benthic bacteria

I was all excited at the prospect that humans aren’t causing global warming after all, that it’s really benthic bacteria. Then Roger Pielke Jr., suspicious bastard that he is, had to go and pour cold water over the whole deal. Turns out that the University of Arizona doesn’t really have a “Department of Climatology,” as near as I can tell from talking to folks there who study, um, climatology. And whatever the “Journal of Geoclimatic Studies” is, Vol. 23 No. 3 seems to be the first time they’ve thought of posting their work on the intertubes:

Domain ID:D21379999-LRMS
Domain Name:GEOCLIMATICSTUDIES.INFO
Created On:02-Nov-2007 14:50:19 UTC
Expiration Date:02-Nov-2008 14:50:19 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R139-LRMS)

I’ll leave it to others to follow the trail of breadcrumbs back to its source, but I’d suggest that whoever did this has “the skills to interpret complex information in an imaginative and engaging way”.

10 Comments

  1. Argh! If someone wants to do a Sokal, we need to let it run a while, instead of exposing it so quickly. This seems something that Marc Moran & Inhofe would have loved.

  2. I loved this description of the terms used in the, ahem, math:

    “Where Q is raw mass, u is area, c is osmotic conductivity, ? is the vertical (neo-Falkian) benthic discontinuity, X is concretised diachronic invariance (P-series), F is trans-dimensional flow structure and jy is the non-rectilineal harmonic regressivity of the constant ?.”

    Personally, I prefer my mass raw.

  3. > would have loved
    Did, briefly, so they say. I wonder if the sample’s large enough to do statistics (grin).

    Marc Moran: 15 min., so they say
    “Inhofe’s staff … retracted their alert only 15 minutes later.” freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1922454/posts

    Benny Peiser: 70 min. between mail headers
    Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:41:41 +0000
    CCNet EXTRA: CO2 PRODUCTION BY BENTHIC BACTERIA
    Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:51:04 +0000
    CCNet: hoax warning

    Anyone else got data on lag times on this one?

  4. This is perfect proof of that the denialist crowd cares not at all about the scinece. A permanent record of this event is needed somewhere.

  5. Add:

    second hand report from RC thread that Rush Limbaugh reported the ‘Benthic Bacteria study on his radio show as a science report. Anyone got a clock running on that?

    Mentioned this thread at Reuters with a pointer here.

    And now there’s a meta-retraction clock running, starting from the time stamp on a denial by one of the alphabet-guys in that thread who said he was unaware anyone had been fooled for more than a microsecond. Well, that’s measurable!

  6. One more estimated time-to-reaction, from the Reuters page:
    # T Sinclair says: November 10th, 2007 at 11:22 am GMT
    Rush talked about it and went to a break. He corrected immediatley after coming off break. Time for correction from Rush was about 90 seconds.

    According to Reuters the hoax site’s gone now, so that ends the chance for people to hear about it, repeat it, then look it up, think about it, and retract.

    I wonder if it’ll become an urban legend, time will tell.

Comments are closed.