I finally got a short email back from Jyrki.

Before I “kind of” say what was in it, let me just state that I replied to his email, asking whether it would be ok to quote him in this blog.

He replied, “Please, do not quote my replies”.

Even though, as far as I can tell, it is totally legal to quote from a freely sent email, the lack of any real substance to his replies makes it not worth lawyering up in this case. I will simply quote him indirectly. Basically, he suggested that the climatefeedback.org contributors (representing the IPCC to him) made mistakes in their takedown of his article.

He also denied receiving any outside funding for the work.

After a follow-up email in which I repeated the question: “Do you know how this preprint reached RT News, Sputnik, etc.?”, he replied that he had not contacted any news agencies.

He followed that sentence with a whole lot of exclamation marks, like this!!!!! So I’ll have to take it at face value unless anything else comes up.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised for climate denial “news” agencies to have some code running online at all times looking for new output from potentially “friendly” “scientists”.

That would be simple to set up.

Slightly scary to see how quickly you can slip between a silly climate change “article” and the geopolitics of the Russian state (via its “news” media) though.

Cue: five more exclamation marks.