I found Norwig's little experiment interesting. Even more interesting is the response it raised with our local HN deniers who seem more interested in discrediting global warming and climate change than in building our understanding of the current state and the climate. They are the moral equivalent, in my opinion, of the folks who dispute evolution.

The denier culture is sociologically interesting. Those interested in the process should a look at John Mashey's report

The current(185-page) PDF, has a much higher production quality and a lot more information on funding and activity patterns than earlier versions. The current version is at:

http://www.desmogblog.com/crescendo-climategate-cacophony
John suggests that you read the first 4 pages, and, then, if you want to read more, do the following:

a) Print pages 2-4, the navigational aids

b) Download the full PDF, and for on-screen reading, open a second window (Acrobat: Window>new). Use one window to read the mainline narrative, and the second for rummaging the Appendices. Different people are familiar with different subsets, so I know of no way to linearize it that makes sense.

A few highlights:

p.167-168 on plagiarism:

Not just the tree-rings, but a big chunk of the “social network” part of the Wegman Report seems plagiarized from the Wasserman and Faust(1994) textbook. Deep Climate’s 4-page side-by-side is:

http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/wegman-social...

That one is interesting because it seems unlikely to have originated with McIntyre and/or McKitrick.

DC is doing a further piece on that, but after that, I may look into letting those authors know.

See Figure 2.1, p.10, for the overall flow of anti-science memes and money-laundering “cloud”

See Fig A.2.2, p.46 ExxonMobil & Foundation Chronological Funding for Some Think Tanks

That identifies only visible funding for (Annapolis Center, CEI, CFACT, GMI, and Heartland), which leaves ((84%, 78%, 53%, 36%, 87%) unidentified, but it is certainly enough to be interesting. Someone with subpoena power could find out more, as there are many potential funding routes.

For amusement, see Fig A.3.1 p.50 “What’s in a Name?” to see how often names like “Institute” and “Science” pop up in entities that basically do PR and lobbying, despite mostly being tax-free 501(c)3s. I don’t know the (murky) 501(c)3 law enough to understand whether the amount of lobbying they do is OK or not …

However, here’s an interesting GoogleMap:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...

Hint: zoom in and see how many of these are located within one block of a Washington’s K Street. Not every organization located there does lobbying, but I doubt that it is a low-rent district.

See Table A.6.2, especially p.96-99 which lists active people versus visible anti-science activities, more or less chronologically from 1990 to now (Climategate), including continuing attacks A.Santer, A.Oreskes (on those folks), A.GATE (the current climategate etc, might be called A.Jones), and then shows organizational connections. I’d guess someone might do some more social network analysis.

At point, I was going to do PeopleXpeople … but in that group, no one was more than 1 hop away

The attacks on the hockey stick (which could also be called A.Mann) are now split:

A.Hockey is the 2002-current visible use of attacks on the hockey stick as a pillar of climate anti-science, basically used by almost everybody in Figure A.6.2(a).

A.HOCKX is my label for the 1998-2006 effort culminating in the Wegman Report, much of which was behind the scenes.

That’s the part that may well be investigated for 18USC1001 (misleading Congress) and 18USC371 (conspiracy) as per A.14, Possible Legal issues, p.184.