Drown Out the Science With Smear Campaigns and Political Witchhunts

Skeptics are a necessary part of the scientific process, especially when it comes to the climate which is far too complex to predict with 100% accuracy.

However, just because someone doesn't like what the science says, that's no excuse to bully, harass, launch a smear campaign, or better yet, a political witch hunt..

Yet conservative ideologues, even when the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the US continues to threaten the ecosystem in the most profound ways possible, they cling to their ideology and do whatever it takes to triumph, even if that means further destruction to our habitat.

Back in April, Lord Oxburgh, former chair of the House of Lords science and technology select committee, cleared scientists who were involved in the UEA's hacked emails "scandal".

However, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) insisted on completing an inquiry of their own and completed a FOIA request for all emails between NASA staff relating to a mistake in the calculation of the US temperature data series. Then complained NASA was not forthcoming despite the fact that anyone can read all of the released emails here.  Rumor has it that the results of the independent inquiry are in, and  supposedly conclude the same as Lord Oxburth: Scientists were disorganized but did not alter their results.  The CEI decided not to publicize the outcome of their FOIA request.

The National Academy of Sciences has now published a paper, Expert credibility in climate change, showing that almost all the scientists (97-98%) who know the most about climate change believe anthropogenic climate change is real, while the skeptics tended to be scientists who knew significantly less about it.

Global Surface Temperature Change

"We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade, despite large year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Nino-La Nina cycle of tropical ocean temperature. Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010."

"Whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly." -- Lord Oxburgh