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Only in America Do Haters Hate Like They Hate [Greg Laden's Blog]
Katherine Bagley of InsideClimate News has an interesting commentary on the idea that only in America do climate scientists face organized harassment.
She notes:
The harassment faced by U.S.-based climate scientists has been well documented in the media—but not the harassment of scientists in Europe, Canada or the rest of the world.
That’s because there hasn’t been much to report.
While outspoken scientists of human-caused climate change in the United States endure torrents of freedom of information requests, hate mail and even death threats from skeptics, their counterparts abroad have been free to do their work without fear.
That may well be so, but it is interesting to note that much of this harassment seems to come from Britain.
She goes on to note that one compelling theory as to why this happens is the lack of strong leadership vis-a-vis science and science policy in the US compared to the UK and various European countries. Here article is very much worth a look.
Two other factors may relate, IMHO: 1) Americans are jerks and 2) This:
While we’ve had our share of anomalous warm in the US, we are not the hardest hit region. Well, we may be catching up now, but there have been many times in the last several years when other regions are much warmer. This is one of the things that annoys me (annoys me = makes me livid) about Americans who claim that there is no effect of global warming, or even those who agree that global warming is real and important but dumbly ask “well, what will be the consequences?” Go look at other regions of the world suffering anomalous dry periods. To so so don’t fetishize the most anomalous numbers… moderately anomalous warm periods over regions with 200-600 mm of rain a year turn potentially usable land into unusable land. In places like the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, modest warming over a series of years kills tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. A few dry weeks at the wrong time in the Sudan or Ethiopia kills the seeds, in the Upper Plains in the US we irrigate that problem away. Big difference.
2012-09-12 12:16:19
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/09/12/only-in-america-do-haters-hate-like-they-hate/
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