The Steve Conspiracy?

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. The Steve Conspiracy? Intl. J. Inact., 1:94–95

The Lay Scientist wonders who’s behind some of the recent global warming-denying articles on The Register :

But who the hell is he? If you do a search for “Steven Goddard” on Google, it doesn’t really show up much, other than his articles in The Reg. If you add “climate” to his name, it gets even weirder. This guy is invisible. [...] Goddard seems to have sprung fully-formed into the intertubes in April this year. That’s where the trail falls cold so far, although somebody is hopefully getting in contact with me about Goddard shortly.

Hmm… Steven Milloy, Stephen McIntyre, and now Steven Goddard? They’re all Steves, and they’re all global warming deniers! No doubt the Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs will be interested in this. :)

So what’s the deal with this “Steven Goddard” character? Apparently, less than 3 hours after The Register ran his 5 Jun article, an ‘executive summary’ of it appeared on the ICECAP site — and it’s written in the first person. Was Goddard moonlighting as a summarizer for ICECAP?

Also, what’s with the name “Steven Goddard”? I’m guessing it’s a pseudonym — “Goddard” is presumably a reference to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies where James Hansen works, while “Steven” may be a reference to Milloy, or McIntyre, or perhaps Project Steve Steve…

Finally, observant readers will note that in Goddard’s 5 Jun offering, the graph captioned “Differences between reported temperature anomalies, NASA, RSS and UAH” leaves out HadCRUT¹ — again.

Footnotes

1. The UK Hadley Centre + University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit global temperature anomaly data. A separate description of the data format is available.

Update 2008-07-09: The Lay Scientist finds something…