An Idiotic Voice on CO2 as Science Adviser? - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is reporting on its blog that John Holdren, the past president of that group and a prominent voice pressing for action to curb greenhouse gases and boost energy research, appears to be President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for science adviser.

Some background on Holdren is here.

Excerpt:

[Holdren:] Another problem is that a denier can tell a lie in a single sentence that takes a scientist three paragraphs to rebut, but the scientist never gets the three paragraphs in the sound bite culture that our media represent. And so, the denialists, even though they are small in number, they have no credible arguments, very few of them have any scientific credentials, get attention out of all proportion to their credentials, the merit of their arguments, and that delays the generation of public understanding and political will to do the things we need to do to address this challenge. There are a lot of things we can do, but we have been delaying doing them, in part because the so-called skeptics, or more accurately deniers or denialists, have basically obscured reality for much of the public and indeed for many of our policymakers.