Virginia: Where the Laws of Atmospheric Chemistry Don't Apply

If nothing else, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli II is succeeding in making a name for himself. In May, he made headlines when he subpoenaed the University of Virginia demanding emails and documents from a climate scientist who used to work there, as Change.org writer Nikki Gloudeman discussed.

Why? A hunch.

This was during the manufactured Climategate “scandal.” Hackers published some private emails from British climate scientists – which did absolutely nothing to discredit the field, and these were successfully spun by conservatives as pseudo-proof against global warming. (For the record, an official U.K. government report released this week “re-re-re-re-vindicates” those researchers but has gone uncovered in the media.)

Cuccinelli was deeply moved by the fake scandal in Britain. Based on that alone, he chose to investigate a prominent American scientist for fraud, setting a new baseline legal precedent for probable cause that a local newspaper articulately dubbed “hey-it’s-not-impossible.”

Unsurprisingly, a judge quashed that subpoena. The British researchers have been cleared of wrongdoing again and again and again. And even Dr. Michael Mann, the American scientist targeted by Cuccinelli’s witch-hunt, was reviewed and exonerated.  Much ado about nothing. Cuccinelli attacked Mann simply to discredit his famous climate research, not because there was the slightest indication of a crime.

After these developments, this week, Mr. Cuccinelli pursued the only logical course of action: He served a new subpoena to UVA.

That humans are causing the climate to change through their greenhouse gas emissions is an unimpeachable scientific fact. I refuse to even provide a hyperlink in that sentence as if it’s news or needs citation.

During the Bush administration, the Republican Party adopted a documented strategy of baselessly yet publicly questioning climate science. Like a hurricane over warm water, that disinformation strategy has drawn strength from this election cycle’s combative conservative extremism. Today, the GOP finds itself in open opposition to science - not just against liberal policy prescriptions, but against science itself. America now officially has an anti-science party.

And as this battle is waged, we are entering truly dangerous territory.

Cuccinelli’s antics are only the latest volley in the Republican onslaught against climate science. You may recall Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s “Dirty Air Act,” the attempt to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases that authorizes the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. Unfamiliar readers can read the full story here, but in short, an amendment sought to reverse an objective scientific conclusion for transparently political purposes; a U.S. legislator attempted to literally replace climate science with political science in federal law.

Unable to challenge climate science on technical merits, the GOP has taken the fight to the streets. Or worse yet, to Congress. Beyond legislating their values, conservatives are now trying to write laws dictating what is true and what is false – arbitrarily striking down facts via legal decree. As if a 60-vote supermajority could by mutual self-delusion muzzle the laws of atmospheric chemistry. FYI, just in case that doesn’t work, they’re also trying to ban climate science from the classroom.

For a conservative movement that loves to hyperbolize about the liberal “nanny state,” it is despicably ironic to see the Tea-GOP enact this Orwellian crusade against reality. And it is alarming to watch it succeed. We must stand strong against them.

We will soon need to beat back another attack against the Clean Air Act, but right now, the battle lines are drawn in Virginia: join us and tell Virginia state officials that Ken Cuccinelli must end his war on science.

Photo credit: KcVaag via Flickr

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