Climate scientists are fighting back, reports The Washington Times.

Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher says:

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”

Of course, climate skeptics (or rather, critics of anthropogenic global warming, AGW) would argue that it’s the climatistas who’ve brought Barrow boy (street-wise) tactics into what ought to be a nice, genteel gathering of Harrow alumni.

Popular British TV writer and eminent free-speech QC, John Mortimer, author of the serial, “Rumpole of the Bailey,” saw through this convenient sentimentality about “gentlepersons” a bit more keen-sightedly than most.

In one episode of the serial, Rumpole, Mortimer’s aging, scruffy, Shakespeare-quoting Old Bailey barrister, defends Nigel Timson, a youthful member of a clan with an inelegant and chequered past, a true Barrow boy, who’s accused of insider- trading at the silk-stocking firm where he’s a broker.

It doesn’t help things that Nigel is living with the daughter of the head of the firm, who isn’t keen on a Barrow boy for a son-in-law. The plot-twist is that the Barrow boy, despite his spotty family history, is actually innocent. I won’t tell you the rest, but the larger point is that clever crooks know how to play to their advantage on public preconceptions about class behavior.

The same holds true for university intellectuals. They also usually enjoy the general presumption that they hold to higher standards of behavior and ethics than the ‘baser sort’ outside the ivory towers.  What the climate fracas shows is that that presumption might be just as outdated as the presumption about the virtues of Harrow boys that Rumpole overturns…