CLIMATEGATE RESEARCHER Dr. Phil Jones, late of the East Anglia CRU, tries to transfer the burden of proof to skeptics by attacking critics for “hijacking the peer-review process… Why don’t they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers.”

Hey, Phil, you’re the one arguing in favor of global warming. The burden of proof is on you. Just because you believe there is a black cat locked in the windowless basement at midnight on a moonless night doesn’t mean I should have to prove it isn’t there.

Ed Morrissey agrees: “[B]ecause we’re not the people advancing extraordinary claims about man-made influence on global weather patterns.... This must be some new, previously unknown tenet of the Scientific Method, wherein people who point out errors, bias, bad process, and unsubstantiated claims from scientists are somehow required to disprove their unsupported hypotheses. It’s apparently no longer incumbent on Jones and his colleagues to substantiate their own conjectures with actual science,”

Instapundit recalls a similar case. Attacking the critics didn’t work then, either.