“Quote of the week #29“. Anthony Watts draws attention to perceived disrespect in a quote from Dr. Gavin Schmidt that points out that Steven McIntyre could have made a real contribution to climate research instead of spending five years whining about being ill-treated. This is a signal to Anthony’s followers to drown out any rational comments with a flood of denialist noise.

The article in question, Climategate’s guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs, from Steven McIntyre’s hometown paper The Globe & Mail and brought to Anthony Watts’ attention by the thin-skinned one himself is actually a fairly insightful. Here’s a telling quote from it that I like better than Anthony’s (emphasis mine):

The key objection to the work of bloggers such as Mr. McIntyre is that they are engaged in an epic game of nitpicking: zeroing in on minor technical issues while ignoring the massive and converging lines of evidence that are coming in from many disciplines. To read their online work is to enter a dank, claustrophobic universe where obsessive personalities talk endlessly about small building blocks – Yamal Peninsula trees, bristlecones, weather stations – the removal of which will somehow topple the entire edifice of climate science. Lost in the blogging world is any sense of proportion, or the idea that science is built on cumulative work in many fields, the scientists say.

Amen.