If you want a couple of quick, albeit stomach-turning examples of the tactics the deniers and their ideological friends will stoop to, I can't think of anything more fitting than these two:

Climate Progress: Obama’s science adviser targeted by smear campaign:

[Quoting a Huffington Post piece, linked from the original]

Conservative media outlets are waging an online defamation campaign against Presidential Science Advisor Jon Holdren, using out-of-context quotes and misinformation to portray him as hell-bent on pursuing population control through the use of forced abortions and mass sterilization.

Fox News reported that Holdren was bent on adopting a “planetary regime” of population control, while blogger Michelle Malkin called him a “wackjob” who entertains policies that would mandate “forced abortions, mass sterilizations, and poisoning the water supply to control the population.” On February 27, FrontPage Magazine published an article decrying Holdren’s “globalist, redistributionist, Malthusian views.”

The attacks are widely off the mark. The evidence generally cited by critics is a 1977 textbook entitled “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment.” The authors — Holdren is one of three — in a chapter detailing various coercive and non-coercive policies for “population control” ultimately come out strongly against such policies. They argue that the harm caused by their adoption “would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent” of involuntary population control.

See Joe Romm’s coverage for much more detail.

RealClimate: Plimer’s homework assignment:

Some of you may be aware of George Monbiot’s so-far-unsuccessful attempt to pin down Ian Plimer on his ridiculous compendium of non-science. In response to Monbiot’s request for explanation and sources for some of Plimer’s more bizarre claims, Plimer has responded with a homework assignment that is clearly beyond even his (claimed) prowess. This is quite transparently a device to avoid dealing with Monbiot’s questions and is designed to lead to an argument along the lines of “Monbiot can’t answer these questions and so knows nothing about the science (and by the way, please don’t notice that I can’t cite any sources for my nonsense or even acknowledge that I can’t answer these questions either)”. (Chris Colose and Greenfyre have made similar points). It’s also worth pointing out as Andrew Dodds has done that each question is actually referencing a very well known contrarian and oft-debunked argument, but dressed up in pseudo-scientific complexity.

However, as a service both to Plimer and Monbiot (as well as anyone else interested), we give a quick scorecard on the relevance, actual scientific content (whether the questions can actually be answered) and sources for discussion for each of the, to be charitable, ‘odd’ questions. For relevance, we grade each question on a scale from 0 to 5, 0 being irrelevant to the issue of detection and attribution of 20th Century climate change, 5 being extremely relevant. For scientific content, we rate the reasonableness of the question posed (i.e. does it make any sense at all), from A to F (A being a very well posed question, F making no sense). For sources, we generally point to a paper or discussion that addresses the real issue.

See the post for some brass-knuckle science at work.

Not that it will shut up Plimer and people who try to pull similar middle-school (at best) stunts.


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