Traitor to our nation and threat to our democracy, dirty-oil money funded Sen. Inhofe (R-Okla.) once again lies to the American people and sends junk science to the President

Scientists Fight Inhofe Attack On Climate Fund

by Brad Johnson, Wonk Room, Think Progress, December 5, 2010

The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

A group of four Republican senators, led by climate denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), have lashed out at the Obama administration’s efforts to protect the poorest and most vulnerable people of the world from climate disasters. Inhofe, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) wrote a letter to President Barack Obama telling him to drop an international adaptation fund for the least developed nations — part of the Copenhagen Accord signed last year by President Obama and over 130 other nations. Under Democratic leadership, the United States appropriated $1.3 billion for the climate fund in 2010 (compared to$136.8 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). After citing the budget deficit and high unemployment as reasons not to invest in protecting the vulnerable, the senators attacked the scientific basis for taking action:

In addition, several of the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning the eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true. We understand that reforms of the IPCC process are currently underway and we believe that no American taxpayer dollars should be committed to a global climate fund based on information that is not accurate.

The Wonk Room contacted the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a new volunteer effort by top scientists, to find out what they thought about the claim that the threat to the developing world is too uncertain for the United States to act.

“This is a dishonest climate change denier myth,” top climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, explained. The senators are referring to two or three errors in the thousand-page impacts report that are “so insubstantial that they didn’t even make the summary for policy makers or the technical summary report.”

Dr. Gary Yohe, the Huffington Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, charged the senators with “misdirection and misrepresentation”:

They are continuing an effort of misdirection and misrepresentation so that the debate does not focus on the issue – the urgent need for adaptation and the value to the United States of investing in adaptation (around the world).

Dr. Spencer Weart, a physicist and leading science historian, told us that “senators are incorrect in their claim that there are substantial errors in the IPCC’s evaluation of the science of impacts of climate change on developing nations”:

Unless the senators can point to serious deficiencies in the actual main conclusions about impacts of the IPCC report — which they have not done and cannot do — the prudent thing is to take the IPCC’s severe warnings about impacts at face value and prepare accordingly.

The senators have received a collective $5.1 million from the fossil fuel industry in campaign contributions.

Dr. Weart’s full response debunks in detail the senators’ letter:

The senators are incorrect in their claim that there are substantial errors in the IPCC’s evaluation of the science of impacts of climate change on developing nations. The IPCC’s main conclusions, as carefully developed in summary statements, were endorsed with no dissent by all the scientists who participated (essentially comprising all the world’s experts in these matters) and also with no dissent by all the representatives of all participating governments (virtually every government in the world, including by the way the representatives appointed by the G. W. Bush administration). 

What the senators are probably referring to are two statements buried among the many hundreds of detailed and specific statements in the body of the report. One of these claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by the year 2035. This is rather obviously erroneous (ultimately it was traced back to a misprint in a non-peer-reviewed article that projected their disappearance by 2350). While the fate of the very high-altitude Asian glaciers remains uncertain, recent studies have shown that at least some of them are dwindling enough to have serious impact on South Asian water supplies within this century.  

In other developing nations, for example Peru, the harmful future impact of the disappearance of glaciers on water supplies has not been disputed, and is indeed already becoming a worry. 

The second statement that the senators are probably thinking of had to do with the risk that the Amazon rain forest might dry up and turn to grassland by the end of the century. This is not an error if the statement is properly understood. There is indeed such a *risk* although since it is not a *certainty* it has been somewhat controversial. The most recent studies suggest that while climate change alone may not destroy the Amazon rain forest, the combined effect of climate change and continuing deforestation is indeed very risky. 

In sum, unless the senators can point to serious deficiencies in the actual main conclusions about impacts of the IPCC report–which they have not done and cannot do–the prudent thing is to take the IPCC’s severe warnings about impacts at face value and prepare accordingly.

 Link:  http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/05/scientists-inhofe-cancun/

Spencer Weart, science historian, expresses his concern over attempts to slander entire community of climate scientists

Science historian Weart: “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.”

Climate Progress blog, November 29, 2009

Spencer Weart: My most interesting conversations were with historians who have been studying the history of the tobacco companies that did their best, and quite successfully for many years, to cover up the fact that smoking kills people by the million.  Some interesting parallels, but…

So begins a fascinating interview of Weart on the illegally hacked emails by Capital Weather Gang’s Andrew Freedman.  Dr. Weart is a physicist and science historian with the American Institute of Physics.

Weart’s website, “The Discovery of Global Warming,” is one of the places to start if you’re interested in getting the basics of climate science.  Based on the comments posted on CP, RealClimate, WUWT, DotEarth, etc., I think it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of the self-proclaimed “skeptics” (aka those who’ve been duped by the professional disinformers) haven’t even bothered to look at the most basic scientific evidence on human-caused global warming.

And the majority of the professional disinformers simply have no regard whatsoever for basic science or an evidence-based search for the truth — which is why they keep pushing talking points that have long been debunked in the scientific literature (see, for instance, Scientists advising fossil fuel funded anti-climate group concluded in 1995: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of GHGs such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied”).

But as science historian Weart tells Freedman — spreading disinformation about science is nothing new.  What is new is the slander of both individual scientists and the entire scientific community:

Andrew Freedman: What effects do you think this will have on public perceptions of climate science and climate scientists?

Spencer Weart: I don’t expect this to have much impact on public perceptions of climate and climate scientists. Opinions have become so fixed that it would take serious evidence to shift a significant number of people. Since the late 1980s, just about every year and sometimes almost every month, a group of people (mostly the same ones) have exclaimed, “Now in these latest (whatever) we finally have proof that there is no need to worry about climate change!” There is a segment of the public that has believed every new claim. The rest will continue to doubt such claims in the absence of truly solid proof.

AF: What do you think this story reveals about the conduct of climate science?

SW: Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science–debating one another’s data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration–and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their time defending their personal reputations against ignorant or slanderous attacks.
The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, 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. In blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers.
Extraordinary and, frankly, weird. Climate scientists are naturally upset, exasperated, and sometimes goaded into intemperate responses… but that was already easy to see in their blogs and other writings.

Guess the tobacco companies just weren’t as clever and ruthless as the big fossil fuel polluters and their allies (see On the 150th anniversary of first commerical U.S. well, the oil industry is headed toward oblivion — and trying to take civilization down with it and Obama takes on the anti-scientific delayers, while Australia’s Rudd slams the “deniers” and the “gaggle” of “conspiracy theorists” opposing climate action).

AF: For a science historian such as yourself, how valuable are these e-mails? And what is your impression of them thus far?
SW: There would be a lot to learn if the owner of these e-mails (I suppose the University) would release them for analysis; for example, you could run up statistics on the types of interchanges and the structure of networks of discussion among researchers. Of course no scholar can make use of stolen material, and in particular one cannot legally or ethically quote a private message without the explicit permission of the writer.
Historians do often work with collections of letters that have been donated to archives. Typically we spend countless hours trying to understand the context; scholarly reputations have been ruined by interpretations that turned out to be mistaken. The risk of misinterpretation is far greater with e-mails, written so much more casually than letters. Our society is having difficulty dealing with this new form of communication. Look at last week’s verdict on the Bear Sterns hedge fund managers who were accused of misleading investors. The prosecuters based their case on a few seemingly incriminating sentences drawn from a mass of e-mails. When the jury saw the whole set of e-mails, they quickly found that there was no crime, just ordinary business chatter. From what I’ve seen, I expect that will be the verdict on the climate scientists’ e-mails.

Precisely — see Reuters: “ANALYSIS-Hacked climate e-mails awkward, not game changer.”
Related Post:

• Rep. Jay Inslee slams SuperFreakonomics: “People are still trying to write books to deceive the American public” on climate science.
• Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)
• Here’s what we know so far: CRU’s emails were hacked, the 2000s will easily be the hottest decade on record, and the planet keeps warming thanks to us!
• Newtongate: The final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment “thinking”
• Competitive Enterprise Institute to sue RealClimate blogger over moderation policy
• The newspaper that publishes George Will (and Sarah Palin) editorializes: “Many — including us — find global warming deniers’ claims irresponsible.”
• UK Guardian: “To stop a climate catastrophe … Scientists must stop sanitising their message”