USA/Sarah Palin’s bylined opinion piece in today’s Washington Post drew fire from the Center for American Progress, which also took aim at the Post for publishing “falsehood-filled … tabloid nonsense.” Take a look at the liberal think-tank’s take here.

Like others who question the scientific evidence for human-generated climate change, Palin — former Alaska governor, ex-Republican vice presidential candidate and now best-selling author — targets hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Climate skeptics have cited this correspondence as a sign that the science of climate change has been tainted with politics and maintain the e-mails show repression of data that does not fit the climate change case. The scientists themselves, and others around the world, have said the e-mail comments were taken out of context and reflect an open exchange of ideas.

The e-mails came to light in the weeks leading up to the climate conference in Denmark. Since then, the scientific journal Nature defended the scientists at East Anglia in an editorial that called the hack-attack and the subsequent heated rhetoric by climate deniers “harrassment.”  The Guardian newspaper reported that the climate scientists have received torrents of abuse and even death threats.

Plenty of people disagree with Palin. Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel laureate who heads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told CNN the e-mails just show scientists “letting off steam.”

Palin said President Barack Obama should boycott the Copenhagen conference, but that’s not going to happen. The White House announced last week that he’s rescheduled his visit to the international conference so he can attend in its final days, rather than at the beginning. In the meantime, he’ll pick up his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Mike Theiler (Book buyers wait in the snow for Sarah Palin to sign her memoir “Going Rogue” at a shopping mall in Gaithersburg, Maryland, December 5, 2009)


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