Shub on Singh
Apr 14, 2011
Bishop Hill in Climate: Sceptics

Shub wonders whether Simon Singh was on James Delingpole's side in his recent Press Complaints Commssion spat with UEA.

Simon Singh must be aware, by now that the ‘denier-numpty’ columnist and blogger, James Delingpole, belonging to the alternate non celebrity-infested world of climate scepticism, has been pursued vigourously by the University of East Anglia, in almost the exact same manner as Singh was by the British chiropractors. Just as Singh did with the chiropractors, Delingpole gave Professor Phil Jones of the University a few choice names — “FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method-abusing”. Delingpole cannot pronounce his hyphenated descriptors of Phil Jones or the Jones-run epicentre of climate controversy and data prison - the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the University felt in turn. They lodged a complaint with the Press Complaints Comission.

The analogy is, of course, not exact - a complaint to the PCC being a different beast to a libel suit. A better comparison would of course have been the pursuit of Tim Ball by various climatologists. Dr Singh will no doubt want to contribute to Prof Ball's legal defence fund here.

Update on Apr 14, 2011 by Registered CommenterBishop Hill

A couple of people have emailed in recent days to point out that Simon Singh has switched off comments on his blog - all preexisting comments have been removed. This is sad, as both climate-change-related threads were good natured, although critical of Singh for not engaging with questions.

Fortunately I had previously archived the earlier thread, with Paul Dennis's comments on Hide the Decline, so these have not been lost.

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