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Wow. After reading that email from Holdren to Nick Schulz from October 13th, 2003 which Freeper I Got Rope displayed in post #94, I had only one impression: what an arrogant a-hole.

Basically, this is what Holdren says:

1.) Most proles cannot comprehend this and how to interpret it. I can. So I’m TELLING you Soon/Baliunas are destroyed by Mann’s work.

2.) Those ignorant dummies and fly-over America rubes who want to REALLY understand this complex issue (that is much bigger than their puny intellects can parse out) need to talk to someone who isn’t in the pocket of “big oil”. Like me.

3.) Soon and Baliunas are rank amateurs and their work can’t be taken seriously. Mann (of hockey stick fame, and at the CENTER of this controversy) is the accepted expert and the one who can explain all this. So people should just SIT DOWN, SHUT UP AND ACCEPT HIS WORK.

Holdren's politically motivated slander against two apparently reputable scientists is despicable. This is not the way that a genuine scientist engages a scientific debate. Indeed, the way that you are supposed to engage a debate such as this is not to pick sides, which Holdren does, but to make better arguments, or, and this is very important, do your own work to get more and better data.

From Wiki: Sallie Baliunas is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division and formerly Deputy Director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Baliunas received her M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Astrophysics from Harvard University.

Willie Wei-Hock Soon (born 1966) is an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon’s honors include a 1989 IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Graduate Scholastic Award and a Rockwell Dennis Hunt Scholastic Award from the University of Southern California for “the most representative Ph.D. research thesis” of 1991. In 2003, he was invited to testify to the United States Senate and was later recognized, with a monetary award, for “detailed scholarship on biogeological and climatic change over the past 1000 years” by the Smithsonian Institution.

They both have fine reputations, and scientists should be outraged that Holdren would do this.