Coincidentally, following on from my review of the first part of the Woods Hole letter yesterday, Bishop Hill follows the scent, looking at the underlying evidence cited in support of the IPCC claim of 40 percent of the Amazon forest being at risk from a slight reduction in rainfall.This impacts directly on the second part of the letter, which I was planning to review today and forms the substance of this post.

It is there, in that second part, that we see William Y Brown, president and CEO of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC), assert that:Mr Booker's criticism of the IPCC's claim that 40 percent of the Amazonian forest is threatened by global warming, on the grounds that it was based on a WWF claim, misses the fact that the WWF's statement was supported by several peer-reviewed science articles, including four published by the WHRC. Bishop Hill does a tolerable job ...

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"To ignore the political dimension is to afford advocacy the same status as genuine science."

Damn right! It is this very thing that Anthony Watts wont acknowledge.

End of digression.

It's a very real problem. The misuse of science as a tool for political advocacy is one of the characterisitics of the warmists, and the failure to recognise it means that argument is being massively distorted. The "scientist" claims a privileged position, which stems from the supposition that he is an honest seeker after truth, and has no interest in the outcome - the work is neutral. When the progenitor of an apparently scientific argument not only has a vested interest in the outcome, but is also offering a selective and partial view of an issue which is highly complex, with many uncertainties, this is no longer science but advocacy, and should be afforded no special attention. These "scientists", therefore, are operating under false colours.

In another online life I enjoy exposing Holocaust Deniers (who doesn't enjoy a turkey shoot from time to time? :) ) and I've always thought that Climate Alarism is closer to HD than climate sceptics/realists are.

The alarmists still have a trick or two to learn yet though. One of the HD'ers methods invloves the same author writing various 'papers' under different names, often granting himself imaginary doctorates, and then quoting these 'paper's as support in other works. One particulary odious individual, Germar Rudolf, when asked why he did this explained that he has to be an engineer, historian, chemist, etc. all at the same time so it made sense to make up different personas and then cite them.

Maybe the alarmists take a similar view? It's not enough to only be a scientist but they must be scientist, activist, publicist, world-saving superhero, etc. so it would make perfect sense for one side of the personality to cite the other!

My tongue is firmly in my cheek with this post, btw, no one deserves to be compared to holocaust deniers.

Another technique is to get a colleague to write a paper and get it published in a "soft" journal, which will fill any gaps that you might have in your own, specifically so that you can cite it rather than lay out a weak argument in you own paper. Reviewers are less likely to drill down and check references, so you can build your paper on assertions imported from other papers, which have the apparent stamp of authority.