The Darker Side of Lexus’ “Darker Side of Green”?

To delude people that there is a “debate” about the fundamentals of climate-change science is a core objective of purveyors of Anti-Science Syndrome suffering Hatred Of a Livable Economic System [get it?]. A common tactic, that can all too easily gain traction, is to “challenge” scientists or those aligned with science to “debate” with the aim of either of two results:

1. Have the reality-based person (organization) reject the debate challenge (because they are unwilling to give credence to those peddling falsehoods) so that climate skeptics can use this in “see, they’re unwilling to debate because their arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny.
2. Have the reality-based person show up (and speak with caution) to have the (falsehood spewing, gamesmanship player) skeptic run rings around them on the stage to ‘win the audience’.

The real target, in any event, is to foster the appearance of a substantive debate to confuse the public when that is utterly misrepresentative of the state of the science.

Math whiz tackles the big carbon sink puzzle | Meet the minds behind all that climate change data | Grist

After grad school, Fung joined a climate-modeling team led by the well-known climate scientist James Hansen at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York.

How Prospects Cooled for U.S. Global Warming Bill

“There were Democratic majorities in the Congress and a president who clearly understood the issue,” says Gillian Caldwell, head of the national climate change advocacy campaign, 1Sky. “We had a better shot than we've ever had. The environmental community was better-funded and more coordinated than we have ever been on this issue.”

But having a numeric advantage in the Senate—even, for a time, the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster—was not enough for Democratic supporters of climate action if they couldn’t keep the party together. “Their problem is not Republicans; their problem is that about a third of their caucus is sitting on the fence of this one, not wanting to take a risky vote just to make a point," says Frank Maisano, spokesman for the law and lobbying firm firm Bracewell & Guiliani, which represents a number of coal-based electric utilities and industrial clients.