Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre is a former statistician and minerals prospector and currently a prominent global warming denier. He is the proprietor of the Climate Audit blog (or, more accurately, "Climate Fraudit" ), somehow the co-winner of the 2007 Best Science Blog award (yeah, you just read that right) and prime source for cranks in the field. McIntyre is guilty of the same shenanigans as most deniers: distortion of facts, egregious use of quote mining, statistical trickery, conspiracy theorizing, excessive whining, gross hypocrisy, and general stupidity. He is also a Canadian who hates hockey sticks.

He managed to get a shoddy paper attempting to "debunk" the "hockey stick" published that has itself been repeatedly debunked since its publication. He is generally known for obtaining the denier Holy Grail: finding an actual flaw in the scientific data. Rummaging through NASA code, McIntyre discovered a Y2K bug. NASA was notified and revised the code. In the revision, 1998 was demoted from the then hottest year on record in the US with 1934 overtaking it by an astonishing (drumroll please…) 0.01 degrees Celsius. The change was statistically insignificant, but it was (naturally) trumpeted by the denialist blogosphere and some mainstream denier outlets like the Daily Fail as the nail in the coffin of the hockey stick graph and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory as a whole. This led Tim Lambert of Deltoid to coin the term "The McIntyre factor":

The McIntyre factor is the amount that you have to multiply the size of an adjustment in the GISS US temperatures by to get the number of words in the resulting Steve McIntyre post. Empirical evidence puts the McIntyre factor at 125,000.

So what else has he done? Nothing really. The great victory for the denialist movement was a statistically insignificant change in one country for one year. (That speaks for itself.) Besides his constant bullshit, he seems to be embroiled in a perpetual Lenski Affair-esque situation with a number of climate scientists, bombarding them with vexatious freedom of information requests so he can whine about getting stonewalled when he gets blown off. His favorite targets are the hockey stick and other assorted "Mann and Briffa lies." He's avoided wingnut political conspiracies about socialism, but constantly accuses NASA and other scientists of cooking the books, hiding data and methodology, and conspiring to stonewall all the skeptics deniers. He's also declared all the Climategate investigations to be whitewashes. In reality, this is probably due to the fact that he's still butthurt over his name coming up in the leaked e-mails.

In an obscenely ironic move, the man who whines incessantly about "corruption" in climate science has himself defended fraudulent claims. Another notable denier, Patrick Michaels, accused Jim Hansen of NASA of making wildly inaccurate predictions in a paper published in the 1980s. Michaels supported his claim by erasing data and graph lines from Hansen's paper and presenting it as the original. When Michaels was called on this dishonesty, McIntyre rushed to his defense. A fraud crying fraud while defending another fraud. That's a lot of fraud.