Richard Littlemore's blog

A tartly critical new reader (see "Cherrypicking" here) complains that the DeSmogBlog has not immersed itself, on every possible occasion in the "hockey stick" debate.

Our apologies. For those who are unfamiliar, the "hockey stick" defined the shape of an early graph by one of the world's most respected climate scientists, Dr. Michael Mann. The graph appeared to demonstrate a long-term spike in global warming that meant the 20th century was the warmest in more than a thousand years.

In a 2002 book (Taken By Storm), Christopher Essex and the economist Dr. Ross McKitrick took issue with Mann's statistical method, pointing out some matters of legitimate concern, and the climate change denial lobby grasped the now-flacid hockey stick and began shaking it hither and yon, arguing that if this one graph was flawed, all climate change science was similiarly shakey.

In a recent post in The Citizen.com, Dr. Robert C. Balling, director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University, launches pseudo-scientific attack on Al Gore's move, An Inconvenient Truth.

As with a clutch of other industry-funded academics who quibble over climate change, Dr. Balling is happy to use his Ph.D. and his title to suggest expertise and to imply scientific objectivity. But readers might be better able to judge the quality of his input if they knew that he has been the eager recipient of funding from such philanthropic organizations as ExxonMobil, the British Coal Corporation, Cyprus Minerals and OPEC. Per the link above, Sourcewatch lists his take from these sources at a little over $400,000 in the last 10 years.