Yesterday, HuffPo, DeSmog and E&E published a list of recommended Red Teamers that the Heartland Institute sent to the EPA. The names should be mostly familiar to regular readers: from the bought and sold like Willie Soon and William Happer, to the incompetent and inept, like Joe D’Aleo and Steve McIntyre.
Now we could write an 11 page document with the various funding biases, errors and distortions of just 15 of these supposed experts, but that’d make an awfully long roundup. Instead, here’s a greatest hits reel featuring these champions of denial.
Let’s start with perhaps the most qualified. The tag-team of John Christy and Roy Spencer run the UAH/NASA satellites that deniers love to cite, because for years they have underestimated warming. By now, Christy and Spencer have been corrected so many times since they originally claimed that the planet was cooling in the 1990s that they were the first example in a peer-reviewed paper showing the poor quality of research done by deniers.
Then there’s Judith Curry, who was included despite her deriding Heartland’s involvement in the Red Team effort. (“They kind of get the B-list people involved, it's really not the best thinkers,” she told E&E last month. “It's a lot of people with an agenda, so it's not quite the group of people I want to work with.”) But Curry would pretty much fit right in, given her denial of the extent of human attribution, misleading congressional testimony, and backwards focus on uncertainty.
Richard Lindzen, another formerly well-respected source, is on the list, despite his failure to make a compelling Red Team case for Peabody Coal, and long-debunked “Iris hypothesis” which held that cloud changes would counteract any warming. Then there’s Craig Idso, member of the “the von Trapp family of climate change denial” who works with his father and brother at the industry-funded Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. His inclusion on the list is hardly a surprise given the Idso family’s longtime promotion of the debunked “Co2 is good” meme.
Roger “my hostile reaction to being debunked made Nate Silver apologize” Pielke Jr. makes the list, as does David “I wrote an error-ridden report for an ExxonMobil/David Koch group” Legates, Patrick “40% of my funding is from fossil fuels and I once confused radians and degrees” Michaels, Anthony “BEST debunked my raison d'etre but I deny it despite saying I’d accept its findings” Watts, Joseph “I don’t know how to read a graph” D’Aleo, and of course Art “I love urine” Robinson.
As Curry mentioned, Heartland doesn’t exactly get “the best thinkers.” Instead they seem to have recommended for the Red Team those who are all too familiar with the painful red ink of corrections and rejections.
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