Last week, the Harvard Kennedy School had a great event on just why it is that we are up such a creek with respect to global warming, politics, and the U.S. public. The featured speakers were Andrew Revkin and Matt Nisbet. Nisbet has a long post providing the audio of the event and a summary of its contents.

He was also kind enough to summarize a question I asked at the end; as the author of The Republican War on Science, I feared my wares were being misused, and the tables unfortunately turned, as now the anti-science folks are crusading at climate scientists and the Obama administration on allegedly scientific grounds:

3. A third important question came from friend and journalist Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at Discover’s The Intersection. Mooney noted that in his own book, he had plied the public accountability frame to draw attention to perceived political wrong doing on the part of the Bush administration and conservatives. This message was also taken up by many liberal advocates and organizations. Now that the Obama administration is in power, observed Mooney, shouldn’t we have been prepared that climate skeptics were going to turn to the public accountability message to leverage their own political goals?

I must confess that unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared enough. I fell for the enthusiasm after Obama’s promise to restore science to its “rightful place” in American life. I myself wrote at Slate that the “war on science” was over. That was wrong.

Granted, in a certain sense the “war” I wrote about did indeed end with the Bush administration. For there is no longer any systematic attempt to undermine scientific integrity coming from within the federal government–and that was the chief characteristic of the Bush “war on science.”

However, what I and many others failed to anticipate was that a kind of guerilla war on science–and especially climate science–would take its place, driven by blogs like Climate Depot and Watts Up With That. This war springs from the same politics, but it is coming from those who are out in the wilderness, rather than running the government.

As a result, this war hits harder, and is much more personal—aimed at discrediting individual researchers, by sifting through their emails and accusing them of scandalous wrongdoing. And it is draws its momentum from the vast numbers of online commenters who closely follow the climate “scandal” stories and then show up at this blog, and other ones, to leave comments attacking scientists like Mann, and institutions like the IPCC.

And how do we counter this war? Well, that’s something I’ll ask readers to ponder…..