackers who leaked emails from scientists at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit in England, said those who doubt the science of global warming are "muddled and confused."

This piece by CAP’s Eric Alterman and Mickey Ehrlich, first published here, looks at how “ClimateGate” fits into the broader set of conspiracy theories pushed by conservatives in the Obama era.  I wrote about this connection here:  “The top 5 ways the ‘birthers’ are like the deniers.”  The fact that Superfreakonomics coauthor Stephen Dubner have joined with the anti-science ideologues, as Alterman and Ehrlich discuss, was, sadly, all-too-predictable (see “Superfreakonomics authors abandon climate science” and “Is Superfreakonomics author Levitt again denying the ‘unequivocal’ scientific evidence for global warming?” and “Dubner ratchets up the rhetoric, claiming his critics have issued a ‘fatwa’!“  If you want to know what the hacked emails really tell us about climate science, read the editorial in Nature: “Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real “” or that human activities are almost certainly the cause.”

On November 19, emails stolen from scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England were leaked onto the web. Conservatives immediately claimed that these proved global warming to be a hoax and part of a worldwide conspiracy run by mad scientists who have quashed debate in order to institute a socialist, business-killing cap-and-trade policy. Thus was yet another conservative conspiracy theory in the age of Obama launched: “Climategate.” It’s getting hard to keep track of all of them.

We have written in this space about the promotion of baseless beliefs regarding President Obama’s birth and the authorship of his books. And while much of the mainstream media continues to ignore the conspiratorial nature of contemporary conservative politics’ arguments, the true leaders of the conservative movement in America””Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the like””have been leading the charge for these conspiracies and many more.

Conservative websites and airwaves abound with conspiracy theories to the point where it becomes nearly a full-time job to merely keep up with the various and secretive forces seeking to undermine our country and turn us into””well, it’s never quite clear. Terrorists? Communists? Socialists? Gays? Whatever. Read more

Proposals for Sustained Employment Growth and Broad-Based Economic Prosperity

An architect and construction manager discuss materials at the site of the Research Support Facilities Project for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which they hope will provide a national blueprint for making buildings greener and cutting energy use.  This piece by guest blogger John Podesta was first published here.  For more on NREL, see my exclusive video interview with director Dan Arvizu here.

The U.S. economy is officially now in “recovery”"”our nation’s gross domestic product grew by 2.8 percent in the third quarter of 2009, and growth seems to be continuing””but we still face the challenge of how to create American jobs. Since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, we have not seen net job growth in a single month. There are increasing indications that even if the economy continues to grow it will happen too slowly to absorb quickly the 16 million people out of work and searching for a job. This in and of itself could stall the nascent recovery, as unemployed consumers are unable to consume at the level businesses need to see before they will hire and expand.

Congress and the Obama administration made enormous strides toward a solution to this problem, most notably by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act earlier this year. At the same time, the Federal Reserve has eased credit conditions and continues to keep interest rates low to encourage investment. These actions should be applauded. The fact that we are now emerging out of the Great Recession and not mired in a second Great Depression should not be taken for granted.

But sustained job creation is a long-term problem that cannot be solved with short-term solutions alone. The Federal Reserve believes it may take years before unemployment numbers come down to acceptable levels. Focusing only on short-term and emergency job creation, year after year, will put us in a position of ignoring the long-term investments we need to get our economy back on track. A combination of short- and long-term strategies will begin to ease the unemployment burden on the 16 million people now out of work and on our economy, and will truly allow this country to move forward on a more stable and sustainable economic path.

In short, we must act today to create jobs now and avoid the specter of another “jobless recovery,” but we also must act today to create jobs for next year, the coming decade, and beyond.

The Center for American Progress proposes a wide-ranging set of policies to create jobs. These proposals include: Read more

Sen. Kerry sees ‘definite Republican votes’ for climate change legislation

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a major architect of Senate climate change plans, on Wednesday said there are already GOP supporters of the legislation.

“There are definite Republican votes for this legislation right now, and we hope to grow that over the next weeks and months,” said Kerry, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, on a conference call with reporters. He did not provide names or numbers.

Senate legislation is evolving and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to bring a major climate change package to the floor next spring.

Securing some GOP support is likely crucial because a small number of Democrats, such as Mary Landrieu (La.), are considered unlikely to endorse cap-and-trade legislation. Several Republicans, including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), are potential votes in favor of a climate bill.

Kerry said another meeting with Reid and chairmen of the committees with jurisdiction over climate legislation will occur early next week. Kerry is attending the upcoming international climate change talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, and plans to offer an outline of the unfinished U.S. plans.

Kerry said he will be able to provide a “pretty good outline” in Copenhagen about what will be contained in the legislation. Thus far two Senate committees have acted on major portions of the bill. The Environment and Public Works Committee approved a cap-and-trade plan in early November, and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved a large energy package in June.

But other committees “” including the powerful Finance Committee “” have yet to weigh in. Kerry is also working outside the committee process with Graham and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on a compromise plan.

Vilsack: Climate bill to be boon to farmers

Read more

The Climate Scoreboard is a new, easily accessible tool for understanding and tracking the global climate change negotiations in real time.

This new online resource “” an embeddable widget, a short video, and a set of graphs and a table “”  reports, on a daily basis, the long-term climate implications of proposals to the United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen.

The Scoreboard team will follow the negotiations in Copenhagen from day to day, and continue tracking progress in the months following the conference, addressing the question: if current proposals for emissions reductions were implemented how much future warming would be avoided?

My friend Drew Jones will be at Copenhagen tracking the commitments with his new widget.  Drew is coauthor of this guest blog post describing his work (“Only the most ambitious emissions reductions under discussion within UNFCCC can achieve climate goals“).  The widget and his explanation are from his blog.

Read more

This guest post is by Elizabeth Grossman, author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry and High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books.  She writes about environmental and science issues for the Washington Post, Salon, Mother Jones, the Nation, Grist, and other publications from Portland, Oregon.  One of the book’s jacket quotes is from The great environmental writer and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben: “There are enough environmental problems that seem insoluble. Elizabeth Grossman has given us this chronicle of a field with a bright future, the green chemistry that will replace the crude methods of the 19th century with the smart ones of the 21st. She tells us how it could happen.  We should listen carefully!”

To melting ice caps, rising sea levels, acidifying oceans, and storm surges, add lung diseases and kidney stones to the expected effects of climate change. At a November 19 briefing in Washington, researchers from the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment, representatives of the American Medical Association and American Public Health Association detailed the likely negative health effects of global warming. These are conditions, reported Paul Epstein, Associate Director of the Harvard center, to which children, the elderly, and poor are especially vulnerable.

Rising temperatures, ozone and sulfur dioxide levels, along with particulate and other pollutants released by forest fires, will create conditions that are expected to increase rates of hospitalization for respiratory diseases, among them pneumonia, asthma, and chronic lung disease. Increased heat exposure, noted the researchers who’ve described these effects in a letter to President Obama, is also likely to increase the incidence of kidney stones.

But these are just some of the adverse health impacts associated with climate change.

In addition to the effects noted at the November 19 briefing – and those prompted by impacts of drought and altered insect patterns – rising temperatures are already triggering environmental conditions that have less visible but potentially profound health implications.

For traveling with global air and ocean currents are a soup of environmentally persistent synthetic chemicals whose behavior and effects are being exacerbated by climate change. Scientists tracking these chemicals around the globe are discovering that the movement of these long-lasting substances – manufactured materials that have no natural origin – is being accelerated by effects of rising temperatures. Researchers are also finding that global warming is increasing human and wildlife communities’ vulnerability to these chemicals’ biological impacts. Read more

Plus Rep. Inslee’s Q&A and Markey’s closing statement

I’ll post Lubchenco’s equally terrific opening statement — which includes a couple of science demonstrations (!) on ocean acidification — when they are up. You can see all the videos and photos here.

Here is the closing statement of Chairman Markey (D-MA): Read more