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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? [7]

The argument is pathetic. Subjected to criticism for poor quality work, Douglass, et al, fail to respond to the criticism and then claim a conspiracy to keep them silent. And the consistently unreliable Dr. S. Fred Singer, is now nowhere to be seen, regardless that he was only too happy to earn a publishing credit by lending his name to the original article, and who publicized it in a U.S. National Press Club conference announcing, “Nature rules the climate: Human-produced greenhouse gases are not responsible for global warming.”

This is yet one more example of how the denierguys have used, and will continue to use, the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the East Anglia University in Norwich, UK. They will scramble out of their holes, take a couple of cheap shots, declare climate science mortally wounded and then, just at the point they might otherwise have adduced evidence, they will disappear. Would that those intervals were longer.