Michael Graham = Coward

This week WTKK radio personality Michael Graham had another fit of climate change denial. Not surprisingly, Graham (along with fellow WTKK personality Jay Severin) have latched onto the non-scandal stemming from the hacking of the servers at Brittan's Climate Research Unit (CRU). This criminal act of breaking into secured computers at a government research facility resulted in the release of about 3,000 private emails without the consent of the researchers who wrote them. Also released was a file full of computer code (some of it proprietary) used to analyze data. A few dozen e-mails raise eyebrows with phrases like "trick", "MAGIC math" and "Hide" as well as a umber of references to fighting efforts to force the release of raw data used by some researchers. These e-mails were presented without context and were private communications. People see what they want to see in them; denialists and Glenn Beck style whack-jobs see "lies" conspiracies and "proof" that global warming is a hoax while others see collaboration, debate, efforts to present data that give an accurate representation of the truth as well as efforts to keep proprietary work confidential.

One thing that is clear is that there is no smoking gun and no hoax. Two excellent discussions of the CRU hack are found here and here. Despite this, Michael Graham continues to make people dumber. His latest posting is partially a rehash of earlier bad arguments that I've dealt with non-specific references to the CRU hack and some news stories about the recent (relative) cooling being "proof" that Greenhouse Gases don't warm the planet. My beef with Michael Graham isn't that he's making people stupid (he is) but that he is such a coward about it. When I tried to engage Graham in an on-air conversation about Hybrid cars and carbon footprints he mocked me, cut me off and hung up. When I tried to respond to comments on his most recent blog I found the following message:
"The site has blocked you from posting new comments.". Apparently I have been "banned" from posting to Graham's blog

Now, Michael Graham is free to moderate his blog in any way he pleases; nobody is entitled to post anything they want on anothers blog but he is a public figure, one who has access to the public airwaves, whose blog is very popular and apparently wants people to take him seriously when he comments on political and social issues. I think it's telling that anyone who offers a strong argument or challenges the mindless bullshit Graham is pushing gets mocked, cut off and prevented from presenting opposing views.