From Jim Hansen's latest rant:

I drove off to a tar sands rally at the White House...IPCC WGII (2007) estimates that, if business-as-usual (BAU) CO2 emissions continue this century, between 21% and 52% of all species will be committed to extinction...Well-oiled Governors and Senators in Texas and Oklahoma bear a responsibility. Asserting that global warming is a hoax, they take actions that help BAU CO2 emissions continue, even if it requires spoiling pristine places to extract the dirtiest fuels on the planet.1 How can they get away with this? When will they finally be smoked out? Do the current drought and fires in Texas provide a legitimate basis for exposing the reprehensible behavior of these mountebanks, a chance to pull the curtain aside revealing the charlatans behind? 1 Our fossil fuel-government oligarchy will not tolerate even peaceful citizen objection to actions that could leave young people with a planet spiraling toward a desolate state. ...The media are partly responsible for the silent summer, as they have mainly chosen not to examine connections between climate anomalies and human-made causes. A cynic may ask whether their silent summer is related to increasing right-wing control of media and large advertising revenues from fossil fuel companies...A different sort of criticism, including an element of character assassination, has developed since then and has been leveled most heavily against scientists Ben Santer, Michael Mann and Phil Jones. The approach has included acquiring and digging into personal correspondences of scientists in search of any inappropriate or questionable statements, as well as fine-toothed scrutiny of their scientific analyses in search of any element, however minor, that could be criticized. The ultimate target of the critics in Santer's case was a specific sentence that Santer was responsible for as a lead author in the 1995 IPCC report: "Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate." The target in Mann's case was the temperature record of the past millennium, which Mann had shown to resemble a "hockey stick", bending upward into rapid warming in the past century. The target in Jones' case was his analysis of observations showing the rapid warming of the past century. The important point I wish to note is that each of these three targets, the scientific conclusions that provoked the critics and which they aimed to destroy or discredit, have been shown in subsequent analyses to have been correct, indeed, dead-on-the-mark...An epitome of the Washington syndrome is the cap-and-trade-with-offsets scheme that was hatched as a 'solution' to global warming. It assures big roles and a continuing stream of big money for big banks, big coal, big oil, and utilities. Who is left screwed and tattooed? You guessed it. John Q. Public. Every single cent in expanded corporation 'profits' and the compensation for multi-million-dollar executive salaries, including salaries for a new class of bankers, 'carbon traders', is extracted via increased energy costs paid by John Q. Public. Most proponents of cap-and-trade must admit that it is inferior to a simple honest rising price on carbon emissions (a fee collected from fossil fuel companies). Their defense of capand- trade is reduced to a fatuous "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". In fact capand- trade is not 'good' – it is designed to allow business-as-usual, leading to certain mining of all fossil fuels on the planet and a debacle for young people...It is time for all of us to get Tea-Party-angry about what our political system has become and about the intergenerational injustice being perpetrated on young people.