The social science community has launched its latest comedy contribution to the climate debate in the shape of a paper by sociologists Dunlap and Jacques. The article seeks to link authors of sceptic books to conservative think tanks and takes a cursory glance at how many have been peer reviewed, although the authors don't seem to have actually done any actual work on this latter question.

Anyway, needless to say The Hockey Stick Illusion is included, and I am flagged as having no apparent links to conservative think tanks. My publisher, Stacey International, is however noted as being an "overtly conservative" publishing house, which I think might be news to them.

It's interesting to note how Dunlap and Jacques selected their papers:

Our data set consists of the population of English-language books assigned an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) that espouse various forms of climate change denial. These books reject evidence that global warming is occurring, that human actions are the predominant cause of global warming, and/or that global warming will have negative impacts on human and natural systems. hese arguments have been labeled trend, attribution, and impact denial (Rahmstorf, 2004). Books were included only if they take one or more of these positions challenging climate science, all of which are used to reject the necessity of carbon emission reductions.

The Hockey Stick Illusion presumably warrants inclusion under the first criterion since it rejects the hockey stick as being any sort of evidence that global warming has occurred. Of course, as readers here know, I do not dispute that the world got a little warmer at the end of the last century, and indeed I say so in the book, so I think nobody can accuse me of rejecting all evidence that global warming is occurring.

But of course that is not the criterion that the authors use. It seems that their somewhat more relaxed criterion is that if you reject any evidence of global warming you are an advocate of "climate change denial".

Which I think says more about the authors and their religious conviction than it does about me.