White Lies… confusion… obfuscation… Karl Rove taught them well. When are we going to join forces with the downtrodden of the republican party and wrestle our nation back from the wealthy? That’s what it’s going to take! Before party, we are all Americans. The rich have a vested interest in keeping us separated and polarized. We’re being played like violins, folks.

The Truth About Denial

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. [...] But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. (emphasis mine) “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”
[...]Global warming

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”

As a result of the undermining of the science, all the recent talk about addressing climate change has produced little in the way of actual action. [...] Instead, every time the scientific case got stronger, “the American public yawned and bought bigger cars,” Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey congressman and physicist, recently wrote in the journal Science; politicians “shrugged, said there is too much doubt among scientists, and did nothing.”

Sharon Begley, Newsweek

Source: MSNBC.com

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