These last few years have not been kind to the climate flat-earthers. Their patron political party got drubbed in the mid-terms, the IPCC demolished their favorite talking points, numerous post-IPCC scientific results make the IPCC look conservative, and the impetus for action on climate change is growing at breakneck speed everywhere outside the U.S. executive branch.
This last couple weeks has been particularly humiliating.
In the Vermont trial wherein the automakers sued to block California’s emission standards (ultimately losing), famed climate change denier Patrick Michaels was called to testify on automakers’ behalf as an expert witness. As part of an affidavit, Michaels submitted a financial statement disclosing his sources of funding. But when he found out he might have to make that statement public … Michaels withdrew as a witness.
Now why do you suppose he wouldn’t want to reveal his funding?
Then there was the hubbub over a paper by "medical researcher" Klaus-Martin Schulte that purported to show that, contrary to the work of Naomi Oreskes, there is no consensus about climate change among researchers in the field. Who cares about a random paper from a medical researcher? Well, it was going to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Sure, it was notorious crank haven Energy & Environment, but hey, at least it was something.
Only, uh … it was nothing. Turns out the paper couldn’t even meet the desiccated standards of that journal. It won’t be published in any peer-reviewed journal at all, it turns out.
So much for that.
Of course, these serial humiliations do nothing to stop the flat earth movement. The Schulte paper has already entered the "skeptic" pantheon and will bounce around the dipshitosphere for all eternity, just like its repeatedly debunked forebears.
After all, these people are desperate. Earlier this month they went into a full hair-on-fire tizzy over a statistically insignificant adjustment of U.S. temperature data. This week they’re freaking out because research they (wrongly) thinks predicts global cooling was done using a tool developed by James Hansen, which allegedly shows that Hansen is a hypocrite, or … something.
Nothing embarrasses them at this point. The scraps they’re clutching are more and more threadbare, but the volume of their screeching hasn’t gone down a single notch.
Luckily, the wider world seems to have figured out how to ignore them. Finally.
