November 23, 2009

P. McIlheran's glow-ball warming

Predictably (what took him so long, though?), ace reporter Patrick McIlheran has latched on to the East Anglia e-mail "scandal," wherein a bunch of scientists, annoyed by professional denialists like P. McIlheran, shared around some catty messages with each other.

Several of the illegally obtained messages make reference to suggested manipulating of data, and those are certainly a bad reflection. But nobody's come up with any proof of any data fudging in any actual research papers, which is what McIlheran is claiming.

And nobody should be surprised that scientists are annoyed by denialists. We observe it as a regular feature of the so-called "controversy" over evolution. Even in that milieu, however, it's rare to see, 'Next time I see Duane Gish I'm going to punch his lights out.'

Yet even that degree of intemperance is no evidence of "fudging data" or "dangerous frauds," as McIlheran darkly puts it.

McIlheran, aside from the standard litany of tediously grandiose and false conclusions, has nothing to offer except a link to the squash-playing denialist Steve McIntyre and a couple more to the Daily Torygraph, a venerable Fleet Street subsidiary of Fox "News."

And then the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel just republishes this, specially adorned with McIlheran's paranoid, addlepated phantasies. Do they really think their readership is that gullible?

McIlheran would never send you, for example, here.

Just a teensy bit more than meets the eye. I bet it took longer to
edit those e-mails than it did to write Sarah Palin's entire book.

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