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A few days later, Motherboard published a slithery retraction. After Crockford complained that Amstrup’s comments about her were “a lie” and that she has never used such terms, Amstrup “clarified” his comments. He said that when he accused Crockford of calling scientists fraudsters, he really meant to accuse “climate deniers as a whole, rather than Crockford in particular.”

Ah, well, mix-ups like wrongly accusing a scientist of slanderous language are the kind of things that can happen given the context. It’s all part of an escalating epic of polar bear junk science. It begins with a paper in which Amstrup, who heads the activist group Polar Bears International, and other climate scientists — including famed temperature hockey-stick maker Michael Mann— produce what must be one of the most pathetic scientific smear jobs in the already sorry history of climate change science smear campaigns. Also along for the hatchet job was Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian psychologist who asserts that people who have doubts about climate policy are wacky conspiracy theorists who would also tend to believe the 1969 moon landing was faked.

Motherboard published a slithery retraction

In their new paper published November 29th, in the journal BioScience, Mann, Lewandowsky, Amstrup and a dozen other authors, headed by Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, attack Crockford as an unqualified climate “denier.”

Crockford is fighting back. On Wednesday, she demanded that BioScience retract the paper. She describes it, in part, as “simply malicious, and an egregious breach of professional ethics” and filled with “untrue statements.”