The Burning Woman Festival of Global Warming: Step up to the stake, Ms. Curry Judith Curry, who has been kind enough to give interviews here before, has now crossed the line in the minds of the climate hysterics who have polluted this discussion with invective and hatred for so long. Her crime has been to read a book. Really. The book is The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, who blogs under the nom de guerre (it's a war now...) of Bishop Hill. The book, which reads like a detective thriller (it has been described as Stieg Larssen without the lesbian sex, which is just about the best one-line review in history), chronicles the exposure of Michael Mann's famous Hockey Stick chart as irretrievably flawed. Curry will pay--she's already paying, in fact. She is now being described as a skeptic, a denialist, someone who has gone over to the Dark Side. Tim Lambert, who runs a blog that is arguably the worst of the climate hysteria genre, has a post up on his site devoted to criticism of Curry. The comments there are summed up by this: "Her comments at RC and CP do not read like those of a scientist, or even of a rational person. They read like those of the typical denialist." Now get this straight. Curry is not pronouncing that Montford's book is the definitive source. She does not endorse the book. (I do, but I'm not a respected climate scientist...) Curry's crime--what makes here a `denialist' and 'skeptic' and 'irrational'--is to say that people should read the book to get an understanding of what happened, how it happened and why it's important. Judith Curry actually had to say that people should read a book. That's because some of the hysterics published phony studies saying it was not necessary to read a book to understand why they were right and their opponents were wrong. I am not making that up. Everybody from Brian Angliss to Michael Tobis is inventing reasons why they don't need to read criticism of the position they support--that Michael Mann is a saint and the Hockey Stick chart is a holy relic. There is no better vignette explaining the intellectual dishonesty of the hysterical position, championed by Joe Romm and Tim Lambert, supported by Real Climate, Tamino and Michael Tobis, and egged on from the sidelines by Eli Rabett and countless commenters. Montford's book shows how Steve McIntrye identified the errors in sample selection and analysis that made the Hockey Stick chart untrustworthy, and the efforts Michael Mann and his colleages went to to hide the defects of their study (which led to Climategate, which Montford covers at the end of his book). Montford's book is good. Curry's recommendation to the community that they read it is a very good recommendation. I have seen too many defenses of the consensus and attacks on its opponents that showed an appalling ignorance of what happened to think otherwise. Judith Curry is a respected climate scientist (who does not dispute the theory or existence of climate change due to human emissions of CO2). She holds respectable positions and has published well-respected papers in the literature. She's getting dragged through the mud by political hacks for the crime of telling these hacks that they should read what exactly their opponents are saying. As I said above, there is no episode in all the climate wars that shows more clearly the cheap partisan political nature and moral bankruptcy of hacks like Joe Romm, Real Climate, Tim Lambert, Tamino and Eli Rabett. The question now is will Curry get burnt at the stake professionally and personally before people say `that's enough'? SOURCE
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