Climate Science Under Attack

 - Industry funded disinformation attack is ongoing against climate scientists. This attack against climate scientists is taken straight form the playbook of the tobacco industry decades earlier attacking the science supporting cancer from smoking, threatening the lives of scientists and bribing legislators (One bribe recipient was Republican John Boehner).

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harrass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid.

But now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian think tank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. He’s telling it in a book out on March 6, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines.

“They see scientists like me who are trying to communicate the potential dangers of continued fossil fuel burning to the public as a threat. That means we are subject to attacks, some of them quite personal, some of them dishonest,” Mann said in an interview conducted in and around State College, home of Penn State University, where he is a professor. James West

War between Science and Antiscience? Or just corporate funded disinformation from big oil and their friends on the right.