Peter Gleick

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Just the other day I wrote in a comment at Samizdata:

It’s a bit cheap, given that there’s no evidence or even likelihood, that actual climate scientists are responsible for this hoax, to say that jumping to very firm conclusions on very little evidence, and indeed fraudulently improving the evidence that doesn’t quite show what you want it to, are characteristic of one side of this debate rather than the other. But there is a pattern here, at least in the political realm, of sceptics being, well, sceptical, and the warmists not.

This is me, eating those words. And let me tell you, they’re yummy.

Look at what the Heartland story tells us about the person behind it:

  • He believes it is justifiable to lie in order to advance the cause
  • He is not able to seriously consider the arguments of his opponents, even when trying to pretend to be one of them
  • He has no instinctive perception of scale — he thinks a couple of million spent by Heartland is significant compared to the hundreds of millions spent by Greenpeace, WWF, FoE, Oxfam, CAP, and the world’s governments.
  • He doesn’t think the morals he applies to others should apply to him. The major climate-related expense in the Heartland accounts is paying scientists to prepare papers and attend conferences —   something his own institute does at the same time, with the same sort of funding from the same sort of people.
  • His evidence doesn’t prove what he thinks it proves. If a piece of essentially information-free data fails to clearly contradict a piece of probably-bogus data, he says the former proves the latter. (That is essentially the story of the Hockey Stick condensed to a sentence).

Now, of course, if the leak was done by some dim environmentalist activist, it would still be unfair to smear actual climate scientists by attributing those same qualities to them.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Peter Gleick. Macarthur fund. Leading climate scientist.

Of course, that’s just one rogue scientist. They’re not all like that. I mean, they have ethics task forces and stuff.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.