There’s something about the words “President Lou Dobbs” that just warps reality. How does Dobbs/Palin 2012 strike you?

Or maybe Palin/Beck?

Huckabee/Palin?

Or (shudder) Bachmann/Paul?

I’m having a hard time shuffling these cards to look good.

The Washington Post’s Andrew Freedman interviewed science historian Spencer Weart about the stolen climate science emails (known at the more hysterical blogs as the “scandal of the century”); Weart has a good perspective on the nontroversy.

Andrew Freedman: What effects do you think this will have on public perceptions of climate science and climate scientists?

SW: I don’t expect this to have much impact on public perceptions of climate and climate scientists. Opinions have become so fixed that it would take serious evidence to shift a significant number of people. Since the late 1980s, just about every year and sometimes almost every month, a group of people (mostly the same ones) have exclaimed, “Now in these latest (whatever) we finally have proof that there is no need to worry about climate change!” There is a segment of the public that has believed every new claim. The rest will continue to doubt such claims in the absence of truly solid proof.

AF: What do you think this story reveals about the conduct of climate science?

SW: Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science—debating one another’s data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration—and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their time defending their personal reputations against ignorant or slanderous attacks.

The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.

Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers. In blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers. Extraordinary and, frankly, weird. Climate scientists are naturally upset, exasperated, and sometimes goaded into intemperate responses… but that was already easy to see in their blogs and other writings.

RealClimate has an update to the story, with context for some of the issues that have been raised.

And Steven Andrew has a post at the Los Angeles Examiner with more information about the one email all the anti-AGW blogs are hammering to death, containing this quote about a “trick” used to correct data:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Andrew interviewed Michael Mann, the “Mike” to whom the email refers, to find out exactly what this was about:

Steven Andrew: You are the Mike referred in the quoted email correct? When was that email written?

Michael Mann: Yes, the email is from ‘99.

SA: Who wrote it?

MM: Phil Jones

SA: What does Phil Jones mean by “hide”?

MM: I think we expressed this best in the “RealClimate” article. Here’s an adapted version of the text: “As for the ‘hide the decline’, comment, I assume what Phil Jones was referring to was the well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy data diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand the reason for the “divergence”.”

SA: What was the Mike’s “trick”?

MM: All he (apparently) meant by “Mike’s Nature trick” was us, in our original ‘98 Nature article, showing the instrumental record after the proxy record ends (1980). Since both records were clearly demarcated and labeled in our article, there was really no room for misinterpretation of what we were showing. So while it’s unclear exactly what Phil Jones meant, “trick” would appear to mean “clever way to deal with the conundrum” that the proxy record ends in 1980. The easy way out of that conundrum is to just show in addition the more recent data from the instrumental record. Again, in our Nature article, this was all clearly labeled and explained, nothing secret or hidden.

SA: Is this much adieu about nothing, again?

MM: Of course. This is about the climate denial noise machine trying to drum up a manufactured controversy in advance of the most important climate summit (Copenhagen) in years.

Indeed.

President Obama’s scheme to indoctrinate America’s children is proceeding apace, with new initiatives to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics: White House Pushes Science and Math Education.

To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.

President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, officials say.

The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.

Science and engineering societies are promising to provide volunteers to work with students in the classroom, culminating in a National Lab Day in May. The MacArthur Foundation and technology industry organizations are giving out prizes in a contest to develop video games that teach science and math.

“The different sectors are responding to the president’s call for all hands on deck,” John P. Holdren, the White House science adviser, said in an interview.

The other parts of the campaign include a two-year focus on science on “Sesame Street,” the venerable public television children’s show, and a Web site, connectamillionminds.com, set up by Time Warner Cable, that provides a searchable directory of local science activities. The cable system will contribute television time and advertising to promote the site.

The White House has also recruited Sally K. Ride, the first American woman in space, and corporate executives like Craig R. Barrett, a former chairman of Intel, and Ursula M. Burns, chief executive of Xerox, to champion the cause of science and math education to corporations and philanthropists.

While welcoming the new programs, some people say it doesn’t focus enough on improving the quality of school instruction.

“I think a lot of this is good, but it is missing more than half of what needs to be done,” said Mark S. Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. “It has nothing to do with the day-to-day teaching,” said Dr. Schneider, who was the commissioner of education statistics at the Department of Education from 2005 to 2008.

LGF readers are probably aware that I’m a strong supporter of good science education, so I’m really pleased to see the President putting a spotlight on the subject — and curious to see how the right wing will attack these initiatives, because you know they will.

It’s an interesting contrast with Sarah Palin, who says in her book:

… she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.”

If you want to know if someone’s blowing a dog whistle, ask the dogs.

Beck insists his critics are imagining things, that he does not engage in racial fear-mongering, that a string of guests with ties to hate groups do not form a meaningful pattern, and that he’s not a racist. It occurred to me the other day that if you really want to know whether Beck and his guests are blowing racial dog-whistles, it’s best to ask a dog.

I decided to reach out to Don Black, the avowed white nationalist who runs the Web site Stormfront.org, the country’s leading “Discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival.” But Black hung up on me. I next tried to get in touch with David Duke, the former gubernatorial candidate and current head of the European American Unity and Rights Organization. Duke, too, had little interest in talking to me, likely because of my past association with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of white supremacist groups.

Unable to get through to the highest-profile spokesmen of the racist grass roots, I took a page from the other side and trawled their Web sites for insight. I scanned Davidduke.com and Stormfront.org to see what they had to say, if anything, about Beck. Admittedly, this method is not scientific, and certainly folks on the left don’t like it when righties cherry-pick an extreme comment from Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and pretend the whole site can be summed up by such extremism.

On the other hand, Stormfront.org isn’t a media organization but a self-described discussion board. And when it comes to Beck, the discussions are fairly positive. On both David Duke’s Web site and Stormfront, Beck’s July 28 claim that President Obama harbors a “deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture” was met with attention and appreciation.

Duke was heartened by the discussion it generated, and placed it in a larger context. “A lot of stuff is happening in the world of race relations and little of it points towards a post-racial society,” Duke noted. “Beck is steadily losing advertisers, but his viewers seem to be sticking with him … White desperation is manifesting itself in various forms.”

Beck’s charge that the president hates white people sparked a more expansive discussion at Stormfront.org. Some participants saw Beck as an important ally in the White Nationalist cause. Others were skeptical, viewing him as a clueless conservative version of Lenin’s “useful idiot.” But some of Stormfront’s most active members generally agreed that, whether he was fully conscious or not, Beck was nudging his audience toward an embrace of racial consciousness.