The anti-science hatemongers have redoubled their efforts, as guest blogger Brad Johnson reports in this pair of ThinkProgress reposts.
On his radio show yesterday, Fox News host Glenn Beck argued that the world’s climate scientists should commit suicide because they “have so dishonored themselves.” After repeating exaggerated and false smears about the work of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international scientific and governmental body tasked with assessing the threat of global warming, Beck said “there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occured,” referring to the form of ritual suicide used by Japanese samurai:
There’s not enough knives. If this, if the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred. I mean, these guys have so dishonored themselves, so dishonored scientists.
Listen here:
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Beck’s hateful attack is part of a larger campaign to demonize the thousands of climate scientists involved in the IPCC and discredit their consensus that manmade pollution is destabilizing the global climate. Their latest effort paints a wild picture of a global conspiracy to defraud the public, based on a handful of inaccurate or poorly sourced but valid claims buried in the 3,000-page report. Unfortunately, Beck is not the first to tell climate realists to commit suicide. Last year, hate-talk host Rush Limbaugh told New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin to “just go kill yourself.”
And here’s Sarah “fiddle while Nome burns” Palin whom the Washington Post itself gave her its highest (which is to say lowest) rating of “Four Pinocchios” for continuing to “to peddle bogus [energy] statistics three days after the original error was pointed out by independent fact-checkers.”
Fox News contributor Sarah Palin has claimed that studies showing polar bears are threatened by global warming are “snake oil science.” Speaking in Redding, CA, at the Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference, Palin argued that the science of climate change is really just a plot to hurt oil companies. “Those promoting polar bear listing really want to shut down oil and gas leasing in Arctic coastal waters off Alaska,” Palin argued:
We knew the bottom line . . . was ultimately to shut down a lot of our development. And it didn’t make any sense because it was based on these global warming studies that now we’re seeing (is) a bunch of snake oil science.
In reality, the 2006 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a “product of research by 300 scientists from northern countries, warned that the Arctic is warming at a rate much faster than the rest of the Earth.” Arctic ice is now at historically low levels. In 2008, George Bush’s Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall testified that there was no significant scientific uncertainty in the endangerment posed by global warming to polar bears, based on numerous scientific studies. In contrast, when Palin petitioned to overturn the endangerment finding, she cited a paper funded by Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and Koch Industries. Now that’s snake oil science.