Ho Hum …

The blogosphere got a bit agitated the other day when 225 members of the American National Academy of Sciences ‘paid’ for a letter to be published in Science complaining about victimisation by climate sceptics. James Delingpole took up the challenge at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100039045/ May 10th and it’s a spat – describing the sceptics as evil truth-seeking types who unfairly think it’s wrong of scientists to lie and embezzle grant money and fake data and exagerate risk and hide evidence and bully rival scientists into silence … etc. You get the drift of the tongue unleashed with poisonous sarcasm but that is not all. Included with the letter, outlining the full alarmism of the AGW hypothesis, was a picture of a polar bear stranded on a small piece of ice floe in a vast ocean of water – and they admit the idea was to illustrate the full gravity of the situation confronting humanity in the Arctic. The trouble was they naively assumed the picture was a real picture. It wasn’t. Sceptics, being … as they say, sceptical, sourced the picture. The polar bear, the ice floe, the ocean and the wide sky are real – they were just not together in the way the picture has them. It is a design photo – a computer simulation from odd bits from other photos. Basically, it is doctored – and the upshot is that a spokesperson for the scientists has been forced to apologise. Hoots all round.