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Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Report Attacking Climate Change Science was Plagiarized, Experts Say

Author:     ERIC W. DOLAN
Source:     The Raw Story
Publication Date:     Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 -- 10:49 am
 Link: Report Attacking Climate Change Science was Plagiarized, Experts Say
Stephan:   The constant with the climate deniers is their willful ignorance and their casual attitude about simple things like ethics. Climate denial in my view, at this point, is right up there with flat earthism, and creationism. Only it is much more dangerous, because Deniers are stopping us from making a proper response to this oncoming crisis. It reminds me of a certain class of Englishman who, throughout the 1930s, thought the rise of National Socialism in Germany was good for Europe, and could not be dissuaded from that willful ignorance until the bombs started falling on London. Perhaps you remember the movie, Remains of the Day, which touched on this.

A congressional report used by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) to question the validity of the science behind global warming in a 2006 hearing was highly plagiarized, according to experts who reviewed it.

‘The report was integral to congressional hearings about climate scientists,’ Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists explained. ‘And it preceded a lot of conspiratorial thinking polluting the public debate today about climate scientists.’

The report was requested by Barton in 2005, when he was the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a position he is currently trying to reclaim. In 2006, he said that global warming science is ‘pretty weak stuff.’

Plagiarism experts told USA Today that the report, which was authored by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, copied material from textbooks, Wikipedia, and other sources.

John Mashey, a retired computer scientist, conducted a year-long analysis of the Wegman report and found that 35 of the report’s 91 pages ‘are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning.’

The Wegman report was highly critical of the ‘hockey stick graph,’ a chart of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years that showed a sharp increase during the last 100 years. That graph was first […]

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