Blatant Hypocrisy Among Global Warming Skeptics: IPCC Chapter 9

I found this story this morning, an article published on Friday by the Canadian Free Press by global warming skeptics Tom Harris and John McLean (article). The authors stated:

“In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”. Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.”

Well, why not see for yourself?

You can download the IPCC report they are referring to here – and I did. Indeed, around 55% of the 1157 comments were rejected. What bothers me, and should bother you, is that the line “Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter…” suggests the distribution of rejected comments was equal among reviewers. It was not[...]

[...]What the author’s of this article purposely left out was that around 90% of these rejected comments originated from one reviewer: Vincent Gray (who has never published a climate article in a peer-reviewed journal) of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project that is headed by both Canadian “climate expert” Timothy Ball (oil funded, hasn’t published a peer-reviewed paper in 14 years[source]), and the same Tom Harris authoring the original article.

Continue reading this post at my blog, here, where I am currently categorizing all of Gray’s comments.

I’m glad one of the author’s has commented here – it brings up an interesting problem: that of accountability and transparency online. I find the net-savvy user crowd demands transparency and authority when discussing anything online, especially hot-topic subjects like climate change.  How much accountability do we put on the author’s of blogs for the information in their posts? If Timothy Ball did publish recently, and Tom Harris had not commented, how much less weight would my statements have on the reader if they were to find out I was incorrect – or worse, purposely misrepresenting the information at hand (or worse yet, straight out lying)?

This beast they call the internet is a fickle Frankenstein of conjoined users with varying ideas, personalities, and software – all sewn into a virtual monster waiting to either turn on them or boost them onto the most grandiose virtual pedestal (if enough people read their work, that is).

What do Terry readers think?