An infamous 2005 report commissioned by skeptic politicians in the House of Representatives now appears to have been fully and officially debunked.
The paper, which was authored by an ostensibly "independent" statistician, Edward Wegman, purported to reveal that the famous hockey stick graph was flawed, and that climate scientists were mired in lazy groupthink.
Needless to say, it soon became a classic in the climate skeptic cannon. However, much of the study was plagiarized, falsified, and was likely never subjected to peer review.
As a result, the journal that published it has retracted the study, and its findings have been rendered moot. Yet it remains useful in one regard: The whole debacle helps illuminate how the so-called 'denial industry' operates, and why hits like this will help dismantle it.
That denial industry, to employ a term used by the professor Anthony Lieserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, is the conglomeration of industry, media, and politicians who all have an interest in publicizing doubt about climate change. Companies like Exxon and Koch Industries fund think tanks and political advocacy groups that conveniently publish papers skeptical of climate change and protest climate policy.
These papers and deeds then get picked up by sympathetic pundits and media outlets, and the doubt is effectively promulgated. It's one of the main reasons many Americans remain skeptical about climate change.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/05/climate-skeptic-debunked-report-exposes-denial-indsutry.php
