Climate Wars Bask
I am going to do a follow-up post (here at Free Advice) next week regarding my recent post on the Heartland Institute / Peter Gleick affair. I still agree with my main points in that post, but in the comments here Stickman made me realize that I had misunderstood what Peter Gleick’s official story was. So, now I am more open to the possibility that he didn’t write that bogus strategy memo, than I was when I wrote my first piece on this. (But to repeat, none of this newfound perspective changes what I had to say in that first article.)
Before I write my follow-up thoughts, however, I’d like to do a sampling of the various climate blogs in their handling of the big scandals. So my questions:
(1) Did RealClimate say anything about the Heartland affair? I know Gavin Schmidt (sp) commented on it, since I saw other blogs quoting his statements, but did he do that elsewhere, and not at RealClimate?
(2) Do we have examples of prominent “skeptic” blogs claiming that the Climategate emails show that “global warming is a hoax” or anything comparable to such a sweeping conclusion?
I think his confession makes it more likely that he wrote the fake memo. Let’s say that someone was trying to trick him. So what were they hoping to happen if they tried to trick him? Clearly, Gleick didn’t think the memo alone was damning without corroborating evidence. Evidence that whoever sent him the memo would’ve had to have in order to write it in the first place. Did they expect Gleick would go to the lengths he did to corroborate the memo? Are we supposed to believe that the info Gleick got just happened to corroborate a lot of the memo but he missed some of the inconsistencies and glaring evidence it was fake? Why didn’t they try to trick anyone else with this fake memo? Why didn’t Gleick tell anyone else about the memo before he went on his phishing adventure? Why didn’t Gleick just put the memo out saying some anonymous source sent it to him and let everybody try and corroborate it? If someone tried to trick him then they tried a trap that should’ve easily failed to ever come to light (he could’ve realized it was a trap and threw the memo away) and got a scenario to play out that nobody could’ve predicted based on just sending him a fake memo.
Dan, don’t get me wrong, my best guess is that he wrote it too. But since he just got the memo (not the other documents), I’m open to the possibility that someone with access to the Heartland documents could have sent it to him, wanting him just to publicize the memo (as you yourself said here he might have done, reasonably). Then if the other bloggers jumped on it, and after a few days everybody realized, “There’s no way this is legit,” they could have all looked foolish.
There have been campaigns like this on the other side. I can’t remember the details right now, but leftist groups have pretended to let something (absurd) leak out, and then laughed at the idiot conservatives when they trumpeted it breathlessly.
I believe that is possible but highly unlikely. I mean he isn’t even going around saying he got set up. If he had at least one witness to back up his story that he got the memo before he contacted Heartland I would be more inclined to give this view more credit.
Why does the fact that he didn’t get the other documents with the memo make you more inclined to believe his story? That makes me believe it less. Without the other documents we have to believe he just got super lucky/unlucky when he asked for information that just happened to fit the story the memo was trying to sell. At least if he had the other documents before he went phishing he would have been more likely to know what to ask Heartland for. I would need a lot more evidence before I would even give the theory that he was set up serious consideration.
Dan, the reason him just getting the memo, makes me consider the possibility that he was duped, is that that conceivably could be something a Heartland person would do. It didn’t make any sense at all to me, that a Heartland person would send a bunch of legit documents that were at best awkward (e.g. it just doesn’t look good to have an “Anonymous Donor” giving millions of dollars), when if Gleick played his cards right, he could have released everything publicly and said, “I’m not saying these are legit, do what you will with them.” Then people might have dismissed the bogus strategy memo etc. So on net, Heartland would have been totally embarrassed, and Gleick would have done nothing wrong.
On the other hand, if the insider sent *only* the strategy memo, then it tempts Gleick to distribute it and look gullible. There is no real threat to Heartland, because they can say, “That memo is bogus. Do you really think we would say stuff like that? Give us a break.”
Don’t get me wrong, this theory is crazy too. But so is the theory that Gleick behaved as stupidly as you and I think he must have.
Let me make sure you get what I’m saying: I can imagine someone sending the fake strategy memo as a trap, without in a million years thinking Gleick would be so dumb as to then impersonate a board member to get other documents from Heartland. So I think you are wrong when you are requiring the trap-theory to have that as one of its elements.
Ok, I get where you are coming from but I don’t think it is crazy to think Gleick behaved as stupidly as we think he must have. He did after all admit to impersonating a Heartland board member. I think at that point his stupidity is a pretty solid case.
Gents, just to point out that (as I have said already), it needn’t necessarily be a Heartland insider… or even an anti-AGW person wanting to embarrass Gleick.
Another option I consider plausible — and this is a relative concept as our discussion here makes clear — is that it may have been “some pro-AWG person or group who thought they could falsely smear Heartland through a prominent [but unknowing] campaigner like Gleick, but simply failed to think through how this mendacious campaign would almost certainly backfire.”
A very stupid strategy and ethically repulsive strategy as I have emphasized… But still more likely to my mind than the possibility that Gleick did it to himself.
Stickman,
I think your theory doesn’t work. The person who created that forged strategy memo needed to have access to the legit Heartland documents. After all, that’s why so many people are still saying it’s an open question whether the memo is a fake or not; it contains some stuff that an outsider couldn’t possibly know.
Fair point. Although, it appears relatively easy to obtain legitimate Heartland docs via underhand means (as Gleick proved). I’m not saying it’s a sure bet, but then again the alternatives aren’t either…
I can’t remember the details right now, but leftist groups have pretended to let something (absurd) leak out, and then laughed at the idiot conservatives when they trumpeted it breathlessly.
A quasi-example: Those anti-AWG petitions that were loudly trumpeted by skeptics… Only later to be found comprised of many bogus names: Dr. Mickey Mouse, Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls, etc.
Are we supposed to believe that the info Gleick got just happened to corroborate a lot of the memo but he missed some of the inconsistencies and glaring evidence it was fake?
Exactly what are the inconsistencies here?
Also, if you think that Gleick couldn’t have missed that it was fake, then that rather undermines the entire thrust of Bob’s original post… i.e. Many people *were* fooled even though it seems an obvious forgery in hindsight.
Off the top of my head the memo claimed Koch donated around 200k in 2011 when they donated 25k but is was for something related to healthcare. If I remember right I think the 200k number was what they hoped for in 2012.
“We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000. We expect to push up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to their network of philanthropists, if our focus continues to align with their interests.”
This quote should of had alarm bells ringing in Gleick’s head as soon as he got the actual Heartland numbers.
This story only makes sense to me if Gleick got the documents, realized there was nothing really there, created the fake memo to spice it up, and didn’t worry about the consequences because he believed he covered his tracks and wouldn’t get caught.
I can’t believe he is so stupid that he didn’t catch any of the evidence the memo was fake in all the time he had that memo. I can believe he was arrogant enough to believe he wouldn’t get caught when he released the info.
Regarding (2),
I can’t help but get the feeling that you are trying to limit your review to a fairly narrow spectrum of favourable “skeptic blogs”. I’ve no problems calling Steve McIntyre a reasonable man. (Note well that he doesn’t deny the underlying science behind AWG for a start, but rather the level of its effects.) However, what constitutes a “prominent skeptic”? Does Alex Jones count (or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh)? How about James Inhofe, Rick Sanatorum and Rick Perry? Or even Ron Paul…?
Regardless, as I have already pointed out, *you* specifically chose to quote Leo Hickman of The Guardian newspaper as “a major player on [pro-AWG] side” in your original article. Well if that’s your chosen standard, then it’s only fair game to cite people like James Delingpole and Christopher Booker (both of The Telegraph) as prominent sceptics. I’ll leave you to search over their columns at your leisure, but when both of these repeatedly refer to the CRU emails in commenting on “the worst scientific scandal of our generation” or “the final nail in coffin of AWG-theory” or “the greatest delusion in history”, I think it’s pretty fair to say that all bets are off as far as a balanced view goes.[*] By the way, Anthony Watts has been only too happy to reprint these sort of sensationalist pieces on his blog (e.g. here), so I’m not entirely sure why you are committed to giving him a free pass here…
A very quick sample of other prominent skeptic outlets writing about the hacked CRU emails:
– Michelle Malkin: “The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century.”
– Melanie Phillips (The Spectator): “ [A] revealed systematic fraud of this magnitude will surely[…] bury AGW once and for all.”
– Mark Steyn (National Review): “It might be that “climate change” is an organized criminal conspiracy to defraud the entire developed world. Or there might be a “good explanation”. I’d be interested to hear it.” [Easy on the sarcasm there, big guy! – S]
– And, if you really want to focus on skeptic blogs in your follow-up comment, then I suggest you take a look at Climate Realists, where you’ll find lots of juicy pieces like this.
[*] One should compare their frothing-at-the-mouth pieces with this very measured analysis (concerning both the Gleick-Heartland incident and the East Anglia emails) by The Telegraphs’ de facto pro-climate journalist, Tom Chivers. Also, here’s a sadly amusing review of Delingpole’s new book, whose central “watermelon” theme refers to his belief that people concerned about environmental problems like climate change are actually dyed-in-red communists.
Some of them may be prominent skeptics, but they don’t run prominent skeptic blogs. The only prominent skeptic blog I know of is WattsUpWithThat.com, and they spent plenty of time detailing both the memo itself and the pro-AGW side’s downplaying and excusing.
[WUWT] spent plenty of time detailing both the memo itself and the pro-AGW side’s downplaying and excusing.
Joshua, with respect, that’s not we’re interested in here. (It would be like me pointing out that Joe Romm spent a lot time going through how the Climategate emails were being spun out of context.)
All of these statements are largely correct. Nobody have ever denied that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas which causes some warming, but only that the global warming scare about the imminent catastrophe if current industrial society is not dramatically changed by central planning of energy production and consumption. That is a quasi-religious delusion and politically motivated scam. You did not need the Climate-gate scandal to know that, but those emails added some very juicy illustrations of the same fact.
“Watermelons” is a legitimate and widely used metaphor used to describe environmentalists by pointing out their radical socialist vision of economy. Whenever you stretch the surface of a “green” you find the same old socialist and communist wet dreams of controlling the entire world by political fiat, just the rationalizations change – it used to be overpopulation scare, then a minor global cooling scare, then the peek oil and exhaustion of natural resources. Now, the best of all is found which affect every aspect of life, and cannot be disproved at all – global warming, pardon, “climate change”, pardon, “global climate disruption”. 🙂
I mean nobody have ever denied that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. 🙂
Argh!
I’m not sure what more I can do at this stage. Bob asks for prominent skeptic bloggers making sweeping statements following the Climategate emails. I provide some pretty clear examples of this. Now you are trying to tell me that they actually don’t matter, and everything is a wash?
I feel like this guy.
Regardless, anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last decade must know that there are vast numbers of people who debate that man-made CO2 can have any discernible effect on our climate whatsoever. This is a battle being waged on multiple fronts and “reasonable skeptics” like Steve McIntyre (or, say, Jim Manzi) are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole army of Chris Moncktons, Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs underneath them.
So, once again, I think you are proving my point about framing this as a false dichotomy, where the debate supposedly exists between reasonable skeptics and knee-jerk alarmists. That simply isn’t the case, and is not representative of the debate that *is* taking place everyday.
If you want to limit your sample space of skeptics to the likes of ClimateAudit, then tell you what… I’ll limit mine to RealClimate and we can all go home!
Stickman, I’ll grant you the Climate Realist piece; fair enough, and I’ll include that in my follow-up. (BTW I’m saying that to a bunch of you at this point, so if I fail to, it’s because I forgot, not because I’m consciously lying.)
But I am astounded at what you consider to be a “very measured analysis” from Tom Chivers. From the article you sent me:
And what’s happened now? Prof Peter Gleick, of the University of California at Berkeley, has admitted using a fake name to get hold of some documents from the Heartland Institute, an AGW-sceptical campaigning group. The Heartland Institute claims that one of these documents is forged, although Gleick denies any knowledge of this.
The whole point of my MR post went over your head, Stickman, so no wonder you think I’m nuts. Don’t you see why that statement from Chivers would make me shiver my timbers? He doesn’t have the confidence to add, “And since the strategy memo is palpably absurd on its face, I’m inclined to believe Heartland, and now think Gleick is either a liar or an idiot.”
But no, his “measured” piece didn’t say that at all. Also, he doesn’t come out and say Gleick impersonated a board member, instead he merely says Gleick “used a fake name.” LIke he just called up and said, “Hi, this is Jim Brown, I’d like a copy of your latest brochure, thanks. Love your work.”
Really Stickman, I can’t believe you are offering up these sites as evidence of how fair and balanced the anti-Heartland crowd is. (I admit some people on the other side are jerks too.)
“The Heartland Institute claims that one of these documents is forged, although Gleick denies any knowledge of this.”
Gleick belatedly admitted that the critical document came from a different source to all the other documents (after being caught out by embedded datestamp, timezone, software versions, etc) and he knowingly bundled these documents together presenting them without any warning to the reader that one had been slipped into the bundle which was from an uncertain source different to all the others.
This in itself is deceptive behavior. Very similar sort of deceptive behavior to mixing temperature measurements from multiple sources into a single line on a graph and not making it clear on presenting that graph that this line was a composite.
In other words, the sort of behavior that is the complete antithesis of how science should be done.
No, Bob… Seriously, I do get your point. You think that “alarmists” (easy on the pejoratives!) have a completely warped view on their skeptic opponents… which blinds them from spotting an “obvious” mischaracterization of the latter’s views.
My rebuttal is that your MR column framed the skeptic camp in extremely narrow and favourable terms, which effectively dissociates itself from the reams of crazy skeptics out there. (Indeed, for every Steve McIntyre out there, I’d wage that there are many more Michelle Bachmanns trying to tell you that “CO2 can’t dangerous because it is plant food”.) If you get to limit the skeptic camp to its most reasonable components, then I don’t see why reasonable pro-AGW people should take ownership of the knee-jerk alarmists either.
By the way, here is how Tom Chivers introduces his piece:
“I am absolutely appalled that a rogue activist, desperate for something to embarrass his political enemies, has illegally obtained confidential material. Worse still, the material he has spread to the press has been painted as somehow damaging to his opponents’ cause, when in fact it’s irrelevant or hugely misinterpreted.”
He ends by comparing the UEA hack and the Heartland affair:
Both “scandals” involved an unscrupulous theft of material, and a wildly overblown response to it.
So, yes, call me crazy, that seems pretty fair and measured to me… Particularly when set against the writings of his “skeptic” colleagues, Delingpole and Booker.
PS.
Stickman, I’ll grant you the Climate Realist piece; fair enough, and I’ll include that in my follow-up.
And the other examples too, I hope? Again, I don’t see why you get to use Leo Hickman if can’t use the likes of Delingpole and Booker…
“Note well that he doesn’t deny the underlying science behind AWG for a start, but rather the level of its effects.”
What is science other than a systematic way to discover the linkage between cause and effect? If you consider that the level of effect is anything other than the most important issue (i.e. take quantitative measurement away from science) then all you have left is some anecdotal handwaving.
The whole box and dice with the surface temperature measurements, and the IPCC models and the feedback estimates were all about finding the level of the effect.
I happen to think that the quality of data and modeling that we have to work on at the moment is of much poorer quality than the people making their money on Climate Science grants would be willing to admit. I read the “climategate” emails myself and don’t need any committee of bigwigs to explain to me how to read either. I also read “Harry’s” comments about the quality of their data, and I still occasionally follow the saga of various people trying to get FOI requests (read Bishop Hill for details going back years). All of these things point in the same direction — that we were dreadfully mislead a decade ago about this issue and the actions of Gleick certainly don’t serve to bolster my confidence in these jokers.
I’m by no means anti-science, indeed I see the climate capers as probably being the biggest setback to science to happen in my lifetime.
Bob, alongside my stated belief that James Gleick didn’t write the original fraudulent memo, my major point has been this: There is an asymmetry in your critical analysis.
You are framing it (via very limiting means I might add), as a straight-up battle between measured climate skeptics and unhinged alarmists. This simply isn’t the case and I would be able to take you much more seriously on this topic if I saw you cover dumb-headed alarmism coming from the other side as well. (E.g. Climate change is about a establishing a new socialist world order, carbon taxes will cause the economy to implode, etc etc.)
There are extremists on both sides. If you call one camp out (as you are justified in doing), then I really think that it behooves you to do so for the other.
Of course, James Gleick didn’t forge the memo. You’re confusing him with his brother! 😉
Peter is no doubt an outlier now.
Ha! My bad…
Brain was nearing standby mode at that time. (James Gleick has written some interesting books, though, if anyone is interested…)
“Climate change is about a establishing a new socialist world order”
Here’s a very simple question. If we take two options from right now, and under options [A] the governments of the world decide to drop the whole Climate Change bandwagon, drop the CO2 tax, forget about cap-and-trade, etc. and under options [B] the governments of the world go the exact opposite way, and take Climate Change very seriously, crank up the CO2 tax, and all that other stuff…
Which of those options [A] or [B] provides the greatest individual freedom, for ordinary people to go about their business?
Tel, thank you for implicitly proving my point. If taxing an externality (ironically, thereby ending the socialized gains that private polluters enjoy at others’ expense) constitutes a new socialist world order, then I’m not sure we can productively continue having a conversation at this point…
I’m interested though: Provided the mainstream view is correct and we need to act on this matter, how do you envisage meaningful action occurring without government action vis-à-vis a carbon tax or C&T?
Since you are unwilling to even attempt to answer a perfectly straightforward, simple and reasonable question, the only point made is your lack of good faith in attempting to achieve real discussion here.
Thus, you undermine your pretence of a moderate stance, but my question stands for any time you decide to start making a serious effort to see someone’s point of view other than your own.
Tel,
I am certainly not unwilling to answer the question… Indeed, I think that my position on this matter is as clear as it can be, but I will expand on it for you again.
What I have pointed out to you, is that correcting for externalities is ultimately about ending unpriced costs that impinge on the freedoms of others. Left alone, I believe that — and I am supported in this view by virtually every major scientific and economic analysis of this question — more harm than good will come from the continued, unregulated dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, some level of mitigation is necessary to protect freedoms and maximize wellfare.
Note well: There will be trade-offs, as there are with any economic question. This is not about unilaterally abandoning fossil fuels (a profoundly stupid suggestion that no-one here is making), but about strike the right balance between mitigation and fossil-driven growth. You can gain a better understanding of why I hold these views by having a look at my blog, for instance here and here. (There are numerous other posts if you care to stay and have a look around…)
What I ask in return, is that you think very seriously about whether any meaningful action against climate change could take place without government intervention. I simply don’t see it. Indeed, I think that a deontological application of libertarian philosophy w.r.t. climate change would lead you to absurd places.
Not exactly a prominent skeptic site, and it was almost a whole year after Climategate, but they did say, or, rather, sing, “it was all a hoax” verbatim.
http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2010/11/m4gws-newest-song—im-a-denier.html
When Climategate broke, all of the skeptical climate blogs were skeptical even in the commentary. Every third comment or so was “be careful – this looks too good to be true” or “yeah, but there might be some fake emails in there.”
On Wattsupwiththat, Phil Clarke was claiming the leaked emails were protected by copyright!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/
Both are great links, Philemon, that I will use in my follow-up piece. They both show the strengths and weaknesses of the reaction to Climategate. Even I was impressed by how many of the comments at WUWT were skeptical, when the news first broke. I say bravo to those people.
Stickman, are you saying if we do a similar analysis at the “conensus” blogs, we are going to see as high a proportion of the commenters warning “that Heartland memo is too good to be true”? We actually have a quantifiable test here. I love it. I’m such an empiricist.
It should be noted that Megan Mcardle herself is pro-AGW (even though she’s libertarian), but she was the most prominent skeptic of the memo’s authenticity.
Yes, and she linked to other “disappointing” pro-AGW-ers who doubled down on their insistence that there was no evidence of fakery:
http://www.desmogblog.com/it-s-bird-it-s-hockey-stick-it-s-faked-document
Joshua I’m glad you linked to that. I saw it when McArdle linked, but I didn’t click the link (or if I did, I didn’t read the whole thing). This last paragraph from Littlemore is too beautiful to paraphrase:
The DeSmogBlog is committed to accuracy. Joe Bast says the document is a fake, a statement we take with a grain of salt given the Heartland Institute’s previous dissembling on the subject of climate change and its discredited position on teh safety of second hand smoke. In the circumstances, if the Heartland Institute can offer any specific criticism of the Climate Strategy or any evidence that it was faked and not, actually, written on Joe Bast’s laptop, printed out and scanned, we would be pleased to consider that evidence.
Remember everyone, he’s talking here about the memo that said they were going to try to get teachers to not teach science, and that they were disappointed Forbes might not be reliably “anti-climate” as it had been in the past.
Bob, I’ll go one better for you and link to Desmogblog’s full statement of why they consider the strategy memo to be authentic: http://www.desmogblog.com/evaluation-shows-faked-heartland-climate-strategy-memo-authentic
Now, you can certainly dispute their conclusion– again, I’m not throwing my lot in with them — but they didn’t arrive there by magic. As I said to Dan in <a href ="http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2012/03/the-heartland-institute-peter-gleick-affair.html#comment-34967"the previous thread: All the best deceptions have an element of truth/authenticity.
And now we’ve come full circle. My original post: “Oh my gosh can you believe how nuts these people are?! They actually think the strategy memo is real.” Stickman: “Bob there are zealots on both sides. You are being duplicitous here.” [3 days later.] Stickman: “Anyway Bob here is why they think it’s real. It’s not so bad.”
Stickman: “Anyway Bob here is why they think it’s real. It’s not so bad.”
No, I’ve clearly emphasized many times that I consider the document to be fake, i.e. that Desmogblog (and Gleick) are wrong. However, I don’t agree that they were simply outright morons for believing what they did. In other words, I still hold that it was a cunning (and successful) ruse. As I wrote previously, I think that they were duped, no more less. (And, yes, your argument about ideological priors clouding their judgement is an important component of that view too.)
The second point about zealots on both sides is largely separate from this particular issue. What I would like to see from you is some critical analysis of the sweeping and decontextualised conclusions drawn by skeptics in the wake of, say, the UEA hack.
Exactly.
I’m such an empiricist.
Heresy! I trust that your Mises.org membership is under review as we speak.
Seriously though, I don’t know what you would find. And I’m not even sure what it would prove… Beyond the well-known fact that a lot of people on *both* sides are incredibly eager to swallow evidence of malfeasance by their opponents, and are prepared to twist said evidence to suit their agenda.
Anyway, what is your sample space for this experiment? I keep coming back to this, but do the thousands of commentators on, say, James Delingpole’s blog count? (I don’t see why not…)
stickman wrote: And I’m not even sure what it would prove…
You mean besides the central claim of my post that you were telling me was due to my bias? Namely, that the skeptics were more skeptical of the (less damning) claims in the CRU emails, than the other side was of the patently absurd claims of the strategy memo.
If my comments didn’t strike a chord, then why are you even writing up a follow-post? You have already acknowledged that I have provided useful links in this regard (e..g Climate Realists), which you may conceivably overlooked due to your “bias”.
However, again(!) you are not addressing my central critique: You are framing “skeptic blogs” in a very limiting and favourable way… When a truer representative sample would have to be much wider and much more reactionary in nature (a la Delingpole and his commentators).
On Wattsupwiththat, Phil Clarke was claiming the leaked emails were protected by copyright!
Um, it’s clear that whoever Phil Clarke is, he’s certainly pro-AWG. He is even <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/#comment-229242"labelled a “troll” on the very thread you quote! (A quick search through some other WUWT threads confirms this btw, e.g. this post)
So, Philemon… I guess thanks are in order for inadvertently providing evidence in my favour! Bob, I trust that you will still use this “great” evidence in your follow-up piece 😉
PS – This shows up another problem with your proposed empirical investigation… Lots of skeptics comment on pro-AWG blogs and vice versa. How will you separate who is whom?
PPS – In addition to the troll accusations, there are some beautiful responses to Clarke’s cautious suggestion about copyright, by some of WUWT’s other loyal readers…
Damn url links again! Please fix, Bob. Tks.
stickman I actually didn’t ever see the Phil Clarke thing he was referring to. I was talking about the post itself, and the frequency of comments saying “guys this is too good to be true.” If that was really pro-CAGW people, then it shows them once again stooping to deception. 🙂
I’m probably the only one still checking this thread, but the more I go back to research things, the more confident I am of my position… In particular, retracing my own steps and looking over the reaction to the Heartland leak shows that there wasn’t nearly the level of gullible conformity among “alarmist” bloggers (or even commentators) that Bob makes out. More on that later…
For the moment, I just thought that I’d add an obvious oversight to my list of reactionary skeptics for (2) above:
Good ol’ Marc Morano at Climate Depot. You can search for his CRU tags starting in November 2009 here. (Or, you might just type “hoax” in that powerful little search box of his.)
Of sweeping statements and hellfire proclamations, ye shall find an abundance. Stuff like:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/4153/The-perpetrators-of-worlds-greatest-scientific-hoax-should-go-to-jail
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/4151/Claim-Climate-Depots-Morano-is-the-guy-anchoring-this-whole-GLOBAL-WARMING-IS-A-HOAX-campaign
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/4162/The-great-green-fraud
etc etc