Climatologist and astronaut Piers Sellers is attired in his Space Shuttle reentry suit for a training session in 2009.

When astronaut and climatologist Piers Sellers announced this past weekend that he has terminal cancer but has decided to continue his life’s work, the climate-change deniers were johnny-on-the-spot to attack him.

Sellers, acting director of NASA’s Earth Sciences division, has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and made his announcement in an op-ed inThe New York Times on Sunday. He wrote that, after he scrutinized his “bucket list,” he had decided to continue the research he loves as long as the disease will let him.

While pretending to feel sorry about Sellers’ impending demise, one prominent denier, former Harvard theoretical physicist Lubos Motl—who has never published a peer-reviewed climate paper and calls those who have “climate fascists”—went so far as to suggest that Sellers is the type of person who would engage in eco-terrorism to create “fake natural catastrophes” to persuade people of the reality of climate change.

And then there was Breitbart weighing in with a despicable lie of a headline: “NASA Chief: Global Warming Is Real Because I Have Cancer,” followed by some crocodile tears from James Delingpole about Sellers’ condition before puking out the claim that “he has chosen to exploit his personal tragedy for the purposes of promoting climate change alarmism.”

Non-scientist Delingpole is one of those bright bulbs (incandescent, of course) who thinks that snow in the winter means global warming is a hoax. In 2009, he popularized the term “Climategate,” the hacking of climate scientists’ emails to prove they had concocted “global warming” as a conspiracy. He called it "the greatest scientific scandal in the history of the world." Eight investigations cleared all scientists, finding the so-called scandal to be bullshit.

All the smug deniers spouting their scientific illiteracy and conspiracy theories would be supremely laughable were it not for the fact that they’ve taken their lead from shills paid by Exxon or the Kochs or some other funders of propaganda outfits with the morals of the makers of snuff films. Shills paid from the coffers of organizations that actively suppressed the truth for decades while smearing scientists whose doubts about climate change have to do not with whether global warming is underway but rather how fast it’s happening and how disruptive it will be. Shills whose denials and delays in action they have promoted will mean the deaths of millions of people.

The deniers’ efforts to discredit people who actually know what they’re talking about, their casual dismissal of data (except for what they’ve cherry-picked or misinterpreted) and their ignoring of the thorough debunking delivered to their bogus claims has always been fury inducing. It’s really no surprise that their pretense of caring about a dying scientist is cover for pissing on his grave before he’s in it.