Latest attack is aimed at Michael Mann, Richard Alley, Penn State

[Note:  People looking for a useful way to respond might consider writing a letter of support to the university, as suggested in the comments (click here for addresses).]

As I said yesterday, one of our jobs this year is to wipe the complacent smiles off the smug faces of the lobbyists, “experts”, “scientists”, politicians and activists pushing AGW.

I must apologize for the U.S.-centrism in my 2009 “Citizen Kane” awards for non-excellence in climate journalism.  I left out James Delingpole and his “paper,” the UK’s Telegraph.

Delingpole makes George Will look like Walter Cronkite, and the Telegraph makes the Washington Post of the 2000s look like … the Washington Post of the 1970s.   Delingpole is a self-described “libertarian conservative” who likes “recreational drugs” and Ronald Reagan — though he apparently hasn’t figured out that those two don’t actually go together.  He says he dislikes “big government” but is in fact a stereotypical big-government conservative.

He’s the Glenn Beck of climate writers who puts out stuff like, “Build-a-bear: the sinister green plot to turn our kids into eco-fascist Manchurian candidates.”  Seriously (see “Right wing bullies Build-A-Bear into removing videos about manmade climate change“).

Delingpole just published his latest screed, “Climategate: Michael Mann’s very unhappy New Year,” with the above lede.  Evincing the glee of a middle-school bully, he describes the latest effort by the anti-science crowd to intimidate and harass climate scientists.

As science historian Spencer Weart said in November of Swifthack: “We’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers.”

But they’ve gone beyond slander to outright harassment — see Competitive Enterprise Institute to sue RealClimate blogger over moderation policy and here where our top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, explains part of the strategy:

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Diane Rehm just rebroadcast her show on world population trends and sustainability (click here for audio).  She had some very knowledgeable, if controversial, guests:

William Butz, president and CEO, Population Reference Bureau

Paul Ehrlich, president, Center for Conservation Biology, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University and author of “The Dominant Animal” and “The Population Bomb”

Hania Zlotnik, director, Population Division, United Nations

As I’ve said many times, I don’t intend to spend a lot of time writing on the subject here (see “Consumption dwarfs population as main global warming threat“).

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The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. “I haven’t had all that many other scientists helping in that effort,” Mann told me recently.

So writes Chris Mooney in his must-read op-ed opinion piece in the Washington Post, “On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up.”  It looks like the Post is feeling just a tad guilty over the travesty of the Sarah Palin op-ed, having now published three responses, though only one was on the op-ed page.  Mooney is on the second page of the Outlook section, which probably gets much fewer readers than the op-ed page now residing in the paper’s front section.

I certainly can’t disagree with Mooney’s core argument, since I have been making a similar point for a while (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1).  Indeed, Physics World published a piece of mine on this very subject last year (see “Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change).

I was so frustrated that scientists were not communicating with the media in a media-friendly way on Climategate/Swifthack that, after waiting several days for the scientific community to put together a media call, I did so myself (see Exclusive audio of press call today with Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and Michael Oppenheimer on “Climate Science: Setting the Record Straight”).  I was also very critical of the scientist at the center of the maelstrom for adopting the Tiger Woods approach to media relations (see “Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review”).  Jones’ failure to speak up, failure to make himself available to the press the way Mann did, helped this story blow up.

BUT I can’t really agree that scientists haven’t responded.  Here’s but a short list of the many leading scientific institutions and hundreds of scientists who have:

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