Dr. Judith Curry, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is about to join a rarefied club — Republican witnesses on climate science. During the past twenty years of Congressional hearings on global warming — by far the hottest decades on record — the Republican Party has called upon a small cadre time and again to question the scientific consensus on the threat of greenhouse pollution to the global climate.

Even though the scientific community first began warning policymakers that the exponential increase in burning fossil fuels could dangerously destabilize the planet in the 1960s, the fossil-fuel industry has successfully blocked action by creating a false atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty. A primary method is the employment of “expert” witnesses, most of whom are not climate scientists, to make false arguments against the scientific consensus.

Tomorrow at 10:30 AM, the House science committee will hold one of its last hearings under Democratic control, “A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response.” Two of the witnesses for the Republican minority are old hands at the denier game: Dr. Patrick Michaels, who has been a Republican climate witness since 1989, and Dr. Dick Lindzen, a Republican climate witness since 1991.

The newcomer is Dr. Judith Curry, a climate scientist who specializes in hurricane dynamics, and is now a climate policy blogger and commercial hurricane forecaster. In recent years, Curry has criticized her fellow climate scientists for not engaging with ideological critics, while making increasingly unsupportable arguments about the science.

The “expert” denial of the climate threat in the halls of Congress relies on a remarkably small bullpen, called to action repeatedly — seven climate scientists with limited influence on their field and eleven others:

The two decades that have been polluted by these experts of doubt have been by far the hottest on record, containing 18 of the 20 hottest years on record. The past decade is similarly the hottest on record, with 9 of the 10 hottest years on record. As predicted, storms, droughts, wildfires, and floods have been growing more extreme, ice from the Alps to the Arctic has melted away, sea levels have been rising, while the rate of greenhouse pollution has significantly increased.

Master misinformers like Bjorn Lomborg are expert at feeding the plausible-sounding rationalizations people use to justify inaction.

Given how extensively Lomborg has been debunked (see here), though, you’d think that Huffington post would be the last place to publish somebody duped by Lomborg’s razzle-dazzle.  But on Saturday, Mark Joseph — “producer, author, talk show host and editor of Bullypulpit.com” — posted a remarkable ‘review’ of the movie.

I’ll go through the whole thing since it sheds a great deal of light on the science illiteracy rampant in this country, the rationalizations that even smart people glom onto, and the mischief that Lomborg makes in his movie:

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Andrew Revkin raises the question on his New York Times Dot Earth blog of whether an instance of misleading Obama White House editing in a statement on the deepwater drilling moratorium is analogous to the Bush White House’s political interference with climate change communication.   Revkin cites our 2005 whistleblower story on the oil industry lobbyist in the Bush White House who edited climate reports. “Same as it ever was?” he asks. Well “¦ no. It’s not the same as it ever was. And the question is misleading. Let’s put things in perspective”¦.

Rick Piltz is the guy who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration’s censorship of federal climate science. This is a re-post from his website, Climatesciencewatch.org:

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Few people have devoted more effort to passing a climate bill in this Congress than Fred Krupp, who has led the Environmental Defense Fund for a quarter-century.  His central role is spelled out in detail in Eric Pooley’s must-read book on the life and death of the climate bill, The Climate War.

Like the rest of us, he is is thinking hard about what the next steps should be.  He has a long piece on that subject at HuffPost on “The New Path Forward on Climate Change,” which I reprint below:

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Troposphere is warming too, decades of data show

(Reuters) – Not only is Earth’s surface warming, but the troposphere — the lowest level of the atmosphere, where weather occurs — is heating up too, U.S. and British meteorologists reported on Monday.

In a review of four decades of data on troposphere temperatures, the scientists found that warming in this key atmospheric layer was occurring, just as many researchers expected it would as more greenhouse gases built up and trapped heat close to the Earth.

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Scientists get off the sidelines to right media wrongs

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Graphic designer and cartoonist Tobias Lunchbreath lampoons all of those tags made of recycled cardboard telling us where our money goes:

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Appearing on CNN on Monday night, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), angrily challenged the scientific consensus on the threat of global warming pollution. The powerful tea-party AstroTurf group helped sweep a wave of Republican climate deniers into Congress earlier this month, serving the economic interests of AFP’s founder David Koch, the right-wing billionaire pollution scion. In the interview with Elliot Spitzer, Phillips argued that “Al Gore” and “the left” are guilty of “arrogance” for believing in global warming pollution:

SPITZER: Do you disagree conceptually there is such a thing as global warming that we have to worry about?

PHILLIPS: I think the science is far from settled. For anyone, including Al Gore, to say otherwise is arrogance. There are enough scientists out there and doctors out there saying hey wait a minute, let’s look at this thing more closely.” I’m not a scientist, I don’t pretend to be, but when I look and read, for the left to say, “Oh, the debate is settled.” Aren’t they the ones always wanting tolerance, open debate, dissent? They are quick to whack you down.

SPITZER: We’re tolerant. We think you are wrong.

Watch it:

Of course, practically every scientific organization in the world has sounded the alarm about the precipitous buildup of greenhouse pollution from companies like Koch Industries, which is bringing devastation to millions of people from Nashville to Pakistan.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress last month, AFP policy director Phil Kerpen claimed that “we don’t engage the science” of global warming. Yet again, reality has contradicted the claims from this highly influential polluter AstroTurf group.