- Bishop Hill blog

I'm still can't take the smile off my face at the ridiculousness of Nick Hewitt's 'review'. It's just so hard to comprehend how one can reach the rank of full professor and still be unable to put together a coherent argument (although who knows, perhaps this is normal at Lancaster, Phil Jones' alma mater). Come to think of it, it's hard to comprehend how one can become a full professor without being able to spell 'practice', but that's probably just me being pedantic again.

And once again, we have a review that could have been written without actually reading the book at all. Not a single quote from the book, not a single fact disputed. I'm wondering if I should christen this kind of thing a "Hewitt", in honour of Professor Nick.

How many more Hewitts do you think there will be before next week?

Update on Sep 3, 2010 by

Bishop Hill

Doug Keenan in the comments:

Suppose that the arguments presented in HSI are valid. Then a scientific conclusion that was major for global-warming science, and was published in the top scientific journal, and had been considered established for years, was not just wrong, but unfounded and rubbish. And the discovery of this came from an outsider. What would that say about global-warming science?

HSI brings global-warming science into disrepute, to some extent. And the global-warming scientists do not want to accept such a thing—because their self-images are founded on the glory of their science. In other words, from Hewitt’s perspective, HSI is an attack on his identity.

This is not about science, but about the self-images of the scientists.