Yesterday I complained about the Left’s fawning over the climate advocacy of Al Gore, who wears his amateur scientific credentials on his sleeve. Despite his tendency to make demonstrable scientific errors, he’s treated respectfully even by scientists who ought to know better.
But as Anne Jolie explains in the Wall Street Journal Europe, laymen who question the received wisdom of climate catastrophists are dismissed—even when those laymen are demonstrably right. Stephen McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who has uncovered a series of embarrassing mistakes by climate scientists over the last few years. His exposés have led to grudging corrections by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, and others.
He has published several articles with environmental economist Ross McKitrick, and writes prolifically on the popular blog Climate Audit. So what do the scientists whose work McKitrick has corrected think of him? James Hansen of NASA “has dismissed him as a ‘court jester.’” Penn State’s Michael Mann, responsible for the now-discredited “hockey stick” graph supposedly showing a rapidly increasing global temperature, complains of “every specious contrarian claim and innuendo against me, my colleagues, and the science of climate change itself.” Stanford’s Stephen Schneider says: “‘You mention his name in my community, people just smile. It’s a one-liner to get a laugh out of a group of climate scientists.’”
These are key players on the catastrophist side of the debate—the experts that we non-specialists are supposed to trust. Contrast their obnoxiously dismissive responses to McIntyre—a statistically astute, intellectually precise, lay auditor of their work—with their acceptance of. . . Al Gore. Apparently for these scientists, intellectual orthodoxy trumps intellectual seriousness and scientific accuracy. Is it any wonder more and more non-scientists are doubting their credibility?