For some time now, Georgia Tech's Judith Curry has been operating in the space somewhere between legitimate-scientist-that's-skeptical-on-climate-change and full-blown-conspiracy-embracing-denier. However, a recent post unfortunately confirms she has fully entered the latter camp.

The post itself is rather unremarkable. It's mostly a hodgepodge of others' quotes, with a little of her own commentary sprinkled throughout. But then—at the end—she makes two very, very concerning statements that reveal the depth of her denial.

She claims that the Climategate emails were "handled pretty responsibly" by the denier bloggers who released them. Yes, Curry believes the manufactured controversy—wherein a trove of emails were quote mined, with various snippets taken completely out of context and presented as damning evidence of climate science malfeasance—was "handled pretty responsibly." Perhaps she has a unique definition of "responsibly," because NINE investigations cleared the scientists of wrongdoing and showed the bloggers were completely wrong in their portrayal.

Not content to stop there, Curry pulls out what may be the single most misleading doctored quote: the combination of "Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline," which deniers trumpeted as evidence that scientists were cooking the books to turn a decline in temperatures into warming. She concludes her post with the following: "Lets face it – 'Mike’s Nature trick' to 'hide the decline' means . . . 'Mike’s Nature trick' to 'hide the decline.'"

No, Curry, it doesn't. At all. "Mike's Nature trick" was referring to (as Greg Laden points out) the process of adding the instrumental observations to the proxy record, and "hide the decline" refers to the fact that tree rings showed a decline in how closely they corresponded with temperatures. The (deliberate) misrepresentation of this truncated quote is a cornerstone of the grand climate denial conspiracy theory that scientists are manipulating data to back up their own theories.

With this endorsement of what may be the single most egregious fabrication of climate change denial, Curry sadly confirms her inability to distinguish between reality and conspiracy, bringing her fully into the climate denier camp.

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