Climate Deniers Embarrassed Again, This Time in Utah

One of the arms of the climate change denial industry, a DC-based group called American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), wrote an absurd op-ed that ran on November 12 in the Deseret Morning News under the name Daniel R. Simmons. The op-ed tried to discredit the final report of Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s Blue Ribbon Advisory Council on Climate Change by questioning -- yep, you guessed it -- the validity of climate science. Today the Deseret Morning News printed a must-read rebuttal letter from Dr. Robert Davies, a physicist and former Air Force meteorologist.

Dr. Davies shrewdly notes that the governor's report was based on findings of the entire scientific community, of the whole world. He also exposes the identity of the author, Daniel R. Simmons, who has absolutely no credentials as a scientist but quite a few as a lobbyist for the biggest carbon polluters on Earth. Dr. Davies explains:

Simmons is not simply a well-meaning local letter writer who misunderstands complex data. He's a lawyer and lobbyist whose D.C.-based organization is funded by companies such as Exxon-Mobil and Phillips Petroleum and who co-chairs his committee with a vice president at Peabody Coal. Together, they aim to take the focus off the broad scientific consensus on global warming.

In his op-ed, Mr. Simmons actually suggess that his Exxon-influenced review of climate science is more accurate than the findings that have emerged from the Nobel-prize winning team of scientists at the IPCC. It's a mockery of peer-reviewed scientific inquiry.

Dr. Davies offers Simmons a chance to redeem himself:

If Simmons believes the climate science community has so utterly misread the data, my simple suggestion is that he write up his analysis and submit it for legitimate review and publication. This is how science is done. It's the same method that's brought us laser pointers, footprints on the moon and Cheetos. And I can assure Mr. Simmons that if he has indeed stumbled onto something that a century of climate research, an army of researchers and a mountain of data have overlooked, he'll be halfway to a Nobel Prize.

We don't let lawyers and lobbyists fly 747s, and we shouldn't let them substitute their clumsy interpretations of complex science for those of an entire science community. Legitimate, useful scientific debate only occurs within the peer-reviewed literature, among those with serious training. It doesn't happen in books, on talk radio or on television. And it doesn't happen in op-ed columns under a lobbyist's byline.

Indeed.

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