Arguing that Republicans don’t reflexively deny scientific facts, conservative MSNBC commentator S.E. Cupp repeated Climategate smears against climate science. Cupp was attacking the premise of author and Science Progress contributor Chris Mooney’s new book, The Republican Brain, which looks at how conservative propaganda and ideological tendencies have led to increasing distrust in science among the American right. Cupp bowled over host Alex Wagner, citing Rick Santorum as her authority that the fact of man-made climate change is “corrupted” by “phony studies”:

CUPP: Here’s what I find infuriating. We have a long and glorious tradition in this country of questioning science. We’ve been questioning science in fact for centuries, asking is science right on this? The idea that science is some unimpeachable institution that cannot be questioned flies in fact in the face of the bedrock of the scientific method, which is skepticism. Whether we are trying to disprove science as junk science or exposing certain science as immoral. I’m thinking of eugenics here, population control. The idea that when a Republican does it is somehow scary or backwards, is exactly why the public is skeptical of science as having been politicized because of suggestions like this that Republicans writ large are afraid of science.

WAGNER: I mean honestly. We have seen Newt Gingrich on the couch with Nancy Pelosi talking about climate change.

CUPP: There have been, to quote Rick Santorum, phony studies on climate change. East Anglia University I should mention!

WAGNER: And that study –

CUPP: Every time science has been corrupted by politics, everyone in the scientific community should be worried!

Watch it:

As Wagner was evidently trying to point out, the hacked emails from East Anglia University were shown by repeated independent investigation to show nothing other than private conversations among ethical scientists doing valid scientific work, despite a well-funded smear campaign to distort the contents of the emails.

“It’s good to be open-minded,” Mooney responded, “but at some point you have to respect the process and the scientific consensus that emerges. That’s what doesn’t happen from the right.”

Our guest blogger is Chris Mooney, who has just published a new book, The Republican Brain.

I first got to know Judith Curry—the Georgia Tech researcher who blogs at “Climate, Etc.,” and has been drawn into controversy for, in her words, “challenging many aspects of the IPCC consensus”—when I was working on my second book, Storm World. I spent a fair amount of time with Curry, and with the other scientists profiled in the book—interviewing them in person, getting to understand their research. This is what science writers do.

At the time, Curry and her colleagues were just coming off a media feeding frenzy after having published papers linking hurricanes to global warming right in the middle of the devastating 2005 hurricane season.

When Storm World came out, it is no exaggeration to say that Curry gave it a rave review. I want to quote in full from her Five Star endorsement at Amazon.com, which is entitled “Science writing at its very best.” Bear with me, this will all become very relevant; and I’ve bolded a few important parts:

To provide a frame of reference for this review, I and my colleagues Peter Webster and Greg Holland are among the scientists that are featured prominently in Storm World. Our involvement in the issue of hurricanes and global warming began when we published an article in Science shortly before the landfall of Hurricane Rita, where we reported a doubling of the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes globally since 1970. When Chris Mooney first approached me with his idea for writing a book on this topic, I was somewhat skeptical. I couldn’t see how this could be accomplished given the rapid changes in the science (I was worried the book would be outdated before it was published), the complexities of the technical aspects of the subject, a concern about how the individual scientists would be treated and portrayed, and a concern that the political aspects of the issue would be handled in a partisan way. Over the course of the past year and a half, it became apparent that Mooney was researching this issue extremely thoroughly and was developing a good grasp of both the history and technical aspects of the subject. Upon finally reading the book, I can only say Storm World has far exceeded any hope or expectation that I could have had for a book on this subject.

The book is surprisingly rich in technical detail, and Mooney has grasped the nuances of the breadth of scientific arguments and uncertainties. He provides a fascinating history with rich insights into the current controversy. The individual scientists are portrayed accurately as well as sympathetically and colorfully. The political aspects are treated in an insightful and nonpartisan manner. I am most impressed by the fresh insights provided by this book, which besides being a ‘good read,’ Storm World is an important and timely contribution that deserves careful consideration in the dialogue and debate on hurricane policy in the U.S. Storm World is science journalism at its absolute best.

After Storm World came out, Curry also invited me to speak at Georgia Tech, where she works.

Given that I got to know Curry and greatly appreciated her support for my endeavors, I avoided criticizing her in subsequent years—even though we were increasingly on different “sides” of the highly polarized web battle over global warming. And for the most part, she didn’t really seem to criticize me either (or at least, not that I noticed).

So imagine my surprise when I came across this post at Curry’s blog, about my new book The Republican Brain. Unlike Storm World, Curry admits she has not read the book. Nevertheless, she cites a variety of critics—none of whom seem to have read the book, either—and uses labels like “neurotrash” and “neurobabbling” to describe what, she seems to think, I am up to.
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The American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green is vying to be the Charlie Sheen of the denial crowd.   He said in a 2008 speech, “For the last decade, warming peaked, and has recently declined: we’re back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978.”  Not.  Not even close.

He also said “No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly.”  Not (see World’s Engineers: “The Technology Needed to Cut the World’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 85% by 2050 Already Exists”).

But in some sense that’s all standard denier fare.  Green went the full Sheen in reply to a recent Chris Mooney column on how “Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left.”

Sheen Green wrote “Obama’s science team is composed almost exclusively of environmental radicals” (!) and he even played the “card-carrying socialist” card.

What follows is Mooney taking the sheen off of Green at Science Progress:

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Chris Mooney, contributing editor at our sister publication Science Progress, has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that calmly lays out the many significant flaws in George F. Will’s recent global warming denial column. In “Climate Change Myths and Facts,” Mooney shows that Will’s errors are not simply “inferences,” as editorial page editor Fred Hiatt claimed, but deliberate lies about the science and the organizations cited in Will’s column. Mooney explains why we so greatly need journalism that “is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility”:

Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities. In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult. Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.

Mooney continues his column with explanations — and links to sources — of several of the errors in Will’s column, errors that fail to meet any standard of evidence, rigor, or reproucibility. He convincingly makes the case that whereas Will himself can say anything, the Washington Post and its army of factcheckers have no place publishing such tripe.