Don't miss this from Bill McKibben: "this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years"

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Climate-Change Deniers Have Done Their Job Well | TomDispatch

...this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them -- and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That -- have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with.  Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp.  That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot.  Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

...If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you -- because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age -- he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry -- plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

...In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican party on the issue.  This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming.  Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years.