“The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me.” —Kerry Emanuel, former Republican

…“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”…

…“The country’s going to become more educated, and that’s not going to break our way, as a party, if we are denying what 90 out of 100 scientists say,” Croswhite argues. “If the scientific community is generally accepting of something, you need to trust that.”…

Remember when environmental protection was a bipartisan effort?

A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives. A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 9 percent of scientists self-identified as conservative, while 52 percent called themselves liberals. Only 6 percent of American scientists self-identified as Republicans. This state of affairs is bad for the nation, and bad for science.

It was not always this way. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon won the votes of 31 percent of physicists, 42 percent of biologists, 52 percent of geologists, and 62 percent of agricultural scientists (compared with 43.4 percent of the popular vote). While these data do not include party affiliation, they suggest that the scientific community of the late 1960s was much more evenly divided between the two major parties than it is now, and, with the exception of physicists, slightly more conservative than the American voting public at large.

Why have scientists fled the Republican Party? The obvious answer is that the Republican Party has spurned science. Consider Mitt Romney’s shifting position on climate change. As governor of Massachusetts in 2004, he laid out a plan for protecting the state’s climate. As presidential candidate, he has said that climate change is real, but has questioned whether humans are causing it. His stance is consistent with the Republican Party platform, which unambiguously calls for expanding the production and use of the fossil fuels that drive climate change. In 2009, Paul Ryan accused climate scientists of “clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change,” echoing false accusations leveled against climatologists at the University of East Anglia. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan exemplify the conservative turn against science, but what explains it?

(continue)

jtotheizzoe:

climateadaptation:

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an anti-climate change op-ed signed by 16 scientists. None of the authors are climate scientists, nor do peer review research in the field.

No matter, it got published anyway. And shortly after the piece was published, real climate scientists came out off the woodwork to condemn the WSJ and the so-called scientists that wrote it. Andrew Revkin of the NYTimes has been tracking the pushback, here.

I’m happy to say that the WSJ published a rebuttal from real climate scientists and researchers, and it is epic. A taste:

Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

You published “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter.

Via Revkin

Previously, for background.

cwnl:

returntothestars:

James Taylor of Forbes magazine, the same James Taylor and Forbes magazine who attempted to debunk global warming using a paper published by a creationist and ExxonMobil associate, is at it again.

This time, Taylor has dug up a 2007 debate, at the end of which, 46% of the non-climate-scientist-audience was persuaded that climate change was “not a crises.” That’s up from 30% before the debate. Taylor finds this persasuive enough to declare victory for the climate science denialists.

Yeah, that’s nice. Meanwhile, 97% of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is real.

What an interesting but expected duo; Creationism and climate change denialists.

(via ikenbot)

The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism looks at both the evidence that human activity is causing global warming and the ways that climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can mislead by presenting only small pieces of the puzzle rather than the full picture. 

EUREKA! I think I’ve found it:

A place to look into claims being made by Climate Skeptics. This searchable archive is a great place to get straight forward info on climate science. All subjects are covered and it’s in plain language.