U.S. politicians aren't just denying that climate change is happening, they're actively using their position and power to try to intimidate climate scientists into keeping silent on the subject, says Raymond S. Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In his new book, Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up, Bradley recounts a tale that should be familiar to those have followed, for example, the travails of Michael E. Mann, a climatologist at Penn State who has been on the receiving end of a campaign of terror waged by none other than the Attorney General of Virginia.
Congressional hearings are full of thinly-credentialed non-scientists brought in to parrot denialist politician's favorite talking points, fed to them by the oil and gas industries that fund their campaigns. Bradley's seen it all, and even been in a few of these hearings himself — it's a sad tale that historians in Survivaballs will no doubt look back on with the same mixture of consternation and incomprehension we now reserve for the battle over the geocentric universe.
