Year 3, Month 2, Day 6: Hats Back On, Gentlemen.

Behold! An idiot. Meet James “Smokey” Shott:

— — More bad news for environmental alarmists came last week when 16 more well-known and well-respected scientists signed on to a Wall Street Journal article titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy,” adding their names to a large and growing list of scientists opposing manmade climate change dogma.

This one was fun. Sent January 31:

“Smokey” Shott tells us that the established scientific foundation of global climate change has been dealt a terrible blow — a double blow, at that. How? First, he notes a piece just published in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the broad scientific consensus on climate change — and written by 16 (sixteen! count ’em!) scientists and engineers (almost none with actual climate science backgrounds). Omitted from his report is the fact that six of the Journal’s signatories have been linked to fossil-fuel interests, or that when 225 (two hundred and twenty-five! count ’em!) genuine climatologists submitted a paper providing scientific facts and analysis of the question, they were rejected out of hand by the WSJ (the paper was eventually published in Science Magazine).

And then Mr. Shott delivers what he clearly believes to be the coup de grace: an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, a paper notorious for its sensationalist, factually-challenged journalism. Quoting “fringe” scientists propounding a thoroughly-debunked “global cooling” hypothesis, the article has already attracted widespread derision in scientific circles.

Getting science from the WSJ is as silly as getting investment advice from a climatology journal. Getting science from the Daily Mail, on the other hand, is as silly as looking for celebrity gossip in the pages of “Global Biogeochemical Cycles.”

Warren Senders