© BBC

Sir Paul Nurse, President of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge [Wiki] aka The Royal Society hosts an excellent round up of some of Reason’s more blatant enemies.

AIDS denialism, climate science cynics, antivaccination lobbyists and opponents to genetically modified food research. Nurse covers this and more. He does an excellent job of scrubbing constructed controversy from the “Climategate” email tale. This includes an interview with perhaps the most famous twonk ever to profit continuously from just one story, James Delingpole of The Telegraph.

All that can be added is that at the time of filming the recent revelation of well funded, coordinated efforts to undermine climate science, were unknown. This involved leaked memos, of all things, from anti-climate science “conservative, libertarian” think tank The Heartland Institute. Blogger Anthony Watts is being paid a nifty $90,000. They want to help the lad with his new website devoted to interpreting temperature station data. Crucially this actual scandal exposed Heartland’s intent to sabotage K-12 science with it’s own “Global Warming Curriculum”.

“K-12” refers to the sum of education from Kindergarten to Year Twelve in Australia, Canada and the USA. The Guardian wrote on February 15th that this included a proposal from journalist and epistemologist Dr. David Wojick which:

…will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.