Wretched week for a typical trio of climate contrarians

Murry Salby is a researcher formerly at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who moved to Australia to work for Macquarie University in 2008. In 2011, Salby began giving presentations arguing that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is natural rather than human-caused. He claimed to have a paper detailing his findings submitted and undergoing review at a scientific journal, but two years later, no such paper has been published. Last week, Macquarie University sacked Salby, who claimed that his termination was due to his contrarian climate position.

John Mashey and The Guardian's Graham Readfearn decided to research Salby's legal history and came up with some stunning findings. Salby had previously been banned for three years from accessing US taxpayer-funded science research money after the National Science Foundation (NSF) found that Salby's "actions over a period of years displays a pattern of deception, a lack of integrity, and a persistent and intentional disregard of NSF and University rules and policies."

The NSF report found that Salby had funneled himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in government grant money through a for-profit company he created, of which he was the sole employee. To justify his salary payments to the NSF, Salby claimed to be working for this company for an average of 14 hours per day for 98 consecutive days, which aside from being entirely implausible, would also have left him no time to fulfill his university obligations. The NSF concluded that Salby's behavior was likely fraudulent, but by the time the report was completed, Salby had resigned from the University of Colorado and moved to his job at Australia's Macquarie University.