Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The umitigated gall of these people

Chris de Freitas is claiming that normal scientific criticism of the McLean et al. paper (which I discussed here, and also generated the largest number of comments I've ever got!), now published in Geophysical Research Letters, is akin to "Climategate", and that the only reason for publishing the refutation/rebuttal to their paper is because it might discredit 'work' that 'challenges alarmism' (quoting New Scientist here -- I don't know where they got the quote from de Freitas).

Well, f*ck yes it does, Chrissy. What you call "alarmism" is the basic scientific understanding of, and consensus on, global warming and climate change. Your paper with McLean and Carter took on some of the basic tenets of that scientific understanding. Did you expect a shoddy paper like this to go unchallenged and unrefuted? Do you think that this is the blogosphere, where even publishing back-of-the-napkin calculations gives you equivalent scientific stature to a paper in Nature?

Fat chance. Publishing a paper like that amounted to putting a big ol' bulls-eye target on it, and it got skewered. Too d*mn bad it was quickly shown to be both trivial and wrong.

"Climategate" jibes fly over El Nino impact on global warming

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