Gavin Schmidt is one of the NASA climate scientists who has been peripherally involved in the Climategate affair, and more well known as the chief sysop at Realclimate.org, a website run by the far-left wing Fenton Communications, and funded in part by the Tides Foundation. He’s also an employee of James Hansen, who has been curiously uninvolved in the climategate affair (and has actually been a critic of Copenchangen, but from the other side).

Last June, before the story broke, Schmidt appeared in this interview, where he tries to explain, in his usual opaque way, what the settled science is, and what isn’t. The rather long-winded dissertation is generally correct, as far as the science part goes, and doesn’t seem as polemical as some of his postings on Realclimate.

Five years ago I was less of a public persona in climate-science than I am now. But at the time, the voices that were being heard discussing climate change were at odds with the science. The Wall Street Journal was featuring attacks on scientists; Congress was filled with know-nothings; and, in the mainstream media, every time there was a story, you would have one of the five obligatory contrarians pop up and say “oh no, everything will be fine.”

So in his world, the congress is full of anti-science “know-nothings”, and the right-leaning MSM is conspiring against the scientists who are only after the truth. But then we get this:

There was no public voice for the science community. There were a few scientists who would step out occasionally — Steve Schneider is one. But there was no community pushing to correct the record or to inform people about the actual scientific results. I began to dabble in public outreach, sending letters to the editor, writing the occasional Op-Ed, talking to journalists. It was all to little effect.

So he organizes a scientific crusade against the anti-science know-nothing Moors to restore science to its rightful place (and you wonder where Chuckles gets this stuff):

Over the past five years, I have spent a lot of time building up resources. We spend a lot of time building background for journalists, staffers, and for science advisors of various kinds. We’re building up resources that people can use so that they can tell what is a good argument and what is a bad argument. And there has been a shift. There has been a shift in the media; there has been a shift in the majority of people who advise policymakers; there has been a shift in policymakers. This kind of effort — and not just by me, but also by other equally concerned people — has had the effect of elevating the conversation.

Yeah. In the CRUtape letters™, the paranoia starts to come out: 1228258714.txt

From: Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: [team]

Ben, there are two very different things going on here. One is technical and related to the actual science and the actual statistics, the second is political, and is much more concerned with how incidents like this can be portrayed. The second is the issue here.

The unfortunate fact is that the ‘secret science’ meme is an extremely powerful rallying call to people who have no idea about what is going on. Claiming (rightly or wrongly) that information is being hidden has a huge amount of resonance (as you know), much more so than whether Douglass et al know their statistical elbow from a hole in the ground.

Thus any increase in publicity on this – whether in the pages of Nature or elsewhere – is much more likely to bring further negative fallout despite your desire to clear the air. Whatever you say, it will still be presented as you hiding data.

The contrarians have found that there is actually no limit to what you can ask people for (raw data, intermediate steps, additional calculations, residuals, sensitivity calculations, all the code, a workable version of the code on any platform etc.), and like Somali pirates they have found that once someone has paid up, they can always shake them down again.

[…]

Oh, dear. The “contrarians” (and let’s at least give Schmidt credit for avoiding the Holocaust-mongering “denier” term) are Somali pirates. And this is the guy standing up for science against the tide of know-nothings.

Back to the original article, here’s the final paragraph:

The problem is that the noise serves various people’s purposes. It’s not that the noise is accidental. When it comes to climate, a lot of the noise is deliberate because if there’s an increase of noise you don’t hear the signal, and if you don’t hear the signal you can’t do anything about it. Increasing the level of noise is a deliberate political tactic. It’s been used by all segments of the political spectrum for different problems. With the climate issue in the US, it is used by a particular segment of the political community in ways that is personally distressing. How do you deal with that? That is a question, which I am still asking myself.

So, it’s all a conspiracy. It’s deliberate misinformation. This guy can’t imagine that people have legitimate questions. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a religious belief system, not the mind of a scientist.

Bizzarrely, he doesn’t even recognize that his own website is owned, operated, and funded by political polemics. Or maybe he does.

Update: More on Gavin and Realclimate here.