Most long-time readers are familiar with the story of Stephen Schneider’s misquoting, which I discussed in one of my earliest posts. Read that post if you haven’t already, otherwise the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense.

So imagine my surprise and disgust when I received a “pingback” (a message that someone else on WordPress has linked to your site) from a post entitled “Environmental Hoax Proof”. The post on WordPress looked like it was republished from somewhere else, and I believe this is the original.

The part of the post which links to me is as follows:

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports

https://climatesight.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/the-schneider-quote/

The author must have read my post before linking to me. Yet they printed the widely-circulated, out-of-context quote anyway.

A lot of people use that particular quote without knowing the backstory. But the author of this post must have known the backstory (unless they didn’t even bother to read what they were providing as a source), and chose to print the seemingly scandolous quote anwyay.

Dishonesty. Fundamental dishonesty. And a real strong faith in the readers that they won’t actually click on the links.

The rest of the post included a lot of similar quotes from climatologists and environmentalists. I could tell without even looking further into any of them that they were similarly out of context.

What does this say about the credibility of some of our opponents?