....before the truth has got its underpants on. Or something like that.
The Great Global Warming Swindle appears to be issue du jour on many blogs today, and there have been a lot of interesting contributions on both sides. Unoftunately a fairly blatant attempt to discredit some of the contributors has been wending its way round the LibDem blogs, and I have done what I can to nip it in the bud, but it may be too late now.
In a comment on Liberal Polemic, Thomas Papworth stated that some of the contributors to the programme were "not what they seemed". This appeared to be based on this comment at a blog called Ballots Balls & Bikes made by another LibDem blogger called Joe Otten.
Apparently they had fake academics from non-existent departments in that programme.
I left a comment at Joe's blog, asking where this had come from. The source was this thread at Bad Science. Comment 43 stated:
What I found most infuriating however, was the use of so-called experts with non-existing university affiliations. For example, Philip Stott is not a professor at the “Department of Biogeography ” at the “University of London”. No such department exists. He used to be a professor at the Geography Department at SOAS (an institution better know for its cultural studies than climate change research).
Equally, Tim Bell can’t be affiliated with the “Department of Climatology” at the University of Winnipeg, because this department does not exist, nor does he work at the University of Winnipeg. Apparently, he left in 1996 to become a consultant.
As far as Philip Stott goes, I knew this to be absolute nonsense. Professor Stott is well known to anyone who follows science in the UK, particularly bloggers, and he is a regular commenter on BBC programmes about science. To suggest that he is a "fake" in this way strikes me as potentially libellous. I would have thought BB&B would want to consider removing the comment. Philip Stott's Wikipedia page is here.Can anyone really suggest that labelling him as Professor in the Department of Biogeography is a misrepresentation?
Tim Ball (not Bell), I hadn't come across before, but he also has a Wikipedia page which is here. There seems to be some doubt as to whether he was the first Canadian PhD in climatology but it is undisputed that he was a professor at the University of Winnipeg and did research into the historic climate. He is clearly qualified to speak with some authoritaty on the subject of climate change. Again, calling him a fake appears somewhat risky, particularly as he appears to know his neighbourhood libel lawyer's telephone number.
This all looks to me like an attempt to play the man rather than the ball. Given that one of the central claims of the programme was that climate heretics were persecuted, this rather proves the point, doesn't it?