Well, THAT Didn't Take Long

On Saturday, we posted this.

Today, the Richard Mellon Scaife's Brain Trust went with this. It's all there:

The Daily Telegraph of London reports that some of the world's top climate scientists engaged in nothing less than fraud to perpetuate the theology that man is responsible for supposedly cataclysmic global warming.

The purported evidence comes in the form of thousands of e-mails and other documents pilfered from the computer servers of the world-renowned University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit.

One e-mail "refers to a 'trick' being employed to massage temperature statistics to 'hide the decline' in temperatures." Which only solidifies the credibility of those who contend the "science" of global warming is anything but "settled" and is in every way "junk."

To their credit, The Trib's editorial board did NOT cite any sources financed (as far as I can tell) back to the Sarah Scaife Foundation or any other foundation controlled by the Trib's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife. No circle-jerk here.

But who did the Brain Trust cite?

Couple this revelation with a new book by Christopher Booker that, claim by claim, debunks what the grim reapers of climate change have been peddling.

Nevertheless, the world's politicians are "proposing the most damaging measures ever put forward in history -- cuts in carbon emissions, if implemented, would plunge our world back to the Dark Ages -- to meet a crisis which it now seems was never going to happen anyway," writes Mr. Booker.

And you'd think that this "Christopher Booker" is some sort of climatologist, right?

Wrong. He's a journalist writing for...the Daily Telegraph, the same source used by the Brain Trust to begin with. And that quotation? It's from here - a column Booker uses to promote his book.

So Booker's no scientist but he might still be a credible source for writing about science, right?

Wrong - he's written that "white asbestos" is chemically identical to talcum powder. Something the British HSE has publicly called "irresponsible."

But Booker's misrepresentations about Climate Change are so egregious that George Monbiot, writer for the Guardian has made up the "Christopher Booker Prize for Bullshit".

Monbiot on Booker:

Claim 2:

"Nothing was more laughable than the sequence showing a huge poster of the infamous 'hockey stick' temperature graph being driven round London on the back of a lorry, without any mention of the expert studies which have made the 'hockey stick' one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science."

Fact:

Far from being discredited, the hockey stick graph of past temperature reconstructions has been supported by a large number of further studies, as you can see in this graphic and on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's site. Those who claimed to discredit it have been comprehensively rebuffed. You can read more about this on the A Few Things Ill Considered blog and on Real Climate.

Claim:

"As late as August 28 this year it [the BBC] was still predicting that Arctic ice might soon disappear, just as this winter's refreezing was about to take ice cover back to a point it was at 30 years ago."

Fact:

This is complete trash. See the latest results from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It reports: "Average Arctic sea ice extent for the month of December was 12.53m square kilometres (4.84m sq miles). This was 140,000 sq km (54,000 sq miles) greater than for December 2007 and 830,000 sq km (320,000 sq miles) less than the 1979 to 2000 December average." And: "Average ice extent in December was well below average and very close to that measured in 2007."

Yea, Booker's a good fit for the Trib's brain trust. Completely wrong, of course, but a good fit.