University of California (San Diego) science historian Naomi Oreskes has a new lecture on line, promoting her upcoming book: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

The Guardian just broke the news that a consultant to Shell and other oil and gas interests was the source of ‘evidence’ provided by the Institute of Physics in the current UK parliamentary review of the controversy in England over climate scientists’ emails stolen from servers at the University of East Anglia.

The Guardian reports:

“Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion”
…
The Guardian has established that the institute prepared its evidence, which was highly critical of the CRU scientists, after inviting views from Peter Gill, an IOP official who is head of a company in Surrey called Crestport Services.

According to Gill, Crestport offers "consultancy and management support services … particularly within the energy and energy intensive industries worldwide", and says that it has worked with "oil and gas production companies including Shell, British Gas, and Petroleum Development Oman".

Joe Romm at Climate Progress does a wonderful job here of deconstructing the insensible blathering of AccuWeather long-range forecaster Joe Bastardi, a man who dismisses climate change as "this red herring of an issue."

Amid his ravings, Bastardi complains that "many of the high circles out there with alphabet soup in front of their names" consider him "stupid," a contention that Romm generously refutes, saying:

"For the record, I don’t think he's stupid.  Stupid people rarely rise to a position of influence necessary to cause as much damage as Bastardi does."

Romm is right about so much, it seems churlish to argue with him on so trivial a point. But read Romm's post and ask yourself: If Bastardi doesn't suffer from terminal stupidity, what other pathology could explain his twisted position on climate science?

The award-winning author Bill McKibben has penned a great piece today comparing the OJ Simpson trial to the attack underway on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chage (IPCC) and climate science in general.

McKibben writes:

"In 1989, I could fit every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. Yet somehow, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger."

And,

"The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it.  The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?"

You can read McKibben's entire piece here: The Attack on Climate-Change Science Why It's the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century.