Scaife's Braintrust Just Can't Help It

So stuck with their anti-science narrative, they have to skew everything around it in order to maintain their myth.

The latest example:

Professor, environmentalist and best-selling author James Lovelock once was regarded as the father of climate studies. But now he's an extremist in the eyes of leading climate cluckers for having the audacity to expose their faith as "alarmist."

Oh, the author of "The Revenge of Gaia" and preacher of global-warming Armageddon still believes that climate change is occurring, but not as fast as previously postulated.

"The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium," Mr. Lovelock, 92, tells MSNBC. Temperatures have remained constant "whereas (they) should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that."

So much for man-made influences.

To the Church of Global Warming, that's heresy

As part of the "Church of Global Warming" metaphor, the editorial is titled:

Warming excommunication: Who's the 'extremist'?

So Lovelock committed "heresy" and has thus been been "excommunicated."  Who's doing the excommunicating?

Luckily the braintrust has some names ready:

Among them, Penn State's Michael Mann, inventor of the discredited "hockey stick" global-temperature graph, who in an email to LiveScience insisted that Lovelock's views were never in line with "mainstream" science.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., was less kind: "The fact is (Lovelock) knows little or nothing about climate change."

So, now Lovelock is an extremist? For all its "settled science," the climate-change club sure is an intolerant group.

In order to remain faithful to anti-science, the braintrust has to maintain that Mann's "hockey stick" was wrong.

But it's right - the National Research Council says so. Like any zealot, the braintrust just can't except reality when it conflicts with their zealously held beliefs.  And that's sad.  Frightening and sad.

Let's move on to that Livescience quotation from Mann.  It's here.  This is what Mann actually said (remember the editorial is about how Lovelock's been "excommunicated."):

Lovelock's views were not in line with mainstream climate science to begin with, Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist, pointed out.

"As I see it, Jim's views were at the alarmist end of the spectrum of scientific opinion, so frankly I see him largely as just coming back into the fold of mainstream thinking," Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience. "That having been said, he has made some statements which appear to reflect a misunderstanding of what the science has to say." [emphasis added.] 

Far from excommunicating Lovelock, Mann's saying that while Lovelock was wrong about lotsa stuff, he's now closer to being right.

Only in the down is up world of Scaife's braintrust could that be excommunication for heresy.