After an unedifying and ultimately pointless dialogue with Richard AE North on the Conservative Home website, relating to the badger cull yesterday (see yesterday’s post), I was drawn to his blog to see what he was fulminating about there.

I discover, not really to my surprise, that he is a comrade in arms of Christopher Booker, that renowned global warming denier, Europhobe and anti-environmentalist. North mentions a recent article by his mate Booker, on global warming, in the Telegraph.

Booker barely strings an article together from a blog written by an American, Steven Goddard (not his real name). Goddard claims that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, have been deliberately manipulating data from the US historical climatology network, to make previous decades look cooler than they actually were. This is what NOAA say about the USHCN and the data adjustments they have made.

I took a look at Goddard’s blog. Look, but be prepared. It’s the usual hotch potch of pseudo science, supposedly independent and expert critique of climate data, cuttings from old newspapers. Just what you expect from the denialist blogosphere.

I looked into Goddard – he has a BSc in geology but does no research himself. It turns out he has joined Screaming Lord Monckton, yes Christopher Monckton the fake Sheikh and Ukipper, at the Science and Public Policy Institute. The SPPI appears to be an offshoot of  Centre for the study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, the key players being Robert Ferguson and the Idso family. Ferguson shared a billing with UKIP climate-denial spokesman Roger Helmer where they both spoke to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a lobbying outfit funded by big Oil and big Tobacco donations. ALEC are also funded by the Koch brothers, notorious for their funding of climate denial front organisations.

So what we have is a climate denier blogger, reporting on a climate denier “journalist”, reporting on some made up stuff from another climate denier blogger, who is working for a front organisation, which is a front for another front organisation, ultimately funded by the Oil industry and some extremely dodgy American multibillionaires.

Why does the Telegraph publish this stuff when it is so obviously blatant propaganda?