“Last week’s revelations about the funding of the Heartland Institute show how a little money goes a long way in sowing misinformation about climate.”
John McQuaid writes at Forbes.com:
The rise of anti-science lobbying campaigns on climate, evolution and other topics seems to have thrown its targets – actual scientists – for a loop. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, they’re eyeing the situation with a mix of alarm and despair:
This year there has been a palpable chill to proceedings. Yes, good work was reported to the 8,000 who attended the various symposia and lectures at the meeting in Vancouver.
However, these pronouncements were set against a background of an entire intellectual discipline that realises that it, and its practitioners, are now under sustained attack.
“…university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians. At the last Republican party debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted he should be the presidential nominee simply because he had cottoned on earlier than his rivals Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney to the “hoax” of global warming”…
actually the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth actually told the truth about John Kerry in Vietnam, so maybe he’s got a point about the Skeptics ‘swiftboat’ science …