The Guardian’s recent “Climategate” event – picking over the fallout from UEA’s hacked emails – was always going to be a weird one, and I left with decidedly mixed impressions. For some, this event clearly represented the rehabilitation of climate denial in even the more progressive end of the mainstream media. One friend described it as “like being in 1998”, which was not far off the mark. Two of the panellists – Doug Keenan and Steve McIntyre – fall broadly into the “sceptic” camp, while a good third of the room at least seemed to be composed of elements of the denial lobby. Benny Peiser – a serial paid advocate for mining industry front-groups – was in attendance, as was the eccentric weather theorist Piers Corbyn – whose constant heckling at one point saw him threatened with ejection from the room (to loud applause).

Now that the full debunking of the “Amazongate” episode has hit the mainstream, it has been instructive to see how the story’s originator has been responding. The wild claims of blogger, climate denier and sometime collaborator with Christopher Booker Richard North originally found their way onto the pages of the Times – after a brief stopover on far-right conspiracy theorist James Delingpole’s Telegraph-hosted blog. North claimed that the scientists behind the IPCC’s second 2007 report had made unfounded statements about the Amazon – in particular on its sensitivity to declining rainfall and potentially grim outlook – an accusation that was debunked by experts in the relevant field almost as soon as it was published. Following a complaint by Dr Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds, who was quoted in the Times’ article, the paper has been forced to publish a retraction.

Yet now that this fake scandal has been exposed, including in an important account by the Guardian’s George Monbiot, North has – perhaps unsurprisingly – been pouring scorn all over that paper’s comment pages. More significantly, after Monbiot noted North’s well-deserved reputation as an “egregious fabulist” “nearly all of” whose “concocted” “stories” (and Booker’s) “fall apart on the briefest examination”, North proceeded to threaten Monbiot and the Guardian with libel action. North referred to “all references to myself” in Monbiot’s blog post “as being libellous and highly damaging”.

Joss Garman is a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK and a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He blogs at: www​.jossgarman​.com.

The respected BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin has published an original but controversial piece criticising the Royal Society, which concludes: “If the great science academies can’t find ways of including the best experts from the blogosphere in their deliberations they may find themselves badly left behind.”

Harrabin draws particular attention to well known “climate sceptic”, Steve McIntyre. He writes, “He has taken on the scientific establishment on some key issues and won. He arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit – but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input.”

But I disagree with Roger because the kind of ‘scepticism’ which is the meat and potatoes of bloggers is qualitatively unlike the organized scepticism which questions, refines and replaces theories about how the world works – i.e. it is unlike science.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus are names that may be familiar. They are the authors of The Death of Environmentalism – a notorious critique on the tactics of the green movement that attempts to address environmental goals from a radically different perspective. Most recently, the two penned a withering attack on environmentalists and climate scientists.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus re-state a plethora of half-truths, misrepresentations and outright fantasies that have lately become almost canonical in the public sphere.

The Guardian reports that Simon Lewis, a UK-based Amazon scientist, is taking the Sunday Times to the Press Complaints Commission over an article they published in January claiming the IPCC wrongly predicted that 40% of the Amazon rainforest was vulnerable to reduced rainfall:
Lewis said he was contacted by the Sunday Times before the article was published and told them the IPCC’s statement was “poorly written and bizarrely referenced, but basically correct”. He added that “there is a wealth of …

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:
As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.
That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of  TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.