The American Spectator

Print Email

Text Size

The Spectacle Blog

As has been reported here regularly, global warming alarmists have been losing to their opponents on the facts, on their credibility, in the public's eyes. Now there's the possibility they could actually lose a Congressional seat to a climate realist, and that really scares them.

Dr. Art Robinson, co-founder of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine and director of the Global Warming Petition Project which has collected the signatures of more than 31,000 scientists who dissent from climate catastrophism, is the Republican nominee to challenge Rep. Peter DeFazio in Oregon's 4th District. The prospect of a Robinson victory in this year of Tea Party momentum has the state's official climatologist (and data-fudger) Philip Mote in a tizzy, as he expressed in an email from his Oregon State University account to a listserv of other academics and students. The Oregon Politico reports:

Mote began the e-mail by acknowledging that Art Robinson was chosen during last week’s Republican primary race to run against incumbent Democrat Congressman Peter DeFazio, who represents the Eugene area. Robinson gained fame with his work on the Oregon Petition Project, a list of scientists worldwide who disagree with the premise that climate change is caused by humans.

“A robinson [sic] victory would put us in the tragic ranks of our climate colleagues at University of Oklahoma (Senator ‘global warming is a hoax’ Inhofe) and Univ of Alaska (Rep. ‘scientists have their opinion, I have mine’ Young),” wrote Mote.

ICECAP explains a bit of Mote's history, which fits nicely with the Climategate narrative:

Phil Mote...published a cherry picked data analysis allegedly linking western snowpack to global warming....Mote’s paper while state climatologist for Washington State was published readily by the sadly advocacy driven [American Meteorological Society]. The much more qualified Oregon state climatologist he subsequently replaced, George Taylor, and the Assistant Washington State Climatologist Mark Albright (who Mote stripped of his title for questioning Mote’s hypothesis) -- and even UWA warmist Professor Cliff Mass -- published papers that showed by analyzing the entire record you see no trend but a cyclical change related clearly to the [Pacific Decadal Oscillation]. See how with the recent change to the negative PDO, heavy snow has returned to the Pacific Northwest. Given the imminent return to La Nina and forecast for deepening of the negative PDO stage, another wild winter with deep snowpack is likely.

Mote apparently received a wrist-slap from OSU, as he wrote a later email to the listserv to apologize and calling the original one "a mistake."

How is it so many of these activist climate scientists are so gaffe-prone?

Update 12:18 p.m.: My friend Todd Myers at the Washington Policy Center calls attention to another instance two years ago, when Mote had to recant incorrect testimony he gave to the state legislature.

topics:
Global Warming, Environmentalism, Climate Change, Election 2010, Climategate