The New York Times has just published another in a series of establishment press missives seeking to marginalize — from the perspective of establishment press-types — tea party activists and politicians who embrace or are embraced by them.

This latest entry is an embarrassment, if a rather typical one as I detail on Chapter 1 of Red Hot Lies, “Media on a Mission.” Here are some problems with the article:

“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” [Dem. Congressman and pro-cap-and-trade voter Baron] Hill said, echoing most climate scientists.

The author does not point to any survey of “most climate scientists,” challenge or even inquire about the source for or other evidence to support that claim. That is because there is no such survey or collective assertion by the critical masses of “climate scientists.” Period. It’s a talking point. But he’s a reporter. If he wanted to be straight about the issue he would at the very least turn to the very inconvenient statement by the Association of State Climatologists. But, again, it’s inconvenient.

When pressed, those who scribble or utter this shibboleth generally expand the universe of “climate scientist” to include anyone who is willing to go on record agreeing in return for being called one of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even if they are anthropology teaching assistants. Read on.

That is, they revert to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of (as its name indicates) representatives appointed by governments, which itself appoints anthropology TAs, instructors in “the human dimension of environmental change” (bring own incense, please) and transport policy instructors, for example, to achieve great if still exaggerated (why is that necessary?) numbers of supporters who supposedly (but didn’t) write its proclamations? The IPCC’s “chief climate scientist” and chief “climatologist,” according to outlets like the New York Times and USA Today is, just for the record, actually a… railway engineer.

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PART III – A global warming skeptic receives the leaked files from an anonymous “Deep-Climate” insider. Release of files exposes gatekeeping and leads to the maturing of a new science movement – that of peer-to-peer review.  Last in a series.  Please click for Part I and Part II.

Few outside the climate skeptic circle have ever heard of Steven Mosher. An open-source software developer, statistical data analyst, and thought of as the spokesperson of the lukewarmer set, Mosher hasn’t made any of the mainstream media outlets covering the story of Climategate. But make no mistake about it – when it comes to dissemination of the story, Steven Mosher is to Climategate what Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate. He was just the right person, with just the right influence, and just the right expertise to be at the heart of the promulgation of the files.

One could even argue that Mosher is one of the few people with the right assortment of circumstances, and associates, to understand the significance of the Climategate files and the technical expertise to post them on various locations using open proxies, a method hackers use to hide their identities while online. Given that the Climategate files came from computers with IP addresses in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, open proxies is most likely the technique used by the person who posted the files and links on ClimateAudit, RealClimate, and the Air Vent. (more…)

Please click for Part I and Part III.

PART II – The “hockey stick” graph inadvertently incites a new camp of “lukewarmer” skeptics. Climategate files make first appearance on the internet, but were in the hands of one person days before they were made public.

If history tells us anything, it shows us that inciting an audience is an extremely precarious undertaking. Inspiring one group of followers with a call-to-action can just as easily unleash the furor of another. Arousing a community to attack an indisputable villain can surprisingly lead to a circling of the wagons by the scoundrel’s close associates. Inciting is an unpredictable endeavor, best left for those with an innate ability to read a situation or an army on-the-ready to quickly take advantage of an opening.

So is the story of the hockey stick – just as quickly as it was used as a rallying call for warmists, it also inadvertently gave birth to a camp of skeptics.

Enter Steve McIntyre, stage right. A retired mineral explorer and math scholar from Toronto, McIntyre became interested in climate science and the hockey stick due to its seeming inconsistencies. A Medieval Warming Period (seen above) had been a well-documented event in which the earth’s temperature increased considerably sometime between 1000 and 1300 AD, followed by a cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age. A graph of this cycle was even included in the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1990. These events were, however, absent from the Mann et al hockey stick graph. McIntyre was curious about how the graph was made and as chance would have it, the discipline of temperature reconstructions, largely an exercise in statistics, fit right within his mathematics wheelhouse.

Steve McIntyre

On investigating the hockey stick, McIntyre happened upon what he viewed as some errors in the application of his field of expertise along with some misuses of data. He contacted Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist with a PhD in economics, and the two worked on a paper that would highlight the errors in the original hockey stick article. (more…)