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This development—the use of a quasi-academic journal to level sometimes groundless
accusations against scientists—was troubling. It happened again in 2009 when an economist and
climate change contrarian named Hu McCulloch alleged that he could not reproduce a tropical ice
core record produced by Lonnie Thompson and colleagues, implicitly claiming either ineptitude or,
worse, malfeasance. Thompson is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and recipient
of the Heineken Prize, the Blue Planet Prize, and the highest scientific honor in our country, the
Presidential Medal of Science. His tropical ice core data provided independent support for the
conclusion that modern warming was unprecedented for the past two thousand years and were
featured in An Inconvenient Truth , making them a particularly tasty target for deniers. Just as with the
attacks against our work by McIntyre and McKitrick that were rejected by Nature , McCulloch was
unable to marshal a credible enough argument to publish a comment in the original journal of record
(in this case, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [ PNAS ]). The McCulloch paper
apparently was rejected by several journals before the author found one willing to publish it— Energy
and Environment . 59
I knew McCulloch's claim that the tropical ice core composite was “irreproducible” was false,
as I was able to reproduce Thompson et al.'s results easily from their raw data. I was also able to
identify McCulloch's error—an incorrect assumption that the amplitude of variation in a series of
measurements must be constant in time—in about a half hour of work. 60 The paper was laden with
innuendo, the conclusion section stating, for example (emphasis added), “The Thompson et al.
tropical composite … bears no replicable linear relationship to … series on which they claim it is
based.” On the basis of erroneous analysis, and with some help from the journal's editor Sonja
Boehmer-Christiansen, McCulloch had leveled false allegations against one of our country's most
respected climate researchers. This was not an isolated incident for McCulloch. In fall 2009, he made
a similarly baseless accusation of plagiarism against my colleague Eric Steig. 61
Suffice it to say that in recent years the Serengeti strategy had become finely honed. Isolate
particular climate scientists from the community, saddle them with trumped-up charges of
incompetence or impropriety, or both, make an example of them to discourage others from coming
forward, and use the controversy to distract the public and policy makers from the real matter at hand
—what to do about the potential looming climate change threat. Yet in the ramping up of attacks
through fall 2009, we had still seen only a set of opening skirmishes in what could be characterized
as the climate war's “Battle of the Bulge.” The main battle loomed in the near future, and nothing
could prepare climate scientists for what was to come.
 
 
 
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