Apologise to Michael Mann, Anthony? I’d rather eat worms

Maybe the greatest victory of all we climate sceptical bloggers have won in the aftermath of Climategate is this: we have established that “authority” – be it the Royal Society or NASA Giss or the Climatic Research Unit or the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change – does not have a monopoly on “truth.”

Of course, the concept of argumentum ad verecundiam – the “appeal to authority” – was acknowledged as a rhetorical fallacy long before the invention of the internet.

But what the sceptical blogosphere has achieved in the last five or ten years has been to re-emphasise this point in a lively, thrilling, intellectually exciting, accessible way for a new generation of open-minded thinkers.

The first skirmish, as we know, was won long before Climategate by a “mere” mining engineer who had never once had a single lesson in climatology from the experts at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit but who yet demonstrated a better grasp of palaeoclimatology and statistical analysis than the entire official climate establishment. Before the internet, this almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible. The climate establishment would have closed ranks – as it tried to do to shut out the unwelcome attentions of Steve McIntyre – and McIntyre would never have had the audience for his findings which he did with ClimateAudit.

2013-04-11 10:45:41

Source: http://climatechangedispatch.com/11145-apologise-to-michael-mann-anthony-i-d-rather-eat-worms.html