You may remember that my Climategate Inquiries report was recently translated into Italian, and was published by a Turin-based think tank. Today I picked up my name being mentioned on Italian blog and I decided to get a machine translation. It was well worth it, because this must be one of the funniest pieces about my work to date.
The author appears to be a science writer and journalist called Mark F. Let's take a look at what he has to say - this is a machine translation tidied up by me. I think it's right though...
I did not read much (I did with the phone) but enough to understand that the choice of sources by the author is dubious - there is also the online version here. GWPF is an organization that fights against the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis: [inside there are climatologists?]. The aforementioned Andrew Montford is a chemist with no climatological background...
Now I don't know about you, but I can't think for a moment why a climatological qualification would be of any relevance at all to a report about the conduct of some official inquiries. Sure the inquiries looked at climatology, but I was looking at questions such as choice of panel members, and whether particular allegations were investigated. The idea that only climatologists could assess, for example, the email correspondence of the astronomer Lord Rees on whether the Royal Society would pretend to have taken part in the selection of papers for the inquiry to look at is quite monumentally absurd.
Do you think Mark should maybe have studied the report a little longer - you know, long enough to find out what it was actually about? Mind you, you would have thought the title, The Climategate Inquiries, might have given him a tiny clue?
Next Mark takes a pot-shot at the Hockey Stick Illusion, and in a truly roll-on-the-floor-laughing moment cites Sourcewatch on the subject, finding it more reliable than Wikipedia (I kid you not)!
and his book The Illusion Hockey Stick was considered a bad (and boring) example of disclosure [?] - the link above is to SourceWatch , because the Wikipedia page is clearly flawed, and only cites sources in favor of Montford.
Do you think if he had maybe delved into the Wiki discussion pages he might have found the bit where everyone was complaining that they couldn't find any negative reviews of it (six months after it was published)?
Does anyone get the impression that Mark has just written this article without doing any research at all? I certainly do. Which is a pity, because his next line is:
I will not go into the analysis, but just five minutes of research to understand that the source was not reliable. Why have not they done that? And in a newspaper that prides itself on having three or four pages of science!
Yes, folks, five minutes of research seems to have been all he actually did, and having got himself a nice example of the genetic fallacy as the crux of his argument he considers his job done.
And apparently he is a science writer and journalist.
Strewth.