Irregular Climate Episode 12

This week: The curious incident of Edward Wegman, and the copied report, the non-significance of the hockey stick, Cuccinelli and the witch, CRU cleared again, exploding deniers, and the importance of coherence.

7 thoughts on “Irregular Climate Episode 12

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    1. Take a look at the books Merchants of Doubt, and Climate Cover-up. As well as John Mashey’s earlier work (which can be found at DeSmogBlog).

      But the money trail is obfuscated by design. Thankfully some of those funding anti-science are publicly traded companies (Exxon) so must disclose their financial records, but some (Koch) are private companies so little is known about their activities. [UPDATE: See John Mashey’s Comment bellow]

      Also for fun if you are familiar with the names of the professorial deniers, look them up in relation to denial of the links between tobacco smoke and Cancer, or the links between CFCs and ozone depletion.

      Nothing but Deniers for hire.

  1. I am pretty angry about the level of “strange scholarship” Wegman has been able to get away with while climate scientists are being investigated for fraud. Apparently, if you’re a climate scientist, then showing instrumental and paleo data in the same figure without an explanatory caption calls for a storm of media “exposes” and a gauntlet of inquiries. But if you’re not a climate scientist, then blatantly plagiarising 80% of the text in a report is just fine and your work is worth presenting to the US Congress!

  2. Great!

    One note: as the Rabett says, there is inquiry and there is investigation, and in GMU’s formal terms they are different. In common usage, it is unclear which is meant, so it is not actually clear they are in formal investigation yet or not.

    Of course, if they are still in inquiry, GMU itself may be in for trouble. All an inquiry has to do is look at a few pages of text and say “looks enough like plagiarism to investigate.” in this case, starting from DC’s side-by-sides, that should take a few minutes.

    Most universities would do that immediately and quickly and fire up an investigation. But read ,a href=”http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/science-fair/2010/10/07/gmuletterx-large.jpg”>this carefully. The *inquiry* Committee was formed in April, and expected to finish by end of September. That’s speedy: 6+ months to look at DC’s work and see if there might be plagiaris

  3. One nit:
    The only records we can reliably get are the donations (like Koch, Scaife, ExxonMobil).

    Direct corporate money is hard to trace, except sometimes to politicians.

    For example, if you can track Exxon => American Petroleum Institute => ??? you are good.

    The oddity is the inexplicable use of the ExxonMobil to give traceable money that is really rounding error.

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