A new paper by the computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey, (attached) digs ever deeper (and in an increasingly well-organized way), into the morass of deception and disinformation that has characterized the recent climate conversation. Mashey never uses the word "lies," but somehow it seemed an appropriate illustration of what he finds underlying the recent campaign against climate science, scientists and anyone who respects their work.

This and Mashey's previous paper point an unflinching finger at corporate front groups and free market think tanks that have worked so hard in the last two decades to spread confusion about climate science and to block public policy that would regulate the use of fossil fuels. Mashey makes a compelling case that Congress has been misled in the process - which is an offense against the democracy that think tankers claim to love (in addition to being a felony).

For a visual reckoning of the kinds of think tanks involved, Mashey has populated a Google Map locating the major and minor players - although care should be taken to sort out those tanks that have the worst record in all of this - say, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute - from some that are just going along with the pack.

In a wonderfully silly update of the (Canadian newspaper the) National Post's campaign of climate change denial, columnist Lorne Gunther (picked up here in the Edmonton Journal) argues that global warming has ended - and to prove it, he imagines the earth as an out-of-control Toyota which he decides has run out of gas.

What good fortune that might be (running out of gas in time to stop before you hit the cliff). But how can we think that our careering planetary heating system - which appears to have it its top speed and has been holding steady for more than a decade - is "out of gas" when we're pumping the stuff into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate?

University of California (San Diego) science historian Naomi Oreskes has a new lecture on line, promoting her upcoming book: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Updated March 9, 2010 to take note of Oil Sands Truth

There's nothing mainstream media loves more than the spectacle of environmentalists ripping one another limb from limb. Witness, for example, the CBC Vancouver Early Edition interview this morning (starting at 1:23:21) in which a little-known activist (Macdonald Stainsby) was invited to slag Tzeporah Berman, co-founder of Forest Ethics, founder of PowerUp Canada and, soon, the chief climate campaigner for Greenpeace International.

Stainsby was all fired up, questioning Berman's environmental bona fides and calling her "a Trojan horse" whose true purpose was to "hand all power over to corporations." As proof, Stainsby said that "Ms. Berman actually gave an award to (BC Premier) Gordon Campbell at the Copenhagen talks. While hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets being tear-gassed and arrested, she was on the other side of the picket line giving an award over on the basis of the carbon tax."

How could you not be outraged? Well, easy enough if you look past Stainsby's rhetoric.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress does a wonderful job here of deconstructing the insensible blathering of AccuWeather long-range forecaster Joe Bastardi, a man who dismisses climate change as "this red herring of an issue."

Amid his ravings, Bastardi complains that "many of the high circles out there with alphabet soup in front of their names" consider him "stupid," a contention that Romm generously refutes, saying:

"For the record, I don’t think he's stupid.  Stupid people rarely rise to a position of influence necessary to cause as much damage as Bastardi does."

Romm is right about so much, it seems churlish to argue with him on so trivial a point. But read Romm's post and ask yourself: If Bastardi doesn't suffer from terminal stupidity, what other pathology could explain his twisted position on climate science?

New polls in the U.S. and in the U.K. show a continuing collapse in public conviction that climate change is a serious and urgent issue - a result that can only be interpreted as an unprecedented measure of success for the campaign to deny global warming.

A poll by Anthony Leiserowitz Climate Project at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies shows that the number of people who are "dismissive" of climate change has doubled and the number of people who are "alarmed" has dropped by half in the last two years.

The Guardian reported that an IPSOS Mori poll shows the number of Britons who believe that climate change is "definitely" a reality has dropped 30 per cent, from 44 per cent to 31 during the last year.

Such results demand that we look back over the past year to figure out what's causing these huge shifts in public opinion. It can't be the scientific evidence, which by virtually every measure gets more alarming by the day. Ice is retreating in the Arctic and the Antarctic. An unprecedented drought persists across southern Australia, the global average temperatures continue to edge dangerously higher, and other wierd weather seems to persist everywhere.