Mining Executive and blogger Steve McIntyre, the darling of so many climate change deniers, surely disapointed the assembled ICCC crowd in Chicago with his dry and relatively reasonable keynote address.  The applause after McIntyre’s keynote address was significantly less than when he started because he didn’t call for Michael Mann and Phil Jones to go to jail.

Astronaut Harrison Schmidt (why is a former astronaut speaking at a climate conference?), who followed McIntyre, helped to steer the crowd back to the witch-hunt it was promised by conference organizers. Mark Sheppard, writing in the American Thinker, gave this account of Schmidt’s remark after McIntyre finished:

This is science, [Schmidt] retorted to a now cheering crowd, and if you want to play that game (tricks, non-disclosure, etc) then you can go somewhere else.  To which more than a few in attendance added:  “To Jail!”

I can think of no better analogy than the hilarious logic used by Monty Python’s King Arthur to impress an even more idiotic group of villagers, and magnificently prove that ‘she’s a witch!’.

David Douglass and John Christy (inset) are lousy scientists who flee from structured, peer-reviewed debate and then generously misrepresent the facts in opinion pieces published by ideologically driven websites; at least, that’s the inevitable conclusion from an open letter (attached) from Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer.

Santer is more measured in his language and criticism. He doesn’t call Douglass et al “lousy scientists,” but he points out with great care that their science is lousy. In particular, a paper that they had written in the International Journal of Climatology with B.D. Pearson and S. Fred Singer was flawed by a statistical error so egregious that it should never have seen the light of day.

After a writing team led by Santer ripped the article apart – carefully, methodically – Douglass and Christy howled about imagined censorship and manipulation in scientific publishing, but made no actual effort to respond in the journal in question, preferring to take their complaints to websites where no one would double-check their facts.

Now, they have used the theft of the East Anglia emails to revive their complaints, wondering aloud on the right-wingy website American Thinker about whether there is A Climatology Conspiracy?

For the past week, the breathless buzz on the global warming denier blogs and radio programs has been about a certain BBC News article regarding the temporary cooling effect of El Niña this year.