A blog entry (disguised as a Press Release) featured on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee homepage by committee staffer and noted SwiftBoater Marc Morano (formerly of CNS News) is disingenuously attacking Al Gore, The Weather Channel's lead climatologist, and Global Warming science, framing their efforts as an attack on Holocaust Survivors, believe it or not, and triggering a conservative blogswarm attack on The Weather Channel UPDATE: with the attack continuing in a fresh post just minutes ago.
Is this what we should expect from a committee chaired by my own Senator, Barbara Boxer? Is this another wacky Inhofe story? What can we (and the Senate and committee leadership) do about it? What's in the release? Do you need a Weatherwoman to know which way the wind blows in the Southern Hemisphere? Find out below the fold.
Not an official Science Friday or Congressional Committees Project or ePluribusMedia post, but inspired by all of those community efforts.
Yesterday, I was tipped off to this outrage, released Wednesday night, by a fellow Climate Project trainee posting on our internal discussion board. He had posted the text with a TinyURL link, so it took a little research to figure out that (a) this is a blog post, not a Press Release, and (b) It was coming from the Senate Committee.
It was written by Marc Morano, [former?] Communications Director for the committee, who was previously known as Rush Limbaugh’s “Man in Washington” as reporter and producer for the Rush Limbaugh Television Show; he was also instrumental in the 'Swift Boat' attacks on Kerry in 2004. Here's what SourceWatch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy) has to say about him:
Many believe that is it Marc Morano who has been behind Inhofe's latest attacks on the science of climate change [5], and this was confirmed by an appearance of Morano at the 2006 Society of Environmental Journalists, where Morano was on a climate change panel with Andrew Revkin (New York Times) and Bill Blakemore (ABC News)
Conservative Web Watch's blog also carries more-recent cautionary notes on his current job:
Morano seems to have brought the same journalistic standards to his Senate gig that he used at CNS to great effect in promoting the allegations of a disgraced ex-NASA spokesman (George Deutsch, the guy who lied about graduating from college) in an attempt to discredit global warming scientist James Hansen. Morano also co-wrote the smear job on Rep. John Murtha in January -- you know, the one that featured the dead, the disgrunted and the incapacitated casting aspersions on Murtha's military record.
Our very own Hunter looked into his history a year ago:
In 2000, Patrick Moore made a documentary with Marc Morano for American Investigator Television. The film was set in the Brazilian Amazon and promoting the notion, by Moore, that the rainforest was "more than 90 percent intact", and that mining and logging were of negligible environmental impact.
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The Press Release Blog Entry Itself
Note that this is a Public Domain Senate document, paid for by our tax dollars, so more-liberal quoting than of news stories is legal
The lead of the item is an attack on The Weather Channel, based on a TWC One Degree blog post, Junk Controversy not Junk Science from last December:
The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.
Morano's Senate blog post seems to have been distributed through right-wing media channels (blogs and talk radio?), directly calling attention to and inviting comments ("[Note: It is also worth taking a look at the comments section at the bottom of Cullen’s blog, very entertaining.]" triggering a flood of hundreds of negative comments (running perhaps 25:1 against) on Ms. Cullen's blog post Wednesday and Thursday this week; apparently SlashDot picked it up as well, with the 'censorship' angle. As you'd expect in any forum allowing anonymous comments with made-up handles, many of the posts were sexist, anti-science, blaming the massive left-wing conspiracy, calling her a McCarthyite, climate Nazi or fascist who promotes witch trials, calling for her decertification, firing, and/or auditing, boycotts of Weather Channel advertisers, and far, far worse. The most common meme: if you can't predict the weather for six hours/two weeks ahead, why should we believe your long-term predictions?
Of course, most of the comments ignore the actual original post's conclusion, triggered by a capitalweather.com interview with a DC-area meteorologist that exemplified "the unfortunate divide that exists right now between the climate and weather communities" (emphasis added):
Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy. If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather. It's not a political statement...it's just an incorrect statement.
I agree with every meteorologist who says the topic of global warming has gotten too political. But that's why talking about the science is so important!
Note, at no point does she suggest revoking credentials (the assertion of most of the comments), or censoring what meteorologists say on the air. She's just asking for demonstrated knowledge of basic science as released by the AMS to be included as part of the criteria for granting of the credential, which differentiates forecasters who specialize in reading and pointing and smiling from meteorologists who study the science itself. She responded with a fresh post Thursday (plus a video response):
I am a scientist. And I'm a skeptic.
AND after more than a century of research -- based on healthy skepticism -- scientists have learned something very important about our planet. It's warming up -- glaciers are melting, sea level is rising and the weather is changing. The primary explanation for this warming is the carbon dioxide released from -- among other things -- the burning of fossil fuels.
With that knowledge comes responsibility.
She invited anyone with other points of view to come on the show or post a blog entry. Alas, the trolls are already piling onto the latest entry, continuing the name-calling and misconstruing of the original post.
Mr. Morano's blog entry also seems to be making a big thing of a Weather Channel guest last September, staff writer David Roberts of Grist magazine, referencing war-crimes trials and Nuremberg, using it to attack Mr. Gore's phrase climate change denier and framing it as an insult to Holocaust survivors:
Cullen’s call for decertification of TV weatherman [sic] who do not agree with her global warming assessment follows a year (2006) in which the media, Hollywood and environmentalists tried their hardest to demonize scientific skeptics of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to "Holocaust deniers" and former Vice President turned foreign lobbyist Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as "global warming deniers."
There's more, linking Gore's interview with Grist, outlining the financial advantages' of the 'climate alarmists', trying to compare the Sierra Club Foundation and Natural Resources Defense Council to the 'often media derided Competitive Enterprise Institute', but I think you get the idea. Read the Whole Thing and note that the links are almost entirely to previous press releases on the same site, plus a CNS News special report from 2005.
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UPDATE: new post continues the attack and the lies, continuing to allege that Dr. Cullen wants to "strip away their "Seal of Approval" ." and "her proposal for decertification amounts to nothing less than intimidation and suppression of science.. The latest post links to a number of the right-wing talk radio, blog, and paper posts and articles triggered by the initial post, and more cherry-picked scientists. "we quoted directly from her blog" (sigh)
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Possible Actions - Macro and Micro
This is perhaps something that the Majority on the committee should rebut or provide some balancing perspective on? The last release on the committee's home page on the Left (figuratively and literally) is an early-December anouncement by Sen. Jeffords. There's a minority blog promoted with a banner, but no majority blog. Hey, Senators, I know you're busy celebratin' and legislatin' and all, but you're missin' a great opportunity here to balance out the communications. This is important stuff, we're just talking about losing a few more cities and sea life.
I couldn't find anything confirming whether Morano still is Communications Director for the committee, or who else is if he's not. If he still is, that sounds like something to contact your Senator (especially committee members) about.
The dKospedia Congressional Committes Project section on this committee could use some love, as well as the committee's primary dKosPedia page. Having better data can only help us. The wikiPedia entry on the committee has more data, but no real depth besides history of chairs.
As of this writing, the Senate blog entry hadn't made it into Google News anywhere yet, at least based on searching the headline. We've got some good climate people here who could probably refute the junk point-by-point; I invite their comments and diaries as well.
The Weather Channel blog entries (original and yesterday's) could use some reality-based community love aka factual perspectives and debunking of the wacko comments; you can find lots of good resources at RealClimate, plus kossack Patrick Kennedy's own BlueClimate (UPDATE: He covers Senator Boxer's Reuters interview in a post this morning); please suggest others in the comments, as well as other actions that could be effective. I'm going to be offline for significant periods in the next few days, so I'll pass the torch to whoever can keep it in motion.