Dementia seems to be contagious. It’s no secret that the blogmaster at a formerly interesting blog has undergone a descent into dementia suggestive of Capt. Queeg of The Caine Mutiny. Seems like he has competition.

In my previous post Meltdown Mann, I wrote about a WaPo column that he penned that sounded like a paranoid rant. At about the same time, WSJ had a not-very-friendly piece about Climategate, where Mann refused an opportunity to respond. After several weeks, he finally responded.

So on New Year’s eve, Mann belatedly replies, and the WSJ publishes it. It’s short, it’s non-sequitur, and a little bizarre:

In his Dec. 18 op-ed “How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus,” Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute falsely claims that work by him (and other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians) has been unfairly blocked by me and others from appearing in mainstream science journals because the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate science deniers.

Right off the bat, he uses the politically-loaded term “denier” (interesting, because the term is never used in the CRUtape letters™). Secondly, the entire paragraph is a strawman, since the conspiracy to keep certain papers out of certain journals and the IPCC reports was incontrovertibly documented, and which ones were being kept out had not so much to do with whether or not they were generally “contrarian” (the term that they actually do use, to which I don’t object), as much as papers by whomever, making specific arguments that the “team” doesn’t want proffered.

But so far, he’s just being political and disingenuous. And there’s more of that here, but each paragraph gets increasingly wilder and more paranoid:

In truth, the only bias that exists at such publications is for well-reasoned writing that is buttressed by facts.

That is why climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama—who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse—have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.

And what about those who are not being published? Every scientist dealing with a major public issue must decide if he or she is going to be a scientist or a de facto politician.

Mr. Michaels and many climate science deniers have opted for the latter course of action. For example, presidential science adviser John Holdren notes that Mr. Michaels “has published little if anything of distinction . . . being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.” This makes Mr. Michaels a perfect candidate for a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a decidedly poor submitter to a serious scientific journal.

Now comes the strawberries:

Society relies upon the integrity of the scientific literature to inform sound policy. It is thus a serious offense to compromise the peer-review system in such a way as to allow anyone—including proponents of climate change science—to promote unsubstantiated claims and distortions.

Excuuuuuuuuse me??? If this were just chutzpah, this guy would win the international chutzpah competition. This is like Al Capone petitioning the church for Beatification.  Of course, the argument is absurd. He’s essentially saying that the peer-review process may fail, therefore we have to keep unapproved papers from being peer-reviewed.

But who, it is documented, has been caught red-handed, compromising the peer-review system?

The only remaining question, among the long-time followers of this story, is who is Lt. Keefer?

Bonus: We have this comment @ ClimateAudit from Ross McKitrick, the “silent partner” in the McIntyre and McKitrick team:

Ross McKitrick

Posted Dec 31, 2009 at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Reply

Regarding Mann’s WSJ letter, how does one become a “climate science denier”? Does that mean you deny the existence of climate science? Talk about setting up an absurd dichotomy.

Of course what he really means is someone who denies the validity of his particular interpretation of what constitutes climate “science”, which is, “the stuff I publish.”

As for appealing to John Holdren’s assessment of the contribution of Pat Michaels to the field of applied climatology over the years, I doubt Holdren has even read any of it, let alone published anything himself of comparable value. And it’s rather rich for Mann to invoke the opinion of a politically-appointed advisor to a politician as part of his argument about the importance of keeping politics out of the discussion. The fact that Mann evidently didn’t see that invoking Holdren is a form of political rhetoric reveals Mann’s own political presuppositions.

Thank you, Ross.

~~~~~

Sorta related bonus feature:

It looks like the media has done a great job of analyzing and reporting on the Climategate scandal. No, not MSNBC, not CNN, not any of the American alphabet soup networks. Not BBC or CBC, either. For some reason, the English language media wasn’t interested. Or French. Or German. Or Spanish, or Italian, or any of the other media in any of the major languages. Until you get to Finland.

I showed earlier an expose on Finnish TV of the climate issue pre-Climategate. Again, they did what the big guys wouldn’t. You have to read English subtitles, but this is about the most correct and to-the-point expose on this subject that I’ve seen. It’s here in three easy pieces, totaling about a half hour. If you watch this, you’ll know what the “nontroversy” is all about, and what decline was being hidden, and from whom it was being hidden.

Watch it and curse.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Quiz after the break.