The Battle of the Bulge - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 140

they discredited me and pronounced the entire study “debunked.”
As a scientist, I welcome input that improves my work, and when needed, I issue
proper revisions…. [However] no formal rebuttal by those who had supposedly
“debunked” the study has been submitted to the journal editors, the standard procedure for
engaging authors in a measured discussion of a scientific study. Instead, accusations remain
plastered across blogs, apparently for political rather than scientific purposes. 47
It's Fraud , I Tell You!
A prime example of the hit pieces that purveyors of climate change denial were publishing in fall
2009 was “None Dare Call It Fraud: The 'Science' Driving Global Warming Policy,” which
appeared on October 16 on contrarian sites such as the Post Chronicle and Townhall.com . 48 The
author, Paul Driessen, has been variously employed 49 by the Center for a Constructive Tomorrow
(CFACT), the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, the Frontiers of Freedom, and the Atlas
Economic Research Foundation, among others—a virtual cornucopia of industry-funded
disinformation outfits. 50
If the overall aim of Driessen's piece was to malign as many individual climate scientists as
possible in one relatively short commentary, it was successful. There was the shopworn myth that
“Dr. Ben Santer and alarmist colleagues” by themselves chose the “discernable human influence”
wording in the 1995 IPCC Third Assessment Report. Next came the spurious claims that Phil Jones
had “withheld temperature data and methods” and that Keith Briffa had “selected just twelve” tree
ring records to “prove a dramatic recent temperature spike.” Last, Driessen re-promoted the familiar
falsehoods that I had “refused” to “divulge [my] data and statistical algorithms” and that I had
“cherry-picked tree-ring data.”
Driessen even managed to malign the collective community of American environmental
journalists as (my emphasis) “ supposed professionals” who were purportedly just advocates for “Mr.
Gore and his apocalyptic beliefs.” He promoted Alan Carlin's “suppressed” EPA report, and decried
the “inconvenient truth” behind “global warming hysteria,” which after all was simply a plot to
“enrich Al Gore” and “alarmist scientists.” He went on to pose the unintentionally pertinent question,
“Still not angry and disgusted?” followed by a litany of fossil-fuel industry-friendly Web site links.
He implored his readers to “get on your telephone or computer, and tell your legislators and local
media this nonsense has got to stop,” and ended with the baseless accusation his piece began with: “It
may be that none dare call it fraud—but it comes perilously close.” All in a day's work!
The repeated reference to “fraud” by Driessen and other hired guns was not coincidental. The
language choice was taken straight from the Frank Luntz playbook, designed to perpetuate the view
that climate scientists were not only wrong, but were in fact evil. My colleagues and I, their narrative
held, were engaged in the perpetration of a fraud—a diabolical conspiracy that would not only make
us rich, but would reward a cabal of powerful pseudo-environmentalist fat cats whose bidding we
were supposedly doing. According to Dreissen, we were all implicated in an elaborate scheme
designed to reward “alarmist scientists who get the next $89 billion in US government research
money” and “financial institutions that process trillion$$ in carbon trades.” It was really scientists