Professional climate change deniers' crusade continues

international | environment | other press Tuesday November 02, 2010 17:51 by Ajax

Michael Mann writes about the ongoing campaign by the climate Change deniers to not just deny Global Warming. Some, funded by Oil companies like Shell, have a broader agenda of repealing environmental measures such as fuel efficiency for vehicles. Full article at url.

I'd like to say I was surprised when news broke a year ago that emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, had been hacked into and leaked, and that scientists' personal emails were being quoted out of context to disingenuously imply impropriety on their part. But I wasn't.

Books such as Merchants of Doubt by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have detailed how front groups for the fossil-fuel industry have been waging an orchestrated, well-funded campaign against climate science and climate scientists for more than two decades. Hacking into the CRU's email was simply the latest skirmish in this war against science, timed to forestall any progress towards lowering carbon emissions at the Copenhagen climate conference being held about a month later.

In January this year, the state of Virginia swore in Ken Cuccinelli as its attorney general. Cuccinelli was already known to have a radical agenda that included trying to end protection of the rights of gay college students. This agenda soon proved to extend in other directions, too.

In February, Cuccinelli filed a request with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about its findings that greenhouse gases endanger public health. He said that he was also looking for judicial review in the federal court. As his press statement explained, he took issue with "unelected bureaucrats with political agendas", who, he alleged, were using "falsified" data to regulate US industry and destroy the economy.