‘I’m SO sorry! How will you ever be able to take me seriously again?’ sobs remorse-stricken Monbiot

By James Delingpole

Well no, not quite. But the Guardian’s Hair Shirt and Scorpions columnist George Monbiot has at least been frightened into taking a slightly more conciliatory line over the Amazongate fiasco.

Here was his original response when threatened with legal action by Dr Richard North, whom he had accused of being an “egregious fabulist” over what was in fact an entirely accurate story about the IPCC passing off as “peer-reviewed” science an unverified claim that had actually come from a World Wildlife Fund propaganda sheet.

Dear Dr North,

Go ahead, make my day.

Yours Sincerely,

George Monbiot

And here, presumably following advice from his lawyers, is Monbiot’s latest Japanese-style non-apology apology at the top of his erroneous column.

In criticising Dr Richard North, below, for not having checked [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-now-for-amazongate.html] whether there was a reference to the claim that up to “40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” in the WWF Report, I was unaware of, and therefore omitted to mention, that Dr North had himself later spotted that there was a reference to the 40% figure in the WWF report. His initial mistake had been corrected on another page [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/corruption-of-science.html ] (before the Sunday Times article had been written) and he had added a cross-link to the original page, which I failed to note. Apologies.

Do you know what, though? I can honestly say it gives me no satisfaction to witness Monbiot pooing his pants over libel issues. I believe that English libel law, just like the wildly erratic and frankly rather disgusting Press Complaints Commission, does far more to shield evil people (not you, Richard North!) and bad ideas than it does to protect the innocent. I look at Monbiot here and think “There but for the grace of God go I…” So it’s not over the legal issue that I find myself gloating over Monbiot’s comeuppance, I swear to you. No, the reason I’m so glad he has been humiliated here is because of the victory it has won us Climate Realists against the Warmists in the great AGW propaganda war.

In his latest blog Monbiot describes the Amazongate story as an “issue of mind-numbing triviality.”

So a story becomes, I suppose, once it has been revealed that you got your details wrong. But it certainly wasn’t how Monbiot felt about the same story when he originally wrote it up.

Lees hele artikel -> blogs.telegraph.co.uk

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