Actually, I think you're the one illustrating my point, inadvertently I'm sure.

Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof.

The book is a journal published by Elsevier, a major academic publisher. You know, academic papers are frequently published in books.

You're right about the date though, I hadn't noticed that. The claim may have been true at the time, but no longer is. The rest still stands. The journalist in question was never going to take anything written by a non-academic seriously.

Now, the core point you've missed yet are making for me is very important: you have to understand that most climate change skeptics (which I am not, btw) aren't really skeptical about climate change per se. They're really better described as science skeptics or more accurately still, academia skeptics.

If you really engage with their arguments, which I get the feeling most people here never have done, you'll notice that what they're actually talking about is the problems of the scientific establishment. A lot of their arguments could transfer just as well to e.g. the healthcare industry, or academic psychology. And often what they're reacting to is not lobbyists or PR spending but what they see as over-credulous belief in the moral and intellectual purity of academics.

Your post is an excellent illustration of this:

• Shoot the messenger, ignoring his arguments because he isn't paid by the government.

• Shoot another messenger, because they're "well known deniers". This is a circular argument. You're saying "anyone who disagrees with what I believe has no credibility" which is a vacuous statement.

• Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit.

The latter part is really highlighting the underlying understanding gaps here. If you truly understand why Climategate created a whole lot of newly minted skeptics, then you'll understand that it was due to apparent duplicity and collusion in the scientific establishment, the possibility/likelihood of which is a major plank of climate skepticism. Thus saying those scientists were cleared by other scientists just like them won't convince anyone of anything, as it misses the point by a mile.

And BTW the Climategate guys weren't exactly cleared. For instance the Muir Russel review, in the words of the Guardian, concluded:

"It found the scientists had not fudged their results or silenced critics. But it found serious shortcomings in the openness with which they worked, posing a risk to the credibility of UK climate science and indicating a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century."

And it was apparent that the scientists in question had been deliberately and illegally frustrating attempts to check their work via FOIA requests:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-...

The dust from that never really settled, and it wasn't some random blog causing trouble. The behaviour exposed by Climategate was covered in all the major newspapers at the time. It did rather strengthen the basic skeptics case but only in the same way that the replication crisis in psychology and medicine strengthened the case of other kinds of "expert skeptics".