As of this moment, it’s raining here in beautiful San Luis Obispo and we’re well over the rainfall we typically get for the year here. This is undoubtedly due to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

On a related note, there’s been a bit of a dust-up in the climate alarmist world since the publication of a paper by the University of Washington’s Eric Steig in Nature last year showed that the entire continent of Antarctica had been warming over the past 50 years. This was good news, because climate alarmists had been warning for years that global warming would cause Antarctica to warm, but it wasn’t—at least until Steig came along.

Then, late last year the Journal of Climate, published a paper by Ryan O’Donnell, Jeff Condon, Nicholas Lewis and Steve McIntyre (of hockey stick fame) showing that Steig’s methodology was flawed and that while the small Antarctic peninsula was warming rather drastically (.6 degrees C a decade), the rest of the continent was much more stable, with most other areas either warming only very slightly or even getting colder. Basically what Steig had done was take the warming in the peninsula and smear it across the rest of the continent.

For an easy visual explanation for the layman, I encourage you to check out this post by Bishop Hill.

Then it gets better.

The O’Donnell paper had some pretty tall hurdles to overcome to even get published. Someone known only as “Reviewer A” had submitted an 88-page critique of the paper, making all sorts of suggestions; some valid, some debatable and some just ridiculous.

Among the suggestions by “Reviewer A” was to insist the use of “iridge.” What is iridge? Doesn’t really matter.

Once the paper was finally published. Eric Steig went on climate alarmist site Real Climate and attacked the O’Donnell paper, specifically pointing out how wrong it was for them to use “iridge.”

For the record: “Reviewer A” was Eric Steig.

And that’s all you really need to know about this climate alarmist clique. Set aside for a moment the propriety of having the author of the paper being rebutted because of a flawed methodology as one of the reviewers on the paper exposing his screw-up. Steig suggested, nay demanded, that his opponents use a specific item in his capacity as anonymous “Reviewer A,” and then when the paper is published, attacks them for using the very item he demanded they use.

Ethical behavior goes right out the window when the narrative must be maintained.