Turned over a rock and there was William Connolley

A good look at the Energizer Bunny of Anthropogenic Global Warming. From Lawrence Solomon writing at Canadian National Post:

Wikipedia�s climate doctor
How Wikipedia�s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world � Wikipedia � in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history � it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time � the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period �dilutes the message rather significantly.�

Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. �We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period� read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating � they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.

And WikiPedia:

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known � Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia�s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world�s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn�t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it � more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred � over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley�s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia�s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

Well, the Medieval Warm Period is back but it has been castrated to within an inch of its life. They are using a variant of the Mann Hockey Stick graph that has a little bump where the MWP was and they are saying that it was a localized phenomenon. Compare and contrast to these readings from the central Greenland ice core: That is a much better picture of the MWP and yes, it was a lot warmer than it ever has been in the last fifty years and there was a time about -1200 BC before that that was warmer still. These braying ninnies that seek to line their pockets while toeing the Marxist line are hypocrites and their Science is a sham. William Connolley, you are an asshat and charlatan of the first order...