Today the board of directors of American Association for the
Advancement of Science announced
they’d
had enough of scrutiny of the pioneers of global warming
propagandism, particularly when it comes to the work of Climategater Michael Mann and the
hockey stick chart he made up (flatlining the Medieval Warming
Period) when he was at the University of Virginia, and also the
outside wealthmaking of NASA stargazer
Dr. James Hansen. In particular they took my organization,
American Tradition
Institute, to task for
asking for records of the aforementioned scientists, and
the Formerly
Mainstream Media unsurprisingly rushed to amplify the AAASes’
message. The
delicate flower from the New York Times who called our
Christopher Horner was
particularly off-put by his
likening the situation to Hollywood’s defense of Roman
Polanski.
Specifically, the board of AAASes said they objected to
“personal attacks on climate scientists, including harassment,
legal challenges, and even death threats,” as though ATI has
advocated those things. We have asked courts to make U. of Virginia
and NASA follow transparency laws that their records of Mann and
Hansen are subject to, but that is a legal challenge to the
government institutions and not the scientists themselves, and it
is a request for their work and data done on public (that is,
taxpayer-paid-for) computers while at those institutions. That is
supposed to be where they do their professional work, but
if they conducted personal business while on the taxpayer dime,
that’s their problem, but anyway that hardly constitutes an
“attack.”
Another FMSMer who rushed to the AAASes’ defense
was USA Today’s Dan Vergano, who wrote:
Climate scientists have endured personal attacks as a result of
their findings for more than a decade. In 2009, a
hacker stole
climate scientists’ emails from a British lab, a brouhaha
that concluded with investigations clearing them of wrongdoing but
in some cases chiding them for lack of transparency. Mann and
others faced a 2006 Congressional committee investigation centered
on a George Mason University team report critical of climate
scientists (that report team itself is now
under investigation for plagiarism and other shortcomings). In
1995, a fossil-fuel-industry-funded
group questioned the integrity of federal climate
scientist Ben Santer.
Vergano is another in the long line of alarmist mouthpieces who
state as fact, with no substantiation (just look at his hyperlink
on that one from Bully
Ben Santer), that the Climategate emails were exposed by a
hacker. No such proof exists, and that part of the case has never
been solved. Many believe it was the work of an anonymous
whistleblower.
Anyway, it’s a laff-riot that Vergano would use Santer as an
example of victimhood for “personal attacks” on climate scientists.
Santer was the guy who was revealed in Climategate to have wanted
to “beat
the crap out of” former Virginia state climatologist (and
global warming realist) Patrick Michaels. But as we’ve already
discovered with Freedom of Information Act requests and alleged
threats toward scientists, the outrage from liberal academia,
environoiacs and the FMSM only boils
when it’s their friends who are scrutinized.
Update 7:25 a.m. 6/30/11: Chris Horner reminds
me (I should have remembered) that it was
Vergano who “personally attacked” (if you go by
his standards)
Dr. Edward Wegman after he produced a
report through George Mason University that criticized the
methodology in Mann’s hockey stick chart. Alarmists have
accused Wegman of
plagiarism in their efforts to prop up Mann, but have not been
able to refute the fact that
it’s always the same small group of academics engaged in each
others’ “pal review.”
