Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University, has been besieged by vituperative and disturbing hate mails at the behest of right-wing operatives. Hayhoe was pilloried as a “climate babe” by hate-radio host Rush Limbaugh for her participation in a planned book edited by Newt Gingrich on a conservative response to the threat of manmade global warming. Climate-denier Chris Horner tried to force Texas Tech to turn over all of the “activist” Hayhoe’s records related to the book. Climate-denier operative Marc Morano, a former employee of Rush Limbaugh and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), published her email on a screed-filled website, encouraging attacks on Dr. Hayhoe.

Texas Climate News has published disturbing excerpts of the frightening, hate-filled messages she received as a result of this intimidation campaign:

– you are nothing but a liar; you lie

– AGW is a hoax […] Where are the facts? Prove your unproven hypothesis. Prove it. Show the world. You can’t. You are a fraud. […] Your name and the names of the other warming alarmists will be mud as the years go forward. You are a disgrace. You are a nut.

– DUMPED FROM GINGRICH’S BOOK HA HA HA […] IT’S A GREAT START!!! SEE YA, FRAUDSTER – GET A REAL JOB, MCDONALD’S IS HIRING

– Nazi Bitch Whore Climatebecile […] You stupid bitch, You are a mass murderer and will be convicted at the Reality TV Grand Jury in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania. AGW has never been anything but a Rockefeller depopulationary eugenical scam. […] After the Grand Jury indicts you, I would like to see you convicted and beheaded by guillotine in the public square, to show women that if they are going to take a man’s job, they have to take the heat for mass murder, just like the men do when they get caught. If you have a child, then women in the future will be even more leery of lying to get ahead, when they see your baby crying next to the basket next to the guillotine.

– I read your whiney comments about researching for a rejected book chapter instead of spending time playing with your baby. Perhaps you should take responsiblility how you choose to use your time. In my opinion, the problem with America is women refuse to stay at home taking care and nurturing their offspring while prioritizing their selfish ambitions attempting to carve out a career for themselves. Be a good mother or be a good researcher.

– I am afraid [blogger Anthony Watts] has exposed you as something of an academic fool. Try using actual data next time.

– Stop using Jesus to justify your wacko ideas about global warming. First, it is an insult to the Lord Jesus. Second, it is insulting to those of us who actually take our Christianity seriously. Third, it is juvenile.

– Do you believe in God? If you do, then you must believe that He is all powerful. But believing in AGW contradicts that, because to be able to change the climate in such a manner as you prescribe to would mean that we are more powerful than He is. I know better than that, but it would appear that you and your husband don’t. Maybe you should both take another look at your belief system. I think it needs some adjusting.

These attacks on climate scientists have been a troubling problem for years. In 2010, ABC News reported on death threats received by scientist Michael Mann. MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel received threats against his family for appearing at a recent forum with Republicans who want action on climate change. Morano published an attack on Emanuel’s wife at his website.

This kind of bile has a marked chilling effect on the decision by climate scientists whether to engage with the public. “I think that there is no question that much of this is intended to intimidate,” Hayhoe explained to Climate Crocks’ Peter Sinclair in a video interview.

In response to the campaigns of legal persecution, scientists have established the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

Oklahoma Senator and leading American climate denier Jim Inhofe decided not to make a fool out of himself by attending the Durban climate talks in person. Instead, he decided to make a fool out of himself on video.

In a statement broadcast at a side event in Durban, Inhofe hailed the defeat of climate legislation in the U.S. and called for an end to Obama’s presidency “for the sake of my kids and grandkids.” He also claimed that the roughly 16,000 people attending the Durban climate talks “are being ignored.”

However, here on the ground at the climate talks in Durban, South Africa, I tried to find a single person who had heard about Inhofe’s video speech. I still haven’t found one person who knew or cared — if they even knew who he was at all.

Watch the video, if you can stomach it:

Read more

Marc Morano and other climate conspiracy theorists are promoting a cruel hoax against a fourth-grade child, the Wonk Room has learned. Morano, the former Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) aide and Rush Limbaugh producer who promoted the Swift Boat slanders, is pushing the story that a “4th-grade climate skeptic wins junior division of National Science Fair,” originally published by the Bee-Picayune in Beeville, TX:

R.A. Hall Elementary School fourth-grader Julisa Castillo has been named junior division champion for the 2010 National Science Fair. Her project, “Disproving Global Warming,” beat more than 50,000 other projects submitted by students from all over the U.S.

Castillo’s project, which wasn’t even a top project within her school science fair six months ago, looked at the historical temperature record in Beeville and extrapolated the results to the entire globe to derive the “creative” conclusion that there is “not enough evidence to prove global warming is occurring.”

As scientist and climate blogger Michael Tobis reported yesterday, Castillo “received a package containing the trophy, medal and plaque, along with a letter” that purported to be from Linda Slakey, the National Science Foundation’s Executive Director of Education & Human Resources, saying that Castillo was named the “Jr. Grand Champion of the NSF’s “2010 National Science Fair” and had won an “all-expenses paid trip to Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.”

The letter was a complete fabrication, according to the NSF, which has referred the incident to their Office of Inspector General. The Wonk Room contacted the NSF for this email interview with public affairs official Maria Zacharias:

Q: Did you send the attached letter?

NSF: No.

Q: Does the National Science Foundation run something called the “2010 National Science Fair”?

NSF: No.

A: Is there a Junior Division of the NSF’s 2010 National Science Fair for 9 to 11 year olds?

NSF: No.

Q: Was Julisa Castillo named the Junior Grand Champion of the NSF’s 2010 National Science Fair?

NSF: No.

This was a cruel hoax played on a fourth grader, furthered by irresponsible journalists who failed to identify the implausibility that “panel of judges” with “former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, 14 recipients of the President’s National Medal of Science, and four former astronauts” would honor a child’s work of flawed pseudoscience, and propagandists like Morano.

Scientists who challenged the possibility of catastrophic sea level rise in coming decades have retracted their argument. Mark Siddall, whose paper claimed sea level rise from global warming could not be more than 82 centimeters (32 inches) by 2100 — despite other estimates of up to 1.9 meters — asked for the conclusions published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience to be retracted, accepting corrections from researchers who had made the higher estimates. The Guardian misleadingly presented the news with the headline, “Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels“:

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown.

If all one read was the introduction, a reader might get the false impression that sea level rise from global warming is in doubt. The misleading Guardian headline was picked up — as per usual — by the Drudge Report and Marc Morano’s conspiracy site Climate Depot. Right-wing bloggers, unsurprisingly, latched on to the headline without any comprehension of the story:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

Jules Crittenden: Warmal scientists are compelled to admit (again) that they don’t know what they’re talking about, retract study that predicted up to a nearly three-foot sea level rise by 2100.

Law professor William A. Jacobson: But now the seas are not going to rise? My dream of a waterfront home is melting away faster than the glaciers.

Caleb Howe: Yet another card removed from the geodesic dome of cards that is AGW hysteria.

However, the retraction instead admits that the paper’s calculations for an upper bound to future sea level rise were incorrect, and sea level rise could be much worse. Siddall’s study, “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change,” used paleoclimate reconstructions to predict that sea level rise from global warming would be constrained to between 7 cm and 82 cm (3 to 32 in) by the end of the century, in line with the estimated sea level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which excluded possible effects from ice sheets.

Unfortunately for the future of human civilization, the best scientific estimates of future sea level rise continue to worsen, as it becomes evident that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass much more rapidly than estimated before 2007. December’s “Global sea level linked to global temperature,” published by Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences projects a catastrophic rise of 0.75 to 1.9 m (2.5 to 6 feet) by 2100:

Figure 3: Projection of sea-level rise from 1990 to 2100, based on IPCC temperature projections for three different emission scenarios. The sea-level range projected in the IPCC AR4 for these scenarios are shown for comparison in the bars on the bottom right. Also shown in red is observed sea-level (Vermeer 2009). The estimate from Siddall 2009 that contradicted Vermeer has been retracted.

Over the past twenty years, actual sea level rise has been at the top of estimated limits since the first IPCC report in 1990. By 2200, scientists warn, the oceans could rise by more than three meters, submerging cities like Los Angeles, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and lower Manhattan.

Marc Morano, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) former environmental communications director, mocked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, to laughter and applause. In his acceptance speech for the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award from the Orwellian-named conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media, Morano argued that the “hoax” of global warming is a “rotting corpse,” based on the Climategate smear campaign he helped promote. Morano asserted that McCain “is bailing out of global warming” and that “you know it’s now politically expedient to be a skeptic when John McCain is running scared”:

You know it’s bad when John McCain is bailing out of global warming! [Laughter.] He’s now claiming — and this is not made up — he just claimed a couple days ago he didn’t even support a global warming bill despite co-authoring two, one in 2003 and one in 2005. He stunned his former aides with his new-found skepticism. That just goes to show you because of the work of AIM, because of all the work of Sen. Inhofe, who I owe a huge debt of gratitude for, he stood on the Senate floor … [applause] — Sen. Inhofe was the chairman of the EPW committee until Barbara Boxer took over — stood on the Senate floor and called mandmade global warming one of the greatest hoaxes of modern times in 2003. You know it’s now politically expedient to be a skeptic when John McCain is running scared. And it’s also worse! Al Franken of Minnesota bailed out on the climate bill last August, again, before Climategate. You know it’s bad when Democrats like Al Franken are bailing.

Watch it:

After helping orchestrate the Swiftboat smear campaign against Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Morano joined Inhofe’s staff from 2005 to 2009, where he coordinated a network of global warming conspiracy theorists. He has since continued his propaganda campaign as an employee of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, an Exxon-funded anti-environment group. Although Morano has reason to celebrate that the fossil-fueled right-wing propaganda machine has infected popular understanding of climate change, reality isn’t paying attention.

McCain’s support for cap-and-trade legislation does seem to have wavered as he runs for reelection, but his stance on the threat of global warming has not wavered. “I believe,” McCain said last year, “that the issue of global warming is one of the most fundamental crises facing the world today.”

Morano’s mention of Sen. Franken (D-MN) is even more bizarre. His claim that Franken is “bailing” on global warming is based entirely on Franken signing a letter calling for carbon pollution tariffs to be set on foreign imports in climate legislation.

This afternoon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, President Barack Obama challenged the nation to explore the “new frontiers” of the “clean energy economy of tomorrow.” He praised Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for working on legislation to make our energy system “more efficient, far cleaner, and provide energy independence for America.” But Obama challenged critics “whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action,” saying the status quo “endangers our prosperity” and the “only purpose” of those who question climate science “is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary”:

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. So we’re going to have to work on those folks.

Following the speech, the Wonk Room asked President Obama why such critics accuse the president of socialism. Obama replied:

You know, it’s hard to say. Maybe if you have an answer to that, you’ll let me know.

Watch it:

Among the critics of President Obama’s clean energy agenda who say it will destroy the economy are Glenn Beck, Marc Morano, Fox News, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and even Democratic candidate for the governor of Virginia, Creigh Deeds. Beck believes the White House energy and environment adviser Carol Browner is a socialist. Morano, Inhofe’s former blogger, argued limits on global warming pollution is the “biggest threat to freedom” at the Accuracy in Media conference today. Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer calls the regulation “cap and tax.” Inhofe warns of a “global tax” from the United Nations. And Deeds is now running ads claiming the “cap and trade bill” would “hurt the people” of Virginia.

The reason Obama’s critics accuse him of socialism is because, for reasons of “interest or ideology,” they support a system of economic inequity based on an unsustainable fossil-fuel economy. The current system has reaped great rewards for the ultra-wealthy and the industrial polluters at the expense of the health and welfare of their fellow Americans. To avoid blame for their malfeasance, they must paint Obama as the villain, and his essential reform agenda as even scarier than the status quo, with language that taps into the darkest fears of the American public.

The Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a toxic pollution front group founded by the Richard Mellon Scaife fortune, recently hired Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) climate denier guru, Marc Morano, to set up shop at ClimateDepot.com. Morano’s slanderous Senate releases were notorious for their enthusiastic formatting. Thanks to DeSmogBlog, the Wonk Room has received his pitch to the media as an “anti-Gore Global Warming Expert,” seemingly qualified by his ability to creatively use the toolbar on his word-processing software:

Here’s your counter guest debater to Al Gore and Global Warming Climate change disinformation plus how Obama’s Policies are affecting our economy.

For your on-air expert contributor talent files: Credentialed “Counter Guest” to popular global warming ideology: Here’s your anti-Gore Global Warming Expert who offers the science to counteract partisan and ideologically driven Environmental entities and issues.

Yes, that’s right, if you have as little respect for aesthetics and the rules of grammar as you do for science, you can get your very own “counter guest” for a “lively, fair and balanced discussion” about flat-earth lunacy. Roll Call TV was his trial run last week, to the great excitement of Morano joker Noel Sheppard.

Morano’s new site, Climate Depot, “aims to redefine global warming reporting,” by attacking professional science journalists like “ABC’s Bill Blakemore, the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein, Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, CBS’s Scott Pelley, NBC’s Anne Thompson” as lackeys of Al Gore and praising Sen. Jim “Hoax” Inhofe as “Churchillian.” Climate Depot is sure to fit seamlessly into Morano’s alternate-reality right-wing universe of Newsbusters, the Drudge Report, and Glenn Beck.

Full release: Read more

Conservative economist Dennis Avery, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers, claimed today on a right-wing website that the “atmospheric CO2 levels at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory have declined since 2004″:

How can this be when humans keep emitting more greenhouse gases? Could declining atmospheric CO2 levels mean that the whole Greenhouse Warming theory is collapsing?

In fact, carbon dioxide levels measured since 1958 at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory have continued their inexorable rise, going from an average of 376 to 385 parts per million from 2004 to 2009:

Avery’s claim was based on a post on Morano climate denial joker Anthony Watts‘ blog, which implied that carbon dioxide growth rates have been going down. As Joe Romm noted at Climate Progress, “Dennis Avery doesn’t know the difference between growth and growth rate.”

In a telephone interview with the Wonk Room, Avery admitted his error:

I stand corrected . . . I apparently misstated the case.

Furthermore, the post Avery misinterpreted was nonsensical as well. Craig Loehle, principal scientist with the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, the forest products industry’s “research institute,” drew an “eyeball trend line for the peaks” of a chart of monthly carbon dioxide growth rates by Morano joker Alan Siddons. Despite Loehle’s ability to draw lines on charts, carbon dioxide is piling up in the atmosphere faster than ever:

To reiterate, carbon dioxide levels are continuing to increase. And the increase is getting faster. In the 1960s, carbon dioxide levels were going up an average rate of less than one part per million each year. Since 2000, carbon dioxide levels have been rising at an average annual rate of two parts per million. Avery and Loehle weren’t just wrong — they’re dead wrong.

The Wonk Room appreciates Avery’s willingness to admit one mistake. But we doubt this marks the beginning of a trend.

A top aide for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will be leaving his Senate post after a Wonk Room investigation revealed how he coordinates the right-wing climate denial machine. Marc Morano, Inhofe’s environmental communications director, joined the Senate in 2006 to promote Sen. Inhofe’s denial of manmade global warming via the Drudge Report and other right-wing outlets. E&E News reports that Morano will return to the conservative media network as a blogger for Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT):

Marc Morano, the spokesman for Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.), will leave the committee later this month to become executive director and chief correspondent for a fledgling Web site that will serve as a “clearinghouse and one-stop shopping” for climate and environmental news.

Morano joined the Senate, with a $134,000 a year salary, from the rightwing website Cybercast News Service (CNS), where he launched the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) in 2004 and attacked the war record of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) in 2006. Morano was Rush Limbaugh’s “Man in Washington” in the 1990s. Limbaugh, of course, still promotes global warming denial.

Both CNS — a subsidiary of Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center — and CFACT are part of the Scaife network of conservative front groups, supported by the Richard Mellon Scaife family fortune and corporations like Exxon Mobil. CFACT and the Media Research Center are co-sponsors of the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, a global warming denier extravaganza that begins Sunday, March 8.

Last night, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) office responded to forecasts of a dangerous storm with mockery. A winter storm sweeping up the East Coast with rain, snow, and ice has caused 350 car crashes in New Jersey, a 15-mile-long traffic jam in North Carolina, and four deaths from car accidents in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Long Island. Hundreds of thousands of households lost power from Georgia to Maine. Marc Morano, Sen. Inhofe’s environmental communications director, mocked the threat of the storm by pointing out it would take place at the same time as a protest of fossil-fueled global warming in Washington D.C.:

BREAKING: Not again! Big DC Snowstorm to Greet ‘Largest public protest of global warming ever in U.S.!’ – Unseasonably Cold March Temps! [Note: All I (Marc Morano) can say is: HA! HA! HA! - The ‘Gore Effect’ Strikes again – this time it impacts NASA’s James Hansen! See also: GORE HEARING ON WARMING MAY BE PUT ON ICE – Jan. 26, 2009 ]

Spurred by his email blast and pumped by Drudge, the conservative blogosphere went into a tizzy that the East Coast has a snowstorm in the beginning of March:

Drudge Report: “‘Largest public protest of global warming’ ever in USA faces DC March snowstorm!”

Stop the ACLU: “As usual, great timing by the Climahysterics.”

Gateway Pundit: “The global warming religionists have been planning this protest in Washington DC for months. They’ve billed it as the largest public protest of global warming in the United States ever. Today, Mother Nature greeted the junk science enthusiasts with a record storm and a foot of snow.”

Watts Up With That reprinted part of Morano’s email and writes: “It seems like the Climate Crew has had some trouble getting their messages across.”

In addition, The Politico‘s Glenn Thrush blogged:

John Bresnahan correctly points out that it seems that a disproportionate number of GW events coincide with winter storms (and no, we’re not going to provide other examples).

The Politico has run with this line of argument before — in print. The Wonk Room checked with Bresnahan, a veteran reporter, and he explained in an e-mail that it was “a joke” that “was never meant to be posted.” He continues:

As someone who wrote his first story on global warming and climate change while a reporter for the newsletter “Clean Air Report” back in 1993, I have no doubt that global climate change is occurring, it is anthropogenic in source, and the US gov’t, as well as other industrialized nations and India/China, need to take action to reduce/combat it asap.

Bresnahan followed up in a phone call with another joke (we hope!): “Glenn Thrush’s days are numbered.”

(HT: Hall of Record)

Marc Morano’s full email: Read more