In an unusually strong attack on politically powerful deniers of global warming, 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 32 from Northern California, have charged that opponents are using “McCarthy-like tactics” against legitimate climate scientists.
The letter condemning “political assaults” on climate researchers was published Friday in the journal Science.
Good. But this fightback should have started long ago, when the attacks started. Instead climate scientists did little, perhaps thinking the attacks were from rubes and could be ignored or that their science was so infallible that defense wasn’t needed. They were wrong, and the political damage has been huge.