Dems say climate change 'deniers' like ‘teabaggers,’ swiftboaters, people who don’t believe smoking causes cancer

House Democrats said Thursday that denying humans were causing climate change is like denying smoking causes lung cancer.

Reps. Edward Markey (Mass.), Jay Inslee (Wash.) and Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) also compared climate change "deniers" to “teabaggers” who spread the false rumor about death panels and swift boaters who attacked Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) war record during the 2004 presidential race.

The three members of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming called a news conference on Thursday in response to the controversy over the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which has now become known as Climategate.

Markey, who is the chairman of the select panel, said climate change skeptics were “engaging in a policy of distraction” by promoting the hacked emails. But he said the emails do nothing to refute the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming. 

“There is no magician trying to trick his audience,” Markey said. "Our world is getting hotter, faster."

That was a specific reference to one of the more controversial emails in the bunch. An email dated Nov. 12, 1999, from Prof. Phil Jones references a “trick” to “hide a decline.”

Markey said the word trick in this case meant a clever way to fix a perplexing problem, and didn’t indicate that the scientists were playing funny with the numbers. The decline relates to data from tree rings that did not correspond to actual temperatures in the region from 1960 to 1994. See a response from the Pew Center of Global Climate Change here.

Climate skeptics say the emails show climate scientists have manipulated data and sought to suppress divergent views.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and GOP vice presidential candidate, said in a Washington Post op-ed that President Barack Obama should boycott Copenhagen in light of the emails.

“The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals,” Palin wrote.

“Before Sarah Palin writes a book, she should try reading a few,” Inslee said. He then listed several reports on climate change, including the National Academy of Science's report in 2007 that concluded with 90 percent assurance that according to Inslee found that  “in fact we are heading down a very dangerous road due to human-induced climate change."