WASHINGTON — At a critical time, the uproar over stolen e-mails suggesting scientists suppressed contrary views about climate change has em bold ened skeptics — including congressional Republicans looking to scuttle President Barack Obama’s push for mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases.
The e-mail brouhaha dubbed “Climategate” by doubters comes as U.S. delegates to the international climate conference in Copenhagen are trying to convince the world the United States is determined to move aggressively to rein in heat-trapping pollution.
To counter the delegates, a group of GOP lawmakers is going to Copenhagen to argue against mandatory greenhouse-gas reductions.
The climate skeptics gained political momentum when former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said Obama should boycott the negotiations in Denmark and “not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices” — a clear reference to the purloined e-mails from computers belonging to scientists at a British climate research center.
Obama is going anyway.
Former Vice President Al Gore, the most recognized U.S. voice on climate change, quickly rebutted Palin and accused the climate deniers in an interview with CNN of “taking things out of context and misrepresenting” what the e-mails actually said.
Thursday, more than 1,700 British scientists released a statement saying they continue to have “the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities.”
That hasn’t stopped Senate Republicans. More than two dozen sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on Thursday demanding that he launch an independent inquiry into the e-mails.
GOP lawmakers say they will loudly and often raise questions about what they consider a corruption of climate science at the Denmark conference, where delegates from 192 nations are trying to forge a political agreement.
Phil Jones, the director of the climate research unit, has said the e-mail comments have been taken out of context and there never was an intent to manipulate data.
Opponents of legislation before Congress to cap heat-trapping emissions and cut them as much as 17 percent by 2020 have seized on the e-mail disclosures and are likely to use them not only at the Copenhagen talks, but in the Senate debate of climate change early next year.
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and the co-author of the House-passed legislation, said the hacked e-mails scandal was being perpetuated by a “paid-for” coalition of deniers who are using it to distract from the action the U.S. and world should be taking.
“These small number of deniers are out there still trying to derail something the rest of the world sees as an imperative for action,” Markey said.
