In a blog post at the Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang September 1 headlined “Obama Needs to Give a Climate Speech—ASAP,” Andrew Freedman wrote,

. . . The need for leadership on climate change science further solidifies when one considers current public attitudes on the issue. Recent polling has shown public concern about climate change may be dropping, just when lawmakers are weighing new climate policies.

If the polls accurately reflect public opinion, which is questionable, then the increasing climate change skepticism among the public is troubling. . . .

Like the public, some fence-sitters in the Senate are unsure what to believe about climate change as well. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), for example, was quoted by Grist Magazine as saying, in response to a question on his view of the link between human activities and climate change, “I’d be foolish if I didn’t give it some consideration because there’s a massive amount of scientists that feel that it does. But there’s also an increasing number of scientists that have doubt about it.” . . . .

Grassley’s statement regarding the number of scientists that have doubts about manmade climate change is telling, since that is the message being disseminated via blast emails and confabs sponsored by the pro-industry Heartland Institute, as well as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a market-oriented group that sponsors the Climate Depot Web site. That site, and others like it, consistently assert that there is a growing defection of experts from the scientific consensus view, seemingly based on the theory that if one repeats a message often enough, it will gradually become the truth.

It’s not groups like Heartland and CFACT and Climate Depot that operate on the theory that if one repeats a message often enough, it will gradually become the truth. They can point to

• over 31,000 American scientists who have signed the Global Warming Petition stating, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animals environments of the Earth.”
• over 700 international scientists who have publicly spoken out against various elements of the manmade catastrophic warming hypothesis.
• over 130 German scientists who wrote an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel saying “humans have had no measurable effect on global warming through CO2 emissions. Instead the temperature fluctuations have been within normal ranges and are due to natural cycles.”
• over 100 international scientists who signed an open letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon saying that in light of research published after May 2005 (cut-off date for consideration by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] for its 2007 Assessment Report) casts doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming and that “it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions.”
• the report by the Japan Society of Energy and Resources that includes the judgment of three of its five authors that “recent climate change is driven by natural cycles, not human industrial activity.”
• a recent survey of the web of science database of refereed publications showing that the percentage of articles rejecting the so-called “consensus” on manmade warming grew between the 1993-2003 period and the post-2003 period.
• hundreds of refereed publications that reject the whole or important parts of manmade warming theory.
• Lawrence Solomon’s and Christopher Monckton’s refutations of the claim that the IPCC’s work represents a consensus of 2500 scientists.

It’s people like Freedman who think interminable repetition of the mantra “overwhelming scientific consensus” will make it true. It isn’t. It never has been.

In addition to calling for “leadership” on climate “science” (what, precisely, is scientific leadership?—perhaps it’s following the crowd, which seems to be Freedman’s notion), Freedman’s appeal to the “consensus view” belies his political, rather than scientific, leanings. How, pray tell, did a master’s candidate in climate change policy wind up on WaPo’s Capital Weather Gang?