The anti-science minority continues to make a lot of noise.  They are growing increasingly ignorant and loud, but I really don’t think they are growing in number.  They seem to revel in the fact that they obviously don’t care to even understand what global warming is, or what causes it. Other people in other countries are not like this, willfully ignorant and proud of it. Are Americans divorced from logic?  Most of us are not.  The denier movement gets more press than the rest of us only because their antics make interesting press.  Meanwhile, a  new government panel that represents people who live in the real world will urge climate change measures.  What are they up against?  This video, the Climate Crock of the Week by Peter Sinclair, is on this week’s topic, Flogging the Scientists, and describes some of the claims made against the facts and science of climate change.

And in a recent article they write about a new panel that has come out with a report showing the U.S. is not ready to deal with climate change.

Climate change has already wrought “pervasive, wide ranging” effects on the United States, and the federal government has “significant gaps” in its strategy to cope with those effects as they accelerate in the future, a White House task force will warn in a report today.

The report will call for better risk assessments, more thorough scientific research and improved coordination of federal and local governments to handle the impacts of warming temperature, according to a draft obtained by the Tribune Washington Bureau.

Adapting to warming temperature, the report concludes, “will require a set of thoughtful, preventative actions, measures and investments to reduce the vulnerability of our natural and human systems to climate change impacts.”

The report urges federal agencies to fundamentally change how they plan for the future, by factoring the potential risks and opportunities of a changing climate into their decision-making. It also advises agencies to rely less on historical climate data when making plans for transportation, energy, infrastructure and natural resource use.

The task force that produced the report includes the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and representatives from nearly every corner of the federal government.

The report comes at a time when global warming skeptics are increasingly criticizing the science of climate change, fueled by a string of controversies surrounding leading climate scientists.

President Barack Obama has asked the task force to lay the groundwork, by this fall, for an explicit federal strategy to adapt to climate change.

The draft report is a first step in that process and light on specific recommendations.

It concludes that climate change “is affecting, and will continue to affect, nearly every aspect of our society and the environment” — through increasingly severe floods, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, along with rising sea levels — and that those impacts are already “affecting the ability of federal agencies [...]