Climate Scientists Rejoice: Closing the book on Ken Cuccinelli, climate science denialist

[cali]

witch-hunter and Tea Party favorite

One of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's political liabilities in his gubernatorial election loss yesterday was his climate science denialism -- in particular, the high-profile witch hunt he launched, and lost, against Michael Mann and the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli's reckless inquisition was always about his Tea Party political ambition -- with the science community and the threat to the university's academic integrity as collateral damage.

Today, Cuccinelli is down for the count while Mann is still standing. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, his detailed and absorbing saga of the collision between climate science and the global warming denial machine, comes out in paperback today. (More on that in a subsequent post.)

John Abraham in the Guardian (Virginia governor's race shows global warming science denial is a losing political stance) leads with:

In yesterday's Virginia governor's race, Terry McAuliffe's win over anti-science Republican Ken Cuccinelli is showing that being a climate-change denier is a losing political position. Certainly the election was about many issues, but climate change was the most striking difference between the two candidates. Virginia's voters clearly rejected Cuccinelli's attacks against climate scientists and his head-in-the-sand views.

<snip>

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/11/06/closing-the-book-on-cuccinelli/

[dipsydoodle]

1. The US is hardly in a position to deny anything on this subject.

Since carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere can stay there for centuries, historical emissions are just as important – or even more important – than current emissions. The tricky question of historical responsibility is one of the key tensions in the process of negotiating a global climate deal. The following figures from the World Resources Institute show the top 10 nations as measured by their cumulative emissions between 1850 and 2007. The US tops the list by a wide margin – though Chinese emissions have risen significantly since these data were assembled.

1. US: 339,174 MT or 28.8%
2. China: 105,915 MT or 9.0%
3. Russia: 94,679 MT or 8.0%
4. Germany: 81,194.5 MT or 6.9%
5. UK: 68,763 MT or 5.8%
6. Japan: 45,629 MT or 3.87%
7. France: 32,667 MT or 2.77%
8. India: 28,824 MT or 2.44%
9. Canada: 25,716 MT or 2.2%
10. Ukraine: 25,431 MT or 2.2%

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/21/countries-responsible-climate-change

The US is fractionally more than China, Russia, Germany and the UK combined.

China's current figure is almost incidental : they're just catching up.