McArdle, quoting Feynman, wrote:

“Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this:”
[Bold mine.]

It sounds to me like she’s making psychological excuses for what is outright fraud. “Silly Rabbit!” she’s saying. “Trix is for kids!” Fraud, it’s just something people do.

Can this be her way of expressing denial? Could she be so crude? Nah.

If Megan was to sit up straight and take a General’s overview of the battlefield, that is, if she was able to stare past the fusillade of manufactured AGW “frightery,” honestly inspect her own personal patronage constraints and deliberately ignore the disproportionate magnitude of partisan media fronts brands (just count the Time Warner syndicate’s “fronts” and most state universities’ “climatology” and humanities departments – these are “media” too) arranged in coordinated, synchronized choral phalanxes evangelizing AGW, and then if she was to ponder for a moment the corruptibility of the multi-billion dollar grants-awards process, if after all that, she still fails to “see the conspiracy,” then I’ll have to doubt either her sincerity or her intelligence.

Where I see ten or fifteen or twenty-two cooperating super-campuses, some corporate, some governmental, some non-governmental, each acting rationally and predictably in perfect accord with its stated anti-[write in any proxy for republican, capitalist America] “mission statement,” Megan sees mud. Where I see composites of miscible, concentric and sub-secting cells – some camouflaged, some not – but all coordinated in offensive phalanxes actively generating an unelected, supernational taxing authority at a UN confab, Megan sees only an “inherited” simian psychological frailty called “confirmation bias” endemic to the practice of science. Where some see a deliberate epidemic, Dr. McArdle sees only the natural common cold.

Take two aspirins and call her in the morning. Is she in-pay, or blase, or simply stupid?

I think this might spring innocently from her having skewed priorities and a short attention span: given that so many of the same campuses implicated in ClimateGate also proliferated Baath Party and Democrat(ic) party talking points through much of the nineties and the ‘oughts, perhaps she is distracted by the flurry of earth-shaking implications, and simply hasn’t thought the topic “interesting” enough to delve into.

I dunno.
-Steve
PS: is it ok to end a sentence with a preposition?