I haven’t read all the new material yet that my good friends at DeSmogBlog are producing. But I have long been suspicious of the attacks on leading climate researchers, like the recently vindicated Michael Mann, because they are so obviously diversionary, and yet also so obviously strategic.

There is no doubt that those attacks have been mounting; I believe a new and full scale “war on science” is afoot in the climate arena, something I hope to say more about shortly.

But in the meantime, it appears that following ClimateGate and GlacierGate, we are once again getting some revelations taking on the other side. Maybe this means the pendulum will shift, and good science can move back off the ropes, where it has been for too long. We’ll see. I’ll be watching closely.

Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle has a really important article out about how, basically, the good guys lost a major battle in the climate war over the past few months. Some combination of the weather, ClimateGate, the relative failure of Copenhagen, and now, the decreasing likelihood of the U.S. Senate passing cap and trade have shifted a mood of climate optimism–which I certainly felt about a year ago–to one of deep despair. “The climate surrounding climate change has changed, and not for the better for those seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” writes Berger. Sadly, I have to agree.

What went wrong? That’s a very long story, and Berger relates much of it. For my part, I am convinced the fundamental factor is that our camp egregiously misunderestimated the skeptic/denial camp and what it was capable of. Our thinking went something like this: “the science keeps getting stronger, and now we have Obama…the tide has turned.” And so we were lulled into a false sense of security. Now, there is a hell of a lot of regrouping to do, and I am not even sure where to begin. But one thing is certain: We should never again assume that science alone is going to make the political difference on this issue, no matter how strong it gets.

Things have been so nuts for me over the past few days, I haven’t even been able to blog my Washington Post Outlook piece from Sunday about the need for better science communication in the wake of the devastating blow dealt by the ClimateGate scandal. The piece has been drawing tons of supportive private emails, as well as lots of online critiques and reactions, and fully 800 plus comments on the Post’s website, many of them from climate deniers.

Anyway, the article starts like this:

The battle over the science of global warming has long been a street fight between mainstream researchers and skeptics. But never have the scientists received such a deep wound as when, in late November, a large trove of e-mails and documents stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were released onto the Web.

In the ensuing “Climategate” scandal, scientists were accused of withholding information, suppressing dissent, manipulating data and more. But while the controversy has receded, it may have done lasting damage to science’s reputation: Last month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 40 percent of Americans distrust what scientists say about the environment, a considerable increase from April 2007. Meanwhile, public belief in the science of global warming is in decline.

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. “I haven’t had all that many other scientists helping in that effort,” Mann told me recently.

This isn’t a new problem….

Read here, there’s much more….on science communication strategies, how to fight the evolution war, and so forth. In essence, the piece builds on some of the central arguments of Unscientific America, but strained through the new example of ClimateGate, which is surely the number one reason yet that scientists have got to mobilize in the way that we recommended in the book. Hope you enjoy…

While in Copenhagen, I spoke with the folks from Fora.tv for a ten minute interview covering a wide range of topics. These included the dysfunctional way in which our culture processes information about science in general, and about climate science in particular; the continuing stream of misinformation about global warming (particularly the bogus claims that we haven’t had any warming in a decade); the increasing allure of the geoengineering option as progress on emission cuts continues to stall; the reasons for heeding climate models, despite their flaws; and the dangerous possibility that the warming we ultimately see could be on the high end of the current projections.

You can watch it all here, and I have also embedded it below:

It has been brought to my attention that I am mentioned, once, in the “ClimateGate” email stash. If you go here and search for my name, you find this, an email from Tom Wigley of NCAR, who I have interviewed for various stories:

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: [Fwd: [Fwd: FW: Press Release from The Science & Environmental Policy Project]]
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:17:14 -0700
Cc: carl mears <mears@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Frank Wentz <frank.wentz@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Steven Sherwood <Steven.Sherwood@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, John Lanzante <John.Lanzante@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “‘Dian J. Seidel’” <dian.seidel@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Melissa Free <Melissa.Free@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Karl Taylor <taylor13@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Steve Klein <klein21@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, Leopold Haimberger <leopold.haimberger@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “Thorne, Peter” <peter.thorne@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “‘Philip D. Jones’” <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

Dear all,

I think the scientific fraud committed by Douglass needs to
be exposed. His co-authors may be innocent bystanders, but
I doubt it.

In normal circumstances, what Douglass has done would cause
him to lose his job — a parallel is the South Korean cloning
fraud case.

I have suggested that someone like Chris Mooney should be
told about this.

Tom.

In searching my emails, I was never told about this, and certainly never wrote anything about the situation, which I am not familiar with. As a journalist, though, I certainly do want to receive tips of things to write about, and I frequently do from a wide variety of folks. With only the most rare of exceptions, I never get around to writing anything; but in this case, I wasn’t even tipped.

Still, I can see why scientists concerned about global warming, and accepting of the scientific consensus, would want me to cover the topic, including its political side. By 2007 I already had a track record for exposing the misinformation campaign to mislead the public about climate change, something I continue to do today. And given that there is such a misinformation campaign–with “ClimateGate” being the latest and perhaps the most severe example–we need scientists and journalists alike striving to set the record straight.

I guess that that’s my way of saying that, as with virtually all of the “ClimateGate” emails that I have seen, the single one mentioning my name is not very surprising–especially as it regards me, who never even heard of this until now.

There is a really good piece up at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media that looks at the top five most prominent issues raised in “ClimateGate”, analyzes the relevant emails in context, and finds some concerns but not much wrong–with the notable exception of the suggestion that emails subject to a Freedom of Information request be deleted. The article’s author, Zeke Hausfather, concludes:

It is unfortunate, if perhaps not surprising, that the quotes from the e-mails that have gotten the most publicity from skeptics and in some media strongly distort the views and actions of the scientists in question, contributing to a perception of collusion to manipulate the climate data itself.

Nothing contained in the e-mails, however, suggests that global temperature records are particularly inaccurate or, worse, that they have been manipulated to show greater warming. The  certainly troubling conduct exposed in some of the e-mails has little bearing on the fundamental science that strongly indicates that the world is warming and that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause.

You should read the whole piece, for it clearly and soberly shows just how much this has been blown out of proportion.

Here’s a Newsweek.com bloggy profile hailing the tough-to-dispute successes of a leading nemesis climate progress, Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com:

With “Climategate”—the release last month of thousands of hacked e-mails showing debate about climate change may have been stifled—[Morano] is now getting more attention than ever before. As of last Friday, according to one the many e-mails this—and probably most—reporters get, he’s currently stationed at ground zero of the climate-change debate, Copenhagen, which he points out in e-mails, “is extremely cold.” (Several independent reviews of the hacked e-mails conclude that some scientists were engaging in embarrassing and at times unethical discussions, but the scientific consensus showing anthropogenic global warming was neither compromised nor fabricated).

He has been on countless news shows lately, including the BBC and CNN where he’s engaged in what he described to me as “lively and hostile debates.” He’s also appeared on the national radio shows of Sean Hannity, Fred Thomspon, and Lars Larsen. One of his fans (and a former boss of Morano’s) is Rush Limbaugh, who last month inadvertently shut down Morano’s site by urging listeners to follow his coverage of Climategate. The race to Morano’s site came after Rush gave this blessing: “Morano’s probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy─other than me, of course─doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what’s going on here.”

Rush is absolutely right. The two of them are driving waves of outrage against climate scientists that are significantly influencing the media and thus, probably, public opinion. And there is, in my mind, little effective counter.

It is clear that the GOP now has a new denial spokesperson–Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. I already blogged her misleading radio address on “ClimateGate” and Copenhagen; now, watch her in this CNN debate with Ed Markey:

It’s all here, folks: We’ve got the massive over-interpretation of “ClimateGate”, global cooling claims (both about the 1970s and about the present), the assertion that “climate change is cyclical,” that it is “unsettled science” and “it depends on whose science you’re looking at,” and so forth. It’s bad, bad news.

Blackburn is quickly becoming the new James Inhofe….

It’s pretty unfair to call somebody “anti-science.” I mean, everybody likes science, right?

That’s what I always thought–at least until fairly recently. That Daniel Henninger Wall Street Journal article got me thinking otherwise, a bit–but only a bit.

But now comes a piece in Investors.com (“powered by” Investor’s Business Daily) by David J. Theroux, who is head of the Independent Institute, a think tank that in the past has been a recipient of ExxonMobil largesse. “Science is not the final arbiter of truth,” blazes the headline–but hey, we all know authors don’t write their headlines.

But the rest of the article is actually in a similar vein: (more…)

The latest column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post is a fascinating read. He starts out with a well reasoned account of why the stolen climate emails from East Anglia cannot be taken to undermine the global edifice of climate science:

But the hacked climate e-mails reveal a scandal, not a hoax. Even if every question raised in these e-mails were conceded, the cumulative case for global climate disruption would be strong. The evidence is found not only in East Anglian computers but also in changing crop zones, declining species, melting ice sheets and glaciers, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. No other scientific theory explains these changes as well as global warming related to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Over millennia, the climate shifts in natural cycles. But we seem to be increasing the pace of change so rapidly that plants, animals and humans may not be able to adequately adjust.

Bravo! This is better than I could have put it. And yet unfortunately, Gerson then somehow goes on blame the scientists quoted in the emails for undermining the whole scientific enterprise:

This professional objectivity is precisely what the hacked e-mails call into question. Some of these scientists are merely activists, deeply invested in a predetermined outcome. They assume that political change is the goal; the scientific enterprise is the means — like a political ad or a campaign speech. But without trust in disinterested, scientific judgments on climate, most non-scientists will resist costly, speculative, legislative actions. When the experts become advocates, no one believes the experts or listens to the advocates.

It is an irony of the first order. Having accused others of a “war on science,” it is climate scientists who are assaulting the authority of science more effectively than anyone else.

I’m not saying that every scientist whose emails have been quoted in “ClimateGate” behaved in a perfectly appropriate manner. However, although he whirls around the phrase “war on science,” Gerson clearly doesn’t know what it means.

What it means, among other things, is that the very scientists now in question were at that moment, when they were writing those emails, subject to politically motivated data requests, harassment, and attempts to seed the scientific literature with questionable papers, all activities tied to fossil fuel interests and their supporting think tanks and politicians. All of this is documented amply in The Republican War on Science.

So for Gerson to describe the scientists as arrogant, “a community coddled by global elites, extensively funded by governments, celebrated by Hollywood and honored with international prizes”–this is ludicrous. These are people who are regularly slandered, pulled before Congress, and indeed, subject to email hacking. They have been under intense and politically motivated fire for years. And, yes, they developed a bit of a siege/herd mentality as a result. Who wouldn’t?

The East Anglia emails cannot be read in any other context but this one.