GISS climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, in a blog entry titled “Mountains and Molehills,” attempted to minimize the importance of GISS’s October 2008 temperature error and questioned the motives of those who caught the error.
“It is clear that many of the temperature watchers are doing so in order to show that the IPCC-class models are wrong in their projections,” Schmidt complained.
Schmidt derided those who independently check GISS data and find errors in alarmist global warming claims as a “cottage industry that has sprung up” and taken attention away from GISS’s message.
Dismissing the GISS error as a mere “molehill,” Schmidt said, “unlike in other fields of citizen-science (astronomy or phenology spring to mind), the motivation for the temperature observers is heavily weighted towards wanting to find something wrong.”
— James M. Taylor
