The smears begin

It didn't take long for the Competitive Enterprise Institute to begin dissembling about John Holdren, President-elect Barack Obama's new science adviser. On his blog, the CEI's Chris Horner dismisses Holdren's soon-to-be ex-employer, the Woods Hole Research Center, as "an environmental advocacy group." This is nonsense, as a simple check of the center's scientific output would show.

I first ran into the WHRC in the late 1980s, while living and working in Woods Hole. Back then, the center was a recent offshot of the Marine Biological Laboratory's Ecosystems Research Center. Founder George Woodwell left the MBL in 1985 to pursue a line of research that wasn't quite in line with the MBL's mission. But it was a line of legitimate scientific research, and to call it mere advocacy is just plain insulting.

I also remember Woodwell, in 1990, estimating that preventing serious climate change would require a 75 percent reduction in fossil-fuel emissions. Woodwell is still writing about such stuff. And good thing, too. Both he and Holdren are respectable scientists who deserve better than to be slandered by a free-market advocacy group like the CEI.

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Maybe they followed the lead of this blog and did a survey on what slanderous names to call those who don't blindly believe "the right way". You sure know a few things about insulting people who don't believe "the right way", eh James?

'Your Ma' (why do I believe the poster is a 300+pound closeted gay male republican?) doesn't seem to understand the difference between telling lies, which is what horner excels at, and honest, caustic, ridicule of opinions that run counter to established science.

You have to be kidding! I doubt that you really expected the Competitive Enterprise Institute to tell the truth and expose themselves for the liars and manipulators they really are. I sure didn't.

I was wrong. The gay bashers are not the common sensicals. The gay bashers are the agw religious zealot whack jobs. witness my own blog. my bad.

I should think that good work is a fine advocate for science. May Woodshole go on advocating for science as they have in the past for centuries into the future.

It's sort of like like the "Reality has a Liberal bias" idea. Good science DOES tend to advocate for the environment.