Climate Change Scientists On the Defensive

Climate Change science continues to face escalating attacks, despite increasing evidence in science journals, news media and the blogosphere that the planet is warming.

A recent post by Tom Yulsman in the CEJournal shows graphs from the National Snow and Ice Data Center tracing shrinking sea ice cover in the Arctic from 1979 to the present. Here is more data on the Arctic melt season from NASA.

At the same time, a story posted Monday by Kate Sheppard on Mother Jones details a new lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the Environmental Protection Agency, feared to be just the beginning of an onslaught of attacks on proposed environmental regulation, waged by business lobbies taking advantage of recent scandals involving the IPCC's credibility and the supposed "Climategate cover-ups."

The Chamber of Commerce lawsuit involves the EPA's endangerment finding classifying greenhouse gasses as dangerous to human health. Because of this finding, emissions can now be legally regulated under the Clean Air Act. Although the Chamber of Commerce does not have much legal ground to stand on, the suit will give them another chance to voice skeptical views of climate change, muddling the perceptions of factions of the public that are already on the fence about climate change.

Al Gore wrote a clear and compelling Op-Ed for the New York Times last Sunday, reiterating that gaps in scientific knowledge always exist, but overwhelming evidence points toward unequivocal anthropogenic global warming.

Unfortunately, as Don Braman of George Washington Law School said, "If you have people who are skeptical of the data on climate change, you can bet that Al Gore is not going to convince them at this point." (See my post from last week.)