A Climate Truth-Tellers Honor Roll of 2013

By Wen Stephenson, The Nation

25 December 13

t’s the closing weeks of 2013 and The Boston Globe, the recently acquired real estate of proud Red Sox owner John W. Henry, still publishes climate denial on its Opinion page. This puts Mr. Henry in fine company, so to speak, as shown in an important new study of the climate-denial funding machine from Drexel University’s Robert J. Brulle and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Of course, Henry’s funding of his op-ed page can’t be compared with the billion-dollar ocean of right-wing anti-science money. But still.

If it’s hard to accept—at this late date, given what we know about the imminent threat of catastrophic warming—that one of America’s great newspapers still runs columns denying the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, consider for a moment some of the other forms that denial still takes, many of them far more subtle and yet, perhaps, no less dangerous.

Indeed, you find them in places you’d least expect, such as Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall. As Tim DeChristopher put it in a guest post on this blog in October, when Harvard President Drew Faust issued her public statement rejecting students’ call for fossil-fuel divestment, she revealed, not outright denial of climate science, but a failure to acknowledge what the situation requires. Here’s DeChristopher:

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