Climate Change Denialists vs. SCIENCE — Science Wins!

Again.

One of the keystones of the climate change denier’s arguments is that whacky “hockey stick” graph (and accompanying report) commissioned by Congressional Republicans (Joe Barton in particular — the one who thinks he can go toe to toe with a Nobel-prize winning physicist) that tried to accuse climate change scientists in the field of working together too closely which biases their findings in this area (and apparently ONLY in this area — the remediation for this problem was that climate change scientists were told they should ONLY co-author papers with their students. Yes, I know.). The author of this report — one Edward Wegman of George Mason University — used these “findings” to question the existence of global warming and to give ammunition to the Congressional Climate Change Denier’s Caucus who used this info to try to derail cap and trade and other carbon control actions.

Wegman’s report was published is the very serious journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (CSDA), where the good folks at the indispensable Deep Climate blog started to document the problems in this paper — the most aggregious one being plagiarism. After alot of slow-walking and spinning from all parties on this, the journal finally retracted the article this week, citing the plagiarism and the lack of peer review as several of the problems. Wegman is denying plagiarism charges and is blaming a student for the problems.

A new report on Climate Change from the National Academy of Sciences and this retraction even roused the Washington Post Editorial Board to tell folks that climate change denial is an unsupportable position:

Climate-change deniers, in other words, are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three. And their recalcitrance is dangerous, the report makes clear, because the longer the nation waits to respond to climate change, the more catastrophic the planetary damage is likely to be — and the more drastic the needed response.

You got that right.

Plagiarism is a Very Serious Offence in the academic community — an offence that not only can damage a reputation, but can result in firing, loss of funding, loss of a career and can taint the people who were your research team for a long time. George Mason U is under alot of pressure to sanction Wegman, but the real take away here is that Science is a serious business, and those who want to recraft it for political uses will get spanked for that eventually. Because the process itself is biased for information that you can measure, check, recreate and the politically motivated will always fail these tests. Because the politically motivated is not SCIENCE.

Barton and Wegman’s bamboozlement on Climate Change got a very great deal of breathless press when it was presented — oooh look! Climate Change Denials with graphs and color and stuff! Not so much press on the retraction on this paper by a fairly prestigious journal. Which means that the narrative that there is some genuine scientific disagreement about Climate Change unfortunately remains in place. Which is a shame — because the thing that the denialists know is that if you can keep the media focused on a fake “debate”, they’ll never get to either the data or the policy.