ClimateGate Becomes MediaGate, Becomes WikipediaGate

by Little Miss Attila on December 20, 2009

At Ace’s place, an update on the, um, Climatology snow job:

McIntyre & McItrick are the statistician/economist duo whose analysis broke Michael Mann’s hockey sticks, while Michaels was a climatologist whose original sin in 2002 appears to have been questioning not AGW, so much as its degree thus far and the worst-case projections.

In this article, Michaels recounts this and other notable published papers that drew the ire of AGW high-priests such as Michael Mann of Penn State, Phil Jones of CRU, and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and describes the result of their witch-hunt after his 2002 paper:

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” he wrote in one of the emails. “We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

This scorched-earth strategy was repeated in other editorial boards of other journals and even Universities, and created a threatening climate wherein those scientists who may have doubts were told implicitly (and explicitly if necessary) to shut-up and toe the line, lest you suffer the fate of other AGW heretics:

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Fundamental to the selling of the Hockey Stick to the Scientific community was the deletion from statistical history the well-known incidents known as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Of ongoing frustration to many of us on this side of the AGW debate are the polls showing that while public support of things like Cap and Trade is waning, there is still a majority who believe the Anthropogenic (and by popular definition this means CO2) part of AGW is significant and potentially dangerous. This is a vestige not of scientific “consensus”, but of the lasting effects of a strategy by AGW proponents to create a public movement to support what, ultimately, their science could not.

He touches, of course, on the Wikipedia/Connolley scandal as well.

UPDATE: Conservative Shemale picks up the latter thread in a post on the WikipediaGate Scandal:

So it wasn’t just peer-reviewed literature that feel under the sway of this group; it was popular informative tertiary source material. The type of thing the average citizen would use to write a school paper, or for quick reference on a topic.

What is scariest about this to me is how easily these people have co-opted the idea of transparency in science. I saw somewhere that 60 individuals control almost all funding and access to scientific journals dealing with climate studies, they are all AWG supporters. If this is true it makes the idea of peer reviewed science a joke. It would be like putting the Galileo era Roman Inquisition in charge of modern Astronomy journals and funding and asking people who disputed the geocentric view of the universe to submit their work for review.

Yup.

{ 3 trackbacks }

Wrapping our heads around the world at Christmas » The Anchoress | A First Things Blog
December 23, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Wrapping our heads around the world at Christmas » The Anchoress | A First Things Blog
December 23, 2009 at 10:00 pm
New Years Predictions? » The Anchoress | A First Things Blog
December 31, 2009 at 2:47 am

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

ponce December 20, 2009 at 4:23 pm

I wondered what would happen to Patrick Michaels back when the coal industry stopped funding his propaganda.

The CATO Institute, official retirement home for industry shills.

Reply

Little Miss Attila December 20, 2009 at 8:28 pm

Do they all have thin moustaches? Do they twirl them a lot?

Reply

ponce December 20, 2009 at 11:40 pm

It’s not a crime to sell out humanity for a few extra bucks, LMA.

Not yet.

Reply

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