Irony is alive and well folks. Seems the a 2006 report that was used by many conservatives in congress to point out faults with climate science, is itself full of problems.

About a third of the report is a word for word rip off of other scientists studies, wikipedia, and other sources.

…a now year-long analysis of the Wegman report made by retired computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif. Mashey’s analysis concludes that 35 of the report’s 91 pages “are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning.” Copying others’ text or ideas without crediting them violates universities’ standards, according to Liz Wager of the London-based Committee on Publication Ethics. (via)

To be fair just because the report was full of errors, plagiarism, and other problems doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some big climate-gate like scandal going on…but it looks pretty bad to criticize scientists for bad research, and then turn around and do that same thing. I am not the only one who thinks so.

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree after viewing the Wegman report:

• “Actually fairly shocking,” says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. “My own preliminary appraisal would be ‘guilty as charged.’ ”

•”If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them,” says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. “There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate.”

•”The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side,” says Ohio State’s Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU’s misconduct committee. (via)

It’s no surprise really that this report was commissioned by Joe Barton (the same guy who apologized to BP after they filled the gulf with oil).

So we have a conservative climate denier, who gets more money than anyone else in the house from big energy companies, putting together a flawed report that is full of plagiarism, and Wikipedia entries, sure that doesn’t prove the scientists were not guilty (independent reviews have shown that they were not guilty), but it does make you wonder what is going on.

I guess if you can’t prove these scientists did anything wrong, you just make something up. I highly suggest you read the entire USA Today article as it does a pretty good job of exposing this so called “expert report” for what it really is, a lot of hog wash produced with a political agenda in mind.