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Monday, November 12, 2007

Don't hold your breath waiting for Limbaugh to admit he was wrong
Posted by Jill | 8:35 AM
Nice try, guys:

On Nov. 7, news flashed around conservative and climate-skeptic e-mail chains, some Web sites and a couple of talk-radio programs that an important new scientific paper proved that undersea bacteria, not people, were responsible for most of the recent buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The trigger was an e-mail chain maintained by Benny J. Peiser, a British social scientist who sends out daily summaries of research questioning dangerous human-caused global warming and international climate treaties, along with other subjects.

This message merited designation as an “Extra,” and had the title “Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?” It cited a new paper in the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies.

It provided a link (no longer active) to a long, equation-laden treatise in that Japanese journal, written by researchers at the University of Arizona and University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.

[snip]

But some climate experts almost instantly smelled something fishy, with Roger A. Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado quickly posting, “Call me a skeptic skeptic - I smell a hoax.”

Just 70 minutes after the first e-mail message from Mr. Peiser, he sent out another one with the headline “hoax alert,” saying, “There is no Department of Climatology at the University of Arizona, nor is there a Daniel Klein or Mandeep Gupta in the U. of A. directory. Neither is there an Institute of Geoclimatic Studies. The whole thing looks like a nice hoax.”

On the side of those questioning calamitous global warming, the blogging and spinning immediately screeched into full-speed damage-control mode.

[snip]

On Saturday, David Thorpe, a British novelist and journalist who had been traced to the Web pages and links created for the mock study, blogged on why the ruse was done:

“Sometimes fiction and satire can reach places facts alone can’t — in the right context,” he said. “What the hoax showed is that there are many people willing to jump on anything that supports their argument, whether it’s true or not. What we wanted to emphasize is that it’s necessary to achieve scientific validity using the peer-review model. Proper climate science makes every attempt to do this, and is a constantly evolving and self-refining process, as all science is.”

There’s only one question now: Is there a real David Thorpe?

There’s more on Rush Limbaugh’s involvement, from very different viewpoints, here and here.

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