Chris Horner weighed in on Paul Krugman’s rant last Friday, “Can This Planet Be Saved?” in this space.

Marc Morano, communications director for the Sen. James Inhofe and the other Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has sent around a Krugman “smackdown” from Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist — and a liberal Democrat — who is among the 500 scientists who signed onto the Senate report dissenting from the “settled” global-warming consensus. Dr. Hertzberg has assented to making his letter to Krugman public, so here goes:

Dear Prof Krugman:I have generally found myself in strong agreement with most of the opinions expressed in your columns dealing with politics and the economy. I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a scientist. In your interview with Keith Obermann last night, there was an implication that somehow those of us who are human-caused global warming skeptics were all supported by big-oil money. In the 20 years that I have been studying this issue and expressing my skepticism, I have never received a cent from either big-oil or the government to study the problem. You failed to mention the 50 billion being spent by governments to finance research that supports the human-caused global warming theory. In this morning’s article “Can This Planet Be Saved”, you simply regurgitated the typical fear-mongering hysteria that the Gore-IPCC-Hansen clique promulgate without any serious consideration of the fact that that hysteria is based on half-baked computer models that have never been verified and that are totally our of touch with reality. I am sure that as an Economist you have seen similar econometric models that are similarly out of touch with reality coming from the likes of “the Chicago boys” or the Heritage Foundation.
I have taken the liberty of attaching copies of Alexander Cockburn’s articles that appeared in the Nation Magazine last year. They are based, in part, on my studies of the issue. Also attached is a recent talk I gave on the subject. It has been published in the Australian web-site: http://www.carbon-sense.com. Also attached is a list of web-sites of global warming skeptics.
I can only hope that you will read the attachments with an open mind and consider the possibility that you might need an informed and objective science adviser before making any further pronouncements on the subject. I will also forward under separate cover, a letter I sent to the President of the American Physical Society about their treatment of a well known global warming sceptic, Lord Monckton. If you might recall, he had routinely advertized in the N. Y. Times, challenging Gore to a debate on the issue, which Gore ignored. You can always tell the difference between a propagandist and a scientist. If a scientist has a theory, he looks diligently for facts that might contradict his theory so that he can test its validity or refine it. The propagandist on the other hand selects only those facts that agree with his theory and dutifully ignores those facts that contradict it.