In his Washington Times op-ed titled 2012 GOP guide to the climate debate,” commentator Steve Milloy made a large number of claims that are demonstrably wrong – 18 at last count. But one of his claims relating to the illegal hack and release of climate scientists’ emails dubbed “Climategate” casts a shadow over all the others. Milloy wrote that “[n]o input from skeptics, even those mentioned in the emails, was included” in the “Climategate” investigations. However, Milloy’s own prior writings on the topic demonstrate that his statement in the Washington Times op-ed is false.

On July 14, 2010, Milloy wrote a commentary for The Daily Caller titled “Penn State’s integrity crisis.” In the commentary, Milloy wrote that “[o]f the five additional interviews conducted, four were of Mann’s fellow alarmists. The lone climate skeptic interviewed was MIT professor Richard Lindzen.” Furthermore, Milloy wrote that he contacted Lindzen personally about his experience during the interview:

[Lindzen] told me, “They also basically ignored what I said. I suppose they interviewed me in order to say that they had interviewed someone who was skeptical of warming alarm.”

Milloy also crossposted the Daily Caller commentary to his own Green Hell blog.

Milloy was also aware that climate disruption denier Benny Peiser of The Global Warming Policy Foundation had submitted a memorandum to the UK House of Commons inquiry. Milloy linked to an edited version of Peiser’s memo at the Financial Post in March, 2010, as shown in Milloy’s Junkscience.com archive for that month.

And in July 2010, shortly after the release of the Independent Climate Change Email Review, Milloy linked to an interview with Steve McIntyre, one of the deniers mentioned most often in the CRU emails, where McIntyre discussed that he hadn’t been interviewed but had submitted written testimony.

Finally, the Penn State investigation final report, the oral and written evidence presented to the House of Commons inquiry, and the evidence presented to the ICCER are all publicly available and all demonstrate that Milloy’s claim is false.

These facts leave us with only two possible conclusions regarding Milloy’s recent Washington Times op-ed – either Milloy is incompetent and unqualified to comment on climate science and politics, or he’s a liar. Either way, the readers of the Washington Times are poorly served by his op-ed.