sci bak

see scientist tag<div>
</div><div>=</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">capt bak 8/17
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>see science suppression</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
see GOP on conservative psychology; conspiracy theory
eg 

<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/10/12/climate_change_benghazi_the_fed_the_science_between_the_rights_irrational_obession_with_conspiracies/">http://www.salon.com/2014/10/12/climate_change_benghazi_the_fed_the_science_between_the_rights_irrational_obession_with_conspiracies/</a>
</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/climate/document-Draft-of-the-Climate-Science-Special-Report.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/climate/document-Draft-of-the-Climate-Science-Special-Report.html</a></font></div><div>
</div><div>but</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/climate/climate-change-drastic-warming-trump.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/climate/climate-change-drastic-warming-trump.html</a></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-your-field-guide-to-the-5-main-types-of-pandemic-deniers/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-your-field-guide-to-the-5-main-types-of-pandemic-deniers/</font></a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sophia A. McClennen / Salon July 26, 2020</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Every day there is more data to prove the dangers of the coronavirus. Yet, bizarrely, the more proof we have of the damage of the pandemic; the more vicious and hysterical its deniers. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of uninformed, deluded ideas covidiots spew on a daily basis. We mourn not just the lives lost and the bodies damaged, but the collective intelligence of our nation. With international news consistently depicting the United States as the dumbest nation in the developed world, it is as if news of the covidiocy is almost as depressing as news of the virus’s spread itself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The trend to what is described as America’s move from freedom to “freedumb” has sadly been a long time in the making. The pandemic only painfully reveals a process that was well-documented by <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Charles Pierce’s 2010 book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.”</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Pierce opens with a story of Americans descending on the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where homeschooled children on field trips can behold a dinosaur wearing a saddle. With stories like these it is not hard to understand how this country lost its grip on even the most basic scientific concepts. It is not a big leap from dinosaurs in saddles to believing that face masks make us sick.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly before the 2016 election we started to hear that part of the problem with America’s stupidity was the fact that social media allows us to exist in information silos or echo chambers where our ideas aren’t challenged and where we get a daily dose of confirmation for our brand of personal wackiness. Surely, information silos are a problem, but as the pandemic deniers have shown, there is actually a fairly diverse array of covidiocy types.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, when we lump all pandemic deniers together into the same pile, we miss the fact that what plagues America on a cognitive level is a far more serious disease, one that has neither one symptom nor one easy cure. <b>Here are five main types of covidiots to look out for:</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Eye Rollers</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The eye rollers think that all of the news over the pandemic is exaggerated hype.</b> This is the line of reasoning that suggests that if we didn’t test for the virus so well, our numbers would be more in line with other developed nations. The eye rollers think that the coronavirus is just like the flu and that its mortality rates are of no real significance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You’d think all you’d need to do with an eye roller is show them the inside of an ICU or have them hear stories from those who have been gravely sickened by the virus. But the key to the eye roller is that they aren’t going to believe a single piece of evidence because, from their view, all proof of the dangers of the pandemic is <b>manufactured to produce hysteria.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The eye roller is disturbing for the fact that they have a long history of not taking a single critical issue in this nation seriously. So, coupled with their eye rolling over what they perceive as coronavirus hype, they are also likely to believe that we have no racism, no sexism, in fact, no significant problems whatsoever.  For them, liberals manufacture issues that aren’t real so that they can create social anxiety and elevate their policy platform. These are the people who disparage the Black Lives Matter movement as reverse racism and mock #MeToo as a problem of thin skin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Shoulder Shruggers</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The shoulder shruggers are your Ayn Rand-style covidiots. These folks get the numbers and the science. They have a full sense of the dead bodies and damaged lungs, but they simply don’t care. They epitomize the “profit over people” worldview.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This is the line of reasoning we saw on display by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick </b>who suggested that grandparents should be willing to die in order to save the economy for their grandkids: “My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” According to him, there is no reason to “sacrifice the country” in order to save a few old people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Like the eye rollers, the shoulder shruggers have a far more pernicious mindset that shapes their views on a wider set of concerns than the virus. These are the folks who see in the virus neoliberal opportunities to capitalize rather than empathize.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Narcissistic Hedonists</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The hedonists simply don’t want to be inconvenienced by the virus. They want their manicures, haircuts and happy hours. Their own selfishness dominates their behavior and clouds their ability to consider the wellbeing of others. They see the entire world from the vantage point of their pleasure-driven egos and they outright refuse to be inconvenienced for the benefit of others.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The narcissistic hedonists talk about how they have a right not to wear a mask and how those who worry over the pandemic should just stay home. “You’re infringing on my rights,” they scream any time they are told they can’t enter a store without a mask. “This is a free country, and I’m here to shop.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The narcissistic hedonists have no commitment to a social project nor do they care a wit about the common good. They have weighed the costs and risks of their behavior and they think that their own desires are more valuable than their grandparents’ lives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This strain of covidiot also has a long history in this nation. Unlike the eye roller who thinks everything in the nation is already great or the shoulder shrugger who cares more about the economy than society, the narcissistic hedonist places their desires at the center of everything. And, even worse, they think that their own destructive ego-driven behavior is their “right” as Americans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Self-Proclaimed Scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The self-proclaimed scientists are a unique strain of covidiot that derives from this nation’s long resistance to expertise. The self-proclaimed scientist will tell you that you should not listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead you should listen to them, since they have done “research” and they know more about the virus than world-leading scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently warned of the dangerous consequences of our national anti-science bias: “One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable — they just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yet, as Pierce documents in the book I cited earlier, the<b> American tendency to eschew expertise and disparage science has extremely deep roots in our collective history. I</b>t is tied not just to religious extremism, but also to the history of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. The urge to put down teachers and professors alongside scientists is part of the American habit of distrusting smart people and it is tied to the idea that some folks would prefer a president they want to have a beer with over an intellectual or even highly educated president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The anti-expertise sickness that plagues the United States is sadly to blame for much of the failed U.S. response to the pandemic, but its negative impact on the functioning of our nation goes well beyond flaws in our healthcare system and public health policy. As long as we continue to be skeptical of knowledge and attracted to BS, we can expect our nation to continue to look less and less like a developed nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Conspiracy Theorists</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the special features of conspiracy theorists is that they are found on both the left and the right, unlike a lot of the other strains of covidiots. They converge in the bizarre alternate reality of anti-vaxxers. But, regarding the coronavirus, the conspiracy theories are largely skewed to the right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The range of conspiracy theories about the pandemic is simply too broad to cover in this piece.  It spans from theories that the virus was deliberately started by China or by Bill Gates to theories that the virus simply isn’t real at all. Nature reported in March that “the website Biohackinfo.com falsely claimed that Gates planned to use a coronavirus vaccine as a ploy to monitor people through an injected microchip or quantum-dot spy software.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Healthline reported in June that 25 percent of people believe unproven theories about COVID-19. This is all to show that there is a strange urge in this country to attach to fantasy theories rather than facts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The danger to the conspiracy theorist is not just their refusal to accept evidence that challenges their views, but rather their paranoid worries that any evidence is actually propaganda designed to dupe them and cause harm</b>. The conspiracy theorist is so worried thinking that information is manipulation that they lose any sight of what the truth actually is. And as coverage of a Palm Beach County Commission meeting that went viral for the outlandish arguments presented by residents against a mask ordinance (which the Florida county did pass) shows, covidiots tend to mix up their reasons for refusing to wear masks and take the pandemic seriously. Trying to follow these arguments against wearing masks will hurt your brain.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s worse is that having to “debate” matters of science and evidence-based medicine tends to leave us fighting each other rather than the virus. Even more disturbing, there is no vaccine for covidiocy: It promises to linger well after the virus has been contained, wreaking havoc on our society, taking up resources and frustrating progress. It’s a condition that has plagued our country for decades and it won’t be cured until and unless we make a collective effort to prevent its spread.</font></div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.ecowatch.com/trump-first-two-weeks-2240402997.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><p style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House has already passed bills to require that almost all significant federal regulations be approved by both houses of Congress before taking effect. It may sound reasonable until you consider that critical government rules on clean air, children's health and any other subject can be held up by a handful of senators.<u><u /></u></font></p><p style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><u><u><u><u><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Equally alarming: Such radical new policies <a href="https://edf.org/7qq" target="blank" style="color: rgb(82, 149, 70); text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">replace expert analysis</a> based on science and law with a highly political, unscientific process.</b><u><u /></u></font></u></u></u></u></u></p><p style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><u><u><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet another bill would sunset all existing regulations after 10 years, reopening long settled issues like child labor, food safety and financial security.<u><u /></u></font></u></u></u></p><p style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><u><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maybe most self-defeating, the House endorsed a bill that allows leaks from natural gas wells to continue on federal and tribal laws. The gas belongs to the public so cancelling this rule will <a href="https://edf.org/7qc" target="blank" style="color: rgb(82, 149, 70); text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">cost taxpayers</a> up to $800 million in lost royalties over the next decade, while increasing air and <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" style="color: rgb(82, 149, 70); text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">climate</a> pollution.<u><u /></u></font></u></u></p><p style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><u><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In their zeal to strip away anything labeled "regulation," lawmakers are busy rolling back common sense.</font></u></u></p></div><div><u><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=
</font></u></u><div><u><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
<a href="http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-worse-anti-science-nonsense-of-2016/">http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-worse-anti-science-nonsense-of-2016/</a>
</font></u></u><h3><u><u><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GOP platform declares coal is “clean”</font></strong></u></u></h3><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><h3><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Interfering with government scientists?</font></strong></h3><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but already there are troubling signs that his administration may attempt to interfere with the work of government scientists and experts.</font></p><ul><li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Energy Department questionnaire. </strong>The president-elect’s transition team submitted a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/politics/questions-posed-by-president-elect-trumps-transition-team-to-energy-department-officials/2143/?rtef">questionnaire</a> to the Department of Energy asking for a list of employees and contractors who had worked on the Obama administration’s efforts to calculate the “social cost of carbon” — that is, the dollar value of the health and environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. The transition team also asked for a list of staffers who attended U.N. climate negotiations. As <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/09/trump-transition-team-for-energy-department-seeks-names-of-employees-involved-in-climate-meetings/?utm_term=.e18c16613f0b">the Washington Post explained</a>, the questionnaire “has raised concern that the Trump transition team is trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama.” (The department didn’t comply with the request, and the Trump team <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/14/politics/energy-department-litmus-test/">ultimately disavowed the questionnaire</a> after facing criticism.)</font></li></ul><ul><li><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Earth science at NASA. </strong>One of Trump’s space advisers, Bob Walker, has repeatedly floated the idea that the administration should begin to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research">remove Earth science</a>from NASA’s portfolio. NASA’s Earth science program is well known for producing some of the world’s most important climate change research, and Walker’s proposal has sparked an outcry among many in the scientific community. (Walker has suggested shifting the work to NOAA, but the incoming administration <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/donald-trump-space-nasa">hasn’t proposed giving NOAA additional funding</a>, and Walker’s critics have called the plan unworkable.) Trump hasn’t actually adopted Walker’s idea, and scientists such as David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist who receives NASA funding, are optimistic that he won’t. But if Trump does attempt to gut NASA’s research efforts, the backlash could be intense. “We’re not going to stand for that,” said Grinspoon on our <a href="https://art19.com/shows/inquiring-minds/episodes/7d2041be-befe-4d56-8f92-54ecffc6e6fd">Inquiring Minds podcast</a>. “We’re going to keep doing Earth science and make the case for it. We’ll get scientists to march on Washington if we have to. There’s going to be a lot of resistance.”</font></li></ul><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans’ devotion to coal was one of the defining environmental issues of the 2016 campaign. Trump promised to revive the struggling industry and put miners back to work by <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/an-america-first-energy-plan">repealing</a> “all the job-destroying Obama executive actions.” Those commitments were reflected in an early version of the <a href="http://grist.org/election-2016/republican-platform-declares-coal-is-clean/">GOP platform</a>, which listed coal’s many wonderful qualities and said that Republicans would dismantle Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which limits emissions from coal-fired power plants. That didn’t go far enough for GOP activist David Barton, who convinced delegates at the party’s convention to add one additional word to the text. “I would insert the adjective ‘clean,’” said Barton. “So: ‘The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, <em>clean</em>, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.’” Barton’s wording change was approved unanimously. As <a href="http://grist.org/election-2016/republican-platform-declares-coal-is-clean/">Grist noted at the time</a>, “For years the coal industry — and at one point, even President Obama — promoted the idea of ‘clean coal,’ that expensive and imperfect carbon-capture-and-storage technology could someday make coal less terrible. But there’s no way it is clean.”</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">sci suppression bkup plain text: 815</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">scisuppr815</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">rfk2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ch 5 Sci Fiction</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1st suppress since Inquisition</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Luntz infamous memo 2003 says enviro is gop weakness: doubt, recruit experts.  ind always had hacks, but gop got them in the gov 77  echo "more study" mantra, then cut $ to do it  77  b2 proposed budget double digit cuts in epa, usgs, dept agr, energy's Office of Sci etc 77 "biostitutes"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ctw hubby interests in Citigroup, which owns Traveler's  (also Port Authority) so incentive to downgrade risk of air 79  moved robt martin ombudsman (dept of labor rules no cause), cancelled the position, on weekend sent agents to grab files and padlock office. Kaufman Resigned. air said ok before all test results in. IG said risk downplayed, raw data blocked 80-1  3x safe level asbestos  Connaughton leaned on Thernstrom (commun dir, now works for Norton) CEQ screamed at epa's Kreisher, T 81  ground zero levels were record 81.  admon gagged epa on perc, mercury toxicologist quits 83</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GW reports altered, dismissed or hid 12 in 10 yrs 84: N Ac Sci, noaa, nasa and 2002 rept by combined agencies 84.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/2002 epa air report left out usual section on gw; same with june 2003; july 2003 epa sci leaked report  that gw could be dealt w/ at small cost. b2 in response spent 100m for 10 yr study to prove gw is natural 84</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Princeton Oppenheimer said pres does not believe in evol, what kind of sci would convince him on gw 85</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">epa report said fracking (Halliburton #1) wd exceed benzene, data revised so not 85 (waxman q never answered) 85</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Norton said drill no harm caribou; she altered sci; 17 major changes; she attributed them to typos 86</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">win/spr 2002 norton and rove pressured nat'l marine Fisheries to alter salmon on klamath; lack of water led to 33K salmon dead, biggest kill in West 86  biologist resigned</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">norton ordered rewrite on arctic wildlife b/c of drill; snowmobiles (fed judge reprimanded) </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">epa sci govt reprisals for dioxin sludge fertilizer 87  dept of agr superbugs from hog farms ordered not to publish or talk; resigned.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CDC replaced health advis panel w/ industry reps incl VP of Heritage , denounced by 10 sci on Sci Jrnl apr 12 2002 p 89 "regulatory paralysis appears to be the goal here" </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr kim thompson HCRA picked for cdc</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gov Acct Pjt on whistleblowers says gag sci unprecedented (goldwater gop guy) p 90</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2003 PEER found widespread demoralization of sci, feared reprisal in energy states Co ut, mon, dakotas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMB found 420K jobs outsourced to industry; risk of not being able to analyze risks 91</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">atrazine #1 in US, tho problems found in 80's; frog deform at 1/30th eap level; lawsuit forced gov to look into.  Gov hired Syngenta, a mfger 92</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">July 2003 epa regional office approved study by developer funded study that wetlands put out pollutants, then used to justify replace wetlands w golf courses etc 92-3  biologist quit "bushwhacked" 93</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/2003 Graham grabbed authority to review all, as opposed to usual for external review  93 opposed by NAS, Nat Assoc for Adv of sci, fed am sci, regulators going all the way o nixon 94 OIRA became law??</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UCS rep 2/2004 60 sci, 20 nobels, scope and scale ... of manip, suppression, and misrep of sci by bush admin unprecedented 95</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">INCLUDES ATTACKS ON, as well as GOP war on sci</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">newly declared evil, as important source of info/moderation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see seralini gmo, atrazine, agric chemicals</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see BJ 3 part huffo on epa, lamar smith, data quality act, connected to e&e?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See Grijalva and Markey asking for records on hacks funding:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">eg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CURRY SNIPES AT AGU OVER GRIJALVA PROBE: While the American Meteorological Society — no skeptic of climate change — came out swinging (http://politico.pro/1K50LkW) in defense of any individual scientist targeted by Congress, the American Geophysical Union issued a slightly softer statement about the seven academics targeted in Rep. Raúl Grijalva’s climate probe. AGU President Margaret Leinen wrote that scientists need to be protected from intimidation, but that requesting financial disclosure was “not unreasonable.” But, she added, the request for drafts of, or communications about, a scientist’s testimony “goes too far.” “All scientists deserve the same protections afforded by academic freedom, just as they have the same obligations to act with integrity,” Leinen wrote. AGU is one of the largest professional organizations for earth scientists. Leinen’s blog post: http://bit.ly/1K4T128</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry, a one of Grijalva’s seven targets, writing on her blog, said that AGU’s response “implicitly supports Grijalva” and was a “failure of leadership by Margaret Leinen.” http://bit.ly/1zQFocW</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL SERVICE: Roger Pielke Jr., a carbon-tax promoting professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who was nevertheless targeted in Grijalva’s recent climate probe has been quite prolific on Twitter — and it seemed to have paid off a little. In a series of tweets yesterday, Pielke complained about his congressman’s position on Grijalva’s document request, writing “Whoa--> My own congressman @jaredpolis (who I voted for;-) refuses to support my academic freedom on9news.tv/1BtkdSR,” adding “Happy to provide my congressman @jaredpolis a personal briefing on my research related to his colleague's "investigation"-I'm easily reached.” Well, Polis tested the water, replying “of course I support academic freedom” to which Pielke shot back: “Wonderful. Then I look forward to your vocal, unequivocal support!” After that Polis decided to take things offline, asking for Pielke’s phone number. Whatever the Colorado Democrat said, it seems to have been convincing. Roughly 25 minutes later, Pielke tweeted, “Just of [sic] the phone with @jaredpolis much respect ... 1st class Thanks.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who's behind the retraction petition?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Writing in The Guardian at the end of September, John Vidal described the attacks already raining down on Seralini and his team as "a triumph for the scientific and corporate establishment which has used similar tactics to crush other scientists". These included, Vidal said, "Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute in Scotland, who was sacked after his research suggested GM potatoes damaged the stomach lining and immune system of rats, and David Quist and Ignacio Chapela", who studied the flow of genes from illegally planted GM maize to Mexican indigenous maize.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The vociferous attacks on Quist and Chapela resulted in the apparent retraction of their paper by the journal Nature, even though such a move was not supported by the majority of its reviewers and subsequent research confirmed the paper’s main finding. But, as the French journalist Benjamin Sourice has pointed out, the simplest way to definitively discredit a study and nullify its impact is to pressurise the journal that published it to retract it from its list of publications. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the case of Quist and Chapela, an investigation that I undertook with the journalist and author Andy Rowell of Spinwatch revealed how the campaign of retraction had been carefully orchestrated from the start by Monsanto's PR people. It used proxies to whip up feeling against the lead author by branding Dr Chapela an "activist" rather than a scientist and by maintaining his findings were bogus and arrived at through collusion with environmental NGOs. Our research, which was widely reported in both print and broadcast media, suggested that at the heart of that retraction campaign sat Monsanto's former chief internet strategist and director of corporate communications. Jay Byrne had gone on to found his own internet PR company v-Fluence, based like Monsanto in the corporation's home town of St Louis. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although Byrne appeared to be the campaign's chief architect, its principal conduit was the lobby group AgBioWorld, overseen by the GM scientist CS Prakash.  The "ipetition" on Seralini contains no information as to who sponsored it, but its first signatory is CS Prakash. Prakash also seems to have set up an earlier more primitive version of the petition, which clearly identifies him as its sponsor. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some time after GMWatch flagged up the likely role of Prakash and AgBioWorld in the ipetition, the organisation acknowledged its authorship in a press release which asserted that "the petitioning scientists are calling on the publishing journal editors to retract the Seralini study" if he failed to give in to their demand that he hand over all his data. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The AgBioWorld press release contained a quote by Bruce Chassy, who was also the first signatory of the earlier Seralini petition. Chassy was also the co-author of the Forbes pieceaccusing Seralini of fraud. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The article's other author was Henry Miller, a darling of the rightwing press who operates out of the Hoover Institution, among other industry backed lobby groups. Miller, like Chassy, has long been associated with Prakash's AgBioWorld. Miller recently co-authoredanother vitriolic piece on GM for Forbes, denouncing the "fear profiteers" of the anti-GM "protest industry". Miller's co-author on that occasion was none other than former Monsanto PR boss Jay Byrne of v-Fluence. Tellingly, Michael Pollan, the renowned New York Times food writer and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, described the piece by Byrne and Miller as a breathtaking example of "the Big Lie".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Byrne hasn't published any media pieces on Seralini. But it is apparent from Byrne's Twitter account that he was almost solely preoccupied with discrediting the Seralini study from the day of its publication for about the next month. Byrne describes himself on Twitter as v-Fluence CEO and  as "Contributing author, Let Them Eat Precaution", a book on GM edited by Jon Entine. Entine, as it happens, is the author of probably more articles to date attacking Seralini than any other commentator. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith,[lamar, tx?] a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, has declared war on the Obama administration, NASA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undermine attempts to prevent dangerous climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Speaking at the Heartland Institute’s climate denier conference in Washington, D.C., last Thursday, the Texas congressman described how three subpoenas for EPA staff emails and texts have now been issued following claims about “secret emails” and personal use of email accounts by the agency. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This follows a similar-spirited freedom of information request submitted to the EPA by Chris Horner, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute supported by the ExxonMobil funded Competitive Enterprise Institute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith, chairman of the science, space and technology committee said at the conference that “regulation should be based on sound science not science fiction.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The science is clear and overwhelming but not in the way the President says. The fact is there is little evidence that climate change causes extreme weather events.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clean Power Plan</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith’s speech comes only two days after a federal court dismissed a lawsuitby the nation’s largest coal companies and 14 coal-producing states that sought to block President Obama’s clamp-down on power plant emissions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The president’s power plan is nothing more than a power play. It will give the government more control over Americans’ daily lives. These regulations stifle economic growth, destroy jobs and increase energy prices,” said Smith.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He continued: “The EPA justify their dictatorial approach by claiming regulations will slow global climate change and reduce carbon emissions. But heavy handed regulation and arbitrary emission targets will do lasting damage to our economy all for little environment impact.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an effort to counter the EPA’s “most aggressive regulatory agenda in its 40 year history,” Smith’s Secret Science Reform Act was passed by the House in March to prohibit the EPA from implementing a regulation unless it makes public all related data, scientific analyses and materials. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith argues the bill will increase transparency and stop the EPA using “hidden and flawed” science. However, 40 scientific institutions and universities have now opposed the bill arguing it will severely hamper the EPA form carrying out its mission to protect public health and the environment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lord Monckton praised Smith’s speech as “the best informed, most passionate and splendid speeches on climate I have every heard from any politician.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monckton joined Smith in his attack on science in calling for a Congressional investigation into the conduct of the Smithsonian and Harvard University in their treatment of Willie Soon, who failed to disclose conflicts of interest in his research funded by ExxonMobil.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cut Off the Money</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In response to audience calls to “cut off the money” from climate change research Smith highlighted the fact that NASA’s budget on earth science was cut by 40 percent just last week. This was met with cheers and applause from the room.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He added: “The second cut we made that you will appreciate [is to the] National Science Foundation, [which] we also have jurisdiction for, we reset [its] priorities, which we are entitled to do. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We moved a lot of money out of the social science into the hard sciences that typically bear results. We’re trying to get the NSF out of the business of awarding grants such as $1,260,000 (£800,000) for someone to write an off-broadway musical on climate change.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Heartland Activists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier in the day, the conference was kicked-off by Senator James Inhofe, who now chairs the Senate environment and public works committee despite calling global warming “the greatest hoax every perpetrated on the American people.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inhofe urged Heartland activists to go out and fight against what he called “the myth of global warming.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you look at the Republican [Presidential] candidates, they’re all denying this stuff,” Inhofe said. “They’re all with people in this room.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He continued: “This is where you guys come in now, you’re all activists, I really mean that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inhofe, whose message was that “God is still up there”, later told reports that the Pope Francis should butt out of climate change: “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> concluded his speech with a call to arms: “We’ve got a country we’ve got to save, and we’ve got to do it together. If you join us, if we do this as a team, we’ll be doing the Lord’s work and he will richly bless you for it. Amen.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bj 3 part huffpo</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">enstrom, DQA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> the second in a three-part series. Read the first story here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The conservative “secret science” campaign harkens back nearly twenty years.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In late 1996, industry was trying to fight the Environmental Protection Agency’s first efforts to set a fine particle pollution air quality standard of "PM2.5," the abbreviation used for particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE)</b>, an astroturf lobbying group founded by the petrochemical industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch in 1984, warned that the “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">effects of the new air quality standards on the economy would be devastating,”</span> based in part on economic analyses conducted by the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University – a group also funded by the Koch brothers. The CSE co-founder and president was Koch Industries vice president Rich Fink, a George Mason economist who has sat on the board of the school's public choice center.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CSE, the precursor to the Tea Party groups FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, was then led by<b> C. Boyden Gray,</b> an heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune and GOP kingmaker. In addition to running the tobacco-and-polluter-funded “grassroots” CSE, Gray also managed the Orwellian-sounding “Air Quality Standards Coalition,” an industry coalition coordinated by the National Association of Manufacturers to fight EPA limits on soot and smog pollution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As industry was not getting much traction with the “it’s going to cost too much” argument, Gray’s group employed street theater as a political tactic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In January 1997, attendees of a Senate hearing on the proposed EPA rules encountered a group of people wearing white lab coats holding signs saying, “Harvard, release the data!” The supposed scientists in fact came from CSE. In addition, CSE took out ads in the Chicago Tribune attacking the Harvard brand, and writers in the libertarian-industrial network questioned the legitimacy of the studies and demanded the release of the private medical records at their core.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The unwillingness of the study's authors to allow access to basic data is troubling; such secrecy is incompatible with the modern scientific process,” complained a CSE publication in June 1997.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CSE also found an ideological hook for the economic-damage attacks, spinning pollution limits as an assault on freedom. “Imagine that – a new government regulation that takes away our freedom to celebrate our freedom," said a CSE radio advertisement in the summer of 1997. The ad claimed that the proposed air pollution regulations would ruin Independence Day by outlawing barbecues, lawn mowers, and fireworks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The outcome of the campaign was threefold: a weakening and delay of ozone and particulate-matter rules; a $50 million taxpayer-funded project to reconfirm the results; and legislation compelling that the data generated by federally funded research be made available to industry and the public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fast forward to last year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The data in question have not been subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) charged in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet Smith’s claim that the studies and the underlying patient data did not undergo independent analysis is false. In fact, in 1997, while Smith was serving his sixth term, Congress appropriated $49.6 million for a major research program into fine particulate matter, including a reanalysis of the Harvard and ACS studies by the Health Effects Institute. Smith voted for the bill.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When we got the medical records from Harvard, I personally signed a confidentiality agreement, as did the investigators at University of Ottawa. The data was conveyed to a locked room with limited access,” said Health Effects Institute president Dan Greenbaum in an interview.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2000, the group issued a 297-page report entitled “Reanalysis of the Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Society Study of Particulate Air Pollution and Mortality.” The explicit goal of that study was “to conduct a rigorous and independent assessment of the findings of the Six Cities and ACS Studies of air pollution and mortality.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In short, the HEI assessment confirmed the studies’ results. So did a separate HEI analysis of public records from 90 cities known as the National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A charitable interpretation is that this multi-year, multi-million-dollar taxpayer effort advanced epidemiological methodologies. Others might say that polluters knowingly gamed the system by unfairly casting doubt on well-founded science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Shelby Amendment</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Following these EPA battles, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) drafted the Data Access Act, better known as the Shelby Amendment, in response to his inability to get the underlying medical records from the Harvard Six Cities and American Cancer Society studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Shelby amendment mandated that “all data produced under a [federally funded] award will be made available to the public through the procedures established under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA].” The Office of Management and Budget drafted rules to implement the Shelby amendment that limited the scope to research “used in developing an agency action that has the force and effect of law” and carved out exceptions for confidential data.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Efforts to repeal the Shelby amendment in 1999 led tobacco and oil industry consultant Steve Milloy to coin the term “secret science.” In February, Milloy launched the “Stop Secret Science” sweepstakes, offering a Wall Street Journal subscription to people who sent a comment to OMB on the “secret science” rule. Soon, the Washington Times and the New York Post published “secret science” editorials, and an oil executive attacked the “secret science” of the EPA rules. But the term failed to catch on, perhaps because most politicians couldn’t claim with a straight face that confidential medical records should be made public on industry’s behalf.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Shelby amendment had little actual impact on the Harvard and ACS studies. The ACS data is not funded by federal or public dollars, and is not subject to the Data Access Act. Essentially all of the non-confidential records and data from the Harvard Six Cities research has been made public, a process that was underway before the passage of the amendment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whatever the intent, the Shelby amendment marked an important shift in the balance of power between industry and the public, as corporate researchers could get access to federally funded work without any expectation of a quid pro quo.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Forcing a Document Release</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fifteen years later, Rep. Lamar Smith was ready to go further.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After two years of fishing expeditions begun during Ralph Hall’s chairmanship, Smith was fed up with the idea that the federal government wouldn’t –- or couldn’t –- force Harvard and the American Cancer Society to turn over private medical records to his committee.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If the administration does not provide this data by the end of July, the science committee will force its release through a subpoena,” he warned.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although the EPA complied with Smith’s previous demands, turning over all of the records under its control, Smith pushed the subpoena forward. On Aug. 1 of last year, the committee authorized subpoenas against the EPA, Harvard University, and the American Cancer Society on a party-line vote. That day, Smith issued a subpoena to the EPA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A month later, Smith expressed his anger at the EPA’s limited response, challenging the agency to force Harvard and the cancer society to turn over the medical records so that his Committee can “analyze the health effects of exposure to certain air pollutants.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a Sept. 3 letter to EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, Smith claimed that the OMB’s implementation of the Shelby amendment means the EPA’s power to compel private institutions to turn over records is without limit, no matter what confidentiality agreements exist between the researchers and their subjects, or between the government and the researchers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A March 2013 Congressional Research Service report on the Shelby amendment notes that its scope “excludes personal and business-related confidential data.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) asked Smith who he wanted to pass along the research data to, he said,“Dr. James Enstrom.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It turns out that Mr. Smith’s preferred expert for more than two decades has been closely connected to the American tobacco industry, reviled for its promotion of deceptive marketing and faux-science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'I Understand Science Better'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enstrom, an epidemiologist, is perhaps best known for his work on tobacco industry-funded studies, including studies on the health effects of tobacco and second-hand smoke.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His first published work as an epidemiologist, which wasn't funded by the industry, “Cancer Mortality Among Mormons” (1975), found that Mormons’ low consumption of tobacco and alcohol seemed linked to lower cancer rates than the general population.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That said, Enstrom’s attempts to be funded by the tobacco industry go back to the beginning of his career, as communications as far back as 1975 indicate. Enstrom received $233,500 from 1992 to 1998 from the tobacco industry-sponsored Council for Tobacco Research. In 1997, as anti-tobacco lawsuits were leading to the dissolution of CTR, Enstrom solicited and received $150,000 directly from Philip Morris for research based on his idea that “there may indeed be a threshold below which tobacco use is not related to mortality.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given the tobacco industry’s widespread campaign of deliberate deceit about the health risks of smoking, tobacco-funded research is now considered tainted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a 2007 essay, Enstrom accused the entire field of epidemiology of “science McCarthyism.” He finds the move to restrict tobacco-industry funding for research into the health effects of tobacco to be the equivalent of the Soviet government’s efforts to create a "regime of truth" by outlawing research into genetics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enstrom has argued depictions of him as a “tobacco industry consultant,” including the one made by Johnson, are “defamatory.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the tobacco money dried up, Enstrom switched over to industry-funded studies of air pollution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a 2005 study funded by Electric Power Research Institute, Enstrom failed to find a “relationship between ?ne particulate pollution and total mortality in elderly Californians,” in contrast to conclusions reached in previous work by the American Cancer Society.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, Enstrom said he’s not biased towards industry but towards the science, and is so often at loggerheads with other researchers because he’s smarter than epidemiologists with medical or other backgrounds. “I'm saying I understand science better,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whether or not Enstrom’s views on science are better, many are unusual.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, Enstrom had no explanation regarding how fine-particulate pollution could have been found to be deadly at various points in the past, as multiple studies around the globe have found, but are not now in California, as he hypothesizes. He told me that the burden of proof should be on the mainstream medical community, because there isn’t medical research that explains how soot causes cardiopulmonary diseases.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We don't have a mechanism,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But just to cite one of many well-regarded studies on the topic, a decade-old report from the National Research Council noted that there is “growing clinical and epidemiological evidence that ambient air pollution can precipitate acute cardiac events, such as angina pectoris, cardiac arrhythmias, and myocardial infarction.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enstrom said he believed that there are potential benefits to exposure to air pollution and radiation. He cited the concept of "hormesis," a controversial scientific concept that hasn't gained widespread acceptance among scientists and is generally reviled by environmentalists. He said hormesis posits that “below a certain level of pollution there's a loss of natural immunity; if the air is too clean the body doesn't necessarily protect itself.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I believe there's a lot of evidence supporting the validity of hormesis,” he told me.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unsolicited, Enstrom then made a point to defend the rampant climate-science denial among the Republican members of the House Science Committee. “We should be all thankful that we live in a country where freedom of speech is allowed,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Private Medical Records</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the main concerns from environmentalists, science advocates, Democrats and others about Smith's demands for the Harvard and American Cancer Society data is that the data includes confidential, personal health information from participants who were promised confidentiality. Such a disclosure of the data would violate their trust, they maintain.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet Smith and his aides (and Enstrom) insist there are ways that participants can be "de-identified."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Even if you were unable to de-identify the documents, you were still required to produce them,” Smith wrote in a September 3 letter to EPA administrator Gina McCarthy. “We are confident the data can be de-identified with relative ease.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But many, including the author of the Six Cities study, argue Smith's position is faulty.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Anonymizing doesn’t work,” said Frank Speizer. “To know enough from the medical records to be able to replicate the results gives you enough information to personally identify individuals.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Speizer added that the specter of being forced to disclose private data is a "stigma" on new research. “How do you get investigators to do this work?" he asked. "How are you going to get people to participate?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The data included in Harvard Six Cities includes detailed medical records, tests, visits on 8,000 individuals,” explained Greenbaum of the Health Effects Institute. “There are sworn signed statements that we will not disclose this information in any way.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“One of the principal rules that goes throughout science," said Greenbaum, is that "you are really constrained from presenting the data in more than aggregated form.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, Greenbaum noted, when the studies were first done, researchers relied on having one or two air monitors in each city and estimating that the exposure reflects everyone in that city. There are now improved methodologies that are based on where people live. “If you know where somebody lives, and when they died, you know who they are,” he explained.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I presented Greenbaum’s points to Enstrom, he conceded that Greenbaum could be right. “You’re raising concerns that I don’t want to deal with in this phone call,” said Enstrom.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Secret Science Reform Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The August subpoena authorized the committee to directly mandate that Harvard University and the American Cancer Society turn over their confidential records. Despite Smith’s rhetoric about the multi-trillion-dollar importance of getting access to the patient records, his committee has only gone after the EPA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since the EPA doesn’t actually have the confidential medical records, he has changed course, with a new and much broader line of attack.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On February 6, Smith and Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) introduced the Secret Science Reform Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bill is less than a page long, but it is breathtaking in scope. It forbids the EPA from taking any kind of action – regulatory, advisory, or enforcement – unless the action relies entirely on scientific research that has had all of its data made public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unlike the “secret science” subpoena effort, the bill doesn’t try to force the disclosure of confidential data. Instead, it calls for the exclusion of any such research in EPA actions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Virtually every regulation proposed by the Obama administration has been justified by nontransparent data and unverifiable claims,” said Smith in his press release announcing the bill. “The American people foot the bill for EPA’s costly regulations, and they have a right to see the underlying science.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmental advocates say it would have been difficult to launch a more potentially devastating attack on the EPA and its stated mission, "to protect human health and the environment."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Anyone who understood anything about EPA and the myriad responsibilities and legal authorities it has to undertake at the direction of Congress could not have written a two-paragraph bill that more thoroughly disrupts the agency’s ability to protect the public,” said clean-air advocate John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “One gasps at how oblivious it is to a vast array of unintended and absurd consequences.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The potential public health implications go beyond preventing the EPA from regulating air pollution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One example: In June, 2010, the Gulf Coast was reeling from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Millions of barrels of crude were gushing into the gulf, treated with millions of gallons of deep-sea chemical dispersants. In Jackson, Mississippi, state legislators convened a series of hearings on the disaster, which BP officials refused to attend.Legislators – even Steven Palazzo, now a member of the House Science Committee and a co-sponsor the Secret Science Reform Act – asked if the dispersants could make made Gulf seafood toxic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The chemical composition of those dispersants was and remains confidential.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another example: Walke noted that the Elk River chemical spill in West Virginia earlier this year involved one chemical the EPA knew about but was shrouded in secrecy, and another they didn’t know about at all. More than 100 people were made sick by exposure to the chemical, and about 300,000 residents were warned not to use their tap water in any capacity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Smith bill, if in effect, in both cases would have prevented the EPA from acting on known dangers that it learned about from confidential information – so therefore, had the law been in place, the agency could not have acted to prevent the circumstances that led to either spill, nor could they have assisted in the spills' aftermath.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Said Walke: "That is ridiculous!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weird Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith hasn't used his perch as committee chairman only to try to make life miserable for environmental regulators. He's got a thing for scientists, too.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bookish-appearing Smith, who wears round rimless glasses and generally has a quiet, respectful demeanor, has cast his agenda regarding the $7 billion National Science Foundation with Texas-sized swagger. “I’m going to have a little fun with them,” he told the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce February 5. “I’m going to change the way the grants are awarded if I have my way.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On April 18, 2013, Smith introduced a draft of the High Quality Research Act, which would compel the NSF director to certify that every grant is for “groundbreaking” research that “solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inasmuch as the grants come before the results of the research are known, the proposed act was rightly considered absurd.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith and other GOP members of the committee argue that the NSF awards far too many grants on topics of an unserious nature, which do little but allow left-leaning scientists to travel to often-exotic locales on the federal dime.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He and the other committee Republicans looked at the most recent crop of 164 NSF grants issued the month before he introduced his NSF bill for examples. Looking at titles alone, and not the substance of the proposals -– which is what one prominent Democrat says Smith did -– questions might understandably be raised about whether taxpayers should be paying for the studies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the grants 164 the NSF announced in March, 2013, was titled, “Picturing Animals in National Geographic, 1888-2008.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soon after, the Washington Times asked, “[C]an the government really afford to spend $227,437 to study pictures of animals in National Geographic magazines?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A month later, Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) challenged John Holdren, President Obama's top science advisor, to justify that and other NSF-funded studies, saying “it’s just hard to conceive how those are important to our national security or our national interest.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith sent a letter to acting NSF director Cora Merritt listing the abstract titles for five grants, including the one regarding National Geographic, questioning their “intellectual merit.” The other grants, which ranged from $152,000 to $435,000, were titled "Comparative Histories of Scientific Conservation: Nature, Science, and Society in Patagonian and Amazonian South America”; “The International Criminal Court and the Pursuit of Justice”; “Comparative Network Analysis: Mapping Global Social Interactions”; and “Regulating Accountability and Transparency in China’s Dairy Industry.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet put in context, it's clear that these studies could be defined as being in the national interest, using a wide range of definitions. According to the NSF Award Abstract, Megan Tracy, an anthropologist with James Madison University, is studying, in part, "how individuals, motivated by global scandals and the pressure to prevent future incidents, transmit and transform food safety regulations and best practices across international borders."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And Maxine Kamari Clarke, a Yale-based anthropologist, will be studying the arrest warrants the International Criminal Court has pursued against African national leaders, as it pertains to "international justice and human rights as these concepts have been interpreted by the [ICC] and the African Union Commission."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All five grants were issued by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During his tenure as chair, Smith has attacked a total of 20 different NSF grants by name, 18 of which are in the social sciences. (The other two were related to climate change.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Remarkably, two-thirds of these grant recipients are female scientists. Smith’s attacks on research conducted by women took some effort, as females represent only about 30 percent of practicing scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democrats suspect that Smith's filter doesn’t appear to go beyond reading the names of the abstracts. “It has been my experience that some members read the titles of the research grants but seldom read the substance behind the headlines,” said Science Committee member Rep. Donna Edwards, (D-Md.), referring to Smith.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as she did when Smith tried to subpoena the Harvard and American Cancer Society data, Johnson, the panel's top Democrat, again issued a harsh rebuke to Smith after he introduced the High Quality Research Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This is the first step on a path that would destroy the merit-based review process at NSF and intrudes political pressure into what is widely viewed as the most effective and creative process for awarding research funds in the world," Johnson wrote April 26 of last year. "In the history of this Committee, no Chairman has ever put themselves forward as an expert in the science that underlies specific grant proposals funded by the NSF."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Washington-based advocates for scientific research say the peer-review process by which NSF grants have been funded works well and is accepted as the best available system –- and that allowing politics to be interjected into the process would be potentially disastrous.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The veiled attack on the merit review system is a serious concern. Scientists come together to volunteer their time and evaluate your competitors’ research. You’re only going to fund the best ideas. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best system we do have,” said Erin Cadwalader of the Association for Women in Science, herself a biomedical scientist. “It’s important science remain separate from partisan politics.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s hard to predict what ideas are going to yield what’s useful and fruitful,” said Cadwalader. “You can’t study heart development without understanding how heart cells communicate with each other. It’s tedious and not very sexy, but it’s what has to be done to understand how to treat heart disease.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the American Association of Universities, which represents top public and private research universities, agreed. “Some of the most extraordinary results have come from research that sounds completely uninteresting, funny, weird, irrelevant,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After months of criticism, Smith slightly watered down the HQRA language into a provision in the FIRST Act, which stands for Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology. The bill is a 2-year reauthorization of NSF programs that still requires NSF officials to certify every research grant as “in the national interest.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On May 1, Holdren told attendees of a forum sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the FIRST Act "would have an extraordinarily unfortunate effect" on the NSF's grantmaking process, according to an account from ScienceInsider.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I think that NSF’s peer-review process has proven itself over the years in a manner that has made it the envy of the world,” said Holdren. “Everybody else is trying to mimic the success NSF has had from funding research. I don’t think we should be trying to fix something that isn’t broken.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a question and answer session after his talk, Holdren got to the heart of the matter. The bill, he said, "appears aimed at narrowing the focus of NSF-funded research to domains that are applied to various national interests other than simply advancing the progress of science."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facing Draconian Funding Cuts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you look at where we are as a nation, the greatest need is more jobs, to get our economy started,” Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, (R-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Science Committee from 2001 until his retirement in 2007, said in a telephone interview from his home in upstate New York. “Most jobs come from the development of new technology, which come from government investment, especially in the basic science enterprise.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the request of Boehlert, the National Academy of Sciences developed a 2007 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, that set goals for greatly expanding the science workforce to ensure America’s future economic competitiveness. The first authorization of the bipartisan Competes Act was 2007, with initial reauthorization in 2010. The goal was to double funding for key agencies in seven years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The economy tanked and that didn’t happen. Today, the U.S. scientific enterprise is in retreat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since the Republican takeover of Congress, the gap between the goals of the 2010 Competes Act and actual science funding has widened into a chasm, with the cuts mandated by sequestration in 2013 adding insult to injury. Only the engineering and computer science directorates at NSF have enjoyed funding in line with inflation, while the other directorates have remained flat or fallen into decline.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In science, when you cut research funding, you're cutting the research as well as the training of the next generation of scientists,” said Toiv. “Training researchers occurs at the same time as you get the research done. You're sending a message to potential young scientists: get out while you can.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The FIRST Act not only calls for funding that doesn’t even keep up with inflation, it intends to cut funding for the social and economic sciences by 45 percent. Social sciences have never been a major portion of NSF funding. This bill suggests even that is too much.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith's war on social science spells doom for his professed goals for American science in general.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Policy Objective D of the FIRST Act is “expanding the pool of scientists and engineers in the United States, including among segments of the population that have been historically underrepresented" in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet, “it seems like a contradiction to say we’re going to prioritize doing these things without providing the funding to answer the questions of how to do this,” said Cadwalader.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House Anti-Science Committee</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The salvos against soot regulations and social science are examples of extreme rhetoric with potentially disastrous consequences to the scientific enterprise in return for relatively small gains to corporate polluters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the existence of climate change represents an existential threat to the fossil-fuel industry, and the Republican Party has become, as political historian and former GOP operative Kevin Phillips writes, the vehicle for “petroleum-defined national security.” It's global warming that sparks the Science Committee’s most aggressive language.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The March 26 hearing before the Science Committee to review the President’s proposed science budget was a typical display.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Smith gaveled in the hearing, he launched directly into an attack on climate science. “Unfortunately, this administration’s science budget focuses, in my view, far too much money, time, and effort on alarmist predictions of climate change,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the likes of Posey, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) took turns trying to mock and belittle White House science advisor John Holdren, it became clear that by the time Smith called on the last committee member, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, Swalwell had had enough. He had listened to more than his fill of climate denial, science-bashing and general hostility toward the witness.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swalwell, at 33 the committee's youngest member, warned Holdren about where Republicans might try to lead him the next time he's called to testify.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"At this rate, frankly, I'd say you should be prepared to address whether the earth is round or flat – that might come up – or whether indeed gravity is happening," said Swalwell. "You never know what could fly at you from what we've seen already."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This story was supported by The American Independent Institute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the meaning of "PM2.5," which refers to the diameter of fine particles, not their prevalence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MORE:Lamar SmithEPAScienceRichard ShelbyClimate ChangeRepublican War on ScienceWar on ScienceHouse Science Committee</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-climate-deniers-are-creating-nightmare-they-most-fear</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recently, the Washington Post reported new data showing something most of us already sense: that increased polarization on Capitol Hill is due to the way the Republican Party has lurched to the right. The authors of the study use Senator John McCain to illustrate the point. McCain's political odyssey is, in some dismaying sense, close to my own heart, since it highlights the Republican turn against science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As unlikely as it might seem today, in the first half of the twentieth century the Republicans were the party that most strongly supported scientific work, as they recognized the diverse ways in which it could undergird economic activity and national security. The Democrats were more dubious, tending to see science as elitist and worrying that new federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health would concentrate resources in elite East Coast universities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In recent decades, of course, the Republicans have lurched rightward on many topics and now regularly attack scientific findings that threaten their political platforms. In the 1980s, they generally questioned evidence of acid rain; in the 1990s, they went after ozone science; and in this century, they have launched fierce attacks not just on climate science, but in the most personal fashion imaginable on climate scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Senator McCain didn’t go directly down the path of attacking science, he, too, shifted in disturbing ways. After all, with Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, he had been a co-sponsor of the Climate Stewardship Acts of 2003, 2005, and 2007, which called for a mandatory cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gas emissions.  These were at the time endorsed by many Democrats and most environmental groups.  By 2010, however, he was retreating fast from support for his own bill and insisting that he had never backed capping carbon emissions “at a certain level.” He now calls for increased offshore oil and gas drilling, claims that important aspects of energy policy should be left to state and local governments, and has criticized both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry for framing climate change as a national security issue — a position that the Pentagon itself endorses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Still, compared to many of his colleagues, McCain looks like a moderate. They have dismissed climate change as a fraud and a hoax, while conducting McCarthy-esque inquiries into the research of leading climate scientists. Many of them attack climate science because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand the reach of government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a hearing at which I testified last month, Republican members of the Committee on Natural Resources denounced a wide range of scientific investigations related to the enforcement of existing environmental laws as “government science.” And this, they alleged, meant it was, by definition, corrupt, politically driven, and lacking in accountability. The particular science under attack involved work done by, or on behalf of, federal agencies like the National Parks Service, but climate science came in for its share of insults as well.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the face of it, the charges were absurd: most agency science is subject to far more scrutiny, accountability, and oversight, including multiple levels of peer review, than research done in academic settings. In contrast, research done under the aegis of industry is often subject to no public accountability at all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In preparing my testimony, however, I realized that something far larger was at stake: the issue of politically driven science itself.  It’s often claimed that environmental science done in federal agencies is “politically driven” and therefore suspect. It was, I realized, time to challenge the presumption that such science is bad science. While widely held, the idea is demonstrably false. Moreover, the suggestion that “government science” is intrinsically problematic for Republicans who eschew big government ignores the simple fact that most of the major contributions of the twentieth century, at least in the physical sciences, came from just such government science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">History shows that much — maybe most — science is driven by political, economic, or social goals. Some of the best science in the history of our country was focused on goals that were explicitly political. Consider the Manhattan Project. During World War II, scientists mobilized to determine the details of fission reactions, isotope separation, high-temperature and high-pressure metallurgy, and many more matters for the purpose of building an atomic bomb. The political goal of stopping Adolf Hitler and the sense that the future of the world might depend on their success provided a powerful motivation to get the science right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Or take the space program. The United States first developed advanced rocketry to threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear destruction. The political goal of “containing” Communism was a powerful motivation for scientists. In later years, the goal of maintaining peace through the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction similarly motivated scientists to ensure that the weapons they developed would go where sent, and work as advertised when they got there.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Apollo program, NASA scientists knew that getting the science right would not only ensure that our astronauts made it to the moon, but that they made it home again. Knowing that lives may depend on your calculations can be a powerful form of accountability.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some might argue that these were technological, not scientific projects, but it’s a distinction without much meaning. If such projects led to new technologies, they were also founded upon newly developed science. Moreover, politics can drive good science even in the absence of technological goals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Plate tectonics, for instance, is the unifying theory of modern earth science and it, too, was a political product. The key work that led to it came from oceanography that was part of U.S. Navy programs to develop methods of detecting Soviet submarines, while safely hiding our own.  It came as well from seismology as part of a military effort to differentiate earthquakes from nuclear bomb tests. Military and political goals, in other words, led to research on the fundamental understanding of planetary processes, an understanding that, not incidentally, forms the basis for oil and gas exploration, mining and mineral exploration, and predicting seismic hazards.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nearly all of this work was done by scientists working directly for the government, or by academics in universities and research institutions with government funds. The Manhattan Project was government science. The Apollo program was government science. Plate tectonics was government science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Saved From the Ozone Hole</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is environmental science any different?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Consider the men and women who laid the scientific foundations for the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. Established in 1985, that Convention protects us from the potentially devastating effects of ozone depletion. Today, the ozone hole is on the mend and scientists expect a full recovery in the coming decades — something that would not have happened without the work of the environmental scientists who first recognized threats to stratospheric ozone in the early 1970s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists working at NASA and the University of California realized then that chemicals released into the atmosphere from supersonic transport planes and the space shuttle could react with ozone in the stratosphere and destroy it. Because of this threat, NASA began to fund studies of the chemical reactions involved. Meanwhile, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina at the University of California, Irvine, recognized that a certain class of chemicals known as chlorinated fluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in hairspray and other consumer products, had the potential to destroy ozone on a global scale.  At first, their predictions were viewed skeptically even by their colleagues: Could hairspray really end life on Earth as we knew it? That seemed an adventurous, if not outrageous, claim.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1985, however, Joseph Farmer of the British Antarctic Survey announced the discovery of an area over Antarctica in which stratospheric ozone was dramatically diminished: the “ozone hole.” The following year, a team led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist Susan Solomon suggested that ozone was indeed being depleted by chlorine chemicals derived from CFCs in catalytic reactions on polar stratospheric clouds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1987, Harvard Professor James Anderson sent an experiment aloft in a NASA U-2 plane over the Antarctic, establishing by direct measurement that the ozone layer had been massively depleted there and that those depletions correlated with CFCs. This was a striking confirmation of the earlier hypotheses. Later, his team obtained similar measurements over the Arctic. All this research was NASA-funded.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the basis of this work, Republican President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz, and Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte gave their support to the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention and so committed the world to reducing, and later to phasing out, the use of CFCs. In 1988, with the president’s support, Congress ratified the Montreal Protocol.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Susan Solomon has since been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the French Academy of Sciences. In 2008, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. James Anderson has won more prizes than you can count. In 1995, Rowland and Molina shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on ozone depletion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If ozone science had been distorted, corrupted, or otherwise incorrectly done, none of them would have received such honors. More important, if the science had been wrong, we would be in dire straits right now because the ozone hole would not be recovering. Among other things, skin cancer rates in America would be about 60% higher than they are today. Livestock, crops, and wild plants and animals would have been affected, too.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush, a Republican president, was not duped. He did the right thing and protected us from harm, but few people realize just how well the Montreal Protocol has worked and at what little cost. It was ratified by 197 nations -—in other words, the whole world! — and production and consumption of ozone-depleting chemicals has fallen 98%.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not only did this cost very little as manufacturers quickly replaced ozone-depleting chemicals with new, less harmful products, but the world profited. The Protocol stimulated competition in technological innovation that reduced manufacturing costs, improved efficiency and safety, and lowered prices for consumers, while we avoided significant economic losses in agricultural and fishery yields and adverse human health impacts. The indirect health profits in terms of avoided cases of cancers and cataracts alone have been estimated at 11 times the direct costs of implementation.  And there was no net loss of jobs, although there was a shift to more skilled jobs carried out by better-trained workers under safer conditions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the risk of disruptive climate change became widely recognized in the 1990s, the ozone success story offered a model for how we might tackle climate change, especially as it refuted the familiar conservative claims that environmental protection restrains growth, hurts the economy, and leads to job loss, or that benefits accrue to polar bears but not people. But the Republican shift to the right was already underway. When it came to the subject of regulation, the GOP was on the road to rejecting any science that pointed in that direction.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the early part of the twentieth century, Republicans had been pioneers in environmental protection; in its middle years, they had worked with Democrats to pass bills like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act.  By the 1980s, however, resistance to environmental measures that might limit private sector prerogatives was starting to overshadow their historic commitment to a safe and beautiful America. By the 1990s, regulation was seen as bad in principle, even when, as in the ozone case, it was clearly and demonstrably good in practice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate Science and the Hoaxers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ink on the Montreal Protocol was scarcely dry when ozone science was attacked as corrupt and politically motivated (in much the same way that environmental science is being attacked today). In 1995, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher organized a hearing on “scientific integrity” meant to challenge such science. Representatives of private industry and conservative think tanks began to claim that the science behind the Montreal Protocol was incorrect, that fixing the problem would be devastating to the economy, and that the scientists involved were exaggerating the threat to get more money for their research. Entered into the Congressional Record was the now-familiar claim that there was “no scientific consensus” on ozone depletion, shown to be completely false by the Nobel Prize awarded to Rowland and Molina only a few weeks later.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If one were to strip the names and dates off the record of that hearing, it would be easy enough to imagine that its subject was climate change and that it took place last week. In fact, climate science has been attacked by many of the same individuals and organizations that attacked ozone science, using many of the same arguments, as misguided today as they were then.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Consider what we know about the history and integrity of climate science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists have known for more than 100 years that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) trap heat in a planet’s atmosphere. If you increase their concentration, the planet will get hotter. Venus is incredibly hot — 864 degrees Fahrenheit — not primarily because it is closer to the Sun than the Earth, but because it has an atmosphere hundreds of times denser and composed mainly of CO2.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oceanographer Roger Revelle was the first American scientist to focus attention on the risk of putting increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office and continued to work closely with the Navy throughout his career.  In the 1950s, he argued for the importance of scientific research on man-made climate change, calling attention to the threat that sea level rise from melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of the oceans posed to the safety and security of major cities, ports, and naval facilities. In the 1960s, he was joined in his concern by several colleagues, including geochemist Charles David Keeling, who first began to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1958, and geophysicist Gordon MacDonald, who served on the first Council on Environmental Quality under Republican President Richard Nixon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1974, the emerging scientific understanding of climate change was summarized by physicist Alvin Weinberg, the head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who explainedthat the use of fossil fuels was likely to be limited well before we ran out of them by the threat they represented to the Earth’s stable and beneficent climate. “Although it is difficult to estimate how soon we shall have to adjust the world’s energy policies to take this limit into account,” he wrote, “it might well be as little as 30-50 years.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1977, Robert M. White, the first administrator of NOAA and later president of the National Academy of Engineering, summarized the scientific findings in the journal Oceanus this way:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We now understand that industrial wastes, such as carbon dioxide released during the burning of fossil fuels, can have consequences for climate that pose a considerable threat to future society... [E]xperiences of the past decade have demonstrated the consequences of even modest fluctuations in climatic conditions [and] lent a new urgency to the study of climate...The scientific problems are formidable, the technological problems, unprecedented, and the potential economic and social impacts, ominous.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences concluded: “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These findings led the World Meteorological Organization to join forces with the United Nations and create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The idea was to establish a stable scientific foundation for informed public policies. Just as good science laid the foundation for the Vienna Convention, good science would now lay the foundation for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992 by President Bush.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since then, the scientific world has affirmed and reaffirmed the validity of the scientific evidence. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and many similar organizations, as well as leading scientific societies and academies abroad, have all given the work of climate science their seals of approval. In 2006, 11 national academies of science, including the oldest in the world, Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, issued an unusual joint statement noting that the “threat of climate change is clear and increasing,” and that “delayed action will... incur a greater cost.” That was nearly a decade ago. Today, scientists assure us that the evidence of the reality of human-made climate change is “unequivocal,” and the World Bank tells us that its impact and costs are already being felt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The scientific work that produced this consensus was done by scientists around the globe — men and women, old and young, and in this country Republicans as well as Democrats. In fact, curiously enough, given recent Republican congressional “hoax” claims, probably more of them were Republicans than Democrats. Gordon MacDonald, for example, was a close advisor to President Nixon and Dave Keeling was awarded the National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush in 2002.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet despite the long history of this work and its bipartisan nature, climate science continues to be scurrilously attacked. This past May, the world’s most revered climate scientists met with Pope Francis to advise him on the facts of climate change and the threat it represents to the future health, wealth, and well-being of men, women and children, not to mention so many other species with whom we share this unique planet. At that same moment, climate change deniers were meeting near the Vatican in an attempt to prevent the Pope from speaking out on the moral meaning of climate change. Whenever there are signs that the political landscape is shifting and that the world might be getting ready to act on climate change, the forces of denial only redouble their efforts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The organization responsible for the denialist meeting in Rome was the Heartland Institute, a group with a long history not only of rejecting climate science but science generally. They were, for instance, responsible for theinfamous billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. They have a documented history of working with the tobacco industry to raise questions about the scientific evidence of tobacco’s harms. As Erik Conway and I demonstrated in our book Merchants of Doubt, many of the groups that now question the reality or significance of human-made climate change previously questioned the scientific evidence of the dangers of tobacco.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, we know that millions of people have died from tobacco-related diseases. Do we really have to wait for people to die in similar numbers before we accept the evidence of climate change?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Private Funding Creates a Hole in the Atmosphere</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ozone science was not attacked because it was wrong scientifically, but because it was politically and economically consequential — because it threatened powerful interests. The same is true of climate science, which is telling us that business as usual will endanger our health, wealth, and well-being.  Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that some sectors of the business community — especially the Carbon-Combustion Complex, the network of powerful industries that centrally rely on the extracting, selling, or burning of fossil fuels — have tried to undermine that message. They have supported attacks on the science and its scientists, while funding distracting research and misleading conferences to create a false impression that there is fundamental scientific debate and uncertainty on the subject.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The point of all this, of course, is to confuse Americans and so delay action, which brings us to the crux of the matter when it comes to “politically motivated” science. Yes, science can be biased, particularly when the financial support for that science comes from parties that have a vested interest in a particular outcome.  History suggests, however, that such vested interests are far more likely to be a feature of the private sector than the public one.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The most strikingly documented example of this is tobacco. For decades, the tobacco companies supported scientific research in their own laboratories, as well as in universities, medical schools, and even cancer research institutes. From their own internal records, we now know that the purpose of this research was not to determine the truth about the dangers of tobacco, but to create an impression of scientific debate and doubt about whether tobacco was really harmful when the leaders of the industry already knew that it was.  In this way, the “research” was intended to protect the industry against lawsuits and regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps most important, as is undoubtedly true with many of the funders of climate denial, the industry knew that the research it paid for was biased. By the 1950s, its executives were well aware that tobacco caused cancer; by the 1960s, they knew that it caused a host of other diseases; by the 1970s, they knew that it was addictive; and by the 1980s, they knew that secondhand smoke caused cancer in non-smokers and sudden infant death syndrome. Yet this industry-funded work was significantly less likely to find tobacco use damaging to health than research not funded by the industry. And so, of course, they funded more of it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What lessons can be drawn from this experience? One is the importance of disclosing funding sources. In preparing for my Congressional testimony I was asked to disclose all sources of government funding for my own research. That was a reasonable request.  But there was no comparable request for disclosure of any private funding I might have had — an unreasonable omission. To ask only about public funds and not private sources is like asking for safety inspections of just half an airplane.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unnatural Disasters and the Nightmare of Denialism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many Republicans resist accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand big government.  Here’s what should give them pause: by delaying action on reducing global carbon emissions for more than two decades, we have already significantly increased the likelihood that disruptive global warming will lead to the kinds of government interventions they most fear and seek to avoid. Climate change is, in fact, already causing an increase in the sorts of extreme weather events — particularly floods, extreme droughts, and heat waves — that almost always result in large-scale government responses.  The longer we wait, the more massive the required intervention will be.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the future, as the devastating effects of climate change unfold here in the United States, natural disasters will result in a greater reliance on government — especially the federal government. (Of course, our grandchildren will not call them “natural” disasters, because they will know all too well who caused them.) What this means is that the work climate deniers are now doing only helps ensure that we will be less ready for the full impact of climate change, which means greater government interventions to come. Put another way, climate deniers are now playing a crucial role in creating the nightmare they most fear. They are guaranteeing the very future they claim to want to avoid.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And not just at home. As climate change unfolds around the globe, climate disasters will give undemocratic forces the justification they seek to commandeer resources, declare martial law, interfere with the market economy, and suspend democratic processes. This means that Americans who care about political freedom shouldn’t hold back when it comes to supporting climate scientists and acting to prevent the threats they have so clearly and fulsomely documented.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To do otherwise can only increase the chances that authoritarian forms of governance will come out ahead in a future in which our children and grandchildren, including those of the climate deniers, will all be the losers, as will our planet and so many of the other species on it. Recognizing and emphasizing this aspect of the climate equation may offer some hope of enabling more moderate Republicans to step back from the brinkmanship of denial.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University and co-author, with Erik Conway, of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Her latest book with Erik Conway is The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the newest variation of legal attacks on climate science, climate science blogger and computer scientist John Mashey was recently sued in retaliation for his work to uncover academic misconduct by several researchers who disputed widely-accepted findings on global warming.  Two of these researchers, Edward Wegman and Yasmin Said, recently served Mashey with tandem complaints, claiming that his work connecting them with plagiarism, falsifications, errors, and funding misuseconstituted “tortious interference with contract” and “conspiracy” — and claiming that because of this, he owed them millions of dollars in damages.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wegman and Said were among the authors of the 2006 “Wegman Report,” which has since been discredited by Mashey and many others, and which was originally commissioned by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) as part of a Congressional investigation of climate scientists.  Subsequent work by Wegman and Said, based on the Wegman Report, was later retracted for plagiarism and the investigations themselves were criticized as “political intimidation.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In their lawsuits, Wegman and Said claimed that because Mashey had voiced his findings of plagiarism and misconduct regarding the Wegman Report and other work, and otherwise “injured [their] reputation[s],” they were “forced to resign” from positions as editors of an academic journal, causing them to lose profits “as well as the ability to edit and publish, and the professional prestige and credibility such a position entails.”  Wegman and Said sought an astonishing $2 million in economic and punitive damages from Mashey, plus reimbursement for their legal fees. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund has stepped in to pay Mashey’s legal defense costs, which have totaled more than $15,000.  Sadly, legal bills in the tens of thousands of dollars – or more – are not uncommon for those subjected to harassing legal attacks, not to mention the substantial time drains and mental anguish such litigation can cause defendants (especially in cases that drag on for years, as is often the situation).  While Mashey was lucky in that Wegman and Said ultimately withdrew their complaints, it was still a time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating experience -- and Mashey’s litigation illustrates that the entire climate science community is at risk for becoming collateral damage in the “street fight” on climate science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unfortunately, legal attacks on the climate science community happen on a regular basis.  Please help us fundraise so that we can continue to fight back against such attacks.  Support of $25, $100, or more will go a long way to ensure that those advancing climate science can continue their important work without worrying about legal harassment slowing them down.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more on John Mashey’s case, please check out his blog post on the experience here, and our blog post here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">street fight nature 2010</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Editorial</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nature 464, 141 (11 March 2010) | doi:10.1038/464141a; Published online 10 March 2010</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate of fear</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See associated Correspondence: Romm, Nature 517, 553 (January 2015)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Top of pageAbstract</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it's only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Worse, the onslaught seems to be working: some polls in the United States and abroad suggest that it is eroding public confidence in climate science at a time when the fundamental understanding of the climate system, although far from complete, is stronger than ever. Ecologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University in California says that his climate colleagues are at a loss about how to counter the attacks. “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don't know what to do,” he says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists must not be so naive as to assume that the data speak for themselves.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Researchers should not despair. For all the public's confusion about climate science, polls consistently show that people trust scientists more than almost anybody else to give honest advice. Yes, scientists' reputations have taken a hit thanks to headlines about the leaked climate e-mails at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, and an acknowledged mistake about the retreat of Himalayan glaciers in a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But these wounds are not necessarily fatal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To make sure they are not, scientists must acknowledge that they are in a street fight, and that their relationship with the media really matters. Anything strategic that can be done on that front would be useful, be it media training for scientists or building links with credible public-relations firms. In this light, there are lessons to be learned from the current spate of controversies. For example, the IPCC error was originally caught by scientists, not sceptics. Had it been promptly corrected and openly explained to the media, in full context with the underlying science, the story would have lasted days, not weeks. The IPCC must establish a formal process for rapidly investigating and, when necessary, correcting such errors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The unguarded exchanges in the UEA e-mails speak for themselves. Although the scientific process seems to have worked as it should have in the end, the e-mails do raise concerns about scientific behaviour and must be fully investigated. Public trust in scientists is based not just on their competence, but also on their perceived objectivity and openness. Researchers would be wise to remember this at all times, even when casually e-mailing colleagues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">US scientists recently learned this lesson yet again when a private e-mail discussion between leading climate researchers on how to deal with sceptics went live on conservative websites, leading to charges that the scientific elite was conspiring to silence climate sceptics (see page 149). The discussion was spurred by a report last month from Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma), the leading climate sceptic in the US Congress, who labelled several respected climate scientists as potential criminals — nonsense that was hardly a surprise considering the source. Some scientists have responded by calling for a unified public rebuttal to Inhofe, and they have a point. As a member of the minority party, Inhofe is powerless for now, but that may one day change. In the meantime, Inhofe's report is only as effective as the attention it receives, which is why scientists need to be careful about how they engage such critics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The core science supporting anthropogenic global warming has not changed. This needs to be stated again and again, in as many contexts as possible. Scientists must not be so naive as to assume that the data speak for themselves. Nor should governments. Scientific agencies in the United States, Europe and beyond have been oddly silent over the recent controversies. In testimony on Capitol Hill last month, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, offered at best a weak defence of the science while seeming to distance her agency's deliberations from a tarnished IPCC. Officials of her stature should be ready to defend scientists where necessary, and at all times give a credible explanation of the science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These challenges are not new, and they won't go away any time soon. Even before the present controversies, climate legislation had hit a wall in the US Senate, where the poorly informed public debate often leaves one wondering whether science has any role at all. The IPCC's fourth assessment report had huge influence leading up to the climate conference in Copenhagen last year, but it was always clear that policy-makers were reluctant to commit to serious reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Scientists can't do much about that, but they can and must continue to inform policy-makers about the underlying science and the potential consequences of policy decisions — while making sure they are not bested in the court of public opinion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref above:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On March 24, after years of litigation, the Arizona Superior Court, Pima County, ruled in favor of the University of Arizona and its efforts to protect climate scientists’ correspondence and prepublication work.[1]  In particular, in Energy & Environment Legal Institute v. Arizona Board of Regents, et al., the court upheld the University’s decision to deny large portions of open records requests by Energy & Environment Legal (known as E&E, and formerly named the American Tradition Institute or ATI), a group that has repeatedly sought to use open records laws to access troves of researchers’ private files.[2]  E&E has been described as having “a core mission of discrediting climate science and dismantling environmental regulations” in part through “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research,” and the group has been linked to the fossil fuel industry, “major conservative players,” and “organizations opposing action on climate change.”[3]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">State and federal open records laws promote government transparency by allowing citizens to request administrative records, with exemptions for national security, trade secrets, and similar issues.  But open records laws have also become common tools of those seeking to harass scientists,[4] and open records requests for large swaths of documents (including private emails) have been made on scientists employed by the government or public universities, or who otherwise receive public funding.  The scientists must then review and produce potentially thousands of documents – sometimes in a matter of days, depending on the applicable laws – or marshal a legal response explaining why the requests are invalid.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Arizona case, E&E filed multiple requests under Arizona’s open records laws for the files of University of Arizona climate scientists Dr. Malcolm Hughes and Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, seeking thirteen years of documents – including emails dating back to the 90s.  (E&E has also unsuccessfully gone after Dr. Michael Mann’s emails in Virginia,[5] as well as many others.[6])  The University of Arizona produced some documents but denied release of several thousand others.[7]  The University stated the withheld documents contained protected intellectual property, including trade secrets and prepublication data and drafts; it also applied Arizona’s general records exemption that it was “in the best interests of the state” to withhold the documents.[8]  The University argued that releasing the scientists’ files would undermine academic collaboration and chill researcher correspondence – particularly between publicly funded scientists and privately funded ones, who are not at risk of such disclosure.  This in turn would harm the scientific process and reduce the competitiveness of Arizona’s public universities, as researchers would become more reluctant to work at Arizona public universities or with public university scientists.[9]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">E&E contested this decision and initiated litigation.  In its Amended Complaint, E&E stated it was conducting a “transparency project,” which it claimed was necessitated in large part by its interpretation of emails released in the so-called “Climategate” hacking.[10]  In particular, E&E claimed that certain hacked emails involving the University of Arizona scientists and others indicated misdeeds worthy of further scrutiny,[11] ignoring that all official investigations related to “Climategate” had shown no misconduct.[12]  E&E also claimed any fear that releasing emails would “chill the creative efforts of faculty” was “unfounded” and it asserted instead that protecting researcher records actually “encourages and rewards misbehavior.”[13]  E&E also acknowledged its requests sought, in part, documents that “embarrass both Professors Hughes and Overpeck and the University.”[14]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The University of Arizona countered that protecting research correspondence and pre-publication work “is necessary to ensure Arizona’s great public universities continue their traditions of excellence in research and scholarship….  E&E’s claim threatens to rupture ordinary and customary expectations of academic confidentiality, and a ruling in favor of E&E will inevitably harm Arizona’s public universities and the scholars working in them.”[15]  The University also stated that E&E was seeking “to attack [researchers’] science, criticize their interactions with each other and publicly assault how they speak about or defend themselves against the increasingly small group of outliers who continue to deny man’s role in global climate change….  E&E request[s] that the Court help it police and control the conduct of climate scientists.”[16]  The University argued that, ultimately, E&E’s “briefs and other public pronouncements reveal a plan to harass scientists whose views do not accord with those of E&E and its allies, or who simply do not play by the rules of etiquette E&E nominated itself to enforce.”[17]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In its March 24 decision, the Pima County Court analyzed whether the University of Arizona had committed an abuse of discretion in denying E&E’s records requests, and it sided with the University.  The court found that the University could properly protect “prepublication critical analysis, unpublished data, analysis, research, results, drafts, and commentary” as well as prepublication peer review work because the University was justified in concluding that, as is prohibited by Arizona law, “release of [the] information would have an important and harmful effect on the duties of a State agency or officer.”[18]  The court also noted that the “volume and complexity of the records at issue is daunting,” and the court acknowledged that it spent “[m]any hours” of its own reviewing 90 “technical and esoteric” sample emails – a small fraction compared to the other 1700+ withheld emails – with “at least one [sample email] exceeding 800 pages in length.”[19]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite losing in court, E&E was still able to create considerable damage through this litigation:  the scientists had to pull and go through their records from the late 90s on, including hundreds of thousands of pages of emails and attachments.[20]  Dr. Hughes said it took him over ten weeks to go through the massive number of documents E&E was seeking, taking him away from his research for a full summer (the time that he would normally use to focus on his research because he teaches during the academic year).[21]  The University and the public court system also spent a substantial amount of time and money during the years of litigation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nonetheless, this recent Arizona decision is a significant victory.  Combined with the 2014 Virginia Supreme Court decision in Dr. Mann’s case – which held that releasing faculty files could cause “harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality and impairment of free thought and expression”[22] – the decision bolsters the consensus among courts that abusive records requests are not a permissible use of open records laws and only harm the scientific endeavor.  Unfortunately, this growing consensus has not yet stopped groups like E&E, which is committed to “peppering universities around the country” with open records requests[23] – including another one dated February 27, 2015, seeking additional records concerning the same two University of Arizona scientists.[24]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more information on attacks on scientists, please visit http://climatesciencedefensefund.org</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lauren Kurtz is the Executive Director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which previously assisted with the representation of Dr. Mann in his Virginia open records litigation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/science-and-democracy/19966054.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-cope-when-activists-ask-for-climate-scientists-personal-emails/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[3] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/09/climate-change-american-tradition-insitute</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[4] http://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/protecting-scientists-harassment/freedom-bully-how-laws#.VRdv7Eu0HKE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2014/04/17/va-supreme-court-rules-for-u-va-in-global-warming-foia-case/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[6] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-cope-when-activists-ask-for-climate-scientists-personal-emails/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[7] Petitioners’ Opening Brief dated June 26, 2014.  Cited court filings are available from the author upon request.  See also Amended Complaint dated October 9, 2013.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[8] Letter from the University of Arizona to ATI (now known as E&E) dated February 5, 2013.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[9] Respondents’ Opening Memorandum dated July 31, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[10] http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html#.VRiv1ku0HKF</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[11] Amended Complaint dated October 9, 2013.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[12] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/uk-police-close-climategate/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[13] Petitioners’ Opening Brief dated June 26, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[14] Petitioners’ Opening Brief dated June 26, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[15] Respondents’ Opening Memorandum dated July 31, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[16] Respondents’ Final Reply dated September 19, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[17] Respondents’ Final Reply dated September 19, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[18] https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/science-and-democracy/19966054.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[19] https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/science-and-democracy/19966054.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[20] Respondents’ Opening Memorandum dated July 31, 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[21] Conversation with author.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[22] http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvwp/1130934.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[23] http://eelegal.org/?p=2958</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[24] http://eelegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/EELI-FME-Law-AORA-Research-Funding-Conflicts-request-U-of-A.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posted in Litigation, State Law - See more at: http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2015/03/31/arizona-court-upholds-protections-for-scientific-research-and-correspondence/#sthash.3qjYTdi4.dpuf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">yikes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate denial campaigns have helped slow the public's acceptance of man-made climate change and delay political action for years, but a new study published last Thursday finds these contrarian arguments have also had an impact on climate scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists spend time and resources addressing denialists' debunked claims in a way the scientific community has never done, said Stephan Lewandowsky [2], a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol in England and lead author of the new study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change. Researchers also often downplay future climate risks to avoid being labeled an "alarmist" by climate contrarians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Scientists are reticent to begin with, and if they know that everyone wants to ream at them for being alarmists, that adds to their reticence," Lewandowsky said. "They are human, just like you and I...and some of the actions by deniers can be quite nasty." He said hate mail and complaints directed to their research institutions are common.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This influence, which the study dubbed "seepage," is something that Kevin Trenberth [3], a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. has seen first-hand.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate denial campaigns "can absolutely influence what you do and what you write about," said Trenberth, who was not involved in the study. "Part of the reason they do it is to distract you and get you to waste your time." Instead of "publishing the good science needed to advance our understanding of climate change," scientists are left defending their work and debunking false claims.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study reviewed dozens of psychological and social science papers to understand why scientists are susceptible to denialist campaigns and provided a real-world example of this impact from the climate science literature. The authors concluded that scientists are as vulnerable as anyone to persuasive messaging and fear being stereotyped (in this case, as a global warming alarmist), and that when enough people criticize or question their work they, too, may begin questioning their findings. [akaBig Lie?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The example it examined is the scientific community's handling of the claim that there's been a supposed pause or hiatus in the world's warming in the last decade. Lewandowsky, along with Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes [4] and colleagues at several Australian universities examined more than 40 scientific studies that addressed the slowed warming trend. The widely touted claim also prompted two special editions of the Nature journal series in 2014 and was addressed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report, released in 2013.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The studies all conclude that the recent slowing in warming is an expected, temporary blip as the Earth's temperature climbs with more fossil fuels burned. But the hundreds of pages scientists have written discussing the trend, and their adoption of the words "hiatus" and "pause" while doing so, indicates  denialists' influence, the study authors said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"They are rebutting the idea of a pause, but to do so, they call it a pause," Lewandowsky said. "Scientists have adapted the framing that is being set by contrarians even when they are rebutting it."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists have long predicted periods of fast temperatures rises and slow ones as the world warms. When there was a sharp increase in global temperatures from the early 1990s to mid-2000s, scientists did not overemphasize it, the study said, and would have most likely taken the same approach to the slowing in warming if it hadn't been for denalists' campaigns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Calling scientists alarmists mischaracterizes them, said Trenberth. "We come at this issue from a neutral standpoint. There's that saying, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.' That's not entirely true. They still have some influence."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lewandowsky and his colleague acknowledge this study could act as a rallying cry for denialists, confirming their campaigns are having an effect. But that's a risk they're willing to take, Lewandowsky said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Knowing about this kind of stuff is half the battle. We hope it will empower climate scientists to resist this subtle seepage," he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source URL: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11052015/climate-denial-takes-toll-scientists%E2%80%94and-science?utm_source=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_campaign=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_medium=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_term=PANTHEON_STRIPPED</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Links</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] https://twitter.com/share</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[2] http://www.cogsciwa.com/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[3] http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[4] https://www.fas.harvard.edu/_{hsdept/bios/oreskes.html</font></div><div>}<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Following reports </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/27/usda-petition-idUSL2N0WT1TQ20150327</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">that scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture are being harrassed and their research on bee-killing pesticides is being censored or suppressed, a broad coalition of farmers, environmentalists, fisheries and food-safety organizations urged an investigation in a May 5 letter sent to Phyllis K. Fong, USDA Inspector General.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The possibility that the USDA is prioritizing the interests of the chemical industry over those of the American public is unacceptable," states the letter, which was signed by more than 25 citizens' groups concerned that a forthcoming report by the White House Task Force on Pollinator Health, which is co-chaired by the USDA, will be compromised.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The signatories include the American Bird Conservancy, Avaaz, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, Farmworkers Association of Florida, Food and Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, Green America, Organic Consumers Association and Sierra Club.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It is imperative that the American people can trust that their government and its employees are serving their constituents and not the profits of private companies," they wrote. "All of the research that the USDA conducts must maintain scientific integrity and transparency to ensure it is guiding sound policy decisions."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The research in question centers on neonicotinoids, a nicotine-like class of insecticides that impair the neurological systems of insects and which studies have linked to die-offs of bees and monarch butterflies—two key pollinators—as well as birds. Neonicotinoids have been strongly linked to honey-bee colony collapse disorder (CCD), a syndrome first observed in Germany that has been blamed for massive bee population declines across the globe. In 2013, certain neonicotinoids were banned by the European Union and a few non-EU nations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The global food system relies on bees to pollinate at least 30 percent of the world's crops. Bees are responsible for pollinating a host of American crops, from apples and almonds to cantaloupes and cucumbers, impacting $15 billion a year in U.S. crops.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an environmental activist group supporting local, state and federal researchers, filed a legal petition with the USDA seeking new rules meant to increase the job protection for government scientists and citing censorship and harassment. At least 10 USDA scientists have come under fire for research into farm chemical safety that conflicts with the interests of the agribusiness sector, according to PEER executive director Jeff Ruch.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"They have very little in the way of legal rights and have career paths that are extremely vulnerable," he said. He said the scientific work under scrutiny is the research into the effects of neonicotinoids and glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's popular Roundup herbicide, which the World Health Organization recently concluded likely causes cancer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Your words are changed, your papers are censored or edited or you are not allowed to submit them at all," a senior scientist at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service told Reuters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Censorship and harassment poison good science and good policy,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "There’s no question that neonicotinoids are killing bees, and it’s long past time for our government to take action. The European Union has already banned neonicotinoids. The reports that USDA is harassing and suppressing its scientists for doing their jobs instead of using their findings to protect our pollinators are extremely disturbing."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“How can the American public expect USDA to develop a federal strategy that will protect bees instead of pesticide industry profits if it is harassing and suppressing its own scientists for conducting research that runs counter to industry claims?" said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, food futures campaigner with Friends of the Earth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In April 2014, the group released “Follow the Honey: 7 ways pesticide companies are spinning the bee crisis to protect profits,” a report documenting the deceptive tactics used by agrochemical companies to deflect blame from their chemicals to pollinator declines and stall governmental regulation on neonicotinoids. The companies named in the report include U.S.-based Monsanto, Switzerland-based Syngenta and Germany-based Bayer, which patented the first commercial neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid, the world's most widely used insecticide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"If USDA wants to employ a kill-the-messenger approach," said Finck-Haynes, "it will only delay critical action to address the bee crisis that threatens our nation’s food supply."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/27/usda-petition-idUSL2N0WT1TQ20150327</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> environmental activist group has filed a legal petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeking new rules that would enhance job protection for government scientists whose research questions the safety of farm chemicals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The action filed on Thursday by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group for local, state and federal researchers, came less than a week after a World Health Organization group found the active ingredient in Roundup, the world's best selling weed killer, is "probably carcinogenic to humans." Roundup is made by Monsanto Co.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The petition to the USDA presses the agency to adopt policies to prevent "political suppression or alteration of studies and to lay out clear procedures for investigating allegations of scientific misconduct."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the petition, some scientists working for the federal government are finding their research restricted or censored when it conflicts with agribusiness industry interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A USDA spokesman said the allegations have no merit and that the agency values the integrity of its scientists and the quality of their research.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PEER's executive director Jeff Ruch said on Friday that at least 10 USDA scientists have been investigated or faced other consequences arising from research that called into question the safety of certain agricultural chemicals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ruch said his organization had received mounting complaints over the last year from USDA scientists claiming they have been ordered to retract studies, water down findings, remove their names from authorship and experienced delays in approvals for publication of research papers. The petition does not identify any specific research or scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"They have very little in the way of legal rights and have career paths that are extremely vulnerable," Ruch said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Research into glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, and neonicotinoid insecticides, which have been linked to honey bee and monarch butterfly endangerment, face particular scrutiny, Ruch said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One senior scientist at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service told Reuters he has experienced harassment and censorship.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Your words are changed, your papers are censored or edited or you are not allowed to submit them at all," said the scientist, who asked not to be named. (Reporting By Carey Gillam; Editing by David Greising, Toni Reinhold)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">November 10, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Schweikert, David [R-AZ-6] (Introduced 02/06/2014)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rules Committee Print 113-57</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Text Of H.R. 4012, Secret Science Reform Act Of 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Showing the text of the bill as ordered reported by the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Smith, Lamar [R-TX-21]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Hall, Ralph M. [R-TX-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Broun, Paul C. [R-GA-10]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Culberson, John Abney [R-TX-7]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Bridenstine, Jim [R-OK-1]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Lummis, Cynthia M. [R-WY-At Large]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Rohrabacher, Dana [R-CA-48]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Collins, Chris [R-NY-27]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Burgess, Michael C. [R-TX-26]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Olson, Pete [R-TX-22]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Cramer, Kevin [R-ND-At Large]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Bucshon, Larry [R-IN-8]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Hultgren, Randy [R-IL-14]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Neugebauer, Randy [R-TX-19]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Palazzo, Steven M. [R-MS-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Brooks, Mo [R-AL-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Salmon, Matt [R-AZ-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Franks, Trent [R-AZ-8]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/06/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Gosar, Paul A. [R-AZ-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/11/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Weber, Randy K. Sr. [R-TX-14]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/11/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. LaMalfa, Doug [R-CA-1]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/11/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Mullin, Markwayne [R-OK-2]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/11/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Duncan, Jeff [R-SC-3]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/18/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Griffith, H. Morgan [R-VA-9]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/18/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Westmoreland, Lynn A. [R-GA-3]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/25/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Lamborn, Doug [R-CO-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/25/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Nunnelee, Alan [R-MS-1]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/26/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Fincher, Stephen Lee [R-TN-8]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Garrett, Scott [R-NJ-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Sessions, Pete [R-TX-32]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Fortenberry, Jeff [R-NE-1]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Kelly, Mike [R-PA-3]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. McHenry, Patrick T. [R-NC-10]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Mulvaney, Mick [R-SC-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/28/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Meadows, Mark [R-NC-11]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>02/28/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. McMorris Rodgers, Cathy [R-WA-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>03/04/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Schock, Aaron [R-IL-18]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>03/10/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Hartzler, Vicky [R-MO-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>03/12/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Kline, John [R-MN-2]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>03/24/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Flores, Bill [R-TX-17]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>03/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Barton, Joe [R-TX-6]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>03/27/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. DeSantis, Ron [R-FL-6]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>04/02/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Forbes, J. Randy [R-VA-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>04/04/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Tipton, Scott R. [R-CO-3]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>05/28/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Bentivolio, Kerry L. [R-MI-11]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/02/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Johnson, Bill [R-OH-6]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/23/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Sensenbrenner, F. James, Jr. [R-WI-5]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/24/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Massie, Thomas [R-KY-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/24/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Lucas, Frank D. [R-OK-3]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/24/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Collins, Doug [R-GA-9]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/24/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Rooney, Thomas J. [R-FL-17]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>06/26/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Cotton, Tom [R-AR-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>07/29/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Aderholt, Robert B. [R-AL-4]<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>11/12/2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This Act may be cited as the “Secret Science Reform Act of 2014”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SEC. 2. DATA TRANSPARENCY.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Section 6(b) of the Environmental Research, Development, and Demonstration Authorization Act of 1978 (42 U.S.C. 4363 note) is amended to read as follows:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(b)(1) The Administrator shall not propose, finalize, or disseminate a covered action unless all scientific and technical information relied on to support such covered action is—</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(A) specifically identified; and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(B) publicly available in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(2) Nothing in the subsection shall be construed as requiring the public dissemination of information the disclosure of which is prohibited by law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(3) In this subsection—</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(A) the term ‘covered action’ means a risk, exposure, or hazard assessment, criteria document, standard, limitation, regulation, regulatory impact analysis, or guidance; and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(B) the term ‘scientific and technical information’ includes—</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(i) materials, data, and associated protocols necessary to understand, assess, and extend conclusions;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(ii) computer codes and models involved in the creation and analysis of such information;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(iii) recorded factual materials; and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“(iv) detailed descriptions of how to access and use such information.”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4/15</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Senate committee has advanced legislation that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science to craft regulations intended to protect the environment and public health, the Hill reported Tuesday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On party line votes, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11-9 to approve the “Secret Science Reform Act,” a bill to prohibit the EPA from using science that includes private data, or data that can’t be easily reproduced. The bill has been pushed strongly by House Republicans for the last two years, but this is the first time it has been advanced by the Senate. It is sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The purpose of the Secret Science bill, according to its House sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), is to stop “hidden and flawed” science from being the basis of EPA regulations. However, many scientific organizations have disagreed with this characterization.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, approximately 50 scientific societies and universities said the bill would prohibit the EPA from using many large-scale public health studies, because their data “could not realistically be reproduced.” In addition, many studies use private medical data, trade secrets, and industry data that cannot legally be made public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The legislation may sound reasonable, but it’s actually a cynical attack on the EPA’s ability to do its job,” said Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement. “This bill would make it impossible for the EPA to use many health studies, since they often contain private patient information that can’t and shouldn’t be revealed.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans in support of the bill have countered that the EPA could still use data within the studies without disclosing personal information or trade secrets. But it wouldn’t be cheap for those studies to meet the bill’s requirements, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO reported last year that the EPA relies on approximately 50,000 scientific studies to craft its regulations per year, and that meeting the goals of the “Secret Science” bill would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 per study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the legislation was moving through the House, Democratic opponents called it disingenuous — a perceived play for “transparency” within the EPA, when all Republicans really want is less EPA regulation. Environmentally-minded Senators on Tuesday seemed to agree. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told the Hill that the bill was “just a joke,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — who is expected to announce a Presidential bid on Thursday — reportedly called it “laughable.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For its part, the White House has already threatened to veto the bill if it does come to President Obama’s desk. Obama made the same threat last year when the House passed a similar bill, but the legislation did not reach the then-Democrat controlled Senate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, a notoriously anti-EPA Republican leading the Senate makes it all the more likely that Obama will have to use his veto pen on the Secret Science Reform Act. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said his top priority is “to try to do whatever I can to get the EPA reined in.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House of Representatives voted 237-190 on Wednesday afternoon to pass a bill that would limit the type of scientific research the Environmental Protection Agency can use when crafting regulations to protect the environment and public health.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dubbed the “Secret Science Reform Act of 2014,” the bill’s intention is to increase transparency at the EPA by making it so the agency can’t use any science that is “hidden and flawed,” according to bill sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). Smith and his Republican colleagues say the bill is needed so that the public can independently check the EPA’s basis for issuing regulations limiting air and water pollutants from various sources.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the bill may sound noble on its face, scientists overwhelmingly take issue with its tenets. For one, they say, the bill does not understand why some scientific data is confidential — namely because much of it uses private medical data of voluntary test subjects to test pollutants, while some contains trade secrets and industry data.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Some of the best real-world public health research, which relies on patient data like hospital admissions, would be excluded from consideration because personal data could not, and should not, be made public,” wrote Union of Concerned Scientists director Andrew Rosenberg in Roll Call. “Demanding public release of full raw data the agency cannot legally disclose is simply a way to accuse the agency of hiding something when it has nothing to hide.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is the second time this week that the House has passed a bill seeking to hamper the activities of the EPA, despite there being no chance that either would become law. On Tuesday, the House quietly passed the Science Advisory Board Reform Act, which would make it easier for scientists with financial ties to corporations to advise the EPA, and prohibits independent scientists from talking about their own research on the board.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans maintained on the House floor on Wednesday that their “Secret Science” bill wouldn’t require that personal data or trade secrets be made public. Indeed, the bill states that “Nothing … shall be construed as requiring the public dissemination of information the disclosure of which is prohibited by law.” Republicans maintain that data can still be used without disclosing personal information or trade secrets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House disagrees, saying in a memo released Monday that doing so would cost the agency thousands of dollars for each scientific study it uses, thereby making it harder and more time-consuming to meet the requirements for each study it wants to use. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the EPA relies on approximately 50,000 scientific studies per year, and that meeting the goals of the House “Secret Science” bill would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 per study.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The result, the CBO noted, would be that the number of studies relied upon by the EPA would be cut in half. That would mean EPA regulations based on less sound science, and less EPA regulations overall.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In short, the bill would undermine EPA’s ability to protect the health of Americans, would impose expensive new mandates on EPA, and could impose substantial litigation costs on the Federal government,” the White House memo reads. “It also could impede EPA’s reliance on the best available science.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Opponents of the legislation on Wednesday took to the floor to voice their outrage, saying the bill represented a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” — a disingenuous play for “transparency” within the EPA, when all Republicans really want is less EPA regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The bill before us today is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s a dangerous attack on the power of knowledge,” said Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA). “Rather than argue with the indisputable facts on air pollution — a losing bet — this bill attempts to discredit the science as secret, when in fact there’s nothing secret about it. The only secret here is the true intent of this bill.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans insisted this wasn’t true, saying their only intent was increased transparency in EPA rulemaking. Many made comparisons to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who controversially stated that President Obama’s health care law only succeeded because of a lack of political transparency in the administration, and “the stupidity of the American voter.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Why the defensiveness about transparency? Why the defensiveness about the truth? Why the defensiveness about more participation as it relates to science?” asked Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL). “What they have to defend is the orthodoxy that allowed the other side to create Obamacare and the architect of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, said this is a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] scores it this way and so forth and so on.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), a co-sponsor of the bill, also brought Gruber into the conversation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It makes you kind of wonder if the opponents of this legislation, like Mr. Gruber, believe that the American people are ‘too stupid to understand’ the costly impact of the EPA’s overreaching regulations,” he said. “Trust me when I say Americans are not stupid, and they deserve and demand the truth from the start.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Climate Science Legal Defense Fund!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The past month saw an important victory for protecting climate scientists: in a bellwether decision, an Arizona state court upheld safeguards for climate scientists facing legal attacks. For years, E&E Legal (formerly named ATI) has been “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research,” including litigation to access huge swaths of researcher records through open records laws. But on March 24, a court validated the University of Arizona’s decision to deny E&E’s sweeping open records requests for troves of climate scientists’ private files. (E&E / ATI’s other open records attacks include a Virginia lawsuit for years of Dr. Michael Mann’s files – a case we assisted with and which the Virginia Supreme Court denied last year.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Arizona litigation, the university determined that E&E only wanted the records so it could “attack [researchers’] science, criticize their interactions with each other and publicly assault how they speak about or defend themselves against the increasingly small group of outliers who continue to deny man’s role in global climate change.” The university denied release of the records to E&E because the “release of [the] information would have an important and harmful effect on the duties of a State agency or office,” as prohibited by Arizona law. The Arizona court found that the university was warranted in protecting the scientists’ emails. The scientists were represented by attorneys for the university, and we were actively engaged in this litigation, including attending the court hearing for this decision. For more on this case, please read our post on the Columbia Climate Law Blog.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a significant win, but the battle to protect climate scientists against legal harassment is far from over. We frequently hear from climate scientists who are dealing with abusive open records requests and other legal attacks, and we provided assistance to several new scientists this past month.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Upcoming event: On May 7, CSLDF will host talks at Columbia Law School about fighting back against legal attacks on climate scientists. Michael Gerrard, Peter Fontaine, and Naomi Oreskes are scheduled to speak, and the event is open to attorneys from all fields. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">vioxx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Censoring spokes doctor-turned-critic</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In June 2005, U.S. National Public Radio's Snigdha Prakash reported:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"New documents obtained by NPR suggest that even as Merck was making Vioxx into a bestseller, the company was putting pressure on independent doctors. The company's apparent aim: to keep them from discussing evidence of Vioxx's potential safety problems. The documents show that Merck exerted pressure not only on individual doctors, but also on several of the nation's top medical schools."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Merck's campaigned to recruit physician Gurkirpal Singh of Stanford University as a Vioxx spokesperson "because he was a senior researcher on a seminal study of arthritis patients." Starting in 1998, Singh became a Vioxx booster and was paid $2,500 per speaking engagement by Merck. However, in 2000, a study suggesting heart problems among Vioxx users worried Dr. Singh and he requested the data. According to Dr. Singh in an interview with NPR:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I wanted to know how many heart attacks, how many strokes, how many deaths were occurring in each one of the groups, and what were these actual number of patients at risk, and how many ended up having an event."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Merck originally promised to share the information with Dr. Singh, but never did. When Dr. Singh began including his concerns in his public presentations on Vioxx, Merck began closely tracking his activities. According to NPR, almost a dozen Merck executives were involved in tracking Dr. Singh. According to an October 4, 2000 email sent by a senior, regional executive who had supervised his scientific handlers:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I have in excess of 80 e-mails pertaining to interactions with Dr. Singh from March 1999 to present. The following is my best recollection of what has happened. Because of the sensitive nature of the following, I strongly encourage you not to share with anyone unless they clearly have a need to know."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Singh's public criticisms of Vioxx continued (he was by this time, promoting Vioxx's rival, Celebrex, while being paid by Pfizer), [17] Merck began calling his superiors at the university. According to Stanford medical professor James Fries:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"(I) received a call from a medical director at Merck, stating that someone on my staff had been making wild and irresponsible public statements about the cardiovascular side effects of Vioxx." According to Dr. Fries, the representative "hinted there would be repercussions for Fries and Stanford if Singh's statements didn't stop. He was left with the sense that Merck's financial support to Stanford was at risk." [18]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://grist.org/news/oklahoma-scientists-pressured-to-downplay-link-between-earthquakes-and-fracking/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oklahoma scientists pressured to downplay link between earthquakes and fracking</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oil company execs and university bigwigs leaned on the Oklahoma Geological Survey so it wouldn’t blame quakes on fracking techniques.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oklahoma has been experiencing an earthquake boom in recent years. In 2014, the state had 585 quakes of at least magnitude 3. Up through 2008, it averaged only three quakes of that strength each year. Something odd is happening.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But scientists at the Oklahoma Geological Survey have downplayed a possible connection between increasing fracking in the state and the increasing number of tremors. Even as other states (Ohio, for example) quickly put two and two together and shut down some drilling operations that were to blame, OGS scientists said that more research was needed before their state took similar steps.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, though, emails obtained by EnergyWire reporter Mike Soraghan reveal that the University of Oklahoma and its oil industry funders were putting pressure on OGS scientists to downplay the connection between earthquakes and the injection of fracking wastewater underground. In 2013, a preliminary OGS report noted possible correlation between the two, and OGS signed on to a statement by the U.S. Geological Survey that also noted such linkages. Soon after, OGS’s seismologist, Austin Holland, was summoned to meetings with the president of the university, where OGS is housed, and with executives of oil company Continental Resources. Continental CEO Harold Hamm was a major university funder, while the university president David Boren serves on Continental’s board, for which he earned $272,700 in cash and stock in 2013. From EnergyWire:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I have been asked to have ‘coffee’ with President Boren and Harold Hamm Wednesday,” [Holland] wrote in an Nov. 18, 2013, email to a co-worker.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The significance was not lost on his colleague, OGS Public Information Coordinator Connie Smith.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Gosh,” Smith responded. “I guess that’s better than having Kool-Aid with them. I guess.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A meeting with such powerful figures in the state would be intimidating for a state employee such as Holland, said state Rep. Jason Murphey of Guthrie.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Wow. That’s a lot of pressure,” said Murphey, a Republican whose district has been rattled by numerous quakes. “That just sends chills up your spine if you’re from Oklahoma.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oklahoma geologist Bob Jackman, who has tried to get the word out about the connection between fracking and the quakes, recalls Holland saying last year that he couldn’t do the same. According to Jackman, Holland, when pressed, blurted out, “You don’t understand — Harold Hamm and others will not allow me to say certain things.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland says Jackman misremembered the conversation. Holland publicly denies being pressured by the university or industry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other scientists at OGS weren’t happy to see the agency downplay the link between one oil and gas project, called the Hunton dewatering, and an earthquake swarm near Oklahoma City. One wrote to a family member, “I am dismayed at our seismic people about this issue and believe they couldn’t track a bunny through fresh snow!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even the USGS picked up on something fishy when Holland suggested alternative hypotheses to explain earthquakes instead of linking them to fracking processes. A science adviser with the federal agency wrote to Holland saying one alternative theory was “unlikely” and “could be very distracting from the larger issue of earthquake safety in Oklahoma … and the role that wastewater injection may be playing.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In July 2014, Holland told Bloomberg that if a link between fracking and the quakes were to be discovered, he’d have to advise the state to shut some drilling operations down. “If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection — and consequently production — in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” he said. “That’s for the politicians and the regulators to work out.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The research is there, even if UO President David Boren or Continental CEO Harold Hamm aren’t pleased about it. Let’s see what those politicians and regulators do next.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">david roberts grist 3/15</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last year, the House of Representatives passed two absurd anti-science bills, theSecret Science Reform Act and the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act. It will come as no surprise that both bills, under the guise of “reform,” would have the practical effect of crippling the EPA’s efforts to assess science in a fair and timely way. I don’t have the heart to get into it — follow the links above for the details.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bills are back; the House considered them both again yesterday. Emily Atkin has the gory details if you’re interested. They might get a little further this time — the Democratic Senate didn’t take them up last year, obviously, but the GOP-controlled Senate might this year — though it won’t matter in the end, as Obama has threatened to veto both. So it’s mainly yet another act of reactionary symbolism from the right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All that is by way of background so I can draw your attention to a hilarious amendment attached to the Science Advisory Board bill. It comes by way of the bill’s sponsor, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), a far-right, coal-country, climate-denying conservative of the old school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s the amendment. Its sole purpose is to prohibit the EPA’s Science Advisory Board from taking into consideration, for any purpose, the following reports:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order No. 12866 (which I wrote about here)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the July 2014 Pathways to Deep Decarbonization Report, from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (which I wrote about here)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So. When considering what to do about carbon pollution, EPA may not consider what America’s best scientists have concluded about it, what an international panel of scientists has concluded about it, how the federal government has officially recommended calculating its value, or the most comprehensive solutions for it. Oh, and it can’t consider Agenda 21 either. Otherwise the EPA can go nuts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As I’ve said many, many times, most Americans have no idea how batshit crazy the House GOP has gone. They serve the base, and only the base (and Politicoobsessives) pay close attention. But imagine, if you will, a GOP House and Senate paired with President Jeb Bush. A bill like this might pass. Politicians might be picking and choosing, based on ideological criteria, which scientific reports administrative agencies are allowed to consider. It’s amusing in its own dark way, but it’s not a sitcom or a satire. It’s real life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">danish solar guy not persecuted</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.globalpossibilities.org/eight-pseudoscientific-climate-claims-debunked-by-real-scientists/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate News Network [1] / By Tim Radford [2]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservatives Don't Like the Message on Climate Change, So They Want to Shoot the Messenger</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">November 10, 2014  |  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you don’t like the message on climate change [3], it seems that the answer is to shoot the messenger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall [4], thousands of abusive emails—including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family”—were received by climate scientist Michael Mann [5], director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph [6]” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Glenn Beck, a commentator on Fox TV, called on climate scientists to commit suicide. A climate denial blogger [7] called Marc Morano claimed that one group of climate scientists deserved “to be publicly flogged.” And the late Stephen Schneider found his name and that of other Jewish climate scientists on a “death list” maintained by an American neo-Nazi website.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Very Strange</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Marshall points out in his absorbing, all-embracing, immensely readable book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, something very strange is going on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary microbiology work on disease prevention never resulted in him having to think about how to use a gun. Jonas Salk never needed to fortify his house as result of working on the development of a polio vaccine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other scientists are trusted and respected. But the way climate scientists are now treated, Marshall argues, is without parallel in the history of science: “They have been set up to play that role in a climate storyline that, it would seem, cannot refute climate change without demonising the people who warn us about it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Forget, if you can, the people who seem to be whipping up these furious responses. Climate change can only be met or mitigated by action—and there are plenty of reasons why a very large number of people nod in agreement about what must be done and then fail to insist that it is done.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dan Gilbert [8], a psychologist who won the Royal Society’s science book prize in 2007 with an examination of the puzzles of happiness, says that climate change is something unlikely to strike fear in the human heart anyway. It is impersonal, it is gradual, it is amoral and it isn’t—or doesn’t seem to be—happening now.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other researchers have pointed out the alarming tendency, shared by all humans, to believe what they want to believe. Furthermore, climate change is not (death threats and public flogging fantasies aside) an immediate or an emotional issue. “A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilising public opinion,” says the Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman [9].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are other difficulties. When, for instance, will the awful things start to happen? How do you mobilise public opinion on an argument with uncertain timescales, imprecise outcomes and real puzzles about the costs and benefits of any actions? No one, Marshall says, is ever going to march under a banner of that says “100 months before the Odds Shift into a Greater Likelihood of Feedbacks.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Marshall founded the Climate Outreach and Information Network [10] (COIN), based in Oxford, England. He is a veteran of Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation, and there isn’t much doubt about what he thinks and knows to be true.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the appeal of this book is that he lets others talk. He examines the political doublethink that seems to infect some legislatures in the U.S. He listens to the skeptics [11], the worriers, the oil giants, the conspiracy theorists, the celebrity environmental campaigners and the other ones who invoke imagery of death, fever and smoking ruin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And he refers to the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute [12], which polled academic experts on global risk, and found an estimate of a “19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of the century”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Altruistic Behavior</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The title, direction and burden of this book seem to augur almost apocalyptic failure to confront the coming crisis. But, of course, Marshall pulls out an ace near the end.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He concludes that while human brains may be hard-wired to not worry about what may or may not happen in two generations, they also have an immense capacity for pro-social, supportive and altruistic behavior.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Climate change is entirely within our capacity for change,” he says, “It is challenging, but far from impossible.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That is good to know. And the book ends with some serious advice about how to make the case for action—and instead of capital punishment, we get generously shouty advice in capital letters. CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING HERE AND NOW, he reminds us. And he urges campaigners to DROP THE ECO-STUFF, especially the polar bears.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Marshall suggests that we really do try to contain global average warming to 2°C. He quotes John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research [13], who told the Australians: “The difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.” And, yes, do think about it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See more stories tagged with:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">climate change [15],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">tea party [16],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">science [17]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/conservatives-threatening-climate-scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Links:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/tim-radford</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[3] http://ecowatch.com/climate-change-news/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[4] http://climatedenial.org/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[5] http://ecowatch.com/author/mmann/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[6] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-hockey-stick/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[7] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientist-targets-of-climate-change-hate-mail-rally-for-support/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[8] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?language=en</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[9] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/13/thinking-fast-slow-daniel-kahneman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[10] http://www.climateoutreach.org.uk/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[11] http://ecowatch.com/search/?q=climate+deniers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[12] http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[13] https://www.pik-potsdam.de/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[14] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Conservatives Don't Like the Message on Climate Change, So They Want to Shoot the Messenger</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tea-party-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/science-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[18] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10/14 </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">World's Scientists Call on Canadian PM Stephen Harper to Restore Science Funding, Freedom (CBC News)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ALSO MATH SUPPRESSION:  Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">extensive:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Abuses of Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ABUSES OF SCIENCE BASICS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Business Trade Groups Drive Anti-Regulation Effort in Congress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Science under Attack: Threats to Scientific Inquiry and Academic Freedom Expand in Virginia and Elsewhere</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Timeline: Legal Harassment of Climate Scientist Michael Mann</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Scientist Letter to the Senate Concerning Science in the Endangered Species Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">House Majority Launches Attack on Science, Public Health, and the Environment</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virginia scientists and academic leaders ask Virginia attorney general to drop misguided investigation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FDA Medical Device Approval based on Politics, not Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Surveys of Scientists at Federal Agencies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2008 Scientist Statement: Scientific Freedom and the Public Good</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2004 Scientist Statement on Restoring Scientific Integrity to Federal Policy Making</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">IN DEPTH LOOK AT ABUSES OF SCIENCE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Focus on Biodiversity and Endangered Species: Scientific Integrity at the Department of Interior</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Focus on Environmental Protection: Interference at the EPA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Focus on Climate Science: Atmosphere of Pressure (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OUR ANALYSIS OF ABUSES OF SCIENCE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Climate of Corporate Control (2012)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FDA Survey Shows Progress, But Issues Remain</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public's Expense (2012)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Survey: FDA and USDA Scientists (2010)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Minerals Management Service Accused of Errors and Violations in Offshore Oil Drilling Program</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freedom to Speak? A Report Card on Federal Agency Media Policies (2008)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Survey: EPA Scientists (2007)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientific Integrity in Policy Making (July 2004)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TOOLS & RESOURCES FOR IDENTIFYING ABUSES IN SCIENCE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Science in an Age of Scrutiny: How Scientists Can Respond to Criticism and Personal Attacks (2012)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Climate of Corporate Control (2012): Company Profiles</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Survey: FDA and USDA Scientists (2010) - Driving the Fox from the Henhouse - Frequently Asked Questions</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Battle Over Climate Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate scientists routinely face death threats, hate mail, nuisance lawsuits and political attacks. How much worse can it get?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Tom Clynes Posted 06.21.2012 at 10:23 am   </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There's no police tape across Michael Mann's office doorway this morning. "Always a good start," he says, juggling a cup of coffee as he slides his key into the lock.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mann, a paleoclimatologist, wears a sport coat over a turtleneck. As he takes a seat at his desk, a narrow sunbeam angles through the window, spotlighting a jumble of books, journals and correspondence. Behind him, a framed picture of his six-year-old daughter rests near a certificate for the Nobel Peace Prize he shared in 2007. Propped into a corner is a hockey stick, a post-lecture gift from Middlebury College, which Mann jokingly says he keeps "for self-defense."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mann directs Penn State University's Earth System Science Center. Several months ago, he arrived at his office with an armload of mail. Sitting at his desk, he tore open a hand-addressed envelope and began to pull out a letter. He watched as a small mass of white powder cascaded out of the folds and onto his fingers. Mann jerked backward, letting the letter drop and holding his breath as a tiny plume of particles wafted up, sparkling in the sunlight. He rose quickly and left the office, pulling the door shut behind him. "I went down to the restroom and washed my hands," he says. "Then I called the police."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For someone describing an anthrax scare, Mann is surprisingly nonchalant. "I guess," he says, "it's so much a part of my life that I don't even realize how weird it is."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Weird" is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists' children.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those crude acts of harassment often come alongside more-sophisticated legal and political attacks. Organizations routinely file nuisance lawsuits and onerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to disrupt the work of climate scientists. In 2005, before dragging Mann and other climate researchers into congressional hearings, Texas congressman Joe Barton ordered the scientists to submit voluminous details of working procedures, computer programs and past funding—essentially demanding that they reproduce and defend their entire life's work. In a move that hearkened back to darker times, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, released a report in 2010 that named 17 prominent climate scientists, including Mann, who, he argued, may have engaged in "potentially criminal behavior." Inhofe outlined three laws and four regulations that he said the scientists may have violated, including the Federal False Statements Act—which, the report noted, could be punishable with imprisonment of up to five years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's late February when I visit Mann in his office, almost two years after Inhofe issued his "list of 17." Though it's still winter in central Pennsylvania, the temperature outside hangs in the upper 60s, crocus stems poke up from flower beds, and shopkeepers have thrown open their doors along College Avenue. Mann is home for three days between conferences in Milwaukee and Hawaii and West Coast stops on a promotional tour for his new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the late 1990s, Mann developed a graph that demonstrated a recent and dramatic uptick in global mean surface temperatures. The hockey-stick-shaped curve has become emblematic to both sides of the climate debate. To the vast majority of climate scientists, it represents evidence, corroborated by decades of peer-reviewed research, of global warming. To climate-change skeptics, the hockey stick is the most grievous of many illusions fabricated by thousands of conspiring scientists to support an iniquitous political agenda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included Mann's graph in its Third Assessment Report in 2001. Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim then included it in their 2006 climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The film galvanized both the pro- and contra-climate-science camps, propelling the issue of human-caused global warming into the culture wars—and Mann along with it. "Since then, my life has been crazy," he says. "People have stolen my e-mails and bought billboards and newspaper ads to denounce me; they've staged bogus grassroots protests; they've threatened my family. I've been through eight investigations by everyone from the National Science Foundation to the British House of Commons. Every time, they find no evidence of fraud or misuse of information. Every time, they conclude that my methods are sound, my data replicable. And every time I'm exonerated, another investigation pops up."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mann has been called a "compulsive liar, a con man and an extraordinary psychological case." Some critics accuse him of masterminding a cabal of scientists that aims to establish a new world order. Still others compare him to Hitler, Stalin and Satan.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the time of our meeting, Mann was juggling several FOIA requests and two lawsuits—one of which would be resolved the following week, when the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the state attorney general's demand that the University of Virginia (Mann's former employer) turn over the researcher's e-mails and other documents. The university spent nearly $600,000 to argue that releasing personal correspondence would chill academic research. "Yes, there's been a toll on me and my family," Mann says. "But it's bigger than that. Look what it's doing to science, when others see this and see what happens if they speak up about their research. These efforts to discredit science are well-organized. It's not just a bunch of crazy people."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Force of Nature Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist, has been the subject of lawsuits, congressional investigations and an anthrax scare. Tom Clynes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"There's really only about 25 of us doing this," Steve Milloy says, shortly after sitting down at Morton's, a Washington, D.C., steakhouse favored by lawyers and lobbyists. "A core group of skeptics. It's a ragtag bunch, very Continental Army." Milloy, a Fox News commentator and former tobacco-industry advocate, runs a website called JunkScience.com that is an outlet for attacks on those he calls "global-warming alarmists." Many of those who question mainstream climate science resent being called deniers; they say it unfairly equates them with Holocaust deniers. They prefer doubters, skeptics or realists. "Me, I just stick with denier," Milloy says. "I'm happy to be a denier."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Milloy is dressed in a striped pink button-down shirt and khaki pants, classic Potomac prep. He moved into climate denial in the 1990s as funding from the tobacco lobby began to dry up. At the time, conservative and libertarian think tanks were just starting to take aim at climate science. Milloy, who has received funding from entities controlled by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch, helps them get their message to the masses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Milloy and other aggressive deniers practice a form of asymmetric warfare that is decentralized and largely immune to reasoned response. They launch what Aaron Huertas, a press secretary at the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls "information missiles," anti-climate-change memes that get passed around on listservs, amplified in the blogosphere, and picked up by radio talk-show hosts or politicians. "Even if they don't have much money, they are operating in a structure that allows them to punch above their weight," Huertas says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists who speak up quickly become targets. Both Milloy and his counterpart Marc Morano, who runs the site ClimateDepot.com and once declared that climate scientists "deserve to be publicly flogged," occasionally publish the e-mail addresses of climate researchers, a stunt that can result in scientists receiving a flood of vitriolic messages. A few weeks before our meeting, Milloy had offered a $500 bounty for a video of anyone who would heckle Mann with "an alarmism-debunking" question during the California leg of his book tour. The hecklers never materialized but, as with the white powder in Mann's letter (which the FBI determined to be cornstarch), the threat made an impact.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mann calls Milloy "a valueless, all-purpose denier for notorious industries who need a hired gun." But Milloy, like others in the movement, says that he's fighting an existential war with forces that would, without his intervention, steal the American way of life. "This whole green thing, the whole environmental scare industry, is really just an ingenious plan to exert government control over everything we do," Milloy says. "I have yet to see an environmental scare that is remotely true when it comes to human health. Secondhand smoke, air quality, ozone depletion, pesticides, superfund sites—you name it."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The evidence to support the theory of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change has been mounting since the mid-1950s, when atmospheric models predicted that growing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would add to the natural "greenhouse effect" and lead to warming. The data was crude at first, and opinions vacillated (skeptics like to recall a 1974 Time cover story that predicted an impending ice age). But by the mid-1990s, thousands of lines of independent inquiry supported the conclusion summarized in the 1995 IPCC report: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since then, the case for anthropogenic climate change has only strengthened; 98 percent of actively publishing climate scientists now say that it is undeniable. But several finer points remain unsettled. For instance, researchers still don't completely understand the role of aerosols in the atmosphere, the variable effects of clouds at different heights, and the influence of feedback mechanisms such as the changing reflectivity of the Earth's surface and the release of gases from permafrost or deep seabeds. Climate-change skeptics have been keen to capitalize on those gaps in knowledge. "They play up smaller debates," says Francesca Grifo at the Union of Concerned Scientists, "and divert the dialogue by attacking particular aspects. They represent climate science as a house of cards, where you pull out one and it all falls apart."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1998, following the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the American Petroleum Institute convened a task force to spend more than $5.9 million to discredit climate science and quash growing public support of curbing emissions. The group borrowed many of the methods and people, including Milloy, that had been used to mislead Congress and the public about the connection between smoking and cancer and heart disease. In a leaked memo titled the "Global Climate Science Communications Plan," the task force laid out a strategy to "build a case against precipitous action on climate change based on the scientific uncertainty." The memo details a plan to recruit, train and pay willing scientists to sow doubt about climate science among the media and the public. "Victory will be achieved," the memo states, when "recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom' " and when "those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of the extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March 2001, George W. Bush's administration declared that climate science was "too uncertain" to justify action (such as ratifying the Kyoto treaty) that might put the brakes on economic growth. That refrain would be echoed again and again, weakening or derailing successive international agreements and domestic policy. How had a small band of non-scientists managed to so quickly and thoroughly pursuade the nation's leaders to reject an ever more coherent and definitive body of scientific evidence?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stop Global Warming A protester at a pro-climate-science rally in 2007. Reuters/Hyungwon Kang</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Multiple feet of sea level rising in the next few decades, that's just fantasy," says Myron Ebell, the director of energy and global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. Ebell is in a taxi heading down K Street, Washington's lobbyist row, talking to a reporter from the Naples Daily News in Florida. The journalist called to get his perspective on a new scientific study that warns of more frequent flooding along U.S. coastlines as higher temperatures accelerate rising sea levels. "The evidence is inconclusive," Ebell says. "The [Antarctic] ice sheet is not shrinking but may in fact be expanding. The reality from the experts is . . . "</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ebell does not claim to be a scientist. His background is in economics, and like Milloy, he was a member of the American Petroleum Institute task force in 1998. Yet his lack of scientific credentials has not deterred a stream of journalists from requesting his opinion of the newly released study. "Happens every time I get quoted in the New York Times," he says. Ebell provides two things most scientists can't: a skeptical view of climate science and clear, compelling sound bites ready for the evening news or the morning paper. For a deadline-pressured journalist covering "both sides" of a complex issue, Ebell might seem an ideal source. Yet by including unscientific opinions alongside scientific ones, that same journalist creates an illusion of equivalence that can tilt public opinion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's that false balance thing," Mann says. "You're a reporter and you understand there's an overwhelming consensus that evidence supports a particular hypothesis—let's say, the Earth is an oblate spheroid. But you've got to get a comment from a holdout at the Flat Earth Society. People see the story and think there's a serious scientific debate about the shape of the Earth."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the taxi's radio, a weatherman forecasts that tomorrow will be Washington's hottest March 15 in recorded history. Ebell glances out the window at the cherry trees, in full bloom two weeks earlier than usual, as he thumbs down to his next call. "This one's a producer at PBS NewsHour," he says. "They're interviewing one of those sea-level guys and they want to know how they should approach asking him a negative question."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ebell connects with the producer: "What they're saying is, we've got to throw huge, scarce resources into what is essentially a nonproblem, that would be the point I'd make to him. The modelers will never admit that their models have no forecasting ability. They're just saying that this could happen." Then he winds up for his kicker. "Well, I'm sorry, a lot of things could happen. The Earth could be hit by an asteroid tomorrow."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"When I get an e-mail that mentions my child and a guillotine, I want to pull a blanket over my head."For the many scientists who consider themselves both political conservatives and supporters of the consensus position on anthropogenic climate change, ideology and party affiliation provide little shelter from attacks and harassment. Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, a political conservative and an evangelical Christian. In 2007, Terry Maple, the co-author of Newt Gingrich's forthcoming book on environmental entrepreneurship, asked her to write a chapter reviewing the scientific facts surrounding climate change. For most of his political career, Gingrich championed the virtues of science, but last year, while campaigning in the Republican presidential primaries, he dropped Hayhoe's chapter after Rush Limbaugh discovered her contribution and ridiculed her as a "climate babe."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my climate chapter in the trash," Hayhoe tweeted on hearing the news. "100+ unpaid hours I could've spent playing w[ith] my baby . . ." The day after Hayhoe's tweet, the American Tradition Institute (ATI), a conservative think tank, announced that it had filed a FOIA request with Texas Tech University "relating to collaboration on a book, using public time and resources." The ATI's paperwork referred to Hayhoe as a "climate activist."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I can delete the hate mail I got calling me a 'Nazi bitch whore climatebecile,'" Hayhoe says, "but responding to nuisance lawsuits and investigations takes up enormous amounts of time that could be better spent teaching, mentoring, researching, doing my job."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Schnare heads the Environmental Law Center at the ATI, which since its inception in 2009 has sued the employers and former employers of a number of climate scientists, including Mann and James Hansen, the outspoken head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The ATI wants the researchers' correspondence and research records. "We are not a venal organization," Schnare says. "Our law center seeks to defend good science and proper governmental behavior and to expose the converse. Citizens have the right to know how government money is spent. Scientists who feel they shouldn't have to respond to these requests shouldn't be working in a government institution, because this is the price of entering."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Richard Muller Muller, a physicist, was one of the few prominent scientists skeptical of global warming. He reversed his position last year. Dan Tuffs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2006, Jeffrey Gleason and Charles Monnett, two government scientists working out of Alaska, published a report that described dead polar bears floating in the Arctic Ocean. The apparently drowned animals raised concerns about the effect of melting ice in the Arctic. As with Mann's hockey-stick graph, the story of drowned polar bears made its way into An Inconvenient Truth and became a point of contention for climate skeptics. In 2010 both scientists came under investigation by the U.S. Office of the Inspector General for what it termed "integrity issues."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, is providing Gleason and Monnett with legal representation. "After more than two years of investigations, there have been no charges, no timelines, no requests for response," Ruch says. "It's Kafkaesque. We don't know what started this and what's keeping it going. But we do know that for both men, their lives have been hell." Monnett, Ruch says, has vowed not to publish another scientific paper, and Gleason has left his job in Alaska. Neither scientist responded to our requests for comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The story of Monnett and Gleason is exceptional. Few scientists have actually left their field as a result of harassment, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA Goddard who is currently defending a case brought by the ATI. "But," he says, "it does dissuade people from speaking out about their work. They see the harassment and intimidation and say, 'It's more stress than I need.' "</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"When I get an e-mail that mentions my child and a guillotine," Hayhoe says, "I sometimes want to pull a blanket over my head. The intent of all this is to discourage scientists. As a woman and a mother, I have to say that sometimes it does achieve its goal. There are many times when I wonder if it's worth it."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With scientists reluctant to speak out (and drowned out when they do), skeptics have had more room to attack climate-research programs. Last year, Republicans in the House of Representatives made a unanimous decision to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse-gas pollution threatens public health. Texas representative Ralph Hall, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, along with 10 of his Republican colleagues, also called for budget cuts and program terminations that directly targeted climate-science research, efforts to curb emissions, and preparations for climate-change impact at the National Science Foundation, the EPA and the Department of Energy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although many of the cuts were undone in the Senate, funding for climate-related programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not fare as well. After launching an investigation into NOAA's attempts to reorganize its climate services into a single unit, Hall successfully pushed through legislation to cut the agency's climate-research funding by 20 percent, forcing it to cancel research grants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Now government agencies and researchers are doing anything to keep the word 'climate' out of their budgets and proposals," says Rick Piltz, a former senior associate in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Office (in 2009, it was renamed the U.S. Global Change Research Program). "And this at a time when all agencies need to be thinking about how the nation will be affected by climate change and factor it into their planning."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Worldwide, proposals for carbon taxes, cap-and-trade programs and meaningful CO2 reductions have foundered on a lack of political consensus. In December, Canada became the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, citing the cost of compliance. The U.N.'s 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen yielded little actionable policy, and this June's Earth Summit +20 in Brazil has been newsworthy mostly for the low expectations surrounding it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the U.S., local climate skeptics have been advancing their agendas. In Virginia, Tea Party–inspired residents recently derailed municipal preparations for sea-level rise around Hampton Roads, the body of water that borders Norfolk-Virginia Beach. They disrupted planning meetings and disputed as a plot NOAA's findings that the area faces the second-highest risk from sea-level rise of any region of its size in the U.S. In April, Tennessee lawmakers passed a measure that allows teachers to question accepted theories on evolution and climate change in the classroom. Science advocates were also stunned by a recently disclosed initiative to design a school curriculum that questions climate science. Science educators say they're increasingly worried that climate could become the same kind of flash point as evolution. The question science advocates ask now is, how do they turn the conversation back to the science?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Face of Denial The Heartland Institute launched an anti-climate-science ad campaign in Chicago in May. The ad was pulled within a day, but other versions would have shown Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden. Heartland Institute</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists are starting to fight back. Schmidt co-founded RealClimate.org, a forum for climate scientists to quickly respond to developing stories and "provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary." Several other scientists launched the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund last year to help scientists and institutions respond to nuisance lawsuits. "We have a responsibility to the scientific community to not allow those looking to discredit us to be successful," Mann says. "What they're going to see is that they've awakened a sleeping bear. We will counterpunch."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But playing the activist can be a slippery slope. In February, climate analyst and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient Peter Gleick admitted using a false identity to obtain and distribute files that provided a detailed picture of the finances and plans of the Heartland Institute, an anti-regulatory think tank that calls climate research "junk science." The incident was a bizarre mirror of the 2009 "Climate Gate" scandal, in which hackers gained access to the e-mails of prominent climate scientists and distributed excerpts out of context. Although eight independent investigations later found that the scientists did nothing unethical, Climate Gate has become a rallying point for climate-change skeptics. Gleick was almost certainly aiming to incite a similar reaction among climate-science advocates. Instead many in the scientific community quickly condemned his tactics. Schmidt deemed them "completely irresponsible" and predicted that "public discussion on this issue will be much the poorer for this."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Seated at a conference table in Heartland's new downtown Chicago headquarters, Joe Bast, the organization's president, is a bit more forceful. "Peter Gleick was so desperate and delusional that he was willing to break the law repeatedly and lie and deceive people. Once again, the most alarmist voices in the debate have been found to be behaving very badly." Bast is compact and intense, with a well-trimmed beard and a raspy voice "from years of smoking," he tells me. He says the documents, one of which appears to have been forged, don't show a smoking gun. "Our enemies are calling it 'Denial Gate,' " he says, leaning forward over the table. "We're calling it 'Fake Gate.' Try to find anything in there that suggests we are anything other than sincere and above the table, and doing exactly what we say we're doing."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We cannot allow those looking to discredit scientists to be successful. They've awakened a sleeping bear. We will counterpunch."Probably the most surprising revelation is that Heartland's climate work is funded primarily by one individual, referred to in the institute's fundraising plan as the Anonymous Donor, who has contributed $12.7 million over the past five years. The organization's climate programs include the school curriculum questioning widely accepted climate science and its annual International Conference on Climate Change, an event many scientists lampoon as "Denialpalooza." Despite those programs, Bast says Heartland does not reject all of mainstream climate science. "Virtually everybody agrees," he tells me, that "there has been warming in the second half of the 20th century [and] that there is probably a human role in that warming, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that the increase in atmospheric concentrations can be attributed to human activity." The organization, he says, argues primarily for "cost-effective solutions" to climate change. As our meeting is wrapping up, Bast says genuinely, "Don't call us deniers. Skeptics is fine. Moderates, realists. But not deniers."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But a few weeks later, Heartland would launch a new advertising campaign. As drivers crawled along Chicago's busy Eisenhower Expressway, they were confronted with a large billboard that compared believers in global warming with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The text on the billboard read, "I still believe in global warming. Do you?" The advertisement was meant to be the first in a series. Others would liken climate-science advocates to mass murderers, including Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden. Bast did not respond for comment following the launch of the campaign, but Heartland issued a press release: "The people who believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Collateral Damage Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, wrote a chapter on climate change for Newt Gingrich's forthcoming book, only to have it pulled after the politician hit the campaign trail. AP Photo/Nellie Doneva</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"There are powerful voices of unreason," says Ben Santer, who led the 1995 IPCC team, "but every year, the science becomes stronger and the data are telling an ever more consistent story." As with tobacco, the more consistent the scientific story, the more difficult it will become for skeptics to reject anthropogenic climate change. That point was driven home after the Charles Koch Foundation donated $150,000 toward a study by Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who was, at the time, a darling of the climate-skeptic community. Muller spent two years investigating claims by global-warming deniers that temperature rises verified by multiple studies were skewed because of flawed analysis, unreliable weather stations and the effect of urban heat islands. Muller and his research team (which included Saul Perlmutter, the joint winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics) compiled 1.6 billion readings at 39,000 sites and examined other historical data.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Muller's conclusion was most likely not what the Koch brothers had in mind. Last October, his team announced that the global mean temperature on land had increased by 1.6 degrees since 1950, a result that matched the numbers accepted by the mainstream climate-science community. "The skeptics raised valid points, and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago," Muller told me. "Now we have confidence that the temperature rises previously reported had been done without bias. Global warming is real."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some conservative think tanks have since begun to soften their positions. Jeff Kueter, the current president of the George C. Marshall Institute, which has been advocating against mainstream climate science since the 1980s, told me in his office in Virginia last month that "climate change is not a hoax" and that "human activities undoubtedly have an impact on climate change."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those who fund the denial machine are likewise reconsidering their positions. Exxon has scaled back its annual anti-climate-science funding by 78 percent, or $2.7 million, since 2006. Other publicly traded oil companies have followed suit. In response to Heartland's billboard campaign, some of its biggest donors, including State Farm Insurance, the beverage giant Diageo, and the insurance and financial-services company USAA, announced that they were pulling their funding. In a message on Heartland's website, Bast wrote, "We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the 'realist' message on the climate." The billboard, however, was gone a day after it was put up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Public opinion in the U.S. about anthropogenic climate change is also changing. This spring, four major universities released polls showing that a clear majority of American citizens now say that the world is warming and that the country should take action. Jon Krosnick, a professor of communications at Stanford University, conducted one of the polls. He found that 83 percent of Americans say they believe that the Earth has been warming. One significant factor, he suggests, is that Americans can finally see and feel climate change happening.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"You no longer have to believe a scientist who is telling you that something is happening that you can't see," Krosnick says. "Now people are saying, 'I can tell my plants are flowering much earlier, and I'm wearing shorts and T-shirts to the fall fair, when I used to wear jackets.' " Among those he polled, 71 percent support the U.S. taking action to reduce emissions regardless of whether other countries do so. "If the public does in fact support these views," Krosnick asks, "why are politicians not taking action?"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Voice of Doubt Myron Ebell educates the media about the "uncertainties" surrounding climate science. The brothers Charles and David Koch support a number of anti-climate-science programs. Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On a summery afternoon in mid-March, Senator Inhofe dashes onto the stage at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., to introduce his new book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. "Why?" he asks the crowd. "Why, when the United Nations IPCC is totally refuted, when Al Gore is totally discredited, when man-made global warming is totally debunked, when passing a global-warming cap-and-trade bill is totally shot down, why is this book necessary?" He veers off-topic for several minutes to rail against "liberal Republicans" and "an unelected bureaucrat at the EPA." Then, suddenly, he looks around and asks, "Am I going to be introduced?"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I scan the room. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Marc Morano, the ClimateDepot.com blogger and former Inhofe aide who is widely considered to have ghostwritten most of his book, are there. So are about 150 others, a mostly older crowd that's captivated by Inhofe's folksy outrage and his PowerPoint presentation, which begins with his famous 2003 quote: "With all the hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it is."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's an entertaining ride. Inhofe doesn't mention Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s comment earlier that week referring to him as "Big Oil's top call girl." Instead he speaks of the current "war on fossil fuels" and about how the U.N.'s interest in climate is motivated by "power, autonomy and control." He boasts of how, in 2005, he called science-fiction novelist Michael Crichton to the Senate floor to testify as an "expert witness" on climate change and about how in 2009 he flew to Copenhagen as "a one-man truth squad" to take the wind out of the U.N. Climate Change Conference. He shows a picture of the igloo his children built in front of their Washington, D.C., home in 2010 to mock Al Gore.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Throughout his presentation, Inhofe deftly manages to be simultaneously affable and outraged. "I love everybody," he tells me after the crowd has departed, adding that he and Gore were "good friends" at one time. "I still am," he says, "because I love everybody. That's the difference between me and my adversaries."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Koch Brothers The brothers Charles and David Koch support a number of anti-climate-science programs. AFP/Getty Images</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as in the rest of the country, belief in human-caused climate change in Oklahoma has been rising with the thermometer—according to Krosnick, a large majority of Inhofe's constituents now believe that anthropogenic global warming is real. I ask Inhofe if he's noticed any climate changes in his home state, such as last summer's unprecedented heat and severe drought, withering crops, wild fires and dramatically expanded tornado season. "There's not been any warming," he snaps. "And there's actually been a little bit of cooling. It's all documented. Look at the Dust Bowl. Back then it was a lot hotter. Matter of fact, now they say the hottest time was actually during that time—1934, I guess."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Actually, last summer's average temperature of 86.9° was the highest ever recorded in Oklahoma. And last spring's drought, when hundreds of farmers abandoned livestock they could no longer manage to feed or water, was the worst since 1921.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of the scientists I've spoken with say that no single act of harassment or intimidation has stung more than Inhofe's "list of 17," the call for the congressional investigation of prominent climate scientists. Mann, I tell Inhofe, said it "smacked of modern-day McCarthyism."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I'm not the guy that called for investigations, I don't think," Inhofe says. He quickly glances at his communications director, Matt Dempsey. "Did I ever call for investigations?" I study Inhofe's face for a clue as to whether he's joking—he brags about the episode in his book. It's clear that he is not. Dempsey nods at his boss. "Okay," Inhofe says. "Maybe right after Climate Gate, I said they need to be investigated."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The room is nearly empty when I ask Inhofe, finally, if he could imagine the possibility, however remote, that science could provide any amount or type of evidence that could convince him that human-caused climate change could be real. The senator darts an impatient look at his watch, and his handlers rise. It's clear that the interview is coming to an end. "When people like you ask that question," Inhofe says, "I can tell you believe it."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tom Clynes is a contributing editor at Popular Science. His last story, in March, was The Boy Who Played with Fusion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canada has cut nearly $3 billion in spending and up to 5,000 jobs from its science-based departments, according to a union representing federal scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Keystone Ads Mislead on Canada's Deep Cuts to Environmental Monitoring</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ads were hard to miss for anyone taking the subway in Washington, D.C.—particularly someone working at the White House, the State Department or Congress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2006</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Associated Press November 14, 2006</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmentalists sue Bush administration over global warming report</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmentalists sued the Bush administration for failing to produce a report on global warming's impact on the United States' environment, economy and public health.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tuesday's lawsuit seeks to compel the U.S. Climate Change Science Program to issue the national assessment, which should contain the most recent scientific data on global warming and projections for its future impacts. The plaintiffs claim the government must complete such a report every four years under the Global Change Research Act of 1990.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Global warming is one of the most serious threats facing humanity today," according to the complaint. Without the report, decision makers and the public "are without one of the most important tools to grapple with this complex, potentially overwhelming and yet all important issue."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was named in the lawsuit, had not received the complaint Tuesday and could not comment on it, said spokesman Ben Fallon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Fallon defended the administration's record on combating global warming, pointing to increased funding for alternative energy research and partnerships with other countries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We feel very positive about our record on climate change," Fallon said. "The president has been focused on results-driven research and looking for practical ways to address climate change in ways that aren't damaging to the economy."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Officials at the Climate Change Science Program, also named in the complaint, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco by the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The assessment, which plaintiffs allege was due in November 2004, is the "first step in crafting solutions to the devastating consequences of climate change if we don't act now," said Julie Teel, an attorney for the plaintiffs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential candidate, who has also been calling on the administration to issue the assessment, expressed support for the lawsuit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's the right time to push Washington to grapple with this issue," Kerry said in a statement. "For too many years, action on global climate change has been stopped dead in its tracks by government foot-dragging, hiding information and smothering science."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmentalists have accused the administration of trying to suppress dissemination of the previous assessment, issued in 2000, which predicted a dramatic rise in catastrophic storms, floods, droughts and heat-related deaths.... </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">canada:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.salon.com/2014/08/19/canadas_despicable_climate_censorship_government_scientists_need_permission_to_tweet_basic_facts/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s the best way to describe the Canadian government’s avoid-the-topic-at-all-costs approach to climate change? Critics have called climate-related media censorship under its 2006 communications policy “Byzantine,” “Orwellian” and “definitely a scandal.” We also might want to try, as Katie Gibbs, executive director of the nonprofit group Evidence for Democracy, suggests, “suppression through bureaucracy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Consider this account, from Postmedia News, of what happened in the summer of 2012, when federal scientists attempted to alert the public of the troubling news that Arctic sea ice cover had reached a record low:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Less ice doesn’t mean less danger. In fact the opposite is true and there is greater need for ice information,” Leah Braithwaite, the service’s chief of applied science said in an August 2012 memo to Norman Naylor, a strategic communications adviser at Environment Canada.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Braithwaite and her colleagues — aware of the national and international interest in the shrinking polar ice — wanted to hold a “strictly factual” technical briefing for the media to inform Canadians how the ice had disappeared from not only the Northwest Passage but many normally ice-choked parts of the Arctic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The briefing never happened. Nine levels of approval — from the director of the ice service up to the environment minister’s office — were needed for the “communication plan,” according to the documents released to Postmedia News under the Access to Information Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The facts, it seemed, got swept under the rug around the sixth circle of bureaucratic hell, also known as “ministerial services.” According to Postmedia, the 449 pages of heavily redacted documents don’t give any reason why the briefing was canceled....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/canadian-gov-t-suppressed-info-on-polar-ice-melt/article/398488</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canadian gov't suppressed info on polar ice melt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posted Aug 21, 2014 by Martin Laine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canada’s Conservative-led government has tried to keep Canadians from finding out just how rapidly the Arctic ice is melting by suppressing the findings of its own scientists, as well as forbidding them from talking about global climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/canadian-gov-t-suppressed-info-on-polar-ice-melt/article/398488#ixzz3BLQWQhaO</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2012, government scientists working for the Canadian Ice Service, the agency whose mission is “to provide the most accurate and timely information about ice in Canada’s navigable waters,“ reported that the Arctic ice had shrunk to the lowest point ever recorded.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Because of the worldwide interest in the condition of the polar ice caps, the scientists wanted to hold a “strictly factual” technical briefing for the media to let Canadians and others know that ice had disappeared from the Northwest Passage as well as other areas, according to an article on the canada.com website.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before they could do this, it had to run through a gauntlet of nine levels of approval by various officials. It never made it through the process. According to the released documents, when it reached the sixth layer, known as “ministerial services,” the briefing was cancelled.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s suppression through bureaucracy,” said Katie Gibbs, executive director of Evidence for Democracy (E4D), a nonprofit dedicated to open communication of government science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Why is it we need nine levels of approval for this sort of thing, what’s the justification?” asked Scott Findlay, a biologist, a co-founder of E4D, and a member of the Institute for Science, Science and Policy at the University of Ottawa.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The secret was out soon after, when the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center released their own, similar findings. By contrast there were briefings, interviews, and press releases about their record- shattering findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Findlay said government scientists are professionals and the government should trust them to interact with the media and release information that is in the public interest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the government’s communications policy, put into effect shortly after the 2006 Conservative Party victory, government scientists are not allowed to talk to journalists without prior approval. One exception is meteorologists, who can discuss severe weather but not climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Environment Canada scientists speak to their area of expertise,” said government spokesman Mark Johnson in an email response to questions from investigative reporter Mike DeSouza. “Questions about climate change or long-term trends would be directed to a climatologist or other applicable authority.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/canadian-gov-t-suppressed-info-on-polar-ice-melt/article/398488#ixzz3BLQOkBQc</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Stephen Harper Hates Science": Federal Scientists ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.desmogblog.com/.../stephen-harper-hates-science-fed...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeSmogBlog</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nov 8, 2012 - The scientists discovered concentrations of toxics such as heavy metals ... the Stephen Harper government has actively suppressed the release of vital ... Eager to promote expansion in the tar sands, the Canadian .... Send us an e-mail · News, Tips, and Confidential Information · Subscribe to RSS feed. [x].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Silencing Scientists - NYTimes.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.nytimes.com/2013/.../silencing-scientists.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The New York Times</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sep 21, 2013 - The Canadian government is making it harder for scientists to do their... the tar sands project proceeds quietly, with no surprises, no bad news,  ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harper's attack on science: No science, no evidence, no ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.academicmatters.ca/.../harpers-attack-on-science-...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Academic Matters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, Canada's scientists are so frustrated with this government's recent overhaul ...Such suppression of communication ranges from the laughable—such as ... He told Postmedia News: “I'm available when Media Relations say I'm available. ... that no definitive link had been made between tar sands contaminants and the  ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canada's government suppresses scientific reporting ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/.../cana-a04.ht...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">World Socialist Web Site</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Apr 4, 2013 - Canada's government suppresses scientific reporting ... super-power” through rapid expansion of oil production from the Alberta tar sands,  ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Harper - news, analysis and information</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">desmog.ca/stephen-harper</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here is a summary of our news and analysis of Prime Minister Stephen Harper: ... Yesterday hundreds of indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians stood on ... HatesScience”: Federal Scientists Muzzled to Protect Tar Sands Reputation ... suppressedthe release of vital information regarding the spread of tar sands  ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New York Times writer credits Vancouver Observer ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.vancouverobserver.com/news/new-york-times-writer-credits-vanco...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Apr 1, 2014 - Leslie -- a former L.A. Times war corespondent, news bureau chief in several ... "The idea that scientific work is being suppressed, environmentalists are being ... "The impact of tar sands on Canadian politics is not healthy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When science goes silent - Macleans.ca</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.macleans.ca/news/canada/when-science-goes-silent/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maclean's</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">May 3, 2013 - With the muzzling of scientists, Harper's obsession with controlling ... It's just one of many such stories of muzzled federal scientists and suppressed research ...trying to promote the expansion of Alberta's oil sands—a significant ... MeanwhileCanada's global reputation on green issues has taken a beating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">William Boardman?Tar Sands Action - Facebook</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.facebook.com/TarSandsAction/posts/471345392916330</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DOES TAR SANDS OIL MEAN “GAME OVER FOR THE CLIMATE” ? ... the environmental side of the argument got scientific reinforcement when a Canadian newspaper reported that government ... Canada Suppresses Scientific Information.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists Find 7,300-Mile Mercury Contamination 'Bullseye ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/30/.../tar-sands-mercur...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ThinkProgress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dec 30, 2013 - The Canadian government touts Alberta's oil sands as the ... by $19 billion a year in investments, according to Bloomberg News. ..... They say it will all be "safe" but suppress all studies & scientific analyses to the contrary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Government censors science it opposes - University World ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">University World News</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jun 29, 2013 - The Canadian government has overhauled science communication policies ... Such suppression of communication ranges from the laughable – such ... nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Postmedia News journalist Margaret Munro ... a study confirming that snowfall near Alberta's tar sands was contaminated  ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">`12/09</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two weeks ago, </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">thousands of illegally hacked emails from a British climate research center were dumped on a Russian webserver, timed to influence the politics of of the international climate negotiations commencing next week in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beginning Thanksgiving week, conservative media and Republican politicians have compared the climate scientists whose private emails were hacked to Hitler, Stalin, and eugenicists, saying they are involved in a global conspiracy to defraud and possibly take over the world. The Climategate “scandal” — a swiftboating intimidation and smear campaign against science — is the right-wing rage from Stephen Dubner to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck to Lou Dobbs. Like the original Watergate scandal involving right-wing operatives who burglarized the offices of their political opponents, the real crime is the original break-in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It has now been reported that the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center is not the only victim of such a criminal invasion: burglars and hackers have also attacked the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These attacks go beyond simple burglary. University of Victoria spokeswoman Patty Pitts told the National Post “there have also been attempts to hack into climate scientists’ computers, as well as incidents in which people impersonated network technicians to try to gain access to campus offices and data.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For thirty years, defenders of a pollution-based economy have intimidated, smeared, and suppressed climate science, using a playbook perfected by thetobacco industry and Karl Rove. Now — as the United States, led by President Obama, finally appears ready to join the world in the fight against global warming — the opponents of reform are resorting to criminal desperation, harkening back to the paranoia-fueled extremes of Richard Nixon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The retraction campaign was by then well under way. An online petition was up and running, demanding in the name of "the scientific community" that Seralini hand over all his raw data. The petition was aggressively promoted via social media, often with the implication that the researchers had something to hide. The assertion that the study was "fraudulent" obviously played well into this campaign, which culminated in the Reuters and New Scientist pieces reporting the retraction calls. Both these articles reported on the petition, as well as containing lacerating comments from two UK scientists – comments once again provided by the Science Media Centre. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the published comments – from Prof. Maurice Moloney – said it was "appalling" that such a study should ever have been published in a respected journal. And a researcher from the UK's John Innes Centre demanded to know whether it was not "time for Food and Chemical Toxicology to retract the manuscript?" The only other scientist quoted claimed the publication of the paper was more than just "a dangerous case of failure of the peer-review system." It represented a threat to not just the credibility of the journal but "the scientific method overall". This apocalyptic claim was backed up by the news that hundreds of outraged scientists had signed the online petition.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who's behind the retraction petition?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Writing in The Guardian at the end of September, John Vidal described the attacks already raining down on Seralini and his team as "a triumph for the scientific and corporate establishment which has used similar tactics to crush other scientists". These included, Vidal said, "Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute in Scotland, who was sacked after his research suggested GM potatoes damaged the stomach lining and immune system of rats, and David Quist and Ignacio Chapela", who studied the flow of genes from illegally planted GM maize to Mexican indigenous maize.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The vociferous attacks on Quist and Chapela resulted in the apparent retraction of their paper by the journal Nature, even though such a move was not supported by the majority of its reviewers and subsequent research confirmed the paper’s main finding. But, as the French journalist Benjamin Sourice has pointed out, the simplest way to definitively discredit a study and nullify its impact is to pressurise the journal that published it to retract it from its list of publications. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/science/item/164-smelling-a-corporate-rat</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hmm:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">George Vye</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">gmvye@me.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://dieoff.org/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.vhemt.org/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not only will men of science have to grapple with the sciences that deal with man, but -- and this is a far more difficult matter -- they will have to persuade the world to listen to what they have discovered. If they cannot succeed in this difficult enterprise, man will destroy himself by his halfway cleverness. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">  ~ Bertrand Russell, 1951</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Begin forwarded message:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From: Staff of the Institute for Responsible Technology<webmaster responsibletechnology.org="responsibletechnology.org" /></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Date: October 1, 2011 4:42:54 AM PDT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To: gmvye@me.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Subject: New DVD for Non-GMO Month, "Scientists Under Attack"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reply-To: webmaster@responsibletechnology.org</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dear George ,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Check out this fabulous NEW film, Scientists Under Attack, a "must see" investigation into the scientists researching the health impacts of Genetically Modified Foods (read more about the film below). Click here to watch the trailer andget a copy to show during October's Non-GMO Month - invite all your friends and encourage them to spread the word! To make it easy to share this great film during Non-GMO Month, we've reduced the cost of buying the film in 6-packs to only $79.95 (individually priced at $19.95). We hope you'll enjoy this new film, and share it with all those who care about the safety of our food supply.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Biotech's Dirty Tricks Exposed in New Documentary Scientists Under Attack </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Review by Jeffrey M. Smith</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Film by Bertram Verhaag and Denkmal Films. 60 minutes, Plus 30 minute bonus documentary: Monster Salmon. $19.95 </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">View the Trailer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"One question means one career." This was the harsh warning of UC Berkeley Professor Ignacio Chapela for those daring to conduct independent research on genetically engineered foods and crops. "You ask one question, you get the answer and you might or might not be able to publish it; but that is the end of your career." Both he and biologist Arpad Pusztai dared to asked questions and do the research. And then all hell broke lose.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using stunning visuals filmed on three continents, veteran German filmmaker Bertram Verhaag tracks the fate of these two scientists at the hands of a multi-billion dollar industry that is desperate to hide the dangers of their genetically modified organisms (GMOs).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BR Online says of the film, "Belief in noble and incorrupt research and science is reduced to absurdity." Arthouse says the "movie shows how purchased truth becomes the currency in the perfidious business between science and multinationals." And GMWatch writes, "Original research showing problems with GM crops is buried under a deluge of smears and follow up studies are not done."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The insect-killing, career-ending potato</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"As a scientist looking at it and actively working on the field, I find that it's very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs." - Arpad Pusztai, UK's World in Action TV show</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Dr. Pusztai voiced his concerns about the health risks of genetically modified (GM) foods during a nationally televised interview in August 1998, his was not simply just another voice in a contentious debate. Pusztai was the world leader in his field, and he had received major government funding to come up with the official method for testing the safety of GM foods. His protocols were supposed to become the required tests before any new GMO entered the European market. Pusztai was an insider, and an advocate of GM foods—that is until he actually ran those tests on supposedly harmless GM potatoes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The high-tech spuds were engineered to produce their own pesticide. "The point of the whole genetic modification experiment was to protect the potato against aphids, which are one of the major pests in Scotland," he said. His team inserted a gene from the snowdrop plant into the potatoes, which did in fact protect the GM crop from the insects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As part of his safety studies, he fed that insecticide producing GM potato to rats, along with a complete and balanced diet. Another group of rats ate natural potatoes. A third was fed not only the natural potatoes, but they also received a dose of the same insecticide that the GM potato produced. This way, if the insecticide was harmful, he would see the same health problems in both the group that ate the GM potatoes, and those that ate the diet spiked with the insecticide. To his surprise, only those that ate the GM potato had severe problems—in every organ and every system he looked at.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Massive health problems linked to GMOs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"After the animals were killed and dissected," Pusztai recalled, "we found out that in comparison with the non-genetically modified potatoes, their internal organs developed differently." The intestines and stomach lining, for example, increased in size, the liver and kidneys were smaller, and the overall rate of growth was retarded. And the immune system suffered. Pusztai emphasized, "They found in those data 36 – 36! – very highly significant differences between the GM-fed animals and the non-GM fed animals."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since the rats that ate the natural potatoes plus the insecticide did not have these issues, there was one obvious conclusion—the process of genetically engineering the potatoes caused unpredicted side effects, turning a harmless food into a dangerous one.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Pusztai saw the extensive damage that his potatoes caused in the lab animals, he also realized that if biotech companies had done the safety studies, the dangerous potatoes would have easily made it to market. He knew this because a few months earlier, he had reviewed the confidential submissions from the biotech companies which allowed their GM soy and corn onto the market. "They were flimsy," he said. "They were not scientifically well founded." They would never detect the changes in GMO-fed animals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reading the industry studies was a turning point in Pusztai's life. He realized what he was doing and what the industry scientists were doing was diametrically opposed. He was doing safety studies. Companies like Monsanto, on the other hand, were doing as little as possible to get their foods on the market as quickly as possible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pusztai also realized that the GM soy and corn already on the market had been produced using the same process that had created his dangerous potato. Thus, the GM crops being consumed in the UK and the US might lead to similar damage in the gut, brain and organs of the entire population.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thus, during his TV interview, Pusztai flatly stated: "If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat [GM foods] until I see at least comparable experimental evidence which we are producing for genetically modified potatoes."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ambushed</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the TV show aired, Pusztai was a hero at his prestigious Rowett Institute, where the director praised his work to the press, calling it world-class research. After two days of high-profile media coverage throughout Europe, however, the director received two phone calls from the UK Prime Minister's Office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's only when we think there was political pressure coming from the top that the situation changed," said Pusztai. "And then the director, to save his own skin, decided that the best way to deal with the situation [was] A) to destroy me, B) to make me shut up."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pusztai was told the next morning that his contract would not be renewed, he was silenced with threats of a lawsuit, his team was disbanded, and the protocols were not to be implemented in GMO safety assessments. And then came the attacks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coordinated between the Institute, biotech academics, and even the pro-GMO UK government, a campaign to destroy Pusztai's reputation was launched. They were determined to counter the negative media coverage and protect the reputation of GMOs—even if it meant promoting blatant lies and sacrificing a top scientist's career. Because Pusztai was gagged, he said, "whatever they did say on TV, radio and wrote in the newspapers, I could not deny it, I could not correct it, I could not say what was the real situation."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The most hurtful thing of all," remembers Pusztai's wife Susan, "was that he wasn't allowed to talk to his colleagues and his colleagues were not allowed to talk to him. So whenever he entered a room, they went silent within seconds."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After seven excruciating months, a committee at the UK Parliament invited Pusztai to speak. This lifted the gag order, which allowed Pusztai to ultimately publish his research, and be interviewed for this film.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oops—GMOs weren't supposed to be there</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ignacio Chapela, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had "a long-term relationship with a group of indigenous communities" in Mexico. Although GM corn was not yet legally grown in the country, Chapela decided to equip the Mexicans with a laboratory that could test for its presence, in case GMOs were eventually introduced. To help with the training, his colleague David Quist brought GM corn from the US. For the non-GM control corn, Chapela said, "we thought we should just use the local corn, which, of course, is going to be clean and wonderful. And the surprise came when the negative control started coming out positive. That means we started finding transgenic materials where they were not supposed to be."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chapela says, "The reason why our findings were so astounding was because it was thought that there was no transgenic corn being planted in Mexico at all. And people wanted it that way. . . . Why? Because Mexico is the center of origin of corn. The Mexican government was worried about maintaining the integrity of the land races." Apparently GM corn imported as food was unknowingly being grown, and had already started contaminating the source of corn's biodiversity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Chapela the industry "had been telling the world that they really had control over these crops, that if they planted . . . transgenic corn in one field, that transgenic corn would not go anywhere else. So our discovery that we were finding transgenic corn maybe a thousand miles from the nearest legal transgenic corn field was a huge problem for them because it really showed very simply, and with real evidence, that they really did not have control."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chapela and Quist wrote up the finding, which was accepted for publication by the prominent journal Nature. This made "many people within the industry very nervous and very unhappy," says Chapella. They "started a discreditation campaign for the paper. They did not want the paper to be published."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unable to stop Nature, however, a Monsanto PR company - the Bivings Group - deployed plan B. "They created two fictitious characters, two doctors," recounts Chapela. "And these two doctors went on the internet and started spreading rumors that what we had said was false and that the paper was flawed." The disinformation campaign went viral. It put huge pressure on Nature, spread the false notion that contamination had not taken place, and resulted in a campaign against Chapela by biotech advocates in his University.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"In my case," says Chapela, "I was pushed out of the university at least three times. Every time I fought back and we managed to keep my job. But it's been very difficult."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trashing scientists worldwide</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The treatment of Pusztai and Chapela illustrates what happens around the world to scientists who discover harm from GM crops. The work of Russian scientist Irina Ermakova, for example, was viciously attacked, and there were repeated attempts to intimidate her: papers were burnt on her desk and samples were stolen from her lab.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Peeking through these stories of personal attacks are the very real dangers of GMOs, which compel the audience to question the use of GMOs in their own diets. Consider the impact of Ermakova's research on young women planning to raise a family. After she fed genetically engineered soy flour to female rats, more than half of their offspring died within three weeks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The film also unravels the claims of biotech benefits on the farm level. A visit to Brazil introduces herbicide-tolerant Roundup Ready soybeans, engineered to make weeding a field easier. Farmers can spray Monsanto's Roundup herbicide right on the field, and the GMOs survive. But this has led to massive overuse of Roundup, which in turn has led to the emergence of herbicide-tolerant superweeds—no longer controllable with Roundup.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A natural reaction to these stories might be to ask why isn't the government telling us the truth and protecting us. Unfortunately, they are part of the problem.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FDA cover up</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The FDA scientists who reviewed GMOs in the early 1990s were uniformly concerned about their health impacts, according to attorney Andrew Kimbrell, who runs the D.C.-based Center for Food Safety. He was on the team that sued the FDA in 1998, forcing them to turn over nearly 60,000 pages of secret internal memos. Kimbrell extracts key memos from massive filing cabinets in his office, reading the scientists' warnings: toxins, nutritional problems, loss of biodiversity, change in water use, etc.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"So the scientists asked for these studies," says Kimbrell. "But the politicians at the FDA and in the administration at that time said no. They suppressed the science. And these questions, these studies, have never been done."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead, the US government maintains the illusion that nothing is wrong, and that this science works just as the biotech companies are telling us. This is beautifully illustrated with excerpts of biotech apologist Nina Fedoroff, the former science advisor to the Secretary of State. Her bland assurances about the safety of GMOs crumble with each new revelation in the film.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unprecedented risks; no benefits</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"No one gets up in the morning saying I want to go buy a genetically engineered food," says Kimbrell. "They offer no benefits, no more nutrition, no more flavor, no nothing. They only offer risks." He says the average rational person would ask, "Why would I buy a food that offers me no new benefits but only risks?" Kimbrell, who wrote the book Your Right to Know, says it was "critical for the industry to get these foods out without anyone knowing, because if they knew, they would obviously choose not to buy them."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But as Chapela's discovery of self-propagating GMO contamination illustrates, the risk of GMOs extends well beyond individual considerations. He warns, "We are manipulating life in a way that we really do not understand, we cannot control, and then we're letting it go into the environment. So it's a change that is radical, that is unprecedented, that is beyond anything we can understand, and it is irretrievable. We cannot get it back. That's my concern!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists Under Attack is recommended for all those who love nature, and for everyone who eats. To view the trailer, click here. To buy the film, click here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bonus film</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Scientists Under Attack DVD includes a 30 minute bonus film Monster Salmon, also by Bertram Verhaag. It describes the efforts by the US firm AquaBounty to bring fast growing genetically engineered salmon to market in the US. Given the FDA's recent attempts to fast-track this controversial fish, this additional documentary is important and timely.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">omg both milloy and gough have books:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://books.google.com/books?id=uKlHJx9OdyUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">singer on keeling, pat michaels, dt, dioxin,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> hormone by stephen safe http://vetmed.tamu.edu/vtpp/directorydetail?userid=2124</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nature/interviews/safe.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">propagandists:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enter Entine, Syngenta intimidation and the American Council on Science and Health.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Intimidation. (Per Wikipedia) “In 2014, New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv reported that Syngenta might have been orchestrating an attack on the “scientific credibility”of not just Tyrone Hayes, the lead critic of atrazine use, but other scientists as well whose studies have shown atrazine to have negative effects on the environment and/or human and animal health [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Paul Winchester, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote a paper that was published in Acta Paediatrica [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1651-2227.2008.01207.x/full] reviewing national records for thirty million births, found that children conceived between April and July, when the concentration of atrazine, mixed with other pesticides, in water is highest, were more likely to have genital birth defects. Professor Winchester subsequently received a subpoena requesting that he turn over to Syngenta every e-mail he had written about atrazine in the past decade.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Deborah Cory-Slechta, a professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and a former member of the EPA’s science advisory board, said that she, too, had felt that Syngenta was trying to ‘undermine’her work, after she published a study showing that the herbicide paraquat may contribute to diseases of the nervous system. “The folks from Syngenta used to follow me to my talks and tell me I wasn’t using ‘human-relevant doses’,”Cory-Slechta said. ‘They would go up to my students and try to intimidate them. There was this sustained campaign to make it look like my science wasn’t legitimate.’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In one of the e-mails obtained by class-action suit plaintiffs, the company’s communications consultants had written in 2005 that they “wanted to obtain Hayes’s calendar of speaking engagements,”so that Syngenta could “start reaching out to the potential audiences with the Error vs. Truth Sheet,”which would provide “irrefutable evidence of his polluted messages.”Syngenta subsequently stated that many of the documents unsealed in the lawsuits refer to “ideas that were never implemented.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">not exactly suppression, but...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Salon [1] / By Dan Arel [2]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anti-Vaxx Insanity: New Study Highlights the Dangers of Science Denialism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">July 3, 2014  |  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We are breaking a new record in the U.S., and it is not one we want to break: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, measles cases are at a 20-year high [3]. As of May 23, more than 288 cases have been reported this year. To put that in perspective, only 37 cases were reported in all of 2004. In 2002, measles had been declared eliminated [4] in the Americas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CDC reports that most Americans have either contracted measles in the past, and are now immune, or have received the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, among the most effective vaccinations available. Yet, measles is now an epidemic in Minnesota, where a 2.5-year-old child was identified by the science journal Pediatrics [5] last month as patient zero, ultimately responsible for exposing more than 3,000 people in its community to the disease.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The child had traveled with family to Kenya and there came in contact with measles, subsequently spreading it to a family member and three other toddlers in daycare. The child had not been vaccinated, as the parents believed vaccines to be dangerous, having bought into the same misinformation [6] that has spread far and wide across America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The family lives in Minnesota, in a small community of Somali immigrants where rates of the MMR vaccination are very low, and which has seen dramatic decrease in vaccinations, from 91 percent in 2004, down to 54 percent in 2014, according to Pediatrics. Of the more than 3,000 people exposed, 21 showed symptoms of the disease and 16 of those were not vaccinated. Dr. Abdirahman Mohamed of the Axis Medical Center in Minneapolis said of these cases, “Every family will tell you that, ‘We’re not going to give our children the MMR. We’re afraid that they’re going to get autism.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Minnesota case is a wakeup call, a reminder of why we vaccinate in the first place. One child was able to bring a previously all-but-eradicated disease back into the United States, putting an entire population at risk. What is more alarming is this is not an isolated incident; outbreaks have been reported [7] in New York City and 18 states.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The misinformation about vaccines is an epidemic in itself, not contained to any one portion of the country, spreading for more than a decade following a congressional hearing in 2000, as anti-vaxx alarmism was first gaining a critical mass. In a recent Politico article [8], Sarah Despres writes:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2000, I was a counsel for the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee working on public health issues, including immunization policy. The committee was in its second year of hearings whose purpose on paper was to oversee various aspects of the nation’s immunization program. But in reality, these hearings had become a forum for spouting unproven, and eventually disproven, allegations, linking the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to autism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[...] One by one, the committee summoned its witnesses. [Dr. Andrew] Wakefield and other anti-vaccine advocates told the committee stories about children who stopped speaking after receiving their MMR vaccines and spun complicated theories about how the vaccine could prevent children from absorbing nutrients, leading to neurological problems. The experts from CDC and NIH explained that the epidemiology and biology of autism and vaccines did not support what Wakefield and others were professing.’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wakefield is a disgraced former doctor who had his medical license revoked due to his unethical behavior in publishing a paper [9] asserting that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism, a claim that was contradicted by his own findings and the findings of other studies. His paper, even though discredited, is used widely as evidence of the dangers of vaccines, and the anti-vaccination movement hails Wakefield as a hero [10] to their cause, even today.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This misinformation has deadly consequences. When it comes to measles, an unvaccinated American child has a 1-in-500 chance of dying [11] if infected. In serious cases, the disease can also result in brain damage or hearing loss. It takes very few people to start an epidemic or outbreak, as the measles case in Minnesota shows. It only takes one child to infect a community, and if each child has the potential to expose many more to the disease, and those exposed are not vaccinated, an epidemic could well be born.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is far too easy to find misinformation on vaccines today. Celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey use their fame to tout scientifically disproven claims that vaccines cause autism or that mercury in vaccines is deadly to young children. Liberal firebrand Bill Maher even waxed apocalyptic [12] about flu vaccines. A proliferation of organizations [13] claim to offer parents a safe place to learn the truth about vaccines yet offer no scientifically credible resources, offering scientifically disproven claims to parents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We easily forget that it takes just one person to bring a disease back inside the U.S. borders. We forget that infants and people with immune deficiency rely on others to be vaccinated in order to stay healthy [14]. Minnesota has reminded us of the dangers that this type of misinformation can have.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See more stories tagged with:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anti-vaxxer [16],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">denialism [17],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">measles [18],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">vaccination [19],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">jenny mccarthy [20],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bill maher [21]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/anti-vaxx-insanity-new-study-highlights-dangers-science-denialism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Links:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] http://www.salon.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/dan-arel</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[3] http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0529-measles.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[4] http://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/measles/elimination.htm</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24913790</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[6] http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/07/23/anti-vaccine-movement-causes-the-worst-whooping-cough-epidemic-in-70-years/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[7] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/29/measles-outbreaks-cdc/9718129/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[8] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/congress-the-measles-108161.html#ixzz369ssqH5t</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[9] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9500320?dopt=Abstract</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[10] http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/01/24/new-evidence-refutes-fraud-findings-in-dr-wakefield-case.aspx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[11] http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/05/29/measles-cases-reach-year-high/w7uF5OwtXqLxtd9Z2LdIVN/story.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[12] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/02/1191045/-Bill-Maher-Anti-Science-Knuckle-Dragger</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[13] http://www.businessinsider.com/anti-vaccine-campaigners-are-clueless-2014-6</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[14] http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/pages/communityimmunity.aspx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[15] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Anti-Vaxx Insanity: New Study Highlights the Dangers of Science Denialism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/anti-vaxxer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/denialism-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[18] http://www.alternet.org/tags/measles</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[19] http://www.alternet.org/tags/vaccination</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[20] http://www.alternet.org/tags/jenny-mccarthy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[21] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bill-maher</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[22] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Twenty states now require companies to disclose the chemicals they use in the hydraulic fracturing process used to pry gas and oil from tight geological formations. But, as part of the omnibus Energy Modernization Act, SB 786, North Carolina Republicans want to impose civil and criminal penalties, including prison time, on anyone who makes such a disclosure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bill has nine co-sponsors, all of them Republicans. Both houses of the state legislature have Republican super-majorities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Molly Redden at Mother Jones reports:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The felony provision is far stricter than most states' provisions in terms of the penalty for violating trade secrets," says Hannah Wiseman, a Florida State University assistant law professor who studies fracking regulations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bill also allows companies that own the chemical information to require emergency responders to sign a confidentiality agreement. And it's not clear what the penalty would be for a health care worker or fire chief who spoke about their experiences with chemical accidents to colleagues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I think the only penalties to fire chiefs and doctors, if they talked about it at their annual conference, would be the penalties contained in the confidentiality agreement," says Wiseman. "But [the bill] is so poorly worded, I cannot confirm that if an emergency responder or fire chief discloses that confidential information, they too would not be subject to a felony."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Biesecker of the Associated Press reported last week that three members of the state's Mining and Energy Commission met privately with officials of companies that use fracking chemicals before the bill was introduced. Among them was Halliburton. The bill assigns the task of issuing fracking licenses to the commission.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greenpeace, which obtained a cache of emails and meeting schedules from the MEC, concluded that there is a "cozy relationship" between the commission and industry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Please read below the fold for more on this bill.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sue Sturgis at the Institute for Southern Studies' "Facing South" blog wrote that Halliburton's complaints had gotten an earlier bill pulled from consideration because it had more constraints on industry. A lobbyist for Halliburton and Koch Industries, D. Bowen "Bo" Heath, managed to get the bill removed in favor of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The North Carolina Conservation Network opposes SB 786 for a number of reasons—for what it excludes as much as what is in it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Missing from the bill, the network says: regulation of "compulsory pooling," under which companies can drill on land without the owner's permission; disposal of fracking wastewater; contamination discovered after drilling is completed; and toxic air emissions from fracking. The bill would also cut in half the zone of liability for drillers who contaminate drinking water and would forbid local jurisdictions from banning fracking or regulating the siting of fracking wells.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ORIGINALLY POSTED TO METEOR BLADES ON MON MAY 19, 2014 AT 01:59 PM PDT.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ALSO REPUBLISHED BY NORTH CAROLINA BLUE, DK GREENROOTS, AND DAILY KOS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TAGS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/19/1300472/-NC-Republicans-push-industry-desires-in-bill-that-would-jail-anyone-who-discloses-fracking-chemicals </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, of ABC's This Week, interviewed Governor Jerry Brown on the more than 1,500 wildfires in California in 2014, during which Brown asserted that they were caused, in part by global warming, and that the challenge of reducing our fossil fuel burning will be more difficult because "virtually no Republican who accepts the science that virtually is unanimous."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PolitiFact decides to fact check Governor Browm's claim in "Virtually no Republican" in Washington accepts climate change science. and found it to be "Mostly True," which is not surprising. Is it not time to push this issue to the the next step and ask what are the implications for America's economy, labor force, culture, and national security if mainstream Republicans can not push back on what I believe is actually a minority of their base who really does not believe in science, stand up and stop this silliness before the damage is irreversible?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"That's a challenge," Brown said. "It is true that there's virtually no Republican who accepts the science that virtually is unanimous. I mean there is no scientific question. There's just political denial for various reasons, best known to those people who are in denial."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Noting that Republicans are less likely than Democrats and independents to believe humans cause global warming, and tea party are the least likely of all groups to accept science PolitiFact was only able to find 8 our of 278 Republican congressmen who will admit to believingg in the science of climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Michael Grimm, (R-N.Y.), Sen. Susan Collins, (R-MN), Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-TN),Sen. Mark Kirk,( R-IL), Rep. Chris Smith, (R-N.J), Sen. Bob Corker, (R-TN), Sen. John Thune, (R-S.D.), Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, (R-N.J.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis believe his loss to tea party challenger Trey Gowdy. Inglis was at least partially due to his belief in climate science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Secret Confessions</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although they have lost several primaries, the tea party has been successful in polarizing American politics and pulling the political spectrum to the right by intimidating many moderate Republican from being willing to even admit in public that they believe in science! Many will not even discuss related issues like global warming in public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Most Republicans say the same thing behind closed doors: ‘Of course, I get that the climate is changing, of course I get that we need to do something — but I need to get reelected,’ " Audubon Society President David Yarnold told National Journal in 2013. "Somehow they’re going to have to find a safe place on this.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My guess is that the problem isn't really that a majority of Republicans do not believe in science and climate change, the problem is that they are afraid admit it in public. It is not even a majority of Republicans I believe, but rather a minority. It may be that they are the loudest and best funded faction because a variety of groups representing the interests of the fossil fuel industry like the Koch brothers find it exceptionally convenient to have a highly charged up group of ideologically committed "shock troops" ready to charge forth on the same political agenda, but I believe the number of "true believers" may not be as large as it appears.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(If it were not for certain ethical concerns, and risk of imprisonment an interesting experiment would be to capture random samples of them and force them to take lie-detector-like tests like the Voight-Kamff psycho-metric test in Blade Runner to see what they really believe - a bonus is we could check to see of they were replicants, or aliens at the same time - something I've sometimes suspected.)  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many decades ago, Republicans made a Faustian bargain with the devil which was amplified by Karl Rove, by forging a grand coalition between foreign policy conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and the more problematic "social value" conservatives."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among this later group are the fundamentalist faction of evangelistic Christians for whom the anti-science position became a tactic to undermine what they perceived as liberal and secular humanist attacks on their faith and for some, perhaps even a minority, who wanted to defend a literal interpretation of the Bible. For some others this was a fair trade for support for persecuting homosexuals, the women's liberation movement, receiving support from anti-abortionists, and even racists could join in  - rounding out the "social values conservatives."  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although, in some cases some overlap exists with the second group of anti-tax, pro-corporate economic and fiscal conservatives a the third group of foreign policy and and pro-military conservatives sufficient differences in priority in these groups exists that I believe there may be hope that national security and national economic vitality  arguments are so powerful and valid we may have hope that the Republican Party will come to its senses, and reject this virulent anti-science cancer that threatens to damage our nation and world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While tea party activists may laugh and celebrate their successful intimidation of moderate Republicans into denying science and climate change, I ask that we all pause for a moment and consider for a moment some tragic unintended side effects of propagating an anti-science and anti-education ethos in our country while most other countries are doing the opposite.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Side Effect of Science-Denial Will Be Damage To Our Economy and National Security</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, as China tries to evolve into a more technologically advanced service economy, China has produced a record 7 million university graduates this year, 7 times the number of 15 years ago. This is in a culture that has already revered scholars since the days of Confucius.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While other nations with superior scientists, and stronger economies will be finding ways to adapt and change will we end up  being a struggling in ways we are not accustomed to as a second or third rate nation with a backward work force? What will prevent this if substantial fractions of our population despise education and science and some states do not even allow schools to buy textbooks that mention evolution?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I've spoken with leaders of  high technology based multinational firms who say one issue that causes them to hesitate to invest here is that in some places our workers are not able to read and understand instruction manuals for advanced manufacturing technologies which are based the latest scientific conceptsm as well as workers in other countries. Scholars at Tai Da University told me last time I was in the Republic of China that the average Asian High School student scores higher on international math tests than the average American college graduate.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Innovation, entrepreneurs, and new businesses will increasingly come from other countries where science, education, and intelligence are admired, respected, nurtured, and promoted.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So here's a national security threat for you. "Republican science denial - the clear and present danger to our national security."  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mainstream Republicans Should Take a Stand and Repudiate Science Denialism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, Bill Briggs of NBC News reported a group of 16 retired three and four star generals and admirals echoed the findings of the IPCC that global warming and climate are here now, but they add the additional warning that global warming represents a national security to the U.S. as well as to the security and stability of other nations of the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Please follow the link here, or check my archives from about a week ago for my synopsis. Four-Star Warning: Generals Dub Climate Change a Security Risk, and calling it “a catalyst for conflict” for the "increasingly decentralized power structures around the world."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The greater threats to U.S. national security come not just from a destabilized world as greater fractions of the world population starve, and their homelands become uninhabitable due to flooding or drought. Think also of how the United States military spending keeps up as our nation's economy falters. As our economy becomes a relatively smaller fraction of the global economy will we try to spend a higher fraction of our total GDP to maintain defense spending ratios compared to the rest of the world?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Fortunately" (snark) since our current defense spending is greater than about the next 45 countries combined, we have some margin to slide,  but at some point our advantage will dwindle. But, even just merely maintaining a superior ratio of military spending may not be sufficient to maintain military superiority, it may become a matter of technological advantage as well.. We will not remain a strong world power with a strong anti-science bias, even if it is "just" a deliberate political strategy to paralyze our political system that many not really believe.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eventually, increasing our the fraction of our GDP devoted to military spending potentially becoming a vicious cycle as we try to spend higher fractions to keep up with countries with larger economies such as China which will surpass us soon will be a losing proposition. This was one of our core strategies for breaking the former U.S.S.R. who we had bullied and intimidated into spending over 20% of their GDP on military spending just before their collapse which "crowded out" capital investment and consumer spending leading to the "death spiral."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most military, foreign policy, fiscal, and economic  Republicans conservatives understand this and I believe nearly all Republicans love America just as much as Democrats do. I ask that after they think about this they explain this to the social value conservatives and finally do the 2012 Mitt Romney postmortem that never really happened and reject this virulent science denialism once and for all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thu, 2012-03-29 03:39Chris Mooney</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservatives versus Science: A New Scientific Validation of the Republican War on Science (and Republican Brain) Thesis</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UPDATE: The paper discussed below is downloadable here [1].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For a while now, I’ve been aware of a powerful new paper that directly tests the central argument of my 2005 book The Republican War on Science [2]—and also validates some key claims made in my new book, The Republican Brain [3]. I’ve had to keep quiet about it until now; but at last, the study is out [4]—though I’m not sure yet about a web link to it. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The research is by Gordon Gauchat [5] of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and published in the prestigious American Sociological Review [6]. In the study, Gauchat uses a vast body of General Social Survey data to test three competing theses about the relationship between science and the U.S. public:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1) the cultural ascendancy thesis or “deficit model” view, according to which better education and engagement with science lead all boats to rise, and citizens across the board become more trusting of scientists and their expertise;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2) the alienation thesis, according to which modernity brings on distrust and disillusionment with science (call it the “spoiled brat” thesis if you’d like); and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3) the politicization thesis—my thesis—according to which some cultural groups, aka conservatives, have a unique fallout with science for reasons tied up with the nature of modern American conservatism, such as its ideology, the growth of its think tank infrastructure, and so on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The result? Well, Gauchat’s data show that the politicization thesis handily defeats all contenders. More specifically, he demonstrates that there was only really a decline in public trust in science among conservatives in the period from 1974 to 2010 (and among those with high church attendance, but these two things are obviously tightly interrelated).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And not just that.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gauchat further validates the argument of The Republican War on Science by showing that the decline in trust in science was not linear. It occurred in association with two key “cultural break” points that, I argue in the book, heightened right wing science politicization: The election of Ronald Reagan, and then the election of George W. Bush.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This one figure from the paper really, really says it all:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> [7]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As you can see, conservatives go down, down, down in their trust in science over the period in question—which, of course, is also the period that thoroughly divided and polarized America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And it’s not just these new findings that resound. Much of Gauchat’s data also validate key points from my new book The Republican Brain [8], which is in many ways my deeper elaboration of the arguments of the Republican War on Science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, Gauchat shows something I also highlight: Graduate degrees are now much more numerous among liberals, and the graduate education gap between left and right is widening. This factor–reflecting liberals’ greater Openness to scientific information and new ideas, as well as unending conservative attacks on academia (and recourse to ideological think tanks to take its place)–is a key structural force involved in driving conservatives away from science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second: Gauchat also captures, once again, the “smart idiot” effect [9]: Conservatives becoming more factually wrong—or, in this case, more distrusting of science, which to me is basically the same thing—as their level of education advances. Here let me quote in full, because frankly, the finding can only be called highly disturbing:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">…conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time and these declines are statistically significant. In addition, a comparison of predicted probabilities indicates that conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree. These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The key question to pose, after reading Gauchat’s paper, is why this occurred. Clearly, The Republican War on Science’s politicization thesis is being strongly validated—a thesis that attributes the problem to the growth of a modern conservative movement, its need to appease its core interest groups and constituencies (corporate America, conservative Christians), its need to have its own alternative expertise and journalism (think tanks, Fox, Limbaugh), and so on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But frankly, I don’t think this thesis goes far enough. That is the whole point of The Republican Brain, where I assert that we need a nature plus nurture account to understand why conservatives deny science and reality. And all of this stuff Gauchat is talking about is sociology—aka, “nurture.” It’s very real, undeniably so–but is it the whole story?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I doubt it. For instance, in their book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics [10], Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler have shown that as the “New Right” emerged in the U.S. in the wake of the cultural battles of the 1960s and 1970s, it mobilized strong forces of authoritarianism–e.g., psychological rigidity and closed-mindedness. In this era, driven by hot button “culture war” issues, authoritarians moved to the  right, leaving behind the Democratic Party, particularly in the South. These were the so-called “Reagan Democrats.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I find it hard to believe that this trend is not also showing up in Gauchat’s data. If anything, the finding about church attendance kind of gives it away—in the U.S., authoritarians are often biblical fundamentalists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whatever the underlying causes, though, the punchline of the story that Gauchat tells—reaffirming the story I have told—is unmistakably grim. We now have a powerful linkage between a powerful political movement in the United States on the one hand, and the denial of science and reality on the other. This not only manifests itself every day in our dysfunctional political debates; it is a gigantic threat to the country’s future and its ability to cope with 21stcentury problems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tags: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">republican war on science [11]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">republican brain [12]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">gordon gauchat [13]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more: Conservatives versus Science: A New Scientific Validation of the Republican War on Science (and Republican Brain) Thesis [14]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source URL: http://www.desmogblog.com/conservatives-versus-science-new-scientific-validation-republican-war-science-and-republican-brain-thesis</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Texas Yanks Funding From San Antonio Air Quality Program For Releasing Emissions Data</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A few casual words and the early release of some scientific data have cost the San Antonio region much-needed state funds to battle its growing air pollution problem. The misstep, which appears to have been unintentional, highlights the sensitivity of studying oil and gas pollution in business-friendly Texas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...This wouldn't be the first time that Fox News' coverage of climate change has beencalled into question. A recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found the conservative news outlet covers climate change inaccurately 72 percent of the time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A 2013 study also found that the more time viewers spend watching conservative media, the more skeptical they become of climate science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"There are some things that in science and scientific discourse are not controversial at all," Moyer told Talking Points Memo in light of his Fox News experience. "I hope that we can all as a society agree to at least discuss them and come up with good solutions. Just because you don't want something to be true doesn't make it not true."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a recent Associated Press-GfK poll, about four in 10 Americans said "they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases," per the AP. That's in stark contrast to the97 percent of climate scientists who say global warming in the last 100 years has very likely been caused by human activity.....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Remember this story out of North Carolina in 2012?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To briefly recap, GOP lawmakers in North Carolina have a new solution to rising sea levels, caused by global warming: scrap the scientific evidence pointing to rising sea levels.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A state-appointed science panel warned officials that sea levels will rise 39 inches over the next century and that North Carolina needs to prepare. Under a GOP plan, officials would be prohibited from relying on the scientific evidence, and would instead have to use a historical model to set expectations. North Carolina would prepare for only 8 inches of sea level increase, since that’s what happened over the last century.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Or how about this one from Virginia?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virginia’s legislature commissioned a $50,000 study to determine the impacts of climate change on the state’s shores. To greenlight the project, they omitted words like “climate change” and “sea level rise” from the study’s description itself. According to the House of Delegates sponsor of the study, these are “liberal code words,” even though they are noncontroversial in the climate science community.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead of using climate change, sea level rise, and global warming, the study uses terms like “coastal resiliency” and “recurrent flooding.” Republican State Delegate Chris Stolle, who steered the legislation, cut “sea level rise” from the draft. Stolle has also said the “jury’s still out” on humans’ impact on global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Or this one from Nebraska?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A study on the impact of climate change on Nebraska, recently approved by the state, may not be carried out – because its own scientists are refusing to be a part of it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem, according to members of the governor-appointed Climate Assessment and Response Committee, is that the bill behind the study specifically calls for the researchers to look at “cyclical” climate change. In so doing, it completely leaves out human contributions to global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> BS mirroring? the original letter has nothing to do wth gov't funding, just asks for more bluesky, like some rtech oc sabbatia/20% time to do whatever.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists: Government agencies use the peer review process to squash dissent</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posted By Michael Bastasch On 1:01 PM 03/21/2014 In | No Comments</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A group of 30 scientists, including Nobel laureates, have written that “politicians” have hijacked the scientific peer review process and hurt innovation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The scientists from around the world, including Britain and the U.S., write that “[a]gencies claiming to support blue-skies research use peer review, of course, discouraging open-ended inquiries and serious challenges to prevailing orthodoxies,” which impedes scientific progress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before the 1970s, according to the scientists, researchers could be sure to get “modest funding” to pursue questions that were not addressed by mainstream scientists or ran up against the consensus. Such freedom allowed scientists to discover “the transistor, the maser-laser, the electronics and telecommunications revolutions, nuclear power, biotechnology and medical diagnostics galore.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“After 1970, politicians substantially expanded academic sectors,” write 30 scientists, including Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach of Harvard University and Sir Richard Roberts of New England Biolabs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Peer review’s uses allowed the rise of priorities, impact etc, and is now virtually unavoidable. Applicants’ proposals must convince their peers that they serve national policies and are the best possible uses of resources,” the scientists continued in their letter to the editor in the UK Guardian newspaper. “Success rates are about 25%, and strict rules govern resubmissions. Rejected proposals are usually lost. Industry too has lost its taste for the unpredictable.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Complaints that the scientific establishment is preventing dissenting voices from getting funding or published has been a major controversy among climate science. Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has argued that “global warming alarmism” has been damaged the integrity of science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly,” Lindzen wrote. “It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The scientific community is clearly becoming less ambiguous in separating views on warming from totally unreasonable fears for both the planet and mankind,” he added. “Environmental advocates are responding by making increasingly extreme claims. Politicians are recognizing that these claims are implausible, and are backing away from both the issue and support for climate science.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The incentive is then for scientists to look elsewhere for support,” Lindzen continued. “Regardless of whether this will be sufficient, one can only hope that some path will emerge that will end the present irrational obsession with climate and carbon footprints.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/4/are_any_plastics_safe_industry_tries</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">use tobacco doubt strat</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We are with Mariah Blake, staff reporter for Mother Jones magazine. "The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics: And the Big Tobacco-Style Campaign to Bury It" is her new piece. What is the campaign to bury the information, Mariah Blake?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MARIAH BLAKE: Well, there are multiple facets to the campaign, but the primary—the primary objective is to cast doubt on the scientific evidence linking these chemicals to human health problems. So—and there are various ways this is done. In the case of BPA, for example, the industry funded studies, which were biased studies that found that this—that the chemical was not harmful to health. And there’s a sort of network there. They published them in certain journals that, in many cases, had links to the tobacco industry. They relied on scientists that, in many cases, had helped to discredit the science linking smoking and secondhand smoke to disease. So, in many ways, this is—they didn’t only borrow strategies and tactics from Big Tobacco; they are actually relying on the same cadre of experts that Big Tobacco relied on to bury—to bury the truth about smoking.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a video made by the plastics industry featuring the vice president of Eastman’s specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, speaking in the video made by the company. A pregnant woman is one of the people shown buying plastic products as Boldea speaks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about George Bittner.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MARIAH BLAKE: OK. George Bittner is a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, and he has launched an independent lab called CertiChem—it also has a sister company called PlastiPure—and it tests products for estrogenic activity. And he—working with a prominent Georgetown professor, he and his staff tested, I think it was, 455 commercially available plastics that are on the market and published a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives, which is the premier NIH journal, which found that virtually all commercially available plastics have estrogenic activity. And among the plastics he tested were Tritan products, several Tritan products. And this publication, this finding, prompted a pretty big backlash from the industry. So he ended up being targeted by the industry as a result and, in fact, was sued by Eastman, which is—many of the documents that formed the basis of my story were released as a result of that lawsuit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: I want to read from a memo that Eastman’s senior chemist, Emmett O’Brien, wrote after customers began asking about George Bittner’s tests that showed that Tritan may still be estrogenic. O’Brien describes a meeting with Whole Foods executives who were considering replacing their polycarbonate bulk food bins with ones made from Tritan. He wrote, quote, "We called Bittner a mad scientist. They didn’t know his name actually. They asked twice, by two independent people, what we thought of them. I hemmed and hawed (ducked and dodged) saying I prefer not to comment, but we joked and pushed and flat out said the guy was 'shady' — with this non-stereotypical crowd it was a good term." O’Brien added, "They asked if they could do their own tests — I mentioned the cost is very high and they were quick to chime in that the tests take very long." Can you respond to that, Mariah Blake?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MARIAH BLAKE: I think you chose the most telling possible quote. So this was effective—this was the strategy they used. Firstly, they worked to discredit Bittner, and they did this through a campaign of personal character assassination and by calling his business practices into question. And secondly, they worked to discredit the science. So, one of the things that Eastman did was they claimed that the test that Bittner is using, which relies on a specialized line of breast cancer cells, had been rejected by the EPA, when in fact it hadn’t. The EPA is considering using this very line of breast cancer cells for its own screening program for what they call endocrine-disrupting chemicals. BPA is one of those.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, the other thing they did was they commissioned their own research, so they paid labs to perform research which found that Tritan was not estrogenic. And—but if you look at—if you look at the research closely, you’ll see that it is—the studies are essentially designed in a way that guarantee that estrogenic activity will not be found. So, for instance, they use a type of rat; it’s called a Charles River Sprague Dawley rat. This rat is known to be insensitive to estrogen, so it can withstand doses, according to one Japanese study, a hundred times higher than a human female can withstand, with—and show absolutely no effect. They also used doses that are below what is known as the no-observable-effect level, so the doses that are known not to cause an effect. And they then published their own study in a scientific journal, which is—has numerous tobacco industry ties, finding that Tritan was in fact not estrogenic. So, that is essentially how they responded to the finding that their product contained these chemicals that are potentially harmful to human health: They attempted to cover it up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AMY GOODMAN: Your report cites some leaked minutes from a 2009 meeting of the BPA Joint Trade Association, whose members include the American Chemical—the American Chemistry Council, Coca-Cola, Del Monte. During the meeting, they explored messaging strategies that included using what they called, quote, "fear tactics." For example, "Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?" The attendees agreed that the "holy grail" spokesperson was a, quote, "pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits ofBPA." Mariah?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MARIAH BLAKE: Yes, and this is one of the most disturbing things I discovered during the course of reporting this, is that in their efforts to portray plastics as safe, they oftentimes target the groups who are most vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals. So, prenatal exposure and exposure during early childhood is potentially the most harmful, and oftentimes the marketing of these products targets pregnant women, targets families with children. And also, Eastman, for example, in their efforts to portray their products as safe, also targeted these specific groups.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> naomi k:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”...http://www.newstatesman.com/print/2013/10/science-says-revolt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">gp update sept:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With this new edition of Dealing In Doubt we:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Detail the ongoing attempts to attack the integrity of individual climate scientists and their work.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Look beyond the strategic parallels between the tobacco industry’s campaign for “Sound Science” (where they labeled mainstream science as “junk”) to the current climate denial campaign, to new research that has come to light revealing the deeper connections: the funding, personnel and institutions between the two policy fights.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Detail how some scientists are now fighting back and taking legal action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Showcase the Heartland Institute as an example of how tobacco-friendly free market think tanks use a wide range of tactics to wage a campaign against the climate science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reveal the range of tricks used by the denier campaign, from “pal review” instead of peer review, to personal attacks on scientists through Freedom of Information requests, self-publishing books, and the general conspiratorial noise from the denial machine in the blogosphere.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GP 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">he Attacks on Scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Case Study:  Bad science versus hockey sticks: Michael Mann</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other attacks on scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using Freedom of Information to attack scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The American Tradition Institute vs Mann and the University of Virginia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ATI vs James Hansen and NASA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ATI vs climate scientists and journalists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ATI and the EPA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FOI in Australia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conspiracy of Doubt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Personal attacks and death threats </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attacks on the consensus</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Faking It</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2012: “Pal review” replaces “peer review”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2012: Fake a Government report</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fake a counter consensus </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fake science and polar bears</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Can’t publish a peer-reviewed article?  Self publish a book!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fake – or outdated - qualifications</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Guardian [1] / By Suzanne Goldenberg [2]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans Block Science Laureate Vote Over Fear of Climate Stance</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">September 20, 2013  |  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It seemed entirely harmless: the creation of an honorary and unpaid position of science laureate of the United States [3] to travel around the country and inspire children to be future scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Republicans [4] in Congress last week quashed the initiative, which had gained rare bipartisan support, on the grounds that a science laureate might support action on climate change [5].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bill had been scheduled for swift approval last week. It would have allowed Barack Obama to name up to three laureates at a time to the two-year term. The posts would all be unpaid, and appointees credentials would be vetted by the National Academy of Sciences.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But after urging from the American Conservative Union, which bills itself as the country's largest and oldest grassroots conservative organisation, Republicans in the House leadership pulled the science laureate bill off the schedule, and sent it for revision.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a letter to members of Congress, Larry Hart, a former Republican congressional aide and the legislative director of the ACU, warned a science laureate might give Barack Obama another chance to advance the case for climate action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Although the bill seems innocuous, it will provide the opportunity for President Obama to make an appointment of someone (or more than one person) who will share his view that science should serve political ends, on such issues as climate change and regulation of greenhouse gases," Hart wrote in the letter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A staffer for one of the Republican co-sponsors of the bill told Science Insider, which first reported on the cancelled vote, that the opposition to a science ambassador was wrong-headed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As first proposed last spring, the idea of a science laureate was intended to encourage American school children to choose science as a career – especially girls and minorities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The US Science Laureate will be a national role model who can encourage students to learn more about the sciences," Senator Mazie Hirono, the Hawaii Democrat who co-sponsored the bill, said in a statement at the time. "By elevating great American scientific communicators, we can empower students - especially girls and minorities - to get excited about science."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Republicans' decision to scuttle the post – putting off a potential vote – looked bound to solidify the party's reputation for denying the science underlying climate change in particular, as well as being generally anti-science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some Republicans have begun to privately express concern about being seen as the anti-science party. But so far they remain in the minority.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More than half of Republicans in the house and 65% of Republicans in the Senate deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on climate change, according to an analysis by the Centre for American Progress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans in the House have voted 53 times to block action on climate or energy-saving measures such as the phasing out of incandescent bulbs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See more stories tagged with:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congressional Republicans [6],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">obama [7],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">climate science [8],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lobbyists [9],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">anti-science [10]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/republicans-block-science-laureate-vote-over-fear-climate-stance</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Links:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/suzanne-goldenberg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[3] http://www.theguardian.com/world/usa</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[4] http://www.theguardian.com/world/republicans</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[5] http://www.theguardian.com/science/scienceofclimatechange</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/congressional-republicans</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/obama-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/lobbyists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/anti-science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Salt Lake Tribune has a must-read piece, “Scientists leave GOP due to attitudes toward science.” The article notes that a 2009 Pew poll “found that just 6 percent of scientists call themselves part of the GOP now.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet just a few decades ago, “Scientists used to be well represented among the nearly half of Americans who voted Republican.” The piece links to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes, which points out:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon won the votes of 31 percent of physicists, 42 percent of biologists, 52 percent of geologists, and 62 percent of agricultural scientists (compared with 43.4 percent of the popular vote).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, what happened? The Utah paper quotes, Barry Bickmore, a Brigham Young University professor of geology and “onetime Republican caucus delegate in crimson-red Utah County in the nation’s reddest state”:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He contends his party is increasingly ruled by zealots and a demand for “ideological purity” that turns off scientists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He says most examples are in the environmental sciences. And he points to the time in 2009 when majority-party Republicans in the Utah Capitol put climate-science doubters on a pedestal — while rejecting the mainstream scientist view about the danger global warming poses and even taking a beef about a Utah State University physicist to the university president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Scientists just don’t get those people,” he says of Republicans who adhere to party orthodoxy about scientific questions on climate change, evolution and other hot-button issues. “They [in the GOP] are driving us away, people like me.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conway and Naomi Oreskes offer a similar answer: “the Republican Party has spurned science.” They note Mitt Romney’s flip flop on the issue:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As governor of Massachusetts in 2004, he laid out a plan for protecting the state’s climate. As presidential candidate, he has said that climate change is real, but has questioned whether humans are causing it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But he wasn’t alone. Tim Pawlenty said back in March 2011, “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was, famously, a former Utah governor, Jon Huntsman, who attempted to inject some reality into the climate science debate during the GOP presidential primaries back in 2011, most notably with the tweet above. He was the guy who slammed Texas governor Rick Perry and the GOP for its anti-science denial: We Are “On the Wrong Side of Science and Therefore in a Losing Position.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course he flat-lined in the polls and, briefly flirted with denial, and when he flopped back to the pro-science side, he still embraced his policy of climate inaction.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even worse than the anti-science denial has been the anti-scientist witchhunts, which generally come from red-state politicians — see, for instance, “VA conservatives persist in bogus ‘Climategate’ witch-hunt against Michael Mann,” and “Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Salt Lake Tribune quotes State Climatologist Rob Gillies about the dangers of rejecting science:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the Utah Climate Center based at Utah State University, he sees invaluable solutions in research for everyday problems, such as how ski areas will survive the shrinking snow seasons and how to plan water supplies in the nation’s second-driest state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Ignoring science,” he says, “comes with risk.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Texas climatologist Katherine Hayhoe has a figure making clear just what kind of risk is posed by 2100 if we keep taking no serious action (derived from the NOAA-led report): http://www.globalpossibilities.org/as-scientists-leave-gop-utah-state-climatologist-warns-ignoring-science-comes-with-risk/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">alec; </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Verifiable Science Act</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Summary:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In order to protect citizens from arbitrary and capricious regulations promulgated without any impetus that is justified by pertinent, ascertainable, and peer-reviewed science, this act guarantees citizens the right to access scientific data that is used to develop public policies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Model Legislation:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 1.{Title} This act shall be known as the Verifiable Science Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 2.{State rights.}Citizens have a right to access data from state funded studies in whole or in part, that are used for development of state law or regulation or enforcement action. Any regulations promulgated by the results of such studies shall be justified by pertinent, ascertainable, and peer-reviewed science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 3.{State responsibilities.} Any scientific documentation, statistics, reports, or research must be made available to the public through (provisions of the state Freedom of Information Act) whenever such scientific data is used, in part or in whole, as the basis for proposed statutes, regulations, guidance documents, policy statements, official reports, legislative studies, or any other pronouncements which might carry the weight of law or which might be intended to lead directly to new regulations or statutes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 4.{Severability clause.}</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 5.{Repealer clause.}</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SECTION 6.{Effective date.}</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Approved by ALEC Board of Directors on January 2001.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reapproved by ALEC Board of Directors on January 28, 2013.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">exxon coll: sci looking for oil in alaska followed by 178 foot cruise ship w/ paid sci; big $ on line if exxon found laible; FOIA for data not even done 131 accused of fraud, hacks in aud whenever they prsent; exxxon execs threaten to level your house if threaten legal (liability) 135 Short gov sci quit b/c of harrassment ch5</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fool me twice, otto: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Judging by Congress, the answer increasingly seems to be no. In an age when most major public policy challenges revolve around science, less than 2 percent of congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it. The membership of the 112th Congress, which ran from January 2011 to January 2013, included one physicist, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist.5</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In contrast, how many representatives and senators do you suppose have law degrees—and whom many suspect avoided college science classes like the plague? Two hundred twenty-two</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AlterNet [1] / By Evan McMurry [2]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">comments_image</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7 Jaw-Droppingly Dumb Things Republicans Think About Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">June 20, 2013  |  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was Texas Representative Michael Burgess’ turn on the GOP’s Bullhorn of Crazy this week. “You watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” Burgess said during a congressional debate [3] on the House Republican’s absolutely pointless bill outlawing abortions past 20 weeks. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. I mean, they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burgess’ prenatal masturbation musing is only the tip of the melting iceberg of Republican science denial. Here are seven battier things they believe, from trees causing global warming to fetuses in your Pepsi.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. Abortion Leads To Cancer, Birth Defects, And Everything Else</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burgess’ absurdity actually masked a very serious GOP belief. The “fetus pain” theory, which holds that fetuses begin to feel pain around 20 weeks, has been the primary logic [4] behind a slew of recent abortion bills in state legislatures. As no reputable science [5] backs the theory up, the GOP has been forced to find anything wearing a lab coat to make stuff up [6].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Abortions are rare after 21 weeks, and usually occur when a woman develops serious complications with her pregnancy. But some Republicans go so far as to think the health exemption is a cover for the abortion industry. “There’s no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing,” Joe Walsh said in 2012 [7] on his way to losing his House seat. “With advances in science and technology, health of the mother has become a tool for abortions for any time under any reason.” (Republicans have no problem invoking science when it suits their needs.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burgess is hardly alone in digging up scientific-sounding nonsense to back up his abortion views. Rick Santorum was the most recent peddler of the long-discounted theory that abortions lead to breast cancer [8], while out in Virginia, which has a nasty strain of abortion-based delusion, a state delegate advanced the notion that abortions lead to handicaps. [9] “The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps have increased dramatically,” Bob Marshall said. “Why? Because when you abort the firstborn of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Everything They Say About Rape</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burgess’ comment was notable for not featuring the word “rape,” the hook on which many right-wing legislators hang their crazy coats, to the point that Stephen Colbert has instituted a “Days Without a Rape Reference [10]” segment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This started with Todd Akin’s famous “legitimate rape” comment last fall, though the theory is still being repeated [11]. Akin’s comment was so bad that even lawmakers who didn’t entirely agree with it were caught in its net: Richard Mourdock blew a gimme election in Indiana when he tripped himself trying to get away from Akin’s remark.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Burgess, Akin’s comment was important not because it was an aberration, but because it reflected a real belief on the right, one that’s beginning to infect policy. Arguing against a rape exemption in his anti-abortion bill last week, Trent Franks stated that the incidences of pregnancy from rape are “very low [12].” Some see daylight [13] between Franks’ iteration of the rape/pregnancy connection and Akin’s, but it’s minor. And while Akin’s view was rooted in medieval medicine [14], Franks’ theory traces its lineage right back to Nazi experiments [15]. Whether dealing with centuries-old pseudo-science or its bleak modern mutations, the GOP’s rape/pregnancy link is bad science at its most savage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Climate Change Doesn’t Exist, and If It Does It’s Caused By Trees</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not all Republican science denial involves evil lady parts. Their resistance to the very idea of climate change is so staunch that it bred an entire theory of GOP-specific ignorance [16].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The least crazy of the party acknowledge climate change is occurring but refuse to link it to human behavior, instead seeing the rise in temperatures as part of a natural cycle. After all, it’s not like Hurricane Sandy was the first extreme weather event in history. “I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy,” Texas congressman Joe Barton said [17] during a House hearing on the Keystone Pipeline. (You will remember Barton from his apology to BP [18] over the company’s oil spill.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s one problem with this: refusing to link global warming to human behavior greatly reduces your options for curtailing it. See Dana Rohrabacher, a far-right California congressman, who found a natural solution to a natural problem [19]. "Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?” Rohrabacher asked during a House hearing on U.N. climate policies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is for the Republicans who actually admit climate change exists. Many don’t, and they made sure we knew about it last year when they rejected an amendment [20] that would have simply acknowledged the occurrence of global warming. The amendment didn’t garner a single GOP vote. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It gets worse. In 2012, North Carolina’s legislature went the full-ostrich route. Not only did they refuse to admit that global warming was happening, they actually banned scientists from researching it [21], passing a bill prohibiting the measurement of sea-levels so nobody could notice they were rising. (The ocean rudely rose anyway [22].)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. Breast Implants, On The Other Hand, are a Fine Use Of Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Okay, most of their science denial involves lady parts, but not all of it’s negative! Tom Coburn proves the GOP would be scientists’ best friend if those nerds would stick to expanding things men want to look at.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants,” Coburn said [23] during a hearing on class action lawsuits, a nagging problem for plastic surgeons. “If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows. . . . In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier." (They don’t [24].)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. No Dead Fetuses In Your Soft Drinks</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the GOP’s science permissiveness begins and ends with breasts; anything that might help with, say, medical research is off the table. Stem cells in particular give Republicans the bends. Where most see the frontier of medical research, Republican candidates for senate see islands of Dr. Moreaus.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains,” Christine O’Donnell told Bill O’Reilly in 2007. Talking Points Memo guessed [25] O’Donnell was referencing an experiment in which doctors grew human brain cells within mice—“not the same as an actual functioning human brain, but a demonstration that human brain cells can be made from stem cells”—but they didn’t sound too confident speculating on her inspiration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At least O’Donnell wasn’t actually a lawmaker. Last year, Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortley got wound up over a zany Internet theory claiming stem cells were being used in the production of artificial sweeteners, and proposed a bill prohibiting companies in Oklahoma [26] from using aborted fetuses to make food.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. Evolution Is (Still) Out To Get Jesus</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’m not a scientist, man,” Marco Rubio recently told GQ [27]. “I can tell you what recorded history says. I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians. Whether the Earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Rubio’s fellow Republicans think they have answered it, as evidenced by the fact that they want schools to teach that humans and dinosaurs used to read GQ together. Republican-controlled state legislatures have been busy [28] trying to pass bills forcing public schools from elementary to college to teach that the world was created 6,000-9,000 years ago.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their cover for this is the necessity of "teaching both sides” of the debate—though only one has scientific backing—but Georgia Representative Paul Broun recently showed the right’s hand. “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell,” he said [29] during his (unopposed) run for reelection last year. “And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. It’s Only Science If Republicans Agree With It</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In perhaps the most unintentionally revealing law ever written by a Republican on science, Texas Representative Lamar Smith recently proposed that all scientific knowledge get his okay first. Called the “High Quality Research Act,” Smith’s bill would require any research receiving federal funds [30] to go through Smith’s Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology, all in the name of “accountability.” Accountability in this case means agreeing with Smith, a climate change denier who has no problem going after projects [31] he, or his donors, disapprove of.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the GOP had its way, this is how all science would work: no rising sea levels to worry about, and all the breast implants Congress can afford. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See more stories tagged with:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">abortion [32],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">gop [33],</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">science [34]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Links:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] http://www.alternet.org</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/evan-mcmurry</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[3] http://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-rep-speaks-up-for-masturbating-fetuses-they-feel-pleasure-why-wouldnt-they-also-feel-pain/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[4] http://www.ology.com/post/68576/arizona-criminalizes-abortion-after-20-weeks</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[5] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=201429</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[6] http://jezebel.com/5789731/the-bogus-debate-that-pushes-anti+abortion-legislation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[7] http://www.ibtimes.com/joe-walsh-other-republicans-controversial-abortion-quotes-849727</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[8] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/05/santorum-suggests-abortion-causes-breast-cancer/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[9] http://akopsa.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/pro-lifers-this-is-why-we-think-you-are-crazy/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[10] http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/420543/october-24-2012/sign-off---gop-rape-mention-tally</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[11] http://www.salon.com/2013/03/02/another_goper_has_a_todd_akin_moment/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[12] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/12/gop-congressman-rate-of-pregnancies-from-rape-is-very-low/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[13] http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/06/12/in_defense_of_trent_franks_who_didn_t_pull_a_todd_akin.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/opinion/the-medieval-roots-of-todd-akins-theories.html?r=0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[15] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/06/12/trent_franks_abortion_myth_and_the_nazis_no_exception_for_pregnancy_from.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[16] http://theamericanscene.com/2010/04/21/liberty-and-tyranny-and-epistemic-closure</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[17] http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/republican-congressman-cites-biblical-great-flood-to-say-cim</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[18] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20008020-503544/rep-joe-barton-apologizes-to-bps-tony-hayward-for-white-house-shakedown-video-/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[19] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/31/dana-rohrabacher-r-ca-on-climate-change-makes-wrong-even-wronger/#.UcC1nFtDo5s</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[20] http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/149585-house-gop-rejects-amendment-that-says-climate-change-is-occurring#ixzz2WcQlKzN0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[21] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/north-carolina-legislature-sea-level-rising_b_1567213.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[22] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/north-carolina-sea-level-n_2095100.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[23] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3130-2005Feb6.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[24] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/8-things-congress-doesnt-know-about-sex.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[25] http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/odonnell-in-2007-scientists-have-created-mice-with-human-brains.php</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[26] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/01/20/145539661/state-bill-outlaws-use-of-fetuses-in-food-industry-meets-visceral-reaction</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[27] http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201212/marco-rubio-interview-gq-december-2012?currentPage=2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[28] http://ncse.com/news/2013/02/antiscience-bill-colorado-fails-0014701</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[29] http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/georgia_congressman_evolution_hell_Wfv6ja02FR6oRfT452pkBN</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[30] http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/02/republican-congressman-introduces-bill-to-require-political-approval-of-scientific-papers/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[31] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/25%20April%20-%20Letter%20to%20Marrett%20from%20Smith%20re%20NSF%20Grants.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[32] http://www.alternet.org/tags/abortion-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[33] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[34] http://www.alternet.org/tags/science-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[35] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bowen, in Censoring Science says DC ran meetings on climate in parallel w/ secret energy mtgs, invited Hansen ) principals only, means big deal p 98</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health 2008 oxford</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Michaels</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">p 162 june 1993 Sup Ct updated 1923 st'd for expert w/ Daubert test, leaving it up to judge to say who is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To esclude the expert is often to exclude the evidence; if judge allows plaintiff expert, it gets expensive to do jury trial so often leads to settlement.  RJR and USCOC lobbied to get Daub into other OSHA law 174</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Data Access Act (Shelby of alabama) gave fossil fuel co's access to raw data of big longterm Harvard epidemiology study that polluted air  could be killing 40K/yr; covers only science that has some federal funding, not industry research, even when the latter is being submitted as part of regulatory process 176-7. actually turns out not to be energy co's but tobacco, b/c sci found combo of tobacco and asbestos was worse than either, so asbestos had models that blames tobacco; Toc co's needed evidence to ctr.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clinton OMB reined in Shelby, but ctr was Data Quality Act 178</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMB peer review can combine w/ e ither 2 to really slow regulation. 190</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">b2 admin sci chapter; typical epa sci advisory panel exxon, monsanto, dow gm as well as wwf; b2 undid</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2006 TRI gutted depite bilat rec and fact that has reduced toxins 60% and did not cost much 211</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stats elimininated on effects of factory layoffs and how tax cuts were distrubuted by class 211</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 networks of climate data cut by budget cuts 2005 NOAA 2111</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wikipedia</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush Administration</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See also: Presidency of George W. Bush</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In June 2005, US State Department papers showed the Bush administration thanking Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy, including the U.S. stance on Kyoto. Input from the business lobby group Global Climate Coalition was also a factor.[12]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Bush administration implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on "climate polluters," according to a report in Rolling Stone magazine which reviews hundreds of internal government documents and former government officials.[13]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"'They've got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated,' says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew the whistle on White House censorship of global-warming documents in 2005. 'Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They're not stupid.'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay, the White House blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen cars. 'It's a charade,' says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. 'They have a single-minded determination to do nothing—while making it look like they are doing something.' . . .</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites. "two weeks after Bush took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming. . . .Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command.[14]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also, the White House removed key portions of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report given to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about the dangers to human health of global warming.[15] According to one CDC official familiar with both the CDC version and the version given to the Senate, the version given to the Senate was "eviscerated." The White House prevented the Senate and thus the public from receiving key CDC estimates in the report about diseases likely to flourish in a warmer climate, increased injuries and deaths from severe weather such as hurricanes, more respiratory problems from drought-driven air pollution, an increase in waterborne diseases including cholera, increases in vector-borne diseases including malaria and hantavirus, mental health problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress, and how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also according to testimony taken by the U.S. House of Representatives, the Bush White House pressured American scientists to suppress discussion of global warming[16][17]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"High-quality science" was "struggling to get out," as the Bush administration pressured scientists to tailor their writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration's skepticism, in some cases at the behest of an ex-oil industry lobbyist. "Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change,' 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similarly, according to the testimony of senior officers of the Government Accountability Project, the White House attempted to bury the report "National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change," produced by U.S. scientists pursuant to U.S. law.[18] Some U.S. scientists resigned their jobs rather than give in to White House pressure to underreport global warming.[16]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[edit] Political pressure on scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">See also: Politics and science in the United States</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">US officials, such as Philip Cooney, have repeatedly edited scientific reports from US government scientists, [19] many of whom, such as Thomas Knutson, have been ordered to refrain from discussing climate change and related topics.[20][21][22]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate scientist James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, claimed in a widely cited New York Times article [23] in 2006 that his superiors at the agency were trying to "censor" information "going out to the public." NASA denied this, saying that it was merely requiring that scientists make a distinction between personal, and official government, views in interviews conducted as part of work done at the agency. Several scientists working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have made similar complaints;[24] once again, government officials said they were enforcing long-standing policies requiring government scientists to clearly identify personal opinions as such when participating in public interviews and forums.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The BBC's long-running current affairs series Panorama recently investigated the issue, and was told that "scientific reports about global warming have been systematically changed and suppressed."[25]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to an Associated Press release on January 30, 2007,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Climate scientists at seven government agencies say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the threat of global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The groups presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report."[26]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Critics writing in the Wall Street Journal editorial page claim that the survey [27] was itself unscientific.[28]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attempts to suppress scientific information on global warming and other issues have been described by Chris Mooney as constituting a Republican War on Science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[edit] Allegations of attempts to mislead the public</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The book Hell and High Water asserts that there has been a disingenuous, concerted and effective campaign to convince Americans that the science is not proven, or that global warming is the result of natural cycles, and that there needs to be more research. The book claims that, to delay action, industry and government spokesmen suggest falsely that "technology breakthroughs" will eventually save us with hydrogen cars and other fixes. It calls on voters to demand immediate government action to curb emissions. Tyler Hamilton, in his review of the book for The Toronto Star, wrote that the book offers "alarming detail on how the U.S. public was being misled by [the Bush administration] (backed by conservative political forces) that is intent on inaction, and that's also on a mission to derail international efforts to curb emissions."[29]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Papers presented at an International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, held in 2009 under the sponsorship of the University of Copenhagen in cooperation with nine other universities in the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), maintained that the climate-change skepticism which is so prevalent in the USA[30] "was largely generated and kept alive by a small number of conservative think tanks, often with direct funding from industries having special interests in delaying or avoiding the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions".[31]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Merchants of Doubt (2010) Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, both American science historians, argue that Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, by spreading doubt and confusion.[32][33]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Requiem for a Species (2010), Clive Hamilton suggests that the roots of climate change denial lie in the reaction of American conservatism to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He argues that as the "red menace" receded, conservatives who had put energy into opposing communism sought other outlets. Hamilton contends that the conservative backlash against climate science was led by three prominent physicists -- Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg.[34]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[edit] Litigation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Several lawsuits have been filed over global warming. For example, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency before the Supreme Court of the United States forced the US government to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. A similar approach was taken by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer who filed a lawsuit California v. General Motors Corp. to force car manufacturers to reduce vehicles' emissions of carbon dioxide. A third case, Comer v. Murphy Oil, was filed by Gerald Maples, a trial attorney in Mississippi, in an effort to force fossil fuel and chemical companies to pay for damages caused by global warming.[35]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[edit] Attempts to undermine U.S. and state efforts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Bush Administration worked to undermine state efforts to mitigate global warming. Mary Peters, the Transportation Secretary at that, time personally directed US efforts to urge governors and dozens of members of the House of Representatives to block California’s first-in-the-nation limits on greenhouse gases from cars and trucks, according to e-mails obtained by Congress.[36]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article's factual accuracy is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. (November 2010)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the August 2010 The New Yorker, Jane Mayer writes that "As their fortunes grew, Charles and David H. Koch (of the privately held company Koch Industries) became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America."[37][relevant? – discuss] Also, in the Wichita Eagle, she wrote an article about the political spending of David and Charles G. Koch.[38][unreliable source?] The articles state the Koch brothers are major funders of the U.S. Tea Party movement, giving money to organizations disabling mitigation of global warming legislation, and underwriting a vast network of foundations, think tanks, and groups mounting opposition campaigns against Obama Administration policies. The movement is associated with active climate change denial through Koch family's Koch Industries funding.[39][not in citation given] The editorial cites Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity as saying, "The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Georges Magazine he [b2?] was ranked nr 45 in a list of the 50 most influential politicians. Greenspan was one, Cheney was two.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> ---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wikipedia:  In July 2008, a former Environmental Protection Agency official stated publicly that Cheney's office had pushed significantly for large-scale deletions from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on the health effects of global warming "fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases."[118] In October, when the report appeared with six pages cut from the testimony, The White House stated that the changes were made due to concerns regarding the accuracy of the science. However, according to the former senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, Cheney's office was directly responsible for nearly half of the original testimony being deleted.[118]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1b_Q1lprAk  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">YOUNG TURKS ON BACKSTORY</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIhOXCgSunc</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SLIDES ON BIZ INSIDER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> ----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TAL 5/13 4 state climatologists fired for supporting agw oregon, va, delaware and </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">State Climatologist of Georgia Ousting: Was It Justified? (‘Skepticism’, not only alarmism, can get political)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by Chip Knappenberger</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">September 19, 2011</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The political battle to control the flavor of scientific discourse claims another victim. This time it was Dr. David Stooksbury, the 12-year veteran State Climatologist of Georgia whose middle-of-the-road opinions about climate change apparently ran afoul of Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s more conservative views.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an executive order issued last week, Governor Deal stripped Dr. Stooksbury of his title and conferred it to a current employee of the state’s Environmental Protection Division—a position under direct government control, unlike Stooksbury’s rather independent office at the University of Georgia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Certainly, the Governor can do as he chooses. And the newly tapped Georgia State Climatologist, Bill Murphey is seemingly qualified for the job. But, the move has all the signs of haste, and none of an orderly, well-thought out and coordinated transition. Which hints of something fishy going on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is worth bearing in mind that politics should consider scientific opinion, not shape it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stooksbury’s ouster is just the latest in a string of State Climatologists have been “replaced” in recent years for what seem like political reasons.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Patrick Michaels in Virginia. David Legates in Delaware. George Taylor in Oregon. Those three now-former state climatologists were on the rather cautious (and outspoken) side when it came to the possibility for alarming climate changes to occur as a result of human changes to the large-scale composition of the atmosphere. All three were ushered out by governors who had a different take on the issue. Michaels, Legates, and Taylor were victims of their title of “state” climatologist, even though, in this case, “state” referred primarily to geographical location more so than “government.” I guess the governors wanted to alleviate any confusion associated with the name and put someone in that position whose view better reflected that of the “State” (with a capital ‘S’).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Is a “State Climatoligist”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senate Environment Chair Inhofe and Aide</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Take on AP/Borenstein, Brokaw, Revkin</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Bud Ward</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The continuing political attacks on climate change science have taken a new and, some felt, menacing track in Washington with the Republican chair of the Senate's key environmental committee alleging bias on the part of three of the nation's leading news organizations and three specific reporters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe of Oklahoma was assisted in his criticism of prominent climate reporting by a new and assertive staff aide,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">a former producer for conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inhofe, a staunch critic of what he calls the global warming "hoax," first put out a Committee majority press release blasting the Associated Press and its well regarded science reporter Seth Borenstein for bias and faulty methodology. The Republican committee members' press release panned a June 27 AP piece reporting climate scientists' generally favorable reviews of the science as presented in former Vice President Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." AP rejected the senators' criticisms outright, and several journalists and academics rallied to AP's and Borenstein's defense.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inhofe's critics question the propriety of the efforts of the committee's chairman and communications director and wonder if it will have any effect on press coverage and public understanding of climate change. Some journalism professors say Inhofe's goal might be to intimidate reporters and editors, particularly in smaller markets that rely on the Associated Press for Washington coverage. This, they say, could damage the public's understanding of the issue at a time when scientific evidence of global warming is growing."It strikes me that the public relations people for Senator Inhofe are trying to distract the media by attacking the media for fairly reporting what the vast majority of scientists are reporting," said Jim Detjen, director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. "It's a last ditch effort to now attack the journalists," Detjen added. "I really believe it's nonsense."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dan Fagin, a former Newsday environmental reporter who now teaches journalism at New York University, said he did not think Inhofe's criticism would affect Brokaw or his reputation. But he said the attacks on the Associated Press might convince some small newspapers and radio and television stations against running the wire service's stories on climate issues rather than wrestle with a Senate committee chairman. Fagin also suggested Inhofe might be attacking the press to toss red meat to conservative activists before midterm elections. "It's about ginning up the base," he said. "That kind of character assassination goes a long way on both counts. It's reprehensive, but it's a very effective political strategy."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Detjen likened Inhofe's efforts to other historical events where politicians have taken aim at the media, from President Teddy Roosevelt dubbing investigative reporters "muckrakers" to former President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew's condemnation of the press in the wake of the Watergate break-in. Media criticism has escalated during President Bush's time in the Oval Office amid news reports of several controversial secret domestic surveillance programs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Discovery Channel did not return calls for comment on Brokaw's report. The Associated Press, in a prepared statement, said Inhofe wrongly characterized Borenstein's article. The AP contacted more than 100 climate researchers, including skeptics. But it only quoted the scientists who said they had seen the movie or read the book, which turned out to be a far smaller number than those it surveyed. Generally, the AP said scientists were "positive toward Gore's scientific presentation." "The AP story reported facts," said Linda Wagner, director of AP media relations. "It did not take a position in a debate, whether political or scientific, about global warming."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inhofe endorsed his press office's work and shrugged off a question over whether he was trying to intimidate reporters. "What are you talking about?" Inhofe said. "The media is 100 percent on the other side."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">also goes after revkin, mann etc demands names of 100 sci ref'd</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.environmentwriter.org/resources/articles/0706_inhofe.htm</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CBO Joins CRS in Finding Almost No Economic Impact From Letting High-End Bush-Era Tax Rates Expire </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You may remember that, last week, Republicans forced the Congressional Research Service (basically Congress’ think tank) to take down a study that analyzed 65 years of individual tax rates and found no correlation between lower taxes on the rich and economic growth. This just did not compute with the GOP, so they had to suppress the facts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now the Congressional Budget Office has come out with an analysis of the fiscal slope measures, and guess what? They found the exact same thing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You have to dig into the data a bit to find it, but basically, CBO measured the impact of a series of the expiring tax and spending measures on economic growth and jobs in 2013. That chart is above. The key portion of it is in the middle. CBO estimates that extending all the expiring tax provisions and patching the alternative minimum tax would boost real GDP by around 1.4%. But, right below it, they estimate extending all those provisions EXCEPT the tax rates over $250,000 of income, to boost GDP by roughly 1.3%. In other words, the difference between extending the tax rates and not is a big fat 0.1% of GDP. That’s a rounding error.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Overall, CBO still shows that going down the slope and staying there would cost 2.9% of GDP and 3.4 million jobs. Just letting the payroll tax cut expire, which Congress and the White House seem OK with, would cost 0.7% of GDP and 800,000 jobs. That’s about 1/4 of the total impact, and almost twice as much as the sequester cuts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the big news here is the CBO showing that tax cuts for the rich do not correlate at all with economic growth. There is no compelling economic reason to extend those tax cuts. As CBO says in proper budget-ese, “the extension of lower tax rates on higher incomes would have a relatively small effect on output per dollar of budgetary cost.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And it’s worth pointing out that the Republicans, in defending their position of extending those high-end tax cuts, are pointing to a study from Ernst & Young that actually is methodologically flawed enough to raise the suspicions of any independent analyst. Meanwhile, the study Republicans tried to sink represents the consensus opinion of virtually every unbiased analyst who studies the matter. And that includes George W. Bush’s own Treasury Department.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nyt:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Firearms Research</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a paucity of research in the field of guns and violence. Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the N.R.A. has all but choked off money for such work.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chris Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said his group had not tried to squelch genuine scientific inquiries, just politically slanted ones.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, researchers at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, that having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to completely eliminate the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research. The N.R.A. argued that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trayvon Martin Case ...http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_rifle_association/index.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.npr.org/2012/09/28/161987243/scientist-cleared-in-polar-bear-controversy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">September 28, 2012</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A long, controversial investigation of a polar bear scientist has ended with his government employer saying it does not look like he engaged in any scientific misconduct.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Charles Monnett is a wildlife researcher with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, part of the Department of the Interior. He and a colleague, Jeffrey Gleason, wrote an influential 2006 report describing apparently drowned polar bears floating in the Arctic, which they saw during a routine aerial survey of whales.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those dead bears became a symbol of the threat of climate change and melting ice, and Al Gore mentioned them in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the sightings were called into question in March 2010, after officials with Interior's Office of Inspector General received allegations of scientific misconduct.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monnett spent more than two years under investigation, and agents repeatedly asked him detailed questions about the dead-polar-bear paper.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cleared Of Misconduct</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The final report on that investigation was delivered to BOEM about three months ago. On Friday, the agency told Monnett that no action would be taken against him — except for an official reprimand for an unrelated matter, the improper release of internal government documents back in 2007 and 2008.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">vs fox headline: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Polar Bear Scientist Reprimanded for Releasing Government Documents</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Published September 29, 2012</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fox News Latino</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cleared not event mentioned?!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JUNEAU, Alaska –  For releasing government documents, the U.S. government reprimanded the scientist who studies of drowned polar bears helped draw attention to the issue of global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An Interior Department official said emails released by Charles Monnett were cited by a federal appeals court in decisions to vacate approval by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of an oil and gas company's Arctic exploration plan.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The official, Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of BOEM, said in a memo that an inspector general's investigation contained findings that Monnett had improperly disclosed internal government documents, which he said were later used against the agency in court. He also said the investigation made other findings in regards to Monnett's conduct, but he wasn't taking action on those. He would not specify those findings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cruickshank called Monnett's "misconduct very serious," and said any future misconduct may lead to more severe discipline, including removal from federal service.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monnett was briefly suspended last year during an inspector general's investigation into a polar bear research contract he managed. The inspector general's report, which was released Friday, said its investigation was set off by a complaint from an unidentified Interior Department employee who alleged that Monnett wrongfully released government records and that he and another scientist, Jeffrey Gleason, intentionally omitted or used false data in an article they wrote on polar bears. During that investigation, authorities also looked into the procurement issue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeff Ruch, executive director of the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which has been involved in the matter on Monnett's behalf, said Friday that the issue of the document release did not even come up in investigators' questioning of Monnett.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He called the outcome "completely unexpected," and said Monnett is confused by it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PEER, in a news release, said the email disclosure had nothing to do with polar bear research but that it embarrassed the agency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We think he's owed an apology, but we're not going to hold our breath until he gets one," Ruch said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Federal investigators had said that Monnett helped a polar bear researcher prepare a proposal even though he was the government official who determined whether the proposal met minimum qualifications. PEER has said that Monnett's handling of the study was proper and that Monnett, instead, was being targeted for a 2006 article on drowned polar bears.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The article was based on observations that Monnett and Gleason made in 2004 while conducting an aerial survey of bowhead whales. They saw four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the article, they said they were reporting, to the best of their knowledge, the first observations of the bears floating dead and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances. They wrote that while polar bears are considered strong swimmers, long-distance swims may exact a greater metabolic toll than standing or walking on ice in better weather.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They said their findings suggested that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future "if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The article and related presentations helped to make the polar bear a symbol for the global warming movement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the inspector general's report, investigators found that Monnett and Gleason used an incomplete database as their primary source of information to write the article, made conflicting statements to investigators regarding the writing and editing process and understated data in the manuscript. However, they found that the article had "little or no impact" on a federal decision to extend special protections to polar bears under the Endangered Species Act, according to the report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A BOEM spokeswoman, Theresa Eisenman, said the findings in the report do not support a conclusion that the scientists involved engaged in "scientific misconduct."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monnett's reprimand could be removed from his record in two years or less.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ruch said Monnett has been told he will return to scientific work.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Based on reporting by the Associated Press.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/09/29/polar-bear-scientist-reprimanded-for-releasing-government-documents/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Extra! May 2012</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Discounting Expertise</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How journalism embraces right-wing anti-intellectualism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Steve Rendall</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From the Scopes trial’s crackdown on Darwinism to William F. Buckley’s famous preference for government by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book over the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty, from columnists George Will (Washington Post, 11/28/10) and Jonah Goldberg (L.A. Times, 8/30/11) lashing out at the “cult of expertise” to Rick Santorum’s rants against universities as “indoctrination centers for the left” (AP, 2/28/12), the American right regularly expresses contempt for expertise, education and other manifestations of “book learnin’.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And climate change may be the single issue area where media offer the widest berth to crackpot commentators and activists with no relevant background. After years of politicization by the likes of Will and others, including Limbaugh and Hannity, the media have opened up to such a degree that a U.S. senator who dismisses climate science in favor of the Bible is one of the most quoted sources in stories on climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Sen. James Inhofe (R.-Okla.) (Voice of Christian Youth America, 3/7/12), claims of a human role in climate change are a hoax because “God is still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And besides, Inhofe stated in a Senate speech (7/28/03), the best climate scientists don’t support the global warming thesis: “I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation’s top climate scientists.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As for those who cite the overwhelming scientific consensus (Skeptical Science, 1/24/12) that says anthropogenic global warming is actually happening, Inhofe (Tulsa World, 7/22/06) says they remind him of “the Third Reich, the Big Lie.... You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s a principle the right is very familiar with.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4541</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bit old, mostly cda http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/category/climate-science-censorship/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The second category of Republican tactics of permanent power are those that must be banished from our public life forever. Hamburger and Wallsten discuss in great detail the misuse of executive branch power for raw political purposes. Karl Rove apparently dropped by unannounced to meetings of managers at the Fish and Wildlife Service and sent polling data to political appointees in such agencies to ensure that routine decisions were made according to the White House’s political priorities. Workshops on how to apply for funds for abstinence education were located in certain electorally key states in order to mobilize religious groups. There are dozens of similar examples. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.schmitt.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hmmn:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Register Citizen</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Litchfield County, Connecticut</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">November 20, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by LOUIS CLARK</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In late October, lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams SF exercised their First Amendment right of free speech when they posted a YouTube video criticizing the proposed cap-and-trade emissions program. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has employed both Zabel and Williams for 20 years, ordered them to take it down and remove from it mention of their work experience.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...Cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia has been studying climate deniers and conspiratorial thinking -- and the link between the two. He suspected that climate deniers -- as opposed to climate "skeptics," who actually use the tools of science to verify facts -- are highly prone to unrelated kinds of conspiracy thinking, and also to a conservative, pro-business ideology. He decided to test these ideas by questioning people who write and read blogs related to global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He chose blogs because people with an anti-science bias have found a welcoming home on the Internet. Science denial is difficult to practice in the mainstream, peer-reviewed literature, but such contrarian views can be freely expressed in the blogosphere, where conspiracy theorists can feed one another's feelings of persecution. Lewandowsky surveyed blog denizens about their views on climate science, other scientific propositions, and their environmental leanings; their perceptions of what scientific "consensus" means; their beliefs about free-market economics; and finally, their views on a number of well-known conspiracy theories. The conspiracies covered the political spectrum, from fears of a world government (a right-wing idea) to the belief that 9/11 was an "inside job" (typically embraced on the left).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The results were unambiguous, and unsettling. First, those who hold a laissez-faire view of unfettered free markets were much more likely to strongly reject climate science. Lewandowsky believes that, because the fundamental importance of fossil fuels (and CO2 emissions) to modern economics, climate science in general (and evidence for global warming in particular) is a threat to free market advocates. Free marketers were also more likely to reject other established scientific findings, even the (undisputed) facts that smoking causes lung cancer and HIV causes AIDS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second, conspiracy thinking was clearly linked to climate denial -- and to the rejection of scientific propositions in general. This was true even of conspiracy theories unrelated to the environment or climate -- the belief that NASA staged the moon landing, for example, or that the CIA killed Martin Luther King. In other words, conspiracy thinking is not simply a convenient way to dismiss a particularly bothersome scientific consensus. Instead, some people seem to have a general personality trait or cognitive style, which leads them to endorse any conspiracy. This paranoid thinking in turn predisposes them to reject completely unrelated scientific facts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lewandowsky's study will be published in a future issue of 'Psychological Science,' a peer-reviewed scientific journal, providing further evidence of a vast and ingenious plot to elevate enlightenment thinking and marginalize the unenlightened. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/climate-change-denial-_b_1686437.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Republican_War_on_Science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">  demo report on b2: http://democrats.oversight.house.gov/images/stories/documents/20080130103545.pdf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BP goes after scientist emails on oil spill scope </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/08/496144/bp-in-deep-water-with-scientific-integrity-advocates/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sciencecorruption.com/ATN177/00331.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">corp corrruption (see also hacks)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sciencecorruption.com/library/about.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">suppressed report on diesel  cancer http://www.republicreport.org/2012/lobbying-diesel-exhaust/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/03/29/study-conservatives-trust-of-science-hits-all-time-low-</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Study: Conservatives' Trust of Science Hits All Time Low</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A sociologist at UNC-Chapel Hill says more people are moving to a conservative "anti-intellectual" ideology, and more people than ever are lumping scientific and political agendas together.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Jason Koebler</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">March 29, 2012 RSS Feed Print </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's not just the vitriol surrounding this year's upcoming election: More conservatives than ever distrust science, according to a report released Thursday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just 35 percent of conservatives said they had a "great deal of trust in science" in 2010, a 28 percent decline since 1974, when 48 percent of conservatives—about the same percentage as liberals—trusted science. Liberal and moderate support for science has remained essentially flat since 1974, according to Gordon Gauchat, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He published his findings in the journal American Sociological Review.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">About 41 percent of Americans identify as "conservative," according to an August poll by Gallup, up from 37 percent in 2008.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Poll: Republicans Coming Around on Global Warming]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gauchat says conservatives' rebellion against the "elite" and the shifting role of science in society is to blame for the decline. He argues that the conservative minority has rebelled against science in the same way it has against media and higher education.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It kind of began with the loss of Barry Goldwater and the construction of Fox News and all these [conservative] think tanks. The perception among conservatives is that they're at a disadvantage, a minority," he says. "It's not surprising that the conservative subculture would challenge what's viewed as the dominant knowledge production groups in society—science and the media."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He says science has also changed—in the middle of the 20th century, science was tasked with creating things for the Department of Defense and NASA, things that "easily built a consensus."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Since then, science has become autonomous from the government—it develops knowledge that helps regulate policy, and in the case of the EPA, it develops policy," he says. "Science is charged with what religion used to be charged with—answering questions about who we are and what we came from, what the world is about. We're using it in American society to weigh in on political debates, and people are coming down on a specific side."...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The premise of the 2005 book The Republican War on Science (by Mother Jones contributor Chris Mooney) was that conservatives in the US hate science. They don't like evolution, they don't like global warming—none of that stuff. Now a sociologist set out to figure out if that thesis really is true, and concluded that the right in the US is indeed growing increasingly distrustful of science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina published these findings in the forthcoming issue of the American Sociological Review. He looked back at data from 1974 through 2010, and found that trust in science was relatively stable over that 36-year period, except among self-identified conservatives. While conservatives started in 1974 as the group that trusted science most (compared to self-identified liberals and moderates), they have now dropped to the bottom of the ranking.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gauchat used data from the General Social Survey, which asked subjects to rate their level of confidence in the scientific community. Here's what he found: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gordon Gauchat/American Sociological Review </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The reason for this, according to Mooney and others, is that the "political neutrality of science began to unravel in the 1970s with the emergence of the new right"—a growing body of conservatives who were distrustful of science and the intellectual establishment, who were often religious and concerned about defending "traditional values" in the face of a modernizing world, and who favored limited government. This has prompted backlash against subjects for which there is broad scientific consensus, like global warming and evolution—backlash that has been apparent in survey data over the past three decades.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney, who also has a new book out titled The Republican Brain, also highlights one of Gauchat's more distressing findings, which is that this trend seems to be more common among conservatives with higher levels of education:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">…conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time and these declines are statistically significant. In addition, a comparison of predicted probabilities indicates that conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree. These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yikes. That's certainly not a good sign for fans of reality-based decision making.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/03/its-not-your-imagination-republicans-really-dont-science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Three-Level Explanation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Well, I think we need to understand three points in order to understand why conservatives act this way. And I will list them here, before going into them in more detail:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservatism is a Defensive Ideology, and Appeals to People Who Want Certainty and Resist Change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative "Morality" Impels Climate Denial -- and in particular, conservative Individualism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fox News is the Key "Feedback Mechanism" -- whereby people already inclined to believe false things get all the license and affirmation they need.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So let's go into more detail:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1: Conservatism is a Defensive Ideology, and Appeals to People Who Want Certainty and Resist Change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There's now a staggering amount of research on the psychological and even the physiological traits of people who opt for conservative ideologies. And on average, you see people who are more wedded to certainty, and to having fixed beliefs. You also see people who are more sensitive to fear and threat -- in a way that can be measured in their bodily responses to certain types of stimuli.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the extreme of these traits, you see a group called authoritarians -- those who are characterized by cognitive rigidity, seeing things in black and white ways -- "in group/out group," my way or the highway.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So in this case, if someone high on such traits latches on to a particular belief -- in this case, "global warming is a hoax" -- then more knowledge about it is not necessarily going to open their minds. More knowledge is just going to be used to argue what they already think.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And we see this in the Tea Party, where we have both the highest levels of global warming denial, but also this incredibly strong confidence that they know all they need to know about the issue, and they don't want any more information, thank you very much.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Conservative "Morality" Impels Climate Denial -- in particular, Conservative Individualism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But, you might say, "well, Tea Party conservatives don't deny every aspect of reality." And it's true. Presumably, they still will accept a factual correction if they have, say, the date of Mother's Day wrong. Presumably they're still open minded about that... we hope.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So why deny this particular thing? Why deny that global warming is caused by humans? And here, I think you've got to look at deep seated moral intuitions that differs from left to right. And it's important to note at the outset that whatever your moral intuitions are, they push you emotionally to reason in a particular direction long before you are actually consciously thinking about it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, conservatives tend to be "individualists"-- meaning, essentially, that they prize a system in which government leaves you alone -- and "hierarchs," meaning, they are supportive of various types of inequality.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The individualist is threatened by global warming, deeply threatened, because it means that markets have failed and governments -- including global governments -- have to step in to fix the problem. And some individualists are so threatened by this reality that they even spin out conspiracy theories, arguing that all the world's scientists are in a cabal with, like, the UN, to make up phony science so they can crash economies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So now let's look at what these individualist assumptions do to the denial of science. In one study by Yale's Dan Kahan and colleagues:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Individualist-hierarchs" and "egalitarian-communitarians" are asked: Who's an expert on global warming?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Only 23 percent of H-I's agree that a scientist who thinks GW is human-caused is a "trustworthy and knowledgeable expert," vs. 88 percent of E-Cs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In another study, meanwhile, Kahan showed that if you frame the science of global warming as supporting nuclear power, then conservatives are more open to accepting it, presumably because it does not insult their values any longer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Fox News is the Key "Feedback Mechanism" -- whereby people who want to believe false things get all the license they need.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So clearly, there are some deeply rooted attributes that predispose conservatives towards the denial of global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But there are also "environmental" factors -- things that have come to exist in our world that did not exist before, that interact with these things about conservatives, and make all this much worse.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And here, Fox News is undeniably at the top of the list. There are now a host of studies (video here) showing that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about various aspects of reality, including two such studies about global warming.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So if you've got Fox News, you've got a place to go to reaffirm your beliefs. And that serves this psychological need for certainty and security. So conservatives opt in, they get the misinformation, their beliefs are reaffirmed, and they're set to argue, argue, argue about why they're right and all the scientists of the world are wrong.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conclusion</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So in sum, we need a nature-nurture, or a combined psychological and environmental account of the conservative denial of global warming. And only then do we see why they are so doggedly espousing a set of beliefs that are so wildly dangerous to the planet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/story/154709/the_strange_conservative_brain%3A_3_reasons_republicans_refuse_to_accept_reality_about_global_warming?page=entire</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including "The Republican War on Science" (2005). His next book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality," is due out in April.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://grist.org/natural-gas/for-pennsylvanias-doctors-a-gag-order-on-fracking-chemicals/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Pennsylvania’s doctors, a gag order on fracking chemicals</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Kate Sheppard</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction—but they won’t be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will “gag” doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">clive hamilton</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two years ago the Labor Party won a decisive election victory in part by riding a public mood demanding action on climate change after years of stonewalling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new Government promised to spearhead world efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Today it's on the run, retreating from a surge of militant anti-climate activism that believes climate science is a left-wing plot aimed at promoting elites, wrecking the economy and screwing the little man. What happened?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Part 1: Climate cyber-bullying</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Australia's most distinguished climate scientists have become the target of a new form of cyber-bullying aimed at driving them out of the public debate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In recent months, each time they enter the public debate through a newspaper article or radio interview these scientists are immediately subjected to a torrent of aggressive, abusive and, at times, threatening emails. Apart from the volume and viciousness of the emails, the campaign has two features - it is mostly anonymous and it appears to be orchestrated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The messages are typically peppered with insults. One scientist was called a "Loudmouth, arrogant, conceited, ignorant wanker".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The emails frequently accuse the scientists of being frauds who manipulate their research in order to receive funding, such as this one to Ben McNeil at the UNSW:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's so obvious you are an activist going along with the climate change lie to protect your very lucrative employment contract."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They often blame the recipients of being guilty of crimes, as in this one received by Professor David Karoly at the University of Melbourne:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It is probably not to (sic) extreme to suggest that your actions (deceitful) were so criminal to be compared with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. It is called treason and genocide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Oh, as a scientist, you have destroyed peoples trust in my profession. You are a criminal . Lest we forget."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Receiving emails like these is unsettling and at times disturbing, which of course is the point. They become worrying when they cross the line to personal threats, such as these sent to Professor Andy Pitman at the UNSW:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"There will be a day of facing the music for the Pitman type frauds... Pitman you are a fking fool!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And this one:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"If we see you continue, we will get extremely organised and precise against you."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Pitman politely replied to the last, the response was more aggressive:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Fk off mate, stop the personal attacks. Just do your science or you will end up collateral damage in the war, GET IT."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All threats have to be taken seriously, and at times warrant calling in the police. The police are able to trace anonymous emails to their sources and take action against those who send them. The police are now advising those who received abusive and threatening emails to resist the immediate urge to delete them and keep them in a separate folder for future reference.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Climate campaigners have also noticed a surge in the frequency and virulence of this new form of cyber-bullying. The following was received by a young woman (who asked that her name not be used):</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Did you want to offer your children to be brutally gang-raped and then horribly tortured before being reminded of their parents socialist beliefs and actions?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Burn in hell. Or in the main street, when the Australian public finally lynchs you."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another campaigner opened her inbox to read this:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Fk off!!!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Or you will be chased down the street with burning stakes and hung from your fking neck, until you are dead, dead, dead!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Fk you little pieces of sht, show youselves in public!!!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greens Senator Christine Milne told me that senators' inboxes are bombarded every day by climate deniers and extremists, so that now they are running at least 10 to one against those who call for action on climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She describes it as a "well-organised campaign of strident, offensive and insulting emails that go well beyond the bounds of the normal cut and thrust of politics".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was widely reported that in the days before the Liberal Party leadership challenge last November, MPs were blitzed with emails from climate deniers. Some MPs were spooked into voting for Tony Abbott, the only one of the three contenders who had repudiated climate science. Australia's alternative government is now led by climate deniers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalists hit</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalists too have become the victims of cyber-bullying. I have spoken to several, off the record, who have told of torrents of abusive emails when they report on climate change, including some sufficiently threatening for them to consult their supervisors and consider police action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One was particularly disturbed at references to his wife. Another received the following from someone who gave his name and identified himself as medical representative at major pharmaceutical's company:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"You sad sack of st. It's ok to trash climate change sceptics yet, when the shoe is on the other foot, you become a vindictive, nasty piece of st not able to face the fact that you're wrong about climate change and you're reputation is now trash."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anonymous emails are usually more graphic.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Your mother was a goat fker!!!!!! Your father was a turd!!!!!!! You will be one of the first taken out in the revolution!!!!!!!! Your head will be on a stake!! Ct!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Few of those on the receiving end of this hatred doubt that the emails are being orchestrated. Scores of abusive emails over a few hours are unlikely to be the product of a large number of individuals spontaneously making the effort to track down an email address and pour forth their rage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While some individuals act alone, increasingly the attacks are arranged by one or more denialist organisations. It's fair to assume operatives in these organisations constantly monitor the media and, when a story or interview they don't like appears, send messages out to lists of supporters, linking to the comments, providing the scientist's email address and urging them to let him or her know what they think.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One or two of the cyber-bullies have hinted at the level of organisation, with one following an abusive rant with the comment:"Copies of my e-mails to you are also being passed out to a huge network for future reference."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Net rage and free speech</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The purpose of this new form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate or to change what they say. While the internet is often held up as the instrument of free speech, it is often used for the opposite purpose, to drive people out of the public debate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unlike the letters pages of newspapers, on the internet anonymity is accepted and the gate-keepers, where they exist, are more lax, so the normal constraints on social discourse do not apply. On the internet, the demons of the human psyche find a play-ground.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If a group attempts to have a considered discussion about climate science on an open forum it is very soon deluged with enraged attacks on climate science, sometimes linking for authority to well-known denialist websites. Most scientists long ago stopped attempting to correct the mish-mash of absurd misrepresentations and lies in web "discussions".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is the new campaign of cyber-bullying working? Receiving a large number of offensive emails certainly wears most people down. Some scientists and journalists probably do change what they say or withdraw from debate. Others have strategies for dealing with the abuse-never replying, deleting without reading or swapping loony emails with colleagues, and cultivating a thick skin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The effect of the cyber-bullying campaign on some scientists-including those I have mentioned-is quite opposite to the intended one. The attempts at intimidation have only made them more resolved to keep talking to the public about their research. Their courage under fire stands in contrast to the cowardice of the anonymous emailers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tomorrow: Who is behind the cyber-bullying campaign?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aus: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/32912.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">canada:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">update: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/02/canada-to-science-drop-dead.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canada's government muzzles scientists, stonewalls press queries about health, environment and climate</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Cory Doctorow at 6:53 am Saturday, Feb 18</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Canadian Harper government's policy of not allowing government researchers to speak without approval and without being attended by political minders is in the news again. A series of speakers at an AAAS meeting told the international science community that climate, environmental and health research that calls government policy into question is routinely suppressed. Prof Andrew Weaver of U Victoria said, "The only information [the press] are given is that which the government wants, which will then allow a supporting of a particular agenda."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> The allegation of "muzzling" came up at a session of the AAAS meeting to discuss the impact of a media protocol introduced by the Conservative government shortly after it was elected in 2008.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The protocol requires that all interview requests for scientists employed by the government must first be cleared by officials. A decision as to whether to allow the interview can take several days, which can prevent government scientists commenting on breaking news stories.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sources say that requests are often refused and when interviews are granted, government media relations officials can and do ask for written questions to be submitted in advance and elect to sit in on the interview...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Postmedia News journalist obtained documents relating to interview requests using Canada's equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. She said the documents show interview requests move up what she describes as an "increasingly thick layer of media managers, media strategists, deputy ministers, then go up to the Privy Council Office, which decides 'yes' or 'no'".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Canadian government is 'muzzling its scientists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented "frenzy of hate" after a video featuring an interview with him was published last week by Climate Desk.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Emails contained "veiled threats against my wife," and other "tangible threats," Emanuel, a highly regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT's Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, said in an interview. "They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/01/mit-climate-scientists-wife-threatened-frenzy-hate</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> ---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">crew report: The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stanley Sokul – Stanley Sokul was the executive director for the president’s committee of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">advisors on science and technology at OSTP from 2002 to 2009.44</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the administration ended in 2009, Mr. Sokul joined Exxon-Mobil as a corporate issues</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">advisor.45 Mr. Sokul is not currently registered to lobby.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mcc& D 2003: 104th congress (1994 gingrich?) House Comm on sci went after green regs: see Kraft 2000) delay and doolittle ~ cfc's, enviro res (esp gw and energy res) rohrbacker and rep robrty walker Penn p 361</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">rfk2</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ch 5 Sci Fiction</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1st suppress since Inquisition</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Luntz infamous memo 2003 says envrio is gop weakness: doubt, recruit experts.  ind always had hacks, but gop got them in the gov 77  echo "more study" mantra,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">then cut $ to do it  77  b2 propsed budget double digit cuts in epa, usgs, dept agr, energy's Office of Sci etc 77 "biostitutes"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ctw hubby interests in Citigp, which owns Traveler's  (also Port Authoprity) so incentive to downgrade risk of air 79  moved robt martin omsbudsman (dep of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">labor rules no cause), cancelled the position, on weekend sent agents to grab files and padlock office. Kaufman Resigned. air said ok before all test results</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">in. IG said risk downplayed, raw data blocked 80-1  3x safe level asbstos  Connaughton leaned on Thernstrom (commun dir, now works for Norton) CEQ screamed</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">at epa's Kreisher, T 81  ground zero levels were record 81.  admin gagged epa on perc, mercury toxicologist quits 83</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">GW reports altered, dismissed or hid 12 in 10 yrs 84: N Ac Sci, noaa, nasa and 2002 rept by combined agencies 84.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/2002 epa air roport left out usual secvtion on gw; same with june 2003; july 2003 epa sci leaked report  that gw could be dealt w/ at small cost. b2 in</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">response spent 100m for 10 yr study to prove gw is natural 84</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Princeton Oppenheimer said pres does not believe in evol, what kind of sci would convince him on gw 85</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">epa report said fracking (Haliburton #1) wd exceed benzene, data revised so not 85 (waxman q never answered) 85</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Norton said drill no harm caribou; she altered sci; 17 major changes; she attributed them to typos 86</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">win/spr 2002 norton and rove pressured nat'l martine Fisheries to alter salmon on klamath; lack of water led to 33K sdalmon dead, biggest kill in West 86  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">biologist resigned</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">norton ordered rewrite on artic wildlife b/c of drill; snowmobiles (fed judge reprimanded)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">epa sci govt reprisals for dioxin sludge fertilizer 87  dept of agr superbugs from hog farms ordered not to pubish or talk; resigned.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CDC replaced health advis panel w/ industry reps incl VP of Heritage , denounced by 10 sci on Sci Jrnl apr 12 2002 p89 "regulatory paralysis appears to be</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the goal here"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr kim thonpson HCRA picked for cdc</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gov Acct Pjt on whistleblowers says gag sci unprecedented (goldwater gop guy) p 90</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2003 PEER found widespread demoralization of sci, feared reprisal in energy states Co ut, mon, dakotas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMB found 420K jobs outsourced to industry; risk of not being able to analyze risks 91</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">atratzine #1 in US, tho provblems found in 80's; frog deform at 1/30th eap level; lawsuit firced gov to look into.  Gov hired Syngenta, a mfger 92</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">July 2003 epa regional office approved study by developer funded study that wetlands put out pollutants, then used to justify replace wetlands w golf</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">courses etc 92-3  biologist quit "bushwacked" 93</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9/2003 Graham grabbed authority to review all, as oppsed to usual for external review  93 opposed by NAS, Nat Assoc frro Adv of sci, fed am sci, regulators</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">going all the way o nixon 94 OIRA became law??</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UCS rep 2/2004 60 sci, 20 nobels, scope and scale ... of manip, suppression, and misrep of sci by bush admin unprecedented 95</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bad stein BS ID movie claims harrassment of sci but not true:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(also cherrypicks darwin quote to make it seem like he's arguing the opposite)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4) The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One section of Expelled relates the case of Richard Sternberg, who was a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. According to the film, after Sternberg approved the publication of a pro-ID paper by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute, he lost his editorship, was demoted at the Smithsonian, was moved to a more remote office, and suffered other professional setbacks. The film mentions a 2006 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report prepared for Rep. Mark Souder (R–Ind.), "Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian," that denounced Sternberg's mistreatment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This selective retelling of the Sternberg affair omits details that are awkward for the movie's case, however. Sternberg was never an employee of the Smithsonian: his term as a research associate always had a limited duration, and when it ended he was offered a new position as a research collaborator. As editor, Sternberg's decision to "peer-review" and approve Meyer's paper by himself was highly questionable on several grounds, which was why the scientific society that published the journal later repudiated it. Sternberg had always been planning to step down as the journal's editor—the issue in which he published the paper was already scheduled to be his last.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report prepared by Rep. Souder, who had previously expressed pro-ID views, was never officially accepted into the Congressional Record. Notwithstanding the report's conclusions, its appendix contains copies of e-mails and other documents in which Sternberg's superiors and others specifically argued against penalizing him for his ID views. (More detailed descriptions of the Sternberg case can be found on Ed Brayton's blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars and on Wikipedia.)  Sci Am review of http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know&print=true</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">waxman hearing 2007:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We will hear from that former lobbyist, Phil Cooney, today. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The documents we have received indicate he was able to exert </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">tremendous influence on the direction of Federal climate change </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">policy and science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">staff at CEQ was the review of government publications about </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the key responsibilities given to Mr. Cooney and his </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the government's strategic plan for climate change research. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Cooney and his staff made hundreds of separate edits to </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These changes injected doubt in place of certainty, minimized </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other key government reports, including an EPA report on </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the dangers of climate change, and diminished the human role in </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">causing the planet to warm.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the environment and an annual report to Congress on the </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Cooney and his staff to these government climate change </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">changing planet were subject to similar edits and distortions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In preparation for this hearing, the majority staff </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">prepared a memorandum for members analyzing the changes made by </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another facet of the White House campaign involved </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">reports. And I ask that this memorandum and the CEQ documents </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">it cites be made part of the hearing record. I also ask that </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Cooney's deposition be made part of the hearing record as </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">well.

</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Deutsch is a young and inexperienced former NASA public affairs </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">controlling what Federal scientists could say to the public and </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the media about their work. NASA scientist James Hansen is one </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">of the Nation's most esteemed experts on climate change. George </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">officer who was tasked with managing the public statements of </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator Christine Todd Whitman to ensure that it followed </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. Hansen and other NASA scientists. Today we will hear from </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">both of them about their experiences.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is even evidence in the documents we have obtained </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">that the White House edited an op-ed written by former EPA </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the White House line about climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> https://house.resource.org/110/org.c-span.197196-2.raw.txt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">end 815 capt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div></div></div></div><div></div>