The journal Science has published a letter signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, that pushes back sharply after months of assaults on evidence pointing to a growing and disruptive human influence on the climate and some of the researchers who’ve done important work on global warming.

The authors specifically criticize some politicians for what the letter calls “McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues on the basis of innuendo and guilt by association.” It doesn’t name names, but a clear target is Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican.

Another candidate could be Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, who has subpoenaed the University of Virginia to obtain information on the work there in 1999 by the climate scientist Michael Mann (now at Pennsylvania State University). I’ll shortly be posting a sharp critique of that action by Paul “Chip” Knappenberger, who has in the past been a critic of some of Mann’s work.

Here is the letter’s take-home point:

Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

The letter has a defensive tone that hasn’t served scientists particularly well in the past, but is understandable given the pressures that have been mounting on this field of inquiry. Just a couple of decades ago, climatology was a quiet arena connected to broader human affairs mainly through maps of planting times for crops.

Now climate research has become entwined with energy policy and the brutal politics of fossil fuels, in which states’ stances largely are shaped by the presence or absence of coal or industries reliant on coal or oil for profits. The influence of fossil fuel money on climate science has sometimes reached right into the White House. At the international level, the climate debate has largely boiled down to economic battles between competitors and between the world’s rich and poor nations.

The journal also has published an editorial on the scientists’ letter and the broader issue of polarization around climate research (subscription required). Written by Brooks Hanson, the deputy editor for physical science, the editorial attempts to cool things down, but also pushes back at the scientific community a bit. Here’s an excerpt (the acronym I.P.C.C. is for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change):