Climate zombie Joe Barton defends plagiarism and incompetence

by DWG

USA Today ventured into investigative journalism in covering plagiarism in the Wegman report, which was commissioned by Texas Republican Joe Barton in 2006 when he was chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The USA story was covered in detail in a diary by Keith Pickering. However, plagiarism is really the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the Wegman report.

Barton and staff brushed off the plagiarism in the Wegman report, claiming the conclusions were valid.

Lisa Miller, a spokeswoman for Barton, reiterated the congressman's support of the Wegman report on Monday, saying it "found significant statistical issues" with climate studies.

False. Absolutely false.

continued at Daily Kos....

USA Today: Key climate denier report was plagiarism

by Keith Pickering

Back in 1998, climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (hereafter MBH) published a famous paper on paleoclimate that showed that the Earth is warmer now than at any time in the past thousand years. This paper became known as the "Hockey Stick" because the graph of global temps looked roughly that shape: a long slow decline from 1000 AD, transitioning to a sudden warming during the 20th century.

The Hockey Stick became a shibboleth to the right-wing climate denier crowd: if MBH were right, that would mean we would actually have to do something about global warming. So the right set out to destroy the hockey stick. This attempt didn't start in academe. It started in the offices of certain Republican congressmen. They found a compliant statistician named Edward Wegman to write a report in 2006, and they fed him information from a congressional staffer. The result was an excoriation of MBH in the form of an official congressional report, read into the record at a subcommittee hearing.

One little problem: the information that the GOP staffer fed to Wegman was plagiarized. And the climate scientist whose textbook was ripped off was none other than Raymond Bradley, the B in MBH.

continued at Daily Kos....