Climate scientists plan campaign against skeptics
WASHINGTON - Faced with increasing political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and have vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in last Tuesday’s election.
On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.
Some are prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk-radio and television shows.
John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate-change skeptics, is organizing a “Climate Rapid Response Team,” which so far has more than three dozen leading scientists to defend the consensus on global warming in the scientific community.
“This group feels strongly that science and politics can’t be divorced…
