Latest attempt to question climate change is junk

[n2doc]

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Computer hackers recently penetrated the server at the University of East Anglia in Britain, and caught academics in the Climate Research Unit in gossipy conversation about how to discredit global warming critics.

Right-wing media have extracted quotes, cried "Junk Science," jazzed up a buzzword -- "Climategate" -- with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times headlining an editorial: "Hiding evidence of global cooling."

It's a classic example of Junk Propaganda. The klutzy profs at East Anglia have become devil figures in a canny disinformation campaign, directed into an ideologues' echo chamber.

Or as Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Newsweek, "The contrarians or deniers do not have a scientific leg to stand on. Their aim is to win a public relations battle, or at least get a draw, which may be enough to stymie the actions that are needed to stabilize climate."

If you apply a critical eye or ear to FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report or the right-wing Daily Telegraph in Britain, you'll recognize a strategy defined in a famous tobacco industry memo on how to discredit the medical consensus that cigarettes cause lung cancer and emphysema:

"Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

more:

http://www.seattlepi.com/connelly/412728_joel30.html

[eppur_se_muova]

1. As was the previous attempt, and the one before that, and ... nt

[tabatha]

2. Some of those responses are so bad it is scary.

[joshcryer]

3. I'm seeing CRU email hack conspiracy crap on half of the comment sections on environ news stories...

...I've read. It's crazy. I think they're making a concerted effort to read, say, Google news for environmental stories, particularly as it relates to global warming, and hammering the comment sections of whatever comes up.

[twitomy]

4. A prescient quote from Ike

You know, the same guy who warned us about the military industrial complex:

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present; and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. - Dwight D. Eisenhower-1961

[bhikkhu]

5. It reminds me of another argument we used to hear

When * was prez and we argued against the war, deregulation and a host of repug economic policies based on how they were going to wreck the economy of this country. For years they made crap up and manipulated and cherry picked the data to make it seem like everything was rosy...until suddenly it wasn't.

I'd guess the whole climate argument will go about the same, and it might be a couple more years before the reality of it "opens its gaping maw", so to speak.