A group with ties to the fossil fuel industry launched a new ad campaign today pushing the idea that carbon dioxide isn't an environmental pollutant. The organization "C02 is Green" funded a half-page advertisement in The Washington Post urging people to call their senators and seek a vote against "the president's cap-and-trade bill that will increase your cost of living and not change the climate. "The bill is based on the false premise that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change," the ad says. "Real, empirical evidence indicates it is not."

A group called Balanced Education for Everyone (BEE) is backing an effort to force the Mesa County, Colorado, school board to mandate school instruction of the "other side" of the so-called debate about global warming, in what may be a national test case on how global warming is taught. Attorney and Tea Party activist, Rose Pugliese — working with the support of Balanced Education for Everyone — presented the board with one petition demanding that global warming not be taught and, ironically, another demanding that political views be kept out of the classroom. At the meeting, Pugliese and her supporters said if warming is taught the "other side" should be too.   BEE is a project of the Independent Women's Forum, which, in turn, is an arm of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — an industry front group that reportedly gets most of its funding from from oil companies  Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.  AFP organized last summer's Astroturf Hot Air tour, in which oil company employees posed as average citizens opposed to climate legislation.

An article in last week’s British paper, The Telegraph, claimed that the IPCC had made yet another significant mistake – this time overstating the sensitivity of the Amazon rainforest to drought.  It turns out that the article severely misrepresented the state of the science. While that one very dry year did not produce the kind of vegetation changes detectible by satellite imagery, it did, in fact, kill a number of trees, turning the rainforest from a “sink” that absorbed 2 billion tons of CO2, to a “source” of even more CO2 from the resulting number of dead trees. The culpa for an initial post to Desmogblog, taking the IPCC to task, is exclusively mea.  The correct narrative of the rainforest’s vulnerability to severe drought comes courtesy of the scientists at Realclimate.

A dramatic reduction in Canadian media coverage of climate change science issues is the result of the Harper government introducing new rules in 2007 to control interviews by Environment Canada scientists with journalists, says a newly released federal document.  "Scientists have noticed a major reduction in the number of requests, particularly from high profile media, who often have same-day deadlines," said the Environment Canada document. "Media coverage of climate change science, our most high-profile issue, has been reduced by over 80 per cent."

Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools. The linkage of evolution and global warming  is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general. They are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

The US Congress's most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists. Climate scientists say Sen. James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body's report represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.