Dr. Roy Spencer, Ph.D.[3] is a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a
crank with a major
persecution complex. His favored form of
pseudoscience is
global warmingdenial, though he has also become known as a proponent of
Intelligent Design.
Spencer is affiliated with a number of
astroturf and
Christian fundamentalist organizations. He is a member of the George C. Marshall Institute, which was founded by
expert for hire Frederick Seitz and is a
think tank and
front group for various corporate interests including oil companies. He also makes the rounds at the
Heartland Institute's denialist conferences.
[20]
The fundamentalist organizations he has worked with include the
Cornwall Alliance and the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), which reorganized into the Cornwall Alliance in 2006. The organization promotes "
Bible-based environmental stewardship," which translates to "a bunch of cranks denying science." He helped the ISA author their "Call to Truth," a denialist manifesto for
evangelicals.
[21][22]
As is common amongst cranks, Spencer flaunts his
credentials at every turn. His website is called
www.drroyspencer.com and is entitled "Roy Spencer, Ph.D." Contrast this with the scientists at realclimate.org, who go by names like "Gavin" and "Mike.
He has noticeably upped his crankiness levels in recent years, claiming that he has turned mostly to publishing books and articles in the popular press because
his work has been kept out of the peer reviewed literature by the evil
warmists. A rather egregious instance was his smear on Andrew Dessler (a climatologist who published work on clouds contrary to Spencer's claims) in which Spencer claimed that the shadowy cabal at the IPCC had pushed through Dessler's paper to hype global warming at the Cancun conference in 2010.
[14]
In 2011, he managed to get a paper pushing the PDO/ENSO line into the geography-oriented journal
Remote Sensing. The reaction from other scientists? Same ol', same ol' Spencer.
[15] Predictably, he immediately cried persecution.
[16]Somewhat less predictably, the editor of the journal resigned about a month after the paper's publication.
[17][18]
